11–20 of 48 posts
If the future of social media looks like Reddit, we should just cancel the internet and go outside instead. 95% of Reddit is a cesspool...never the subs you frequent, though...
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.
I think the future of the Internet will contain a lot of "Join to download!" so I hope the Reddit model prevails. Discord communities are regressive in that they're not indexed by search engines so a lot of the activity and information there may as well be nonexistent.
I think Reddit outgrew the "gamer/nerd" thing you mention, some years ago. It's a mainstream site.
Discord is a instant messaging product that reflects modern social media priorities of walling everything off behind a user login; anathema to the public-facing nature of Reddit and Digg. If there's anything that prevents regular people from joining Discord, it's that you actually have to be told to join a specific discord, for something you're interested in. You can't click a link from someplace and see something interesting happening there.
If you believe all those people talking are real people you'd be very wrong. Most are bots designed to harass contributors, threaten credibility, and waste time resources without providing anything back.
I think the future is going to be fake social media websites that tailor make all the content to your preferences. Aka LLM generated content. You know how in Minecraft (and other games) how they have infinite maps? You just keep on exploring and the game generates new lands for you to explore? That is what the future of social networks will be.
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…
I think the future of the Internet will contain a lot of "Join to download!" so I hope the Reddit model prevails. Discord communities are regressive in that they're not indexed by search engines so a lot of the activity and information there may as well be nonexistent.
The reddit model is not without serious issues. Over the short term, reddit communities become echo chambers through the upvote/downvote mechanic. You only get group think, no outside viewpoints or discussion. The model promotes insular communities of single viewpoints. You also get thought-police moderators who will ban your account if you offer an opposing viewpoint.
If clearnet can't see it, it's inherently of less utility to me.
Subreddits can make themselves more like Discord via private subs or approval-only posting but the majority of subs aren't this way. Reddit has a nice wiki feature. Downvoting doesn't remove posts. This is all great.
The only thing better than reddit would be a standard MediaWiki instance or regular old web forum. Something less centralized.
And yes, your web forum run by a cabal of mods could devolve into a censured echo chamber just like any niche subreddit, but this will never not be a problem. As long as my censured echo chambers are visible to web crawlers, the collective Internet can retain SOME level of agency.
Even 4chan boards are archived in several places. Despite inconsistent moderation, bad-faith dialog and the fact that it's ostensibly an echo chamber - we at least KNOW exactly what it is because there's a paper trail. On the flip side, HN has its own paper trail of good-faith dialog here: https://hn.algolia.com/
Discord is a black hole. And worse - it's tens of thousands of niche black holes, each one representing a community that otherwise would have found its home on the clearnet.
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.
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 sophomoric. No one needs to know with perfect clarity. If bots ever get good enough and prevalent enough most social media users are fake, there will be a little lag as people figure it out. Then people who keep using social media will get mocked for wasting their time, and it will die.
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.
> 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…