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The internet wants to be fragmented

noahpinion.substack.com

151–160 of 246 posts

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#151
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Discord and Telegram may fill in the gap. WhatsApp is kind of personal, where you communicate with your real world friends.

But these are all closed communities. I just think that it would be a point in having a community that is also searchable from google? Why is closed communities like Discord so popular?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse If you’re thinking closer to forum software of yore.

If you don’t mind being centralized Reddit is what really killed forums and is still very good despite a drive to make it worse every year. There are many Reddit clones as well.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#152
post #3

Written on substack no less…

And yet you participate in society

I think it’s reasonable to say federated blogging platforms are a solved problem in 2022 (2023!) I don’t think this is analogous to debates about economic systems.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#153
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even IRL people tend to congregate mostly with like minded individuals Historically, forming these tiny niche communities wasn't possible. Sure you had different social groups but they were geographically limited. You are also stuck to a degree when there is conflict. > if the congregation turns out to have too many views in contrast to ones own then folks tend to leave. Sure and it tends to be moderate people who…

> Historically, forming these tiny niche communities wasn't possible. Friends?

Your friends were your church, schoolmates, etc. You can't pick "People who are X, Y, Z and support only A and B" because the pool of potential friend candidates just wasn't large enough.

On Twitter, I can choose to only be friends with conservative libertarian furries who believe in crypto. That doesn't scale to real life.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely use IRC any more and I used to run some small IRC servers. Most moved to Discord but I refuse to use such platforms for their abuse of retaining both text and voice transcription chat history forever. Discord voice transcription can run silently in any public or private channel and nobody can prove otherwise. This was not impossible on IRC but far less likely. Public channels were recorded with publicly visi…

Hiii, I'm the person who made devzat. Devzat supports a "private" mode in which only some IDs you specify in the config file are allowed to join. In that mode, it disables the 16 message backlog on #main too. It seems like that would be a good option for you, but it looks like you're having the people you know gen new SSH keys every time (which is what IDs are based on). I'm curious why. Would you have liked a standa…

but it looks like you're having the people you know gen new SSH keys every time

This is just an example of an ephemeral implementation of your chat system. Spin up a node, have some people play around with it, communicate whatever they wish then destroy the node in the sense of destroying a VM. One could certainly leave it running and people could use persistent ssh keys like you do on your instance. Using ephemeral ssh keys implies more aspect of anonymity assuming one connects from a short-lived VM. People could of course adjust my example shell function to not remove keys and to use a persistent nick-name.

Would you have liked a standalone preference for whether to have a backlog?

That sounds like a great feature/configuration option. Maybe even allow a admin-defined backlog size for people that want persistent instances.

What features would you like / what things could be improved?

I think it is great as-is but that is just my personal take. For me, simpler is better. I appreciate that you added a configuration to disable external integrations. Less specific to devzat but more specific to golang would be to have default compile-time hardening options. I am impressed with how nice you made it look with the color schemes.

Perhaps others here will play around with it and offer suggestions. SSH based chat is not super popular which really surprises me. I could see devzat being an amazing fall-back for a private chat inside a company when Slack or Discord are having a moment or for those times when people want to say something that isn't recorded forever and especially not visible to their management. I think it would also be amazing for people in oppressive regimes that block access to all the mainstream chat platforms but allow SSH to specific VPS providers.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#155
I mostly agree with the author in that everyone shouldn't be on one platform and that yes, Twitter, Facebook, etc., aren't anywhere close to ideal sites for actually forming strong relationships and having good discussions. I also agree that the separation of internet self and real self has all but vanished from the internet, despite my own personal attempts to retain it. Additionally, as someone who has spent their formative, adolescent, and even current years being parts of independent communities on the internet, I can assure you that there were people out there who knew what was being lost and what the problems were as Reddit, Facebook, and the others became the hubs for everything.

However, the author makes references to things like MUDs, IRC chats, web forums, and then antagonists like "random internet Nazis" (come on dude) and Gamergate of all things, and I can't help but feel that the author of the article is part of a intellectual group that appeared after things like internet forums, transient chatrooms, and video game servers. It's very popular to try to "dunk" on sowing doubt in a case like this because everyone cites that "Yet you participate in it. Curious!" comic in some way or another, but I think the doubt is warranted in this case.

The author may have been around when those things were active, but expressed no deep interest at worst or a passing interest at best in any of them until centralization became a problem to think about, and SUDDENLY all of those things captured their attention. A HN poster who doesn't really care about non-techie niche communities but puts on big airs about caring because rebelling against centralized monoliths like Twitter is part of (hacker) counterculture/social signaling.

