I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience • Hacker News Board

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#191

Post by FormerBandmate » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #61

speak_plainly wrote: post #33

I think there is a larger question about the role that celebrities, influencers, meme accounts, thirst trap accounts, or any other account that is incentivized to post play on social media. You immediately saw the energy and positivity drop as these groups arrived to threads. Perhaps it was a mix of egotism, phoniness, and shallow attempts at engagement, but you also saw engagement and follows rise with that group. T…

> I would love to see them deprioritize these financially motivated accounts and try to focus more on local and more genuine interactions, otherwise they will just fall into the same trap Twitter has been stuck in for years. Meta goes farther than Twitter ever did, as they actually deprioritize the more news-like content. After all, why pay for less engaging content when you have users tripping over themselves to gam…

Threads is literally just textual Instagram and TikTok. I don’t get the feeling Twitter users ever really used those, and Threads is much closer to those

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#192

Post by FormerBandmate » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 6:52 PM UTC

flangola7 wrote: post #128

firecall wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true, but I really don’t think I want to. It’s Instagram in words, and Instagram by and large is an awful, fake and vapid place. Threads might be decent software, but the content is horrible.

What is so bad about Instagram? It's my most used "normie" platform. I don't choose to have fake friends or follow awful creators, so I don't see that on the website.

It’s not intellectual.

I love it, it’s great for workout and vacation pics and seeing what people you know are up to. I get the feeling Twitter powerusers hate it

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#193

Post by p3rls » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 6:54 PM UTC

smokel wrote: post #143

adventured wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand". Humanity breaks into three groups: originators, amplifiers, mimics. Probably 95-97% of humanity or more are mimics. They will never produce much of anything original, that includes writing long-form blog posts or original media content (eg YouTube). They have little to no interest. This…

Hm, I doubt that not actively contributing on a forum makes you a "mimic". Perhaps your wording is a bit too strong? I agree with you that these people may lack the energy or creativity, but there could be dozens of other valid reasons for not contributing. For one, I think most people who ignore social media are quite wise. A lot of time is lost here on more important matters.

As long as we're throwing out stupid triadic models of humanity -- [Pythagoras said that] human life seemed to him comparable with the festival to which people flocked form all over Greece in order to see those magnificent [Olympic] Games. This is an occasion for which some people have gone into physical training in the hope of winning the splendid distinction of a crown, while others are attracted by the prospect of buying or selling for profit, whereas a further category again – and these represent an especially good class of people – are interested in winning neither applause nor profit, but come merely for the sake of the spectacle, to get a thorough look at what is going on and how it is done. And we too, said Pythagoras, as we enter this life from some other kind of existence [as he believed in reincarnation], behave like people who have moved out of town to join the crowds at this sort of show. Some of us are enslaved to glory, others to money. But there are also a few people who devote themselves wholly to the study of the universe, believing everything else to be trivial in comparison. These call themselves students of wisdom, in other words philosophers [“lovers of wisdom”]; and just as a festival attracts individuals of the finest type who just watch the proceedings without a thought of getting anything for themselves, so too, in life generally, the contemplation and study of nature are far superior to the whole range of other human activities. (Cicero, Tuscalan Disputations, 5.9)

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#194

Post by godelski » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

This is what happens to slack channels to me. The big reason is lack of actual control over how often my devices ping me and user abuse. I'm curious if others face this because people in my lab do too.

== Slack Bugs ==

Constantly I will get pings despite having had my settings to be "Direct messages, mentions & keywords". Including pings for threads that I never even participated in or were tagged in. Slack will also notify me for channels that are muted and grayed out! So my only real choice is to just kill notifications all together and it fixes most of these problems. But then I don't see any messages unless I see the icon in my dock.

== False Positives/User Abuse ==

Lots of users abuse the @channel (almost never using the @here). My advisor sends tons of irrelevant papers in the main group channel, so I have to ignore or be spammed, but then miss "important" messages. There's something I don't get, it is that people don't seem to understand that you can't send spam and junk from the same location as you send critical information. Spam and junk is more common and you're just teaching users to ignore everything. My Uni does this too and it is infuriating. I know they might think that this gets people to see more of the spam, but it just makes people not see important things.

Slack people: can you fix notifications. Admin/manager people: can you please for the love of god stop spamming channels and chastise anyone who abuses tags everyone unnecessarily? I just want to do my work without getting distracted every 5 minutes. It's akin to someone knocking on my door: I don't know if they just want to chat or need something. This kills productivity.

