161–170 of 194 posts
Tech heads are re-discovering what "community" actually means, after overusing and abusing the term for the last two decades when they actually meant to say "audience" or "network".
You know you're in a community when people help each other move house, for example.
I had an interesting experience with a WhatsApp group recently. In the past, WhatsApp groups had an upper limit of 256 participants. They then increased this to something much bigger (not sure how much, but at least 1,000). Anyway, I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management…
I had similar experience on Telegram where groups that grew in size plummeted in quality. I just came up with the following concept reading your comment: a slowmode, so that people can write once every x minutes, but others who are mostly read-only can give 'points' to those writing messages in the moment to bypass slowmode, basically they are voting for quality discussions to continue.
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Neither is HN, should I stop using it too? Btw, Telegram is E2E encrypted opt-in
HN doesn’t have direct/private messaging. There is no expectation of privacy in public comments. Systems designed around direct messaging that don’t have e2ee should not be used; otherwise you normalize surveillance.
I too advocate for privacy, but for public discussions E2E encryption would make sense only as a mean of certification (person holding the key really wrote the message)
I had an interesting experience with a WhatsApp group recently. In the past, WhatsApp groups had an upper limit of 256 participants. They then increased this to something much bigger (not sure how much, but at least 1,000). Anyway, I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management…
> This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the sales people away, or at least invite-only. You can't keep sales people a.k.a phonies away it will always happen. Every underground subculture gets appropriated as soon as even…
>Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse? Because the public internet makes it too easy for people to sell you stuff, extract value from you, or harass you. Private chats are human-scale environments where understandable social norms---not commerce, algorithms, or formal rules---drive the interactions. It's an authentic experience.
In many cases its the exact opposite, it's authenticity sold to you as an experience, and thus Clubhouse was born. Exclusivity as a service, about as authentic as Westworld. Which was obviously true for a lot of historical clubs as well, they're often just commercial spaces where you get to feel exclusive and that is most of the draw. It's no accident that so many of these new private online communities are crypto, AI tech or VC centric and were born coincidentally enough when a lot of money poured into them.
If you want to see real interesting things in tech watch Andrej Karpathy rebuild GPT-2 from scratch on Youtube, everyone can follow along. That's authentic technology and science, it's all open these days.
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I think the sentiment you describe has more to do with alignment of interests: Starbucks wants to sell you coffee, free online services on the other hand want to sell access-to-you to some third party. There also aren't the same network effects. No one feels obligated to visit Starbucks even though they dislike it due to all their friends/family only conversing at Starbucks.
> Starbucks wants to sell you coffee, free online services on the other hand want to sell access-to-you to some third party. That's exactly the business model of shopping malls. They create a fun place to hang out at that just happens to have hundreds of shops. > There also aren't the same network effects. No one feels obligated to visit Starbucks even though they dislike it due to all their friends/family only conve…
In the US teenagers teenagers hang out at malls, but that's only because cities and communities don't give a shit about building inclusive places for all people to spend time without needing to spend money.
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It's pretty ironic that every one of their "cozy internet" site examples requires pumping all of your communications through a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you, and which can do whatever nebulous stuff with your data that it wants. Doesn't seem very cozy to me. I believe the mainstream internet is already completely overrun by malicious actors, whether bots or not,…
I don't understand why some people hate third-party private businesses so much on the internet. I mean, people often have conversations in coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Starbucks is a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you. I am pretty sure it also does "nebulous stuff" with the data it gets off me - it has my credit card after all, and I am sure it runs all the analy…
We've been overrun by capitalism for so long and so many of our interactions that we can't see it anymore.
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> Starbucks wants to sell you coffee, free online services on the other hand want to sell access-to-you to some third party. That's exactly the business model of shopping malls. They create a fun place to hang out at that just happens to have hundreds of shops. > There also aren't the same network effects. No one feels obligated to visit Starbucks even though they dislike it due to all their friends/family only conve…
Who thinks a mall is a fun place to hang out at? People go to malls because it's convenient to have everything you need for shopping at one place, and there's some shitty food for in between. In the US teenagers teenagers hang out at malls, but that's only because cities and communities don't give a shit about building inclusive places for all people to spend time without needing to spend money.
Indeed. If malls were fun, why are they all being abandoned and closed down due to a lack of foot traffic?