151–160 of 234 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.
Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
I'm planning an app where people are forced to talk to each other and learn more about each other, if they do not they are banned from the platform.
Going on Tinder to gather likes and never talk to anyone should be forbidden.This is the issue with social sites, they make it as generic as possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. A pet peeve of mine is when businesses reject the marketing channel they own (their websites) to adopt platforms like X or Instagram. Use them, yes, but do publish on your own site (and adopt RSS along the way).
except no one goes to their website or uses rss. it is unfortunately a waste of time for small niche group that finds it useful
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're not logged in, the evil algorithmic trending feed is literally the first thing you'll see being pushed onto you. (seems like it's a default setting, because it's that way across several different instances.) So what's the truth? Seems like an incoherent position to me, especially given how mastodon itself advertises it as "no algorithms". It doesn't hold true when you can immediately see algorithmic feeds,…
You seem to be purposefully mixing the two opposing uses of the word "algorithm". On the non-abusive platforms, an algorithm is a fairly simplistic set of criteria that are designed to be useful to the human beings that use a service. If you want to, you can inspect the code used to generate them; the likes of Mastodon don't hide how these work because they aren't trying to harm anyone. I think this is the part of Ma…
It's not "evil" to be showing an algo feed per se. But mastodon and a bunch of other platforms refer to algo feeds as "bad/evil" or something of the sort, market themselves as not having them, and yet thoroughly employ multiple algo feeds. Is that not just hypocritical? It looks glaringly dishonest. They could at least have some integrity to say "we don't like the yucky algorithms, but here we only have good™ algorithms", when that's literally what it is.
First of all, social media has stopped being social long ago. Now it's just a platform for content mills. Producer to consumer. Social media was peer to peer and it's dead.
I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm. Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed…
Mastodon literally has a trending feed. Is that not an "algorithm"? It has algorithmic popular hashtags, news feed, and user recommendations. Just a bog standard handful of algorithmic surfaces, so why are they still pretending like it's "algorithm free" is beyond me. "Absolute lack", right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?
> Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN? Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page. Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted be…
In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN? Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page. Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted be…
I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts. In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the cha…
> In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
The following was built and deployed in Taiwan and proved to be very capable at sidestepping policy gridlock.
I've often wondered if some of the concepts that power it could be applied to help facilitate more generalized discussion and debate (which could also optionally tie into instances of the original political purpose it was built for).
https://github.com/pluralitybook
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plai…
That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead.
That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble.
> If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media. At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like "people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop" . Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these f…
Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.