Is HN a form of social media?
You're talking to people, aren't you?
Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
101–110 of 147 posts
Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
That actually would have been a great idea, in hindsight. I have seen far to many people who suffer from intense anxiety if they have no internet or device access, even if it's just for a few hours. It's like a form of addiction. A day away from the Internet each week would condition people to be able to survive without it.
I just spent seven days with only a limited data plan. I felt like time slowed down to a crawl and I was able to do much more than on a regular day with the internet.
I've cut down to a 2GB plan for this reason. Initially I was just switching networks but I stuck with it because of how much better I felt. Being more data conscious made me realise how much time I was wasting. I used to consume 2-3 times more data and now I don't even hit my cap anymore.
Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would define online forums, newsgroups, and IRC/IM chat as predecessors to the current generation of social media, which are focused on the individual profile. On social media you follow people, while on forums you follow topics. From that understanding, I think HN is more of a forum, which is an online media format that predates what we define today as social media. (but it certainly similar to varying degrees, as…
To me, a forum is about topics and people can discuss them at their own leisure, bumping them in the process. In contrast slashdot, reddit, HN are more like "what topics are currently on", and if only few people are interested in a topic and visit the site apart from each other, no story they are interested in will make it to the front page, and they can't even discuss it "slowly, sometimes", like they could on a for…
I don't think you are entirely wrong, but IME bumping an old forum thread will, more often than not, result in other members getting annoyed at necroing a thread. And while discussion does somewhat get replaced with like buttons, I have seen entirely too many "+1" posts on forums; people want to do something to show they like/agree with a poster even when they have nothing constructive to add.
Although on this site, I don't think I'm alone in only downvoting posts that are flamebait or factually incorrect, rather than opinions I disagree with. There is a bit of an echo chamber effect here, but it is nowhere near as bad as Slashdot or most forums get.
Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strong disagree. HN is not a social media. Because we do not use it for social purposes. This site has no concept of user relationships, and it does not encourage you to use real/identifying information about yourself to use it. It is centred on topics and discussion - sites like this, Reddit, and other forums can develop social networks, but this is a byproduct and not the intent, which I think is the single most im…
Where are you getting your definition for social media? Wikipedia defines social media as [1]: Social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. I don't know if there's an "official" agreed upon definition somewhere, but I do know this: The definition of what s…
By this definition, the internet itself is a social media?
Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there could be some useful purposes for everyone outside of social media: unifying those people, helping them find each other, mobilizing them to take community measures. I think it's safe to say that at this point we're not looking for another social network to replace Facebook or another search engine to replace Google - we need to start finding ways to work decentralized but still come together -this is go…
> unifying those people, helping them find each other, So a social media platform for people that don't like current social media platforms?
Not at all - I participate in the Indieweb and TiddlyWiki communities (and others) outside of social media. Plain old WWW works well - just need to continue building tools to expand it.
Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there could be some useful purposes for everyone outside of social media: unifying those people, helping them find each other, mobilizing them to take community measures. I think it's safe to say that at this point we're not looking for another social network to replace Facebook or another search engine to replace Google - we need to start finding ways to work decentralized but still come together -this is go…
One big issue is that there’s nothing decentralised that currently exists that can rival the quality & user experience of mainstream social networks, and decentralisation comes with its own problems (I personally think the problem with mainstream social media is its ad-based business model and not centralisation). Mastodon (which seems to be the biggest alternative being proposed) is still a joke, even the name and b…
> One big issue is that there’s nothing decentralised that currently exists that can rival the quality & user experience of mainstream social networks.
The Web at large is the decentralized network. And, anyway, part of the reason the ‘quality’ isn’t there (and this is arguable, I wouldn’t call social media a ‘quality’ experience) is due to the fact that we are spending our time and resources there. If that time was spent on the Web, it would improve.
Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
#107Is not email and SMS already a decentralized form of social media?
I doubt the existence of decentralized social media would mean the end of centralized social media. How do you build a video sharing platform that's anywhere near as full-featured as Youtube without centralization?
Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because the Internet is no longer built for it I’d say the Internet is no longer optimised for it because the use-case is no longer possible for the majority of people. You can’t run a server on a phone due to power constraints and yet more and more people are using phones as their only computing device.
That is part of it. But the important point is that it is not inherent. There nothing saying that you can't be protocols for that. It is just beyond what the Internet was design for many years ago, and the de facto Internet today include proprietary infrastructure run by large tech companies. But it is generally even worse then that because today smart phone don't have external ip addresses so you can't connect to th…
Mobile networks are moving towards IPv6 now, so phones are uniquely addressable again. Making them reachable from outside (if they aren’t already) is a trivial problem to solve should there be demand for it.
But I don’t see any major use-case for that - the main issue of battery life remains for any significant usage, and frankly I wouldn’t want to have something running in the background that would deplete my battery in an hour because someone happened to connect and watch a video hosted on it.
Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
#109I created Timelines - a social network that allows people to own their data. Timelines stores your data in a specific folder on your Google Drive which is sandboxed from all your other data on Google drive. Check it out! https://www.timelines.co
I'm encouraged by your effort (anyone working on stuff to help decentralize people's data is always GREAT in my mind). However, if you really want to empower people to own their own data, you may want to consider data repository target platforms like NextCloud, and other platforms like it. That way, from soup to nuts, they have control over their data. Good luck and cheers with your project!
Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure that being a global network is a problem. Instagram is a global network and seems to be doing fine (although the quality of the content has now declined). Personally, a global network is what I want. I already have the solutions you mention (group chats, Slack/Discord instances, forums, etc) for specific communities. What’s missing is something like Facebook or Instagram where everyone is on it and I ca…
You don't jump from nothing to a global network. You host tangentially-related communities in the middle. The more of them you host, the bigger your overall numbers are. Instagram succeeded for that same reason: profiles set to private, no real name policy, people can't look you up in a search bar. It was easier to group up in small communities. The less that's the case, the crappier the content. Instagram was ruined…
To me, Discord is just a partial implementation of Slack. What does it have that Slack doesn’t?