Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

meta.ath0.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 174 posts

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#121

Post by rg111 »

rm445 wrote: post #106
rg111 wrote: post #56

As soon as your news feed becomes too big for you to read all of it and then decide whether to repost anything, the quality of information you propagate is going to fall because of that filtering process. I avoid this by unfollowing people very frequently. I see one stupid candid or a pout or a food shot, I just unfollow that person. Same goes for SJW/White Supremacy types. Whether you are OP or a sharer, you get mut…

Interesting. What you say makes some sense for keeping sane where the Internet is one big room of people shouting, but for preference I'd prefer the total opposite. I would love to be part of small social media groups with bonds of friendship and tolerance. Trends, food, non-extreme politics, in proportion to their magnitude in everyone's lives, varying with people's interests but not magnified by one-issue echo cham…

I just have DMs on Telegram/Signal with people I like to be close with.

For 3-4 people of my parents' generation, I just call them up once in a while.

Actually, there isn't a lot of an overlap of interests with those of the people I grew up around. I have no interests on sports, celeb culture, etc. And politically, I conform to neither side (although I am not a centrist).

People have said things behind my back and in one particular instance, I have been verbally harassed for not liking the things most people like.

So, I don't bother being "social". I do community service, donate time and money to charities, attend marriages and funerals and such and nod and smile for 1-2 hours. I also mentor 2-3 kids. One is a neighbor, one lives on a different country.

I don't see the point of a "social" media. I just want to be away from most people I know in real life.

I find better solace on anonymous sites like Reddit, HN, or new like-minded people I get to know through interest-based forums.

I do send people pictures of stuff I cook, glasses I buy, etc. tgrough DM.

I also have a private Instagram where I allow about 30 people to follow me.

I would never even think about social media like most people use it.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#122

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

peakaboo wrote: post #102
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you imagine if hypothetically, HN suddenly became the world's most popular social network? It would be unusable for it's current purpose and no amount of moderating could ever fix that. This sounds harsh but not everyone deserves to be heard all of the time- myself included.

It's the same with Linux. If it would be super popular and mainstream, the corporations would destroy everything that's fun with it in order to sell you things and track your data.

They already do. Not everything even in the server segment is unicorns and rainbows; a lot of corporate “fauxpen source” is SDKs for proprietary hosted services, and paid staff working on those “OSS” offerings is more about “building a vibrant community” (read: extracting free labor) and making sure the only contributions accepted are those that narrowly match their internal roadmaps (which reinforces my previous point).

I mean, it’s still better than closed source SDKs with bugs unfixed for years and books written about working around them, but that would be a pretty low bar anyway.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#123

Post by rg111 »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #69
rg111 wrote: post #56

As soon as your news feed becomes too big for you to read all of it and then decide whether to repost anything, the quality of information you propagate is going to fall because of that filtering process. I avoid this by unfollowing people very frequently. I see one stupid candid or a pout or a food shot, I just unfollow that person. Same goes for SJW/White Supremacy types. Whether you are OP or a sharer, you get mut…

I unfollow everyone, absolutely everyone on facebook. I do it systematically whenever somebody sends a friend request. This way I can decide whose posts I see, and not the algorithm. Ha, take that! Facebook even displays an error message in your feed if you unfollow everyone :)

I logged on to FB a few months back because I had to send a message. I just sent that message and logged off. (I would get email when they replied)

Facebook seriously asked me if it was my own account I logged on to. Because, "when people log on to other people's accounts, they tend to log off quickly".

Yeah!

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#124

Post by Stratoscope »

usui wrote: post #105
pathseeker wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love these idiom screw-ups. One of my coworkers once tried to use an English idiom and it came out, "let's not beat a horse to death."

The worst offenders are ones that can be solved logically if the person spent 5 seconds to think. "I could care less" vs "I could not care less" The amount of people who defend the former with their own head-canon is frightening. Ones I have heard are "It's sarcastic" and "I care so little that I won't put the extra effort into caring less"

Steven Pinker and other linguists would like a word with you:

https://www.google.com/search?q=steven+pinker+i+could+care+l...

