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Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

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Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#301

Post by latexr »

maxlin wrote: post #198

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Eventually, with subscription…

> When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead"

That is not what it says. Please don’t straw man and misquote.

> it's off better than ever

By which metric? Certainly not financial.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-el...

> X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc.

Those conversations happened all around. There was nothing special about Twitter.

> Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills

That’s an astronomical assumption.

> X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time.

So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those don’t make sense at the same time.

> You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech.

If you’re a free speech absolutist, Twitter is definitely not the platform for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet

https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte...

https://thewire.in/tech/musk-twitter-takedown-government-com...

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#302

Post by footlose_3815 »

slalomskiing wrote: post #191
footlose_3815 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github pages is free. A .info domain is $5/year. That's already more than half the features you get with this, and you get to be on the actual internet, not some dude's silo. As the post's age goes on, I see more criticism, and less positive reactions.

It’s just a fun project why are you taking it so serious

It’s $20/mo, and a lot of people are eager to spend it so it should be subject to due criticism.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#303

Post by hnbad »

dash2 wrote: post #213
inamberclad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the long-term potential supposed to be? Is Mastodon supposed to replace Twitter, or is it supposed to enhance the lives of people? I'm a member of several small forums that just don't grow. It's the same people each day, and that's fine. It's much closer to how human interactions work in real life. You don't join an ever-expanding pool of people where you strive to maximize your connections (or at least, I do…

This argument confuses “everybody hangs out with just a few people” with ”a few people hang out with a few people”. The former is a cool idea, sure, but the latter is just a description of a not-very-successful service. I mean, I like my local pub, but it isn’t HN-worthy. Social media is valuable, that’s why people use it. It would be nice if we end up coordinating on social media that aren’t toxic or addictive. Unfo…

> Social media is valuable, that’s why people use it.

That doesn't follow. Neither of those two statements seems self-evident.

People typically follow social media for a number of reasons and to my mind novelty and the pretense of a sense of community are the biggest one. But the latter is usually just paper thin. In "successful social media" most social interactions are either fleeting or superficial. You argue on the Internet with strangers and you pigeonhole them to fit your biases. The entire focus for social media is to drive up "engagement" because clicks and views mean more ad revenue and a bigger "audience". And as the effort of providing something genuinely interesting is a lot higher than something provocative (which has the benefit of being able to simply be an outright lie), that's where social media inevitably trends towards.

Pre-social media spaces were a lot more social in the sense of being communal: IRC chat rooms would have old guard regulars, often lurking around in case something interesting pops up; moderation would happen very bluntly and immediately to set clear house rules about what is or isn't acceptable behavior. Forums had a much lower frequency but followed similar patterns. There was a clear sense of a shared culture if you stuck around long enough and people would actually avoid hanging around in the extremely large forums or chat rooms because they were "too noisy" to have a conversation. It would usually be where you'd go to seek advice or help you couldn't find elsewhere and any follow-up would usually happen in a more confined space like DMs.

What social media has effectively done is looked at the extremely large and noisy spaces and decided that this is what everything should be like by default and then bolted on some ways to keep track of what conversations you were having while mixing the ideas of "people that seem interesting/nice" and "accounts that post interesting content", productizing and transactionalizing all social interactions. Even Mastodon is guilty of this but on the smaller instances at least the scale is limited by default.

The problem with social media being the "marketplace of ideas" is that you normally go to the market to get new things and then you go to work, go home or go to your "third place" (e.g. your peer group, your pub, your club house) where you can all show each other what you got. Social media wants to be all of those places but because the marketplace is the only part that makes money, that's all it delivers.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#304

Post by rambambram »

bovermyer wrote: post #297
rambambram wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm talking about your personal site. It might be my homegrown RSS reader, because around 10 to 15 of the 900+ feeds I follow just don't show me the content of the feed items. It also doesn't show the feed's title, the description and - strangely enough - also not your site's favicon (which is outside the scope of the feed itself). I validated the feed at https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2…

I went through and corrected all the little problems the validator was reporting. Maybe that will fix it. Can you try again?

Yes, it works! I see a post about a wellness challenge from 2 December as being your latest post. Thanks a lot!

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#305

Post by arp242 »

underdeserver wrote: post #245
Arch485 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not a lawyer, but that sounds more like "if another company acquires us, we will give your info to them" and then separately "Stripe might sell your data; we're not responsible for them". Which is rotally reasonable/expected imho.

Not a lawyer so I might be reading this wrong - but to me this says "We might sell the company to someone else, and they in turn might sell it to anyone", and that's a bit scarier.

You can't prevent that, not really. That "section 6.3" applies to every company, but these ToS are a bit more upfront about it.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#306

Post by _heimdall »

dash2 wrote: post #213
inamberclad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the long-term potential supposed to be? Is Mastodon supposed to replace Twitter, or is it supposed to enhance the lives of people? I'm a member of several small forums that just don't grow. It's the same people each day, and that's fine. It's much closer to how human interactions work in real life. You don't join an ever-expanding pool of people where you strive to maximize your connections (or at least, I do…

This argument confuses “everybody hangs out with just a few people” with ”a few people hang out with a few people”. The former is a cool idea, sure, but the latter is just a description of a not-very-successful service. I mean, I like my local pub, but it isn’t HN-worthy. Social media is valuable, that’s why people use it. It would be nice if we end up coordinating on social media that aren’t toxic or addictive. Unfo…

Its a really interesting challenge to solve

Twitter, for example, aimed to be a single, universal town square. Mastodon follows much closer to forums where you find yourself in smaller, potentially more tightknit communities

Both have pros and cons. I don't expect Mastodon will give people the same value as social media, but it won't have some of the downsides either. Similarly, I don't expect social media will ever be sustainable as a coordination platform without toxicity and doom scrolling.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#308

Post by agos »

hnbad wrote: post #286
CaptArmchair wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Section 8.6 GDPR > Part b. omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws. That's a hard disclaimer if there's any. I read that as: if you're a European user, we do not believe you can legally enforce us to honor your rights, even though we operate within the EEA.

That's also a sovereign citizen level of legalese. It doesn't matter what omg.lol states it believes. If anything, this demonstrates clear intent to violate users' privacy and be non-compliant with international data protection laws. This is largely a moot point as long as omg.lol remains some guy's side project but given that the ToS explicitly mentions the possibility of a merger or buyout, this feels like it's poi…

your comment is spot on. an acquisition is also the perfect time to have someone trigger an investigation by the local privacy authority for breach of GDPR and I can tell with reasonable certainty that the wording on that ToS is enough to get fined. Until they have a legal presence in the EU they might get away with it, though.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#309

Post by Spivak »

proxyon wrote: post #241
shusaku wrote: post #131

That’s a fun set of features, but I don’t see the connection with the community. You can browse their mastodon feed and it’s just a bunch of vaguely liberal vaguely tech posts? I’d like to see which accounts are using the services for a better community

[flagged]

Dude old Twitter was conservative west-coast brand libertarians and it's silly that people keep confusing them with liberals for seemingly no other reason than the NAP "as long as you're not hurting anyone I don't give a shit" means they're tolerant on social issues when they have basically nothing else in common with liberals.
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