101–110 of 122 posts
call me nostalgic, but i refuse to let go of that internet. There are plenty of alternatives that dont get a multi billion dollar TV ad blitz, and theyre worth checking out https://freenode.net for a classic IRC experience, free of charge. https://mastodon.social/about for a distributed open source twitter-like experience https://diasporafoundation.org/ for an alternative to facebook that respects your privacy.
OT: I don't get social networks. Till today, I don't see any value in real name social networks like Facebook. They should present content I want but they don't, they show upvoted content from my connections which is wrong from a consumer and entertainment perspective. My friends like or share mostly content of people because those people are kind of high-profile in their circles. Not because they post good content.…
> I don't see any value in real name social networks like Facebook The value is that they're usable, least common denominator (not in a bad way) networks where you can keep in touch with your 80 year-old grandmother. > The typical example, we all know, is some boring dude working at a VC that just raised a new fund who hourly posts really crappy content on FB You're in a bubble. For nearly every Facebook user, this i…
I'd say that sentence generalizes pretty well.
I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans. The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social . I distinctly recall when my gro…
Facebook did two things: make everyone part of the network (from your grandma to your 9 year old nephew), and made it not nerdy to use. the raw web, irc, newsgroups, were all for nerds.
This "everybody" clearly does not include privacy-conscious people.
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I maintain to this day a personal IRC network. Many of us have been “together” for over a decade. In fact I just tried to advocate self-hosted communities at CCC. So I’m also stuck in the past and refuse to let the internet go. But I have two points I’d like to mention. 1) Forums are dead for almost all but the biggest communities that surround a product of some kind. Social forums are simply dead. 2) As an IRC-user…
Spam is the reason Facebook is currently the easiest way to get in touch with someone. Otherwise you could just put your email address in a publicly searchable database. It seems like we need a service that provides the verification and permission based communication model of Facebook but without the public feeds, virtue signaling, and political garbage.
I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans. The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social . I distinctly recall when my gro…
Sure, I know what is going on in the lives of my buddies from high school and college. I know when they have a kid, bought a house, that they switched jobs, that they moved out to Denver, etc. But I realized that I had learned all of this through passive consumption.
With the exception of three close friends, the vast majority of my "friends" list are people who I haven't directly messaged, spoken to, or even written on their "wall" in ten years. At this junction, I'm more of a voyeur into their lives then an actual participant.
I haven't deleted my FB account, but I have stopped browsing it. I've started to pick out people who I would really like to re-connect with and then using the platform to start real conversation with people and perhaps drop in for lunch when I pass through their cities. And then perhaps, un-friend everyone not important enough to my life to value maintaining that kind of a connection.
I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans. The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social . I distinctly recall when my gro…
It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and self-determination that Western society has been building up since the Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted advertising. Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation. Viva la revolucion! www.hellolyra.com/introduction
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I'm not pretending that it didn't do anything to connect people. It did. In my anecdote the friends who stopped calling around started using Facebook to organize our activities together. But therein was the problem for me: nobody had to actively maintain relationships that way. Socializing became a spectator sport. Passive. It became anti-social . But prior to its existence I still had plenty of friends and we social…
In my experience, the "calling around" thing was something that started when everyone got a cellphone. Prior to about 1999, folks would actually just drop by your house unannounced sometimes.
We just had to sit by the single rotary phone in the kitchen with a 8ft curly cord that was so tangled, it was really only 4ft. Had to deal with lots of busy signals because even once call-waiting was invented, it cost $3 per month and no parent raised during the Great Depression could imagine committing to that expense!
> Those "social networks" were small, and never made front-page news (or any news at all), and were more concerned with keeping to themselves than recruiting new members. And I'm supposed to be convinced that those small forums weren't anti-social in their own important ways?
Such as? It wasn't that you never brought new people in. It was that you weren't operating under a perverse incentive to bring in as many new people as you could.
The most striking example I can remember was with Rick and Morty creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that is no longer alive, but it appears someone kept some of Dan's insults from that thread[1].
But that pales in comparison to more technically-oriented forums and mailing lists where insidious forms of passive-aggression flourished. These include:
* making the new user feel stupid for failing to comprehend the poor documentation or poorly considered forum guidelines
* making the new user feel stupid for asking a question and failing to read a relevant footnote from a message posted three years ago with an unrelated message topic
* endlessly blathering on about top-posting, asking-about-asking, proper quoting, on-topic vs off-topic, reading-the-stickies, formats for uploading images/attachments, instead of making the software better so that humans don't have to deal with that bs. (The same way git makes it so that humans don't have to bicker about who gets repository permissions)
* telling a user they will be ignored, then mentioning in a meta-discussion about the forum who is ignoring whom
* other users rationalizing the behavior of trolls because those trolls were veteran members
* general lack of mentors to help new users (if the purpose of the forum was to be a sort of community)
There are of course exceptions. But I still remember the feeling of just crossing my fingers in the hopes that my query about a technical topic wouldn't trigger Socratic bombs from a forum's resident jerk.
Stack Overflow proves there's a way to at least a way to discover and read relevant responses without that pain. I have no idea what the antidote to Facebook/Google is. But pining for single-point-of-failure, buggy backends serving up poor UIs with content that cannot easily bubble up to a wider audience isn't going to help.
And forget the anti-social part-- you can't even technically achieve the spirit of such forums today because sock puppets and Sybil have become so sophisticated. Unless we confine ourselves to topics so ineffectual that nobody on the internet would ever decide to hate us.
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No, you don't have to. But if everyone you know does, then you have to make a choice. I've had the same "just get on Facebook" experience as the article's author, and it isn't just about "what are we doing this weekend?" It's about human social behavior changing to fit the model implemented by Facebook, because Facebook tries so hard, and so successfully, to be sticky, that eventually everyone is on Facebook. If you'…
I understand where you're coming from, but ultimately it is your decision to stay on Facebook. If you ever want to try something different then try Scuttlebutt. All of your data there is stored in your own blockchain, and then you exchange these blockchains with others. There is no central server or identification authority. The UI is very much in an alpha state but the SSB protocol is solid, so the blockchain itself…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such as? It wasn't that you never brought new people in. It was that you weren't operating under a perverse incentive to bring in as many new people as you could.
Such as being subject to the whims of random administrator/moderators and whatever random set of principles they wished to apply to their users. The most striking example I can remember was with Rick and Morty creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that…
But this all misses the point. What we're talking about here isn't "content" bubbling up to "audiences". It's people keeping in touch with one another, and making themselves places to hang out on the Internet and arrange to hang out off it. I mean, yeah, some people are going to be assholes. That's not really a problem for technology to solve. "Don't hang out with assholes" is maybe not that hard? But this isn't, like, Buffy or X-Files forums we're talking about here. It's "hey, let's put up a thing so we can talk to each other". If anyone can just sign up to join whatever you're thinking of, then whatever you're thinking of isn't really what we're talking about here, because what we're talking about here is more than anything like long-running group chats avant la lettre, using whatever technology happens to be available. Using technology, shaping it to fit one's purpose, and not the other way around. That's the distinction toward which we're struggling here, I think.