I just want Discord but a forum. I would pay good money to that
Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
161–170 of 234 posts
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations! But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free. What we call today "social medi…
Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group. Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention…
"social media" is forums, IRC, blogs, etc, but through the lens of advertisers.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#163Earlier 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.
Youtube does not expose the number of down votes any more. LinkedIn has no dislike button and I find it positively toxic.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. 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, an…
Please describe what it would be like if it were not a bubble. If everything is a bubble, the concept is worthless.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#165When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.
Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#166First 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.
You are literally topping that comment on a peer to peer social media website right now. It's hardly dead, it just happens away from meta and X. Discord is absolutely popping off, for example. HN and other forums are still very lively.
This is hobby project for a billionaire, not a social media website. It doesn't need to generate a dime. It runs very efficiently because it was coded well (and cared for), but there are salaries paid to people to watch it that are just a gift to the people who post here.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#167I 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.
I suggest calling it a 'ranking algorithm' or 'engagement-driven ranking algorithm' to be more precise.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community. Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, p…
Building "reputation" and building yourself a "brand" are the worst things from the forum-era. I will not miss power-tripping mods and users with 20,000 posts writing the dumbest replies possible into every thread asking "why would you do this?", "have you used the search function?", etc. Just because you have many posts doesn't mean the posts are good. Many users ignored high-quality posts from new accounts for exam…
Forums aren’t all like that, as the HN comment section demonstrates. While not a full-featured forum, it would be prone to the same effects.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#169> A few creators do append labels disclaiming that their videos depict “no real events,” but many creators don’t bother, and many consumers don’t seem to care.
https://youtu.be/kLyuNo3vEuQ?t=346
AI videos as propaganda. In this clip, the guy can be seen passing through a missile transport railing.
300K views.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#170I just want Discord but a forum. I would pay good money to that
Discord has "forum channels". https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
What aspects of conventional forums are you looking for?