341–350 of 378 posts
An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> HN is way the driest and most soulless. Well if you are looking for memes and catposts, yeah, the S/N ratio here is quite low. Honestly I think of those things as noise, so I see S/N of HN as much higher. I can always go elsewhere for the vibes.
My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN. It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jok…
The café was the first pub-like place where people did mostly not drink alcohol. Reportedly, it was an inportant place for the enlightenment period of history. Let's not oversell HN here, though...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we could go back to the days when there was no feed and Facebook was just a way of keeping track of your friends and sending a message, I might use it at all.
The problem is the incentives for any ad-supported profit-driven social network and the incentives on "what makes a social network good for users" are basically a venn diagram that's two circles that touch about 2% in the center.
An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…
> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. > HN is like that. HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging liter…
Jokes regularly get upvoted here, the bar just happens to be a bit higher than inane Reddit pun threads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mastodon feed is 100% actual friends. That reality exists; it's just not evenly distributed yet.
Probably the nicest bonus feature of Mastodon is that I can subscribe to a friend's original posts but unsubscribe to their "boosts," which is Mastodon's way to quickly share content. This way I can follow artists that make cool stuff I want to keep up with, but I don't have to see their political reblogs and other interactions, which helps to cut down considerably on the noise. It's great because it's granular at th…
Wait, you can do this?! I guess I wasn't paying attention. Time to give Mastodon another go.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> HN is way the driest and most soulless. Well if you are looking for memes and catposts, yeah, the S/N ratio here is quite low. Honestly I think of those things as noise, so I see S/N of HN as much higher. I can always go elsewhere for the vibes.
My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN. It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jok…
I kinda understand this because in the first 10 to 15 years of the commercial internet people were eager and hyped to get connected and share everything what they do and think. Later on this backfired with security and privacy issues like numerous hacks, leaks and privacy fiascos and now they seek more private space to get connected. Nowadays only influencers, content creators and "public personas" want get as much e…
Even the public personas are having a rough time. Twitter is falling apart and then there is Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and just generally a very fractured yet crowded space where you're up against dirty tactics of your peer influencers. I don't feel sorry at all for commercial grifters, but there's also genuine publishers. Institutes that just want to share a message and get it out to the public, as a service. That…
When Zuckerberg talks about Twitter not fulfilling completely its role as a text based social network, I would like to remind him that the biggest social network in the world is the global e-mail network not Facebook and yea e-mail is primarily textual. E-mail as a protocol is powerful but features around it are very much stuck in time. Facebook started like Zuckerberg described it as "a directory of people" and then he built around that concept adding features to connect with other people in that directory and share content. But the problem with Facebook is; it's a walled garden and if you are not in it, you are completely out of touch with other people. On the other hand virtually all people who use internet have an e-mail account and e-mail being an open protocol you can connect with anybody without much hassle.
When people think about text-based social networks, they need to think again about e-mail and how we can improve e-mail experience and build more powerful features around it and not invent new protocols which are barely getting any foothold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN. It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jok…
There are many very different kinds of humor. I think HN generally allows some "insightful" or "never thought of it that way" jokes. Which is probably a narrow subset of humor in general and often requires quite a lot of knowledge about the subject matter.
Some of the most brilliant people in history also had an often juvenile sense of humor. Hacker culture was born out of puns and memes and Discordianism and Monty Python references.
But we don't do that here. We're serious people having serious discussions on serious topics. Look at how serious we are. Like that monocle guy meme, except replace the glass of wine with a can of Gamersupps mixed with adderall.
Social Media started it's down fall ~2008 when the teachers and parents joined facebook. I remember when facebook was _only_ the fellow kids you knew. There were inside jokes, offensive stuff, lots of pure text posts. It was _way_ different. Parents and teachers joined, a couple kids got in trouble for what they posted on facebook, and everyone stopped using it freely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many very different kinds of humor. I think HN generally allows some "insightful" or "never thought of it that way" jokes. Which is probably a narrow subset of humor in general and often requires quite a lot of knowledge about the subject matter.
Only accepting humor if it's sufficiently serious is poser behavior. It reeks of insecurity. Some of the most brilliant people in history also had an often juvenile sense of humor. Hacker culture was born out of puns and memes and Discordianism and Monty Python references. But we don't do that here. We're serious people having serious discussions on serious topics. Look at how serious we are. Like that monocle guy me…