Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder

#141

Post by espeed » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 12:11 AM UTC

dTal wrote: post #120

F-0X wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

Moreover, it's impossible to use HN to keep in touch with friends in meaningful ways - you can't send private messages on HN. There are people I've otherwise lost touch with, who turn up on HN from time to time. What am I gonna do, hijack a thread to say hi?

People say hi on HN all the time, esp when they see someone they know comment on a thread.

Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder

#142

Post by dmix » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 4:11 AM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #137

dmix wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like competiting versions of slacktivism to me.

Slacktivism is a word people even lazier than the slacktivists use to describe small attempts at change. As a lazy guy myself, I'd lift my glass to you if it wasn't all the way over there.

Sorry the idea about being another person acting outraged on Twitter about something makes me cringe.

I'd rather spend my time building decentralized alternatives to those products. Which is what I'm doing in my spare time.

We, the developers and startup peoples, are the ones who can do something real about it.

Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder

#143

Post by z3phyr » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 8:39 AM UTC

sbmthakur wrote: post #116

z3phyr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this definition, the internet itself is a social media?

Do you mean the World Wide Web? The Internet also consists of devices like routers.

More than WWW. There is a lot of content on the on the internet not served by hypertext markup in a web browser.

Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder

#144

Post by hadsed » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #40

I feel that even if everybody who cared went on strike, the difference in daily visitors would probably be in the error margin. I think most people who really care have already left the centralised social media or scaled it down to the point that a non-strike day is an exception. I do not disagree with the message, but I seriously doubt that this will have any effect.

It doesn't have to reach its end game goal immediately. It's an iterative process of slowly gathering people together, showing others that there are at least some people who care, technologists seeing the demand and creating products, rinse and repeat. Until one day you hit the phase transition point and then boom... Change.

Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder

#145

Post by SamuelAdams » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

3xblah wrote: post #62

Interesting how he chose the word "strike", commonly used to refer to workers, as if to imply users are working for Facebook or Twitter. Every time a user submits something to them, it is arguable she is doing work for those companies. The companies do not produce content, yet they depend on it in order to draw traffic. What they provide is a centralised distribution channel. They rely on users to do the work of prod…

That's one of the amazing things about social media. It has the largest unpaid workforce in history - bigger even than the slave trade. Companies aren't getting billions of dollars in stock valuations because of their 50 or so really smart employees: they're getting billions because of their user's data, and their users willingness to continuously cultivate and update that data.

That's what makes Facebook data so valuable: it's up to date and it's very detailed, all thanks to the billions of people who contribute to it.

Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder

#146

Post by craftyguy » Mon, Jul 01, 2019, 11:25 PM UTC

espeed wrote: post #35

tickerticker wrote: post #6

Is HN a form of social media?

Yes. HN is a form of social media -- it's a social media exemplar -- the exception that proves it's possible to have an open system for high-quality public discourse, even if such a system is hard to establish and even harder to maintain. Paul Graham has said, "he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community" [1]. Hacker News launched 12 years ag…

> open system

"Hacker" "news" is not an open system. The source code, AFAIK, is proprietary, and the FAQ even states that votes are not counted 1:1, which implies "algorithms" and other hand-wavy stuff.

For an actual open social media system, where moderator actions and source code are public for all to review, see https://lobste.rs.

Re: Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder

#147

Post by EGreg » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #80

kickscondor wrote: post #48

Earlier 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…