171–180 of 194 posts
Private chats solve the problem of anonymity allowing people to behave badly. In a chat you have reputation and you get kicked if you're an asshole.
I had an interesting experience with a WhatsApp group recently. In the past, WhatsApp groups had an upper limit of 256 participants. They then increased this to something much bigger (not sure how much, but at least 1,000). Anyway, I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're old enough you might remember Americans were much more violent from 1960 to 1995 or so and the crime rate was incredibly high in American cities, leading to what was called white flight. Now, if you work with young people (so-called zoomers), you'll notice they are absolutely not like this anymore. At least 30% of this was caused by everyone breathing leaded gasoline.
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However, every time someone gets assaulted on the subway these days, it's in the news, complete with cellphone camera video from multiple witnesses.
Back in the 1960s, when violent stuff happened, there was not much record of it and it didn't get into the news unless it was particularly bad.
Perception has really changed, along with information technology.
> This leads to one of my favorite axioms: every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you. This is directly at odds with the aforementioned moderation. The slack that I'm in has no qualms about warning toxic members of their shit, and making them ex-members if they have to. Thus the only N-…
I disagree. I have chats where some people engage in good faith and aren't malicious, but nonetheless they are exhausting at times. You can tell them the rules and they will engage in good faith efforts to follow but the letter and spirit of the rules, but the simple truth is some people aren't "cool" or socially graced. One of my more social group chats has someone who is both autistic and extremely romantically lon…
Most of us figure that out by our mid 30s and I firmly believe that is a main reason you don’t usually see people over a certain age in that kind of environment. Some platforms like Discord or Reddit can have a network bias effect toward this as well.
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> This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the sales people away, or at least invite-only. You can't keep sales people a.k.a phonies away it will always happen. Every underground subculture gets appropriated as soon as even…
I think that your comment is spot-on
I also had a brief discussion about the subject with an older person I respect, and this is what he had to say:
> Interesting post. I think you've hit on the central issue: where are the experts? > > Back in the day, USENET was kind of the hotspot for that kind of thing; these days, it's mostly cranks and luddites; a few folks are still around, but it's just not what it once was. > >The challenge is tapping into the current set of experts; the thing is, TUHS and COFF are great for talking to the older generation, but (and I think that Doug, Ken and Rob at least would admit this) they're mostly retired and have handed the torch off to the next batch. So where are THOSE people? > > I think that there is no central online presence for that group like there was for the previous generation with USENET. I mostly chat with them at conferences or idly on social media, but the real work is being done more or less independently. To the extent that folks are communicating about it, I think it's mostly point-to-point. :-(
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It's pretty ironic that every one of their "cozy internet" site examples requires pumping all of your communications through a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you, and which can do whatever nebulous stuff with your data that it wants. Doesn't seem very cozy to me. I believe the mainstream internet is already completely overrun by malicious actors, whether bots or not,…
I don't understand why some people hate third-party private businesses so much on the internet. I mean, people often have conversations in coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Starbucks is a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you. I am pretty sure it also does "nebulous stuff" with the data it gets off me - it has my credit card after all, and I am sure it runs all the analy…
I had an interesting experience with a WhatsApp group recently. In the past, WhatsApp groups had an upper limit of 256 participants. They then increased this to something much bigger (not sure how much, but at least 1,000). Anyway, I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management…
> This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the sales people away, or at least invite-only. You can't keep sales people a.k.a phonies away it will always happen. Every underground subculture gets appropriated as soon as even…
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQHQhNq5Tek The original creator seems to have removed their account and this is reupload.
is there anything that VCs will _not_ pontificate on?