The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#51

Post by dmonitor » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #50

layer8 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important problem also in the West is closed services like Discord replacing public web forums (and mailing lists with public archives, and usenet). It’s harder nowadays to discover and get access to communities you’re interested in, and as the article explains it also leads to a decline of longer-form content with long-term value. Of course, the chat-like interface almost all modern community platforms feature do…

Public web forums attract trolls, bots, spammers, and all sorts of bad actors. It's ultimately better this way. In the 90's, the notion of "netizen" as a distinct fun, curious, respectful culture seemed to exist and therefore letting random netizens on your Internet doorstop was fun, even despite trolls and what not. I honestly believe this culture is an accident - the Cold War ended in the early 90's and that coinci…

Public discords are no better for bad actors. You just need active moderation in both cases

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#52

Post by Isthatablackgsd » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:33 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #45

Aperocky wrote: post #14

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be…

An important problem also in the West is closed services like Discord replacing public web forums (and mailing lists with public archives, and usenet). It’s harder nowadays to discover and get access to communities you’re interested in, and as the article explains it also leads to a decline of longer-form content with long-term value. Of course, the chat-like interface almost all modern community platforms feature do…

Largely to blame for the fall of public web forums is moderation. It always boils down to moderation. Moderating forums is not an easy task. I used to be a forum moderator 20 years ago for 2D MMORPG forum, I have difficult time to moderate a forum that have over 20k registered users with over hundred sub-forums. With moderation team, it is still difficult to moderate professionally and clean.

Majority of the moderation are volunteering position, meaning they don't get paid to moderate those sites. Reddit plagued with this issue, there are power mods that moderating 50 or 100 subs. The reason for that because no one else want to moderate the subs since it requires time investment.

Moderation is always and a thorn on their site for many forum/discussion sites. When Elon Musk announced their consideration creating a new social media platform, I always think of how they will manage the moderation part in those platforms? Look at other small social media platform like Truth, Gab, Parler. Common issue with those sites is moderation.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#53

Post by Aardwolf » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

Aperocky wrote: post #14

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be…

> Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere.

A lot of information on Wikipedia is permanently valid and doesn't need to be "couple of days old" fresh. Same for many hobbyist websites from the past

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#54

Post by jl6 » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

Aperocky wrote: post #14

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be…

This is the one thing I dislike about Hacker News. We have a diverse and talented commentariat that loses all interest in a topic after 2-3 days max, with no long-term discourse. Perhaps this is by design - a pressure release valve? But it does feel less of a venue for conversation, and more like running down a platform trying to talk to someone whose train is leaving.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#55

Post by Aperocky » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #54

Aperocky wrote: post #14

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be…

This is the one thing I dislike about Hacker News. We have a diverse and talented commentariat that loses all interest in a topic after 2-3 days max, with no long-term discourse. Perhaps this is by design - a pressure release valve? But it does feel less of a venue for conversation, and more like running down a platform trying to talk to someone whose train is leaving.

We regularly have [2015] flags on articles, in that regard this place is probably better than 99% of the internet.

After all, an article is to inform the current audience, and debates should not last forever.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#56

Post by Barrin92 » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

I think this has less to do with technology to be honest and more with the size of the 'chattering class' in a lot of Western countries. The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China, or a lot of Asian countries for that matter. I think it's more cultural than technological.

I'm in agreement with one of the other commenters here who pointed out that this is an economic phenomenon if anything. There's a large elite, upper middle learned class that puts a lot of status on being into these kinds of media that you just don't have in many places around the globe.

I still remember a similar discussion when I was in Singapore and I talked to people about what books by Singaporean authors they could recommend, and almost nobody had a recommendation. This always stuck with me because I have no doubt if I had asked this in Iceland or Finland I would have gotten plenty of domestic fiction recommended to me.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#57

Post by stult » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #54

Aperocky wrote: post #14

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be…

This is the one thing I dislike about Hacker News. We have a diverse and talented commentariat that loses all interest in a topic after 2-3 days max, with no long-term discourse. Perhaps this is by design - a pressure release valve? But it does feel less of a venue for conversation, and more like running down a platform trying to talk to someone whose train is leaving.

It’s the lack of notifications and an inbox showing new replies to your comments. I miss 90% of the replies to my comments until it’s way too late to reply in turn.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#58

Post by torginus » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #52

layer8 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important problem also in the West is closed services like Discord replacing public web forums (and mailing lists with public archives, and usenet). It’s harder nowadays to discover and get access to communities you’re interested in, and as the article explains it also leads to a decline of longer-form content with long-term value. Of course, the chat-like interface almost all modern community platforms feature do…

Largely to blame for the fall of public web forums is moderation. It always boils down to moderation. Moderating forums is not an easy task. I used to be a forum moderator 20 years ago for 2D MMORPG forum, I have difficult time to moderate a forum that have over 20k registered users with over hundred sub-forums. With moderation team, it is still difficult to moderate professionally and clean. Majority of the moderati…

Yea, and most forums would eventually attract a bunch of die-hard but absolutely insufferable users with all the time in the world. Occasionally these folks would be in cahoots with the admin staff and would get to have their transgressions ignored while banning people who dared to disagree with them.

I've seen a handful of these people wreak havoc on huge online communities.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#59

Post by hintymad » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

There is also an interesting phenomenon in China's internet: concentration of communities, for good or for bad. For instance, zhihu.com, the Chinese copycat of Quora has way more deeper discussion on machine learning, math, or STEM in general than Quora. On zhihu, it's easy to find the in-depth discussion of latest papers, hundreds of posts on intuition or interpretation of pretty much every STEM concepts and their historical context, dozens if not hundreds of lengthy articles that compare Raft and Paxos and ZABs and what not, all kinds of recommendations of interesting papers in top-tier conferneces, and etc. Quora, in contrast, has few such discussions because people would go to reddit, stackexchange, or some mailing list for such discussion.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#60

Post by Isthatablackgsd » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #58

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largely to blame for the fall of public web forums is moderation. It always boils down to moderation. Moderating forums is not an easy task. I used to be a forum moderator 20 years ago for 2D MMORPG forum, I have difficult time to moderate a forum that have over 20k registered users with over hundred sub-forums. With moderation team, it is still difficult to moderate professionally and clean. Majority of the moderati…

Yea, and most forums would eventually attract a bunch of die-hard but absolutely insufferable users with all the time in the world. Occasionally these folks would be in cahoots with the admin staff and would get to have their transgressions ignored while banning people who dared to disagree with them. I've seen a handful of these people wreak havoc on huge online communities.

You are not wrong. I was in a game modding & hacking forum and there was a discussion about particular game. There was heated debate between the original poster and the moderator in a thread and then this moderator decided to target and respond hateful political comment against the original poster that are not relevant to the gaming mod topic. It is like the mod had their ego bruised and felt like need to take it out on the original poster. I reported that mod to the admin/owner of the forum and the response I got from them is that everything is fine and it is not against their TOS (while it is...). Which is sad because this mod is well known in this community, it is out of character for this mod to react that way. After that response from admin, I lost all respect for that admin and the mod.