191–200 of 234 posts
The algorithmic feed should be banned for all public discourse. That is what’s killing us (quite literally). Let topics be searchable and people should find what they need. Very simple algorithms such as “most recent conversation” may be allowed.
When 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.
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Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.
I do wonder if this is just a symptom of monetization. Free advertising with viral posts was possible for talented marketers until the early 2010s. Now you have to pay. OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger…
The same problems people cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.
If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census.
If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)
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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…
The over generalization of the term social media drives me bonkers. In the olden days we had things like message boards , forums , and chat rooms . Then came social networks . All of those terms reflect some sort of connection between people. When I see the term social media , I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting se…
It tells you exactly what it does in a way that "social media" obscures. Nothing drives engagement like a Gossip Engine!
eh, I'd say monetization/gamification was the issue. bet a social media without likes, organized in circles, would be way less toxic.
Without advertising you would have to pay for it. But that would not sufficiently deter bad actors. What you need is culture to repel and moderation to exclude them.
of course sustainability of the whole thing is questionable
When 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.
Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem? Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them…
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When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media. That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now…
> I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter. We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.
Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.
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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…
Just, FTR, there's always been the problem of how much moderation is required to keep the discourse (in a group) flowing without being so restrictive as to only be about the moderators.
See IRC, which (IMO) can be over-moderated, channel ops used to be very much about themselves, vs Usenet, which had no moderation at all (and was "destroyed" by google groups making access trivial for troublemakers), through to current things like Reddit which have some moderators.
It's (IMO) exactly like governance IRL - some countries overdo it, and some underdo it.