From Pinker's book The Language Instinct (p.377 or 389 depending on the edition):

> A tin ear for prosody (stress and intonation) and an obliviousness to the principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools for the language maven. Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression I could care less. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying I couldn't care less. If they could care less than they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and scope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how the two versions are pronounced:

[If viewing on mobile, turn your device sideways to avoid wrapping.]

  ------------------------
  
     COULDN'T care
                    LE
                      ESS.
  i
  
  ------------------------
  
  I
            CARE
                  LE
                    ESS.
     could
  
  ------------------------
> The melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it's sarcastic. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, “Oh yeah, as if there was something in the world that I care less about.”

But I hear you and sympathize with your point of view. I have been there myself. It didn't make sense to me that people would use a word or phrase in any meaning other than its literal one.

Especially a word like "literally", right?

Merriam-Webster has a article on that. It's literally the best article ever written!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#125

Post by streamofdigits »

People may find the original simulation studies [0] oversimplifying but that is the more or less the state-of-the-art of our understanding of social networks using agent models. There is always the nagging concern that your get out what you put in.

We don't have to theorize though. Given all the open source platforms of the fediverse [1] people can setup networks, tweak to their heart's content and explore what "works" when actual humans are involved.

Maybe what is really missing is some sort of crowdsourced framework for collecting and sharing that information.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...

[1] https://fediverse.party/

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#126

Post by rm445 »

rg111 wrote: post #121
rm445 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. What you say makes some sense for keeping sane where the Internet is one big room of people shouting, but for preference I'd prefer the total opposite. I would love to be part of small social media groups with bonds of friendship and tolerance. Trends, food, non-extreme politics, in proportion to their magnitude in everyone's lives, varying with people's interests but not magnified by one-issue echo cham…

I just have DMs on Telegram/Signal with people I like to be close with. For 3-4 people of my parents' generation, I just call them up once in a while. Actually, there isn't a lot of an overlap of interests with those of the people I grew up around. I have no interests on sports, celeb culture, etc. And politically, I conform to neither side (although I am not a centrist). People have said things behind my back and in…

Yeah. I guess most people have a complex list like that. In many ways we're actually spoilt for choice when it comes to communication. And the forum we're on right now is quite excellent.

It would just be nice if the big sites were less terrible. If Facebook were once again a nice place to stay in touch with 'real life' people instead of an engagement-driven nightmare. If LinkedIn could be a wider-professional-interests place with HN-quality discussion instead of just recruiters and drivel. If Twitter remained an amazing place to connect with thinkers but not the place for outraging people into campaigning for someone to lose their job. Because of network effects, the big sites eat up a lot of what should be better discussion.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#128

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

ramijames wrote: post #67
crdrost wrote: post #7

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to s…

Growth is always the default expectation. It's part of humanity at this point. I personally feel that it is destructive. I hate the idea that static and stagnant are NEGATIVES. They are not. They have value.

In a niche community, even to be stable you need slow growth, even if at a trickle pace. The simple reason is that some formerly active people grow disinterested and move on, some grow old, some die.

You need such a stream of newcomers that within their first, say, 500 contributions they get savvy enough to fit in and carry the momentum. You also need enough people who understand and tend to the spirit of the community so they can successfully oppose a famed veteran who may suddenly go renegade.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#129

Post by ColinWright »

abnry wrote: post #27

I am trying to get into self hosting. Can anyone recommend a Twitter or Facebook self hosted app? The idea would be that it would be an invite only social network where I choose who can join.

As others have said Mastodon might be what you want. You can self-host it, either "at home" or "in the cloud", and you can choose not to federate at all, or choose to federate only with instances you choose. You can choose to run as "invite only", or to allow anyone, and then eject people who behave poorly.

So you can set it up as an "invite only social network where I choose who can join", as you say.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#130

Post by squarefoot »

notanzaiiswear wrote: post #114
peakaboo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same with Linux. If it would be super popular and mainstream, the corporations would destroy everything that's fun with it in order to sell you things and track your data.

Like Android?

Sorta, although to get to that point it had to lose 99% of what it needs to call it Linux.
Post reply on HN