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#195

Post by gnicholas » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

passwordoops wrote: post #163

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, same has been happening here for years too. Whoops, what I meant to say was: Hi! As a developer at ACME inc ( http://example.com/ACME ) I have been following the trend of self-promotion here too, while sitting at my utra-comfortable ACME Comfy(TM) chair, and I have noticed that some people, even the ones not using our ACME Inc. TNT-as-a-service(TM), have a tendency to self promote. I have written more about it o…

Would be interesting to see the rate of this self-promotion here. It's definitely not as present or in-your-face as other places, but it is noticeable

I find that HNers are generally respectful about this. There are some outliers, but the posts they make tend to get downvoted and therefore rendered invisible.

But there are probably at least as many instances where someone refers to their experience with a topic and pointedly leaves out the name of their company, and then other commenters ask for more details and the company name.

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#196

Post by jasonladuke0311 » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:16 PM UTC

m3kw9 wrote: post #157

flangola7 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is so bad about Instagram? It's my most used "normie" platform. I don't choose to have fake friends or follow awful creators, so I don't see that on the website.

I use instagram occasionally but it’s mostly for eye candy and maybe a few will post stories with vids, it’s really a pure form of internet junk food.

If Instagram is eating junk food then Twitter/Threads is trying to find bits of steak in a pool of toxic waste

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#197

Post by gnicholas » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:16 PM UTC

pdntspa wrote: post #99

rcme wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not commenting on your theory, but what I love about HN is that, for the most part, people comment purely to talk about a topic. There’s very little self promotion. It’s very nice.

Unless you're posting a show HN, in which case every brother and their mother chimes in with "this is nice but here's my cloud service that does a similar thing but better" sideswipes

I have mixed feelings about this. From the perspective of the HN audience, it's useful to see what other startups are serving a particular need/niche. From the perspective of the poster of the Show HN, this is probably annoying. However, it is at least marginally useful to see what the competition looks like, so you can figure out how to differentiate your product (or whether there are too many free competitors, and you should give up).

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#198

Post by thomasz » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:29 PM UTC

jsbisviewtiful wrote: post #185

thomasz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hyper commercialization of the internet has turned people into spam bots. That’s why todays internet, with billions of users feels less populated than what we had in the early to mid 2000s.

I know it sounds very “old man yells at cloud” but I truly miss many parts of the old internet, when YouTube was new and social media was still in its fledgling phase. There are a lot of perks and quality of life improvements thanks to all the advancements, but being subjected to 4 ads per 11 minutes on YouTube, Google being much less useful thanks to SEO optimization and all the self-indulgent self- promotion on jus…

That’s not really what I meant. Ads rarely get through my Adblock anyways. No, the problem with the dead internet isn’t that powerful entities flooded it with artificially generated bullshit, the problem is that the hyper commercialization incentivized real, living people to behave like inauthentic robots, mindlessly maximizing everything they do to drive engagement metrics.

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#199

Post by fknorangesite » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

rcme wrote: post #186

the-smug-one wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I genuinely believe people who like talking about politics are miserable humans. I dunno, maybe they're just in a place where talking and acting politically is important and useful to them? Perhaps that does make them miserable, if I was a white and rich guy in the US I probably wouldn't have to ever talk about politics.

Is it exhausting looking at every offhand HN comment through a racial lens? Plenty of rich white people like discussing politics. There are only two main political parties in the U.S. One of them has rich white people as their entire shtick. Or, log on to Facebook at look at the type of stuff boomer grandparents post.

It is easy for me, personally, to just...Not Talk About Politics. But I'm also a white cis het man. For me, "politics" isn't an actual physical - sometimes mortal - threat.

But the very least I can do is recognize that for many, many people "politics" is a literal matter of life and death. Can you blame them for recognizing and voicing that?

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#200

Post by motoxpro » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:38 PM UTC

jsbisviewtiful wrote: post #185

thomasz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hyper commercialization of the internet has turned people into spam bots. That’s why todays internet, with billions of users feels less populated than what we had in the early to mid 2000s.

I know it sounds very “old man yells at cloud” but I truly miss many parts of the old internet, when YouTube was new and social media was still in its fledgling phase. There are a lot of perks and quality of life improvements thanks to all the advancements, but being subjected to 4 ads per 11 minutes on YouTube, Google being much less useful thanks to SEO optimization and all the self-indulgent self- promotion on jus…

Grab YouTube premium to not see ads. You have to pay for it somehow, either you watch ads for free or you swap out your LTV for cash by just paying outright.

This isn’t a mark of degradation at all. “Back in the day” of non-monetization isn’t sustainable for any decent length of time because eventually the people donating (VCs) will want a return or will run out of money.