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

Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 265 posts

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#121

Post by yunwal »

haunter wrote: post #71
KineticLensman wrote: post #2

> “The thing about Letterboxd is there isn’t a ‘central town square’ like there is on X; it’s a very single-channel conversation,” says Gracewood. Comments happen in-line – similar to those on the Guardian and Observer websites – meaning that it’s less possible to performatively repost content into a main feed in order to encourage a pile-on. Similar situations exist on platforms such as Goodreads and Strava, where i…

>The thing about Letterboxd is there isn’t a ‘central town square’ like there is on X; it’s a very single-channel conversation,” The problem with Letterboxd that it's gamified and there is an incredible amount of noise and it's getting worse. Top reviews are all just copy paste like baits. "Me when watching a Ghibli film :cryingemoji:" 20k likes "Yes I'd let Ethan Hawke visit me every single night" 10k likes etc It's…

I’m not seeing what’s so bad about the popular reviews. I guess my one complaint would be that no one is writing reviews and so they should stop calling it reviews when they’re really tweets about movies, but I think if Letterboxd were actually 100% in-depth reviews I’d log off immediately. Usually people writing a short quip about a weird/funny thing they noticed is way more enlightening than trying to go through some intellectual exercise after every movie you watch.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#123

Post by cjbgkagh »

goatsi wrote: post #103
cjbgkagh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By giving people what they want. A lot of this emergent behavior falls out of doing good search science. By optimizing other metrics YouTube etc are giving people less of what they want and more of what YouTube wants. YouTube would be useless if I couldn’t ban so many channels from my recommended feeds. At the early stages of TikTok there was some controversy that diverse, disabled, marginalized etc people were being…

>At the early stages of TikTok there was some controversy that diverse, disabled, marginalized etc people were being underrepresented compared to other platforms and we now see how that turned out. The controversy was that they were being actively suppressed as a moderation decision. https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

There is more than one way to give people what they want, and in my haste I clumsily muddled two of them. All the platforms are being moderated heavily with thumbs on the scales to advantage one group over another.

My personal preference would be to have no thumbs on the scales.

Additionally I hate TikTok for the intentional addictive mechanism that requires an attention 'ante' to find out if a video is interesting by preventing jumping to a later point in the video to see where it is going. Basically gambling but with attention instead of currency, the algorithm optimized to give the user just enough to keep them coming back but not too much to satiate their desires.

Search Science is one of those research domains where it appears things are going backwards, google barely works anymore, facebook videos was terrible from the start and AFAIK stayed that way, YouTube only works for me because I have a subscribe list to people I support on Patreon. Amazon is being flooded with duplicate listings which should be trivial to de-dupe and clean up but I guess they suck at search science as well. If Amazon doesn't fix their search and fake good problem people might as well buy from Temu. Almost forgot, Twitter can't find bots that are so easy to find that they become 'X in bio' memes.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#124

Post by yunwal »

robjan wrote: post #87
Renaud wrote: post #60

I wish there were more offerings for socialising around hobbies. Strava looks great for some sport activities, but I’d like to meet other nerds into 80s computing, hobby electronics, comics, sci-fi, home automation, kayaking, city exploration, etc You invariably end up with lical Facebook groups, which are just a flow of posts, and require a FB account, or some non local reddit group, or small scale website you have…

Doesn't meetup.com somewhat fulfil this, although it's most useful to people living in big cities

Meetup.com in large cities has become a money-grab, spawning a bunch of semi-professional “event planners” who charge much more than the cost of putting on the event. Feeling like you’re paying for the privilege of talking to other people is demoralizing. People want a place to meet other people that doesn’t feel like they’re paying to be “set up”.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#125

Post by Beijinger »

"Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?"

I don't know, but has anyone tried using Tinder in the US recently? Just scammers, crazies, wackos and strange people - if you can get a match. Tinder has gotten totally useless, in fact, it has become a marketplace for lemons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Your chance of finding a decent date would be bigger on a Hire a dog walker app or hire a cleaner app. Some years ago, I was told that Couch Surfing is a dating app. Kind of.

Good luck.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#126

Post by tinybrain »

skhunted wrote: post #100
tinybrain wrote: post #97

What happened to Meetup? I moved to a new city in 2015 and made a handful of long term friend groups, all started from meetup. I moved to a new city in 2024 and it's basically empty... except for some Wiccan book clubs, or MLM pyramid schemes or whatever. I don't get it. Seems like there would be competition in this space to replace Meetup, but there's nothing? Or did we all just collectively give up on meeting stran…

In my area Discord took the place of Meetup. Meetup went downhill when WeWork bought them.

Hey thanks for the tip. I searched my local subreddit and found some Discord invites, maybe I'll find better luck there.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#128

Post by hooverd »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #119
SunlitCat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually many sport activities seem to be largely women based, which kinda says much about men not really caring about their health. :)

Go into most gyms and it’s the opposite phenomenon. Men know that some types of physical activity (weight lifting) actually get them laid and others (I.e running) are the equivalent of what food does to get away from predators. The men who get good at that type of physical activity tend to be treated like the food is.

Women don't like men who do cardio?

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#129

Post by fragmede »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #102
brushfoot wrote: post #73

"Users near you" functionality is sorely needed in online spaces, considering how much interaction has moved online. Reddit has worked around their lack of it to some degree with location-based subreddits like r/AtlFilmmakers. But subreddits are high maintenance, and they isolate content. Plus, the naming conventions aren't standard. Maybe there's r/AtlFilmmakers for filmmakers in Atlanta, but another subreddit for m…

Unfortunately “Users near you” has the same problems AirTags has to deal with. If you’re looking for someone, these features often make finding the names of their new accounts trivial. It also tells you that person is within the app’s range.

Airtags are very near you. Knowing someone is within 50 feet/a couple of meters is much different than knowing someone is within 30 mins drive of you, in a dense urban environment.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#130

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #102
brushfoot wrote: post #73

"Users near you" functionality is sorely needed in online spaces, considering how much interaction has moved online. Reddit has worked around their lack of it to some degree with location-based subreddits like r/AtlFilmmakers. But subreddits are high maintenance, and they isolate content. Plus, the naming conventions aren't standard. Maybe there's r/AtlFilmmakers for filmmakers in Atlanta, but another subreddit for m…

Unfortunately “Users near you” has the same problems AirTags has to deal with. If you’re looking for someone, these features often make finding the names of their new accounts trivial. It also tells you that person is within the app’s range.

All you did was describe the feature. That is the entire point.
Post reply on HN