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Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

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21–30 of 48 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

#21
Facebook is the brand that's not gamer nerd culture. You have groups there, lots of normies you may not regularly interact with use that platform quite a bit.

I think it's too difficult to speculate what the next big social platform is/will be though. It goes through cycles from what I've observed. Generally the platform changes in a direction that the community at large doesn't like which causes a fragmentation to occur and other sites pick up the loss to start the process again.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

#22
Reddit is too centralized. I like the idea of the fediverse where people can run their own instances and run small cozy communities which are easier to moderate by virtue of being small. You don't need sophisticated machine learning algos or shadow banning to filter out bad actors. You just nuke accounts which broke the rules.

Excited for things like Lemmy[0]. If everyone had their own Lemmy instance it would vastly improve the Internet and social media.

[0] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Re: Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

#24

Reddit is too centralized. I like the idea of the fediverse where people can run their own instances and run small cozy communities which are easier to moderate by virtue of being small. You don't need sophisticated machine learning algos or shadow banning to filter out bad actors. You just nuke accounts which broke the rules. Excited for things like Lemmy[0]. If everyone had their own Lemmy instance it would vastly…

Very excited for things like Lemmy. Having a Lemmy instance per subreddit makes a lot more sense than Mastodon, because it makes the "which instance do I choose?" onboarding issue self-explanatory.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

#25
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that's not a social network. If it was open about what it was, its nature would undermine the main reason for using a social network. Probably the only people who'd bother to engage are some geeks who've confused themselves into thinking a social network is just about generating messages for consumption. Also, such a fake social network might be able to replicate BS political slapfights, but I'd think it would…

Yeah, you aren't wrong, but how do you know that you are talking to an actual human right now and not a GPT powered hackernews bot? Like you are assuming I'm a real person, but you don't know it. You can't ever really know it.

You should worry about everything you interact with, not just text on some small Internet forum. After all, you could be the star of your own reality-tv Truman Show, and everything you see is made up for the benefit of a TV show that you're the star of, but aren't privity to? How do you know your mom and dad aren't just hired actors along with all the people you interact with? Maybe I'm secretly being paid by producers of a TV show to write this comment to provoke you into discovering the truth of your existence for the season finale?

Re: Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

#26

Discord yes, small communities with barriers to entry, posts broadcast only to that community not the entire planet. Reddit, no. Reddit is 15+ years old now. It is what it is, a news aggregator site with volunteer mods to police content. I don't see how they grow either revenues or users which is why they are trying to ipo and cash out.

Think of walled off 'private communities' with HOAs. My take is people want the internet that self selected for only the certain social groups/classes of people that could afford the internet in the early 2000s without having to say that is what they want. Mainly college students and post-college professionals with enough disposable income to afford the limited practical use the internet offered back then. Maybe make…

This is kind of already the case. There are stock/forex trading discords where "verified" trader roles already exist (e.g. you have an account with that prop firm), and helpful information (including job openings) are sent there first.

Same thing with various Discord communities that recruit from Reddit where your participation in the subreddit is used to determine if you're trustworthy.

If you don't know how to get access to those Discords, you wouldn't know that they exist.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

#27
> getting away from all the noise traditional social media has.

Why do you presume the general population actually want to get away from "the noise", or that they even consider it noise? They're the ones making the stories and posts and aren't so happy that you called their feed "noise".

I think the future of social media looks a lot like Instagram, because that's where social media is today, and it's crazy, I know, but some people actually like Instagram.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

#28
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, you aren't wrong, but how do you know that you are talking to an actual human right now and not a GPT powered hackernews bot? Because it's 2023, and GPT, while impressive in its way, still sucks. Even if you generated the text with GPT, you're still operating it and I'm interacting with you. > Like you are assuming I'm a real person, but you don't know it. You can't ever really know it. That's a little sophom…

I'm just hoping that the robots dont hand wave away my arguments by making fun of them as "sophomoric".

> I'm just hoping that the robots dont hand wave away my arguments by making fun of them as "sophomoric".

I didn't hand-wave it away, I just labeled it correctly and addressed it.

A mind-blowing trump card of an "argument" it wasn't.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

#29
I think the future of social media is an oxymoron. Concentration of capital trends toward that direction (at least in the near term), but this doesn't mean it's what people want or need.

If what we're at is called late-stage capitalism, since it is the theoretical end of the road, there's nowhere to go but backward.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

#30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you aren't wrong, but how do you know that you are talking to an actual human right now and not a GPT powered hackernews bot? Like you are assuming I'm a real person, but you don't know it. You can't ever really know it.

You should worry about everything you interact with, not just text on some small Internet forum. After all, you could be the star of your own reality-tv Truman Show, and everything you see is made up for the benefit of a TV show that you're the star of, but aren't privity to? How do you know your mom and dad aren't just hired actors along with all the people you interact with? Maybe I'm secretly being paid by produce…

I think the difference is that the cost of faking my family is extremely high, but the cost of spewing comments on the internet went to basically 0.

I think it is pretty widely accepted that corporations and governments already conduct astroturfing, but those operations were limited in that you had to open an office somewhere and pay people hourly to write propaganda. Now you only need an API key.

I'd be really surprised if there are not conversations happening right now at Facebook and its competitors about injecting generated comments into people's feeds to increase engagement.

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