Social networks are no longer social • Hacker News Board

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#171

Post by gaius » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 7:52 AM UTC

propogandist wrote: post #154

FirinMyLazr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely and horrifyingly true. Let’s continue to bring up Equifax’s failure as much as possible because it seems like it’s not a big issue anymore Which is crazy.

Threaten equifax and you disrupt the business model of an entire industry, the same one that's responsible for the economic collapse. Credit ratings from the 3 major providers are used by banks to assess credit worthlessness of personal loans. Naturally, the more data these firms have on people the better they can rate (perceived) risk. These 'data controllers' serve banks and corporations who make their billions on…

the same one that's responsible for the economic collapse.

Credit ratings of individuals (Equifax) are unrelated to credit ratings provided by companies such as Moody's for corporate and government bonds.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#172

Post by gaius » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 7:58 AM UTC

scarecrowbob wrote: post #29

cgriswald wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine going to a bar and having your name, relationship status, political orientation, and a list of your big mistakes floating above your head. Good times. Good times.

To be fair, that's what it is like to go anywhere in a small town you've lived in for a long time. :D

To be fair, that's what it is like to go anywhere in a small town you've lived in for a long time. :D

That's true, but it's also true that in the next town over, you can be anonymous again. The difference with social media is the profile follows you everywhere.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#173

Post by sanoojm » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 8:27 AM UTC

These are expected when people run behind instant gratification instead of creative happiness. For me, it's like chain smoking, everyone says to quitting smoking, you know it's not making any good for you, you know it's you paying cigar industry to make yourself sick. Still you can't give up. But once you give up, you will start seeing the world differently. I Uninstalled Facebook and insta from my cellphone. I am counting that as a small step.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#174

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 8:31 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #172

scarecrowbob wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that's what it is like to go anywhere in a small town you've lived in for a long time. :D

To be fair, that's what it is like to go anywhere in a small town you've lived in for a long time. :D That's true, but it's also true that in the next town over, you can be anonymous again. The difference with social media is the profile follows you everywhere.

You cannot be anonymous in the next town over, because those townfolk, like your local townfolk, know everyone and everything that belongs in their town. Your unfamiliarity means you don't belong and aren't trustworthy.

You can be anonymous in a city.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#175

Post by ZoomZoomZoom » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 8:55 AM UTC

Larrikin wrote: post #144

Paperweight wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When everyone's anonymous, anyone can speak their mind without worrying about offending anyone. When everyone's identified, only the crazies and extremists truly speak their mind - they don't care about offending anyone. You might end up with a mix of crazies and extremist "thought leaders" with packs of quiet followers - a suppression of the moderates and deep thinkers.

The failed experiment that is 4chan was founded on this idea and its plainly clear that anonymity in a large community leads people to just spout the craziness constantly and loudly because well researched and thoughtful comments are simply lost in the sea of crap and there are literally no downsides to constantly lying. You can thoroughly debunk a persons claims and they'll resort to insults or usually will stop res…

Total anonymity may lead to this anarchy, but having a persona that's not tied to your everyday life, your social status and appearance, but to your status in a specific web-based society or a sphere of your interests, this is what helped moving meaningful discussion forward.

What really devastated so much of the pre-social-network internet is erosion of this practice, in my opinion.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#176

Post by Joeri » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 9:00 AM UTC

Kye wrote: post #75

iagovar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, this is an interesting take. I may apply it to one of my communities. I've been playing with the idea of banning politics entirely, but that's what most people want to talk about. Did you notice any improvement on the level of discussion? Or do they just reacted different with each other posts? Also, do you just censor the keyword or remove the post entirely?

"Politics" is a shaky, fluid concept. For example: Talking about a date I went on would be political to a sizable subset of most communities because of the genders involved. Drawing the line there while others are able to speak about their lives freely would alienate a large part of your community. Politics is not an innocent team sport with few/no consequences for the losing side. Figuring out where to draw the line…

Politics by itself isn’t necessarily the problem, it’s the tribalism that brings out the worst. Politics is just one outlet that leads into tribalism, just like sports and religion.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#177

Post by zapzupnz » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 9:01 AM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #107

elliekelly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meaningless at best. For some users the relationships and one-upmanship is detrimental to their mental/emotional wellbeing.

Why would people think that this is unique to Facebook? For a lot of people, relationships and one-upmanship is detrimental to their mental state... offline.

Heck yeah. For instance, Tall Poppy Syndrome is a national sport in New Zealand unless rugby is involved.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#178

Post by int_19h » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 9:03 AM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #84

300bps wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do miss those early days. I got my first modem in 1985. I racked up a $300 phone bill my first month calling bulletin boards exchanging messages and software with people all over the world. My parents took my modem from me until I paid off the debt. I’ve been on dozens of forums with topics I’m interested in over the last 3.5 decades. I’ve used every kind of internet communication including Usenet, irc, web, etc. T…

> Just look for them! That's an issue in itself. Google used to have a "discussion" search feature you could use to find a search term in forum posts. Now, that feature is gone. Social media content is highly prioritized and incentivized. Forum discoverability was better in the past. Now, if you search for a community, you'll find a half-dozen Facebook groups, its Twitter feed, a subreddit, its G+ counterpart and You…

Adding +forum to the query usually narrows it down as expected.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#179

Post by antt » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 9:13 AM UTC

Larrikin wrote: post #168

antt wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan has better discussions that reddit and hackernews put together. The point is that they aren't stored anywhere and disappeared once they were finished. Over here I've been told that I can't have more than one account to post things I don't want associated with me in public. Give that I have a more than even chance I will work in some regime that takes offense to many things I might say, e.g. that I theoretically…

4chan only has better discussion when you are absolutely new to a topic, since the userbase tends to be on the younger side and they are happy to reshare the information they just learned. The basics are constantly presented over and over again. But people with real knowledge eventually grow tired of sharing that information with a userbase that is happy to discuss which programming language has the best Hello World,…

Back in my MSc I had to code a ray tracer for a black hole. all the lovely GR tensors implemented in C and the like. Someone in sci pointed me to the gsl and how to install it on the local lab machine in Suse. Then they critiqued the way I was running the rays.

I ended up getting 100% on that coursework.

4 chan is like a piggie bank. You get out of it what you put in.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#180

Post by evrydayhustling » Tue, Dec 25, 2018, 10:04 AM UTC

electricEmu wrote: post #150

evrydayhustling wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality video! I hadn't heard the points about mutation of ideas and forming complementary controversies.

What’s quality about it? The title “This will make you angry” doesn’t instill confidence.

The parts I mentioned about why popular ideas discover more potent forms through mutation? Also the title is a self referential joke. Added my comment exactly because it doesn't look like quality at first glance.