The author didn't have to deal with being a powerless normal user as internet Nazi groups infiltrating communities they were a part of, never had to watch independent sites and projects get absorbed into Reddit and its abhorrent community; it's all just a fun intellectual thought puzzle to ruminate on with a buddy at a bar and philosophical soapbox to stand on with their web blog and Twitter account. The author even boils it down to political pundits retreating to private circles, which completely separates it from the real experiences of loss of and yearning for smaller communities.

We've read this same song and dance here on HN almost weekly if not daily here on HN: everyone's glued to their smartphones, Twitter and Facebook control all online content, return to tradition, yadda yadda. I don't really know how this comment is going to be taken but because of all these things, I find it very difficult to believe the author isn't subject to the tyranny of likes and internet attention himself, and that the post reads more as disingenuous intellectual fellatio than anything else, intended to resonate with those who closely follow hacker culture on HN for traction.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#156
post #114

It's going to be paradise when we can find our natural best friends AT SCALE Here's my second most recent idea on how to do it, haven't written up the latest yet: http://zeroprecedent.com/A%E2%9D%AF%E2%9D%AEON%20deck%20v.3....

Interesting concept but what seems more compelling to me would be more like a Tiktok/Reddit hybrid. You log in and see content that "the algorithm" knows you'll like, but with an added element of community from people "the algorithm" knows you'll find cool/funny/insightful/etc. Like a simulacrum of the Facebook feed but instead of friends and family it's this "tribe". No need for labels or even naming those people. F…

I actually mention extremely good content aggregation in there, but more as a byproduct of good matching than as a way to arrive at it. But it really could work the other way around, with the things you and everyone else likes providing strong signal that can be correlated.

I hope this is the year we all get a thousand true friends! Instant connection every time

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#157
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is that you can make money from the internet. The internet was more about self-expression and fun. Then people realized they can sell things or themselves (being a "content-creator", "thought-leader", etc.). As a result the most active people are tailoring their actions towards increasing engagement, getting you to buy something, getting you to think a certain way, etc. and we have a divide betwee…

I would say the biggest problem is advertising. It would be much less harmful if commercial content was upfront about asking for your wallet, and the transaction ended there (the publisher's incentives are directly aligned with the end-customer's). Instead, we have stuff that's technically "free" but actually comes with plenty of strings attached such as mismatched incentives - the content is only there as bait and t…

I would hazard a guess to say that the best micropayment service in the world is going to have trouble competing with "free" for the average user.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#158
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, having run small communities I can see platforms like Mastodon growing into Twitter albeit with a different twist of behavior but eventually becoming equally toxic, just a different flavor of toxic. I believe one of the root causes is that the internet basically connected billions of people from many different cultures into one big pool without any arbiter mechanisms which is bound to get ugly fast. I…

I think Mastodon has the tendency to grow into the opposite extreme of toxicity: fragility. People as well as instances are very generously blocked, leading to perfectly peaceful bubbles. Which are not that great. There's almost perfect ideological agreement...but not really. A handful of people dominate conversation by posting frequently whilst the rest barely engages and/or is afraid to speak their mind. As an exam…

toxic positivity

Positively toxic echo chambers. I think you summed it up perfectly. I've seen what you described occur in the past on other chat platforms and forums. Mostly forums. People that think alike get some high rank and access to private sub-forums and people that have thoughts not aligned with the tribe start to think the forum is no longer being used. Not sure how that would translate into the Mastodon platform.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#159
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does someone’s position need to change? That implies that somebody is wrong, and that’s not necessarily the case. More often, the “wrongness” comes from having a different point of view. For example, it’s easy to say “fuck cars” when you live in the city and they are only polluting, noisy nuisances that are, at best, optional for living your life. But when you live where I do, not having a car means a significant…

Great example, because people saying "fuck cars" probably aren't talking about your cars or your situation. They mean the cities. They too have a different point of view. What discussion is good at is allowing us to talk about topics even with differing points of view, but a like/dislike button only rewards or disuades what you said. There is no opportunity for the meeting of minds, and it makes an echochamber. Had y…

So get rid of pre-fabbed "individualization" by the platform, and allow individuals to choose what they do&don't want to see. This usually cuts ads way down, so I see why they don't do it, but it would fix the issues of bubbles. (Assuming bubbles and division is not what they wanted in the first place).

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#160
post #93

The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience al…

Once in a while I’ll say something snarky and get downvoted. I usually delete those because I’m not really adding to the dialog. But the world is full of uncomfortable truths, software doubly so (or at least, I can see more of them). It’s humbling when people agree, irritating or amusing when they don’t. Confusing when I say the same thing in two replies in one thread and one gets 25 downvotes while the other gets 35…

I leave my stuff up, since most people downvote based on what they think I am trying to say, not based on what I am actually saying, at least seeing from responses I get.
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