[HN Gopher] Killing Community
___________________________________________________________________
Killing Community
Author : dasil003
Score : 252 points
Date : 2023-06-12 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.marginalia.nu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.marginalia.nu)
| caseysoftware wrote:
| Is this an allegory for mass immigration?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It is not.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I posted the core idea in a comment here as I was finishing
| editing the post, generated interesting discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295239
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Interesting model; it probably doesn't help moderation effort
| if mod team members start to feel like they've gone from
| village elder to mall cop.
| [deleted]
| koromak wrote:
| There needs to be a way to incentivize long-lived, stable
| corporations. Maybe going public simply makes that impossible,
| but the target of consistent profit rather than infinite growth
| is so much heather. I guess that don't make VC money though huh.
|
| The problem is, theres just no ramifications for pumping a
| company to its death.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think corporate involvement is part of the problem, not part
| of the answer. Corporations have very different, and sometimes
| very opposed, goals to those of community.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Still need to solve the problem of how to fund these public
| services. Not really plausible to expect their devs and
| admins to live like the desert fathers.
| JohnFen wrote:
| There is a large range of ways to do this that exist in
| between corporate involvement and no funding whatsoever.
| pram wrote:
| This is what B Corporations are for I guess, they're relatively
| new. As in within the past decade. The legal framework is in
| place though.
| krono wrote:
| If I were a VC with investments in Reddit who saw it was going
| nowhere, and on top of that learned that my other investment
| OpenAI had been gobbling up all its data entirely free of charge
| for the purpose of fencing it without any significant legal
| consequences, I would:
|
| 1. Try to cut off any upstart rivals of my better performing bet
| from playing the same trick by sabotaging easy data extraction
|
| 2. Cut my losses and rid myself of future ones by somehow sizing
| Reddit down a notch, not so much that it dies though - I'm a
| sentimental guy, bite me
|
| 3. Ensure no one finds out I had anything to do with this by
| throwing someone else under the bus and buying them off if they
| ever figure it out (lucky for hypothetical VC me, Reddit's CEO
| seems arrogant, impulsive, and greedy enough that he probably
| wouldn't even realise having been played before its too late +
| easily convinced to take the fall for far less than that'd
| actually be worth)
|
| Wouldn't it be something if I could have the subject of step 3
| take care of step 1 and 2 for me, perhaps together in one single
| master-stroke of a go?
|
| *evil laugh*
| lolinder wrote:
| This really resonated with me, and I'm wondering what the
| practical implications are for the development of a sane social
| landscape for the modern internet.
|
| We seem to all agree that VC-funded platforms are the wrong bet,
| and I would take it further and say that that means that _no_
| centralized platform can be the answer. You simply can 't run
| something on the scale of Reddit with any other funding model.
|
| I would like to think something like the fediverse could work--
| instances can in theory function as small villages, they can gate
| membership so that they can control the rate of new additions. An
| instance can be small enough in scale that it can be paid for out
| of pocket by a single admin, maybe with help from the members,
| which eliminates the perverse incentive for growth. Federation
| can (in theory) provide links between communities that aren't
| possible with a traditional bulletin board forum.
|
| I do wonder, though, if the fediverse is going to suffer for
| straddling the middle ground between village and platform. A lot
| of people seem to want all the benefits of the village without
| losing the intensely-connected feeling of a place like Reddit or
| Twitter. Is such a thing possible, or are they mutually
| exclusive?
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| I think social networks and community driven
| websites/applications simply have a lifecycle. They all
| eventually crash and burn, only for a newer (note: newer is not
| the same as better) one to grab the share of users. It's a
| slightly stretched analogy, but each social network is a bit
| like a country/state. With a long view of history, it's rare
| for one to last a long time. History is riddled with failed
| states or once grand countries that everyone thought would last
| forever.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Villages used to be the norm on the internet, when far more
| communication happened on forums.
|
| The great promise of the fediverse is that you _can_ have both,
| even at the same time. You can be part of a single small group
| where you know the people around you and would notice someone
| new. But you can also have massive instances without any of
| those connections.
| seydor wrote:
| villages scale up to cities successfully, however. Some media
| like reddit do not grow beyond the village culture. The villagers
| are imposing their politics on every subreddit, even if it is
| about obscure crafts. Maybe there is something wrong with the
| medium, or it is too simplistic.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| are there any examples of for-profit villages actually scaling
| up to cities successfully?
| seydor wrote:
| Hm . Facebook started with college networks and pokes but
| they got removed as it grew
|
| Youtube started with piracy and pranks but it got contentID
| over time
| JohnFen wrote:
| > villages scale up to cities successfully, however.
|
| This is true, however "community" is typically lost when that
| happens.
| pmontra wrote:
| If you want to know what's a Harlow's monkey, here's the story
| https://www.simplypsychology.org/harlow-monkey.html
| hexator wrote:
| How does that work with a app like Discord, which is more like a
| huge group of villages and not one big village? Will they be able
| to continually grow by adding more servers without destroying the
| community? Is that model more sustainable?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Will they be able to continually grow
|
| I think that this demand for continual growth is what destroys
| community. There's a word for unchecked growth: cancer.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| I think that model is more sustainable, if we do assume that
| discord will sunset eventually I would guess two possible
| avenues. First one is feature creep - different communities
| want different features and eventually discord forms into
| everything app that new users find confusing. Maybe there is a
| new simple, cool, and hip competitor that takes off. Second one
| is rotting of each community from the inside by overwhelming
| them with information. I've gone through plenty of servers that
| I've fully engaged with, but that had grown too big. These
| servers are on permanent mute and I never read any messages
| because keeping up with the traffic is impossible. The result
| of this is that instead of keeping discord running in the
| background I switched to opening it only when I want to game
| with friends.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Discord can be multiple things, for some it is just a teamspeak
| server (village), for others it is facebook groups for under
| 30s (city).
|
| Both seem to work and people are able to choose. I think it is
| also important that reddit facilitates a very different model
| of interaction, a discord server with a thousand users can be
| extremely active and engaging, while a subreddit with a
| thousand people tends to be quite "empty".
| bombcar wrote:
| Discord has other problems, but it can be a decent village for
| community purposes.
|
| However it has the "too easy to reuse an account" problem that
| has its own issues, too.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| > How does that work with a app like Discord, which is more
| like a huge group of villages and not one big village?
|
| Reddit is/was also arguably a huge group of villages. It still
| feels that way, if you are only subscribed to sensibly small
| subreddits and you experience it through the prism of
| old.reddit and third-party apps like Apollo. Reddit doesn't
| think that that model is the future, though, and the mainstream
| Reddit experience has evolved away from that and toward the
| algorithmic feed model.
|
| I would be wary in assuming that Discord's interface and
| community model will remain the same as it seeks ways to
| monetize.
| riskable wrote:
| Nothing is worse than joining a Discord server and finding out
| it's _enormous_. You go to any given channel and the
| discussions are flying by so fast only people who are regulars
| can catch all the content but even then it 's basically just
| noise.
|
| Thread support was added to alleviate some of the noise problem
| but in communities that actually use them there's so many
| threads it's easy to lose track and everywhere else they're
| basically just strange ways of isolating yourself from the rest
| of the people in the community.
| TillE wrote:
| I'm not even sure what the point of a giant Discord server
| is. Like, I use Discord for organizing (online) activities,
| asking a question and getting it answered by a real expert,
| hanging out with friends, etc.
|
| None of this scales, it's totally unworkable if you have 100+
| people actively chatting, let alone thousands.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Conversely, I had a YT snowboarding person I followed start a
| Discord server with a few channels for chat, meetups and
| equipment swaps. Really cool, lots of good discussion and the
| community was really welcoming.
|
| I stepped away and came back like a month later.
|
| It had grown so fast, with so many users, there were suddenly
| like 50-60 channels, it was unreal how hard it was to keep
| track of anything happening. Even the original three channels
| were completely overrun with so many discussions and chats, I
| couldn't keep track.
|
| So I had the experience of joining a small server, only to
| have it blow up when I came back and I just had to give up
| and moved on.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| Reddit seems to be dying for me for completely different reasons.
| Meme dependency for lack of a better word. Not the images with
| one liners though there are an annoying amount of those as well,
| but a standardized repetitiveness of responses to any input that
| tend to linger toward the top of the thread if sorted by best.
| This is much more prevalent in threads off r/popular or r/all
| than smaller subreddits, but as an example, any rape or sexual
| assault story on r/news or r/politics will always have the Brock
| Turner SEO peppering within the top five threads, sometime
| multiple. Any Trump thread will have the long, long list of
| misdeeds with links and then some one liners that the wording has
| become standardized. This then extends in to related subreddits
| where the meme pops up when the triggering subject is talked
| about.
|
| It just becomes so boring and predictable.
| moron4hire wrote:
| This kind of thing is what kept me off of Reddit all these
| years. People would say "you just need to find the right subs",
| but any of the ones in topics I was interested in were all like
| that, and I was never interested in using Reddit just to use
| Reddit. Reddit is what Reddit is, and there is no finding "the
| right sub" if that metaculture is what you don't like about it.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Reddit has been a place for clever people to talk, but as it
| and its reputation grew, it started to attract not-so-clever
| people too. Cleverer people don't respond as well to
| advertising, so if you want to make more money from your users,
| you want more of the less intelligent ones, and fewer of the
| more intelligent ones.
|
| The standardised comments you mention are a way for the less
| intelligent to participate, and the upvotes they attract
| reflect the numbers of these users. The ones you've mentioned
| sound like a case of aping one's betters; the ones I see most
| often are the vacuous 'Putin must be defenestrated' comments
| that litter the Ukraine war daily threads, and are the worst
| kind of performative virtue signalling.
|
| Reddit as a loss-making assembly of communities is dying;
| Reddit as a profitable set of curated feeds, a sort of TikTok
| that's not just for short video, is rising.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| A while back, I posted this[0] on a Mastodon story.
|
| It applies here, as well.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33545049
| [deleted]
| devjab wrote:
| Is Reddit a village? I'm part on some of the "smaller" (maybe
| less large?) communities like the Blood Bowl subreddit, but it's
| still mostly just a bunch of strangers talking with each other
| for a while. It's frankly similar to this place isn't it? Chances
| are you'll read this post of mine, and then never see another of
| my posts again.
|
| That's not really what I'd consider a village, or even a real
| community. I think a lot of the things a lot of people miss about
| the "old web" is really just things being smaller. You'd go into
| an IRC channel and it would be the same people that was there
| every day. This made it possible to actually create a community,
| where people knew each other.
|
| Sure it's fun to be on HN or Reddit or similar and sometimes bump
| into someone "famous", but it's not like it's really "social"
| when you're just talking to a new bunch of people every time you
| post. That is, if what you post is even read by anyone.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| HN is a lot more like a village than Reddit though. I doubt
| people who don't have any interest in tech would know what is
| HN.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I think this site is somewhere near the boundary, IMO. I don't
| recognize every commenter, but in most comment sections I'll
| see posts from someone I recognize. There's also a pretty
| consistent culture (or, more accurately, two cultures, devs and
| tech entrepreneurs), though, compared to say a Reddit comment
| section. It's definitely not an intimate social space like my
| private Discord servers are, either, though.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'd say no, at some point maybe it was, and some niche
| subreddits may still be, but for the most part it's not.
| ddq wrote:
| Sports reddit is the most village-like, and in my view one of
| the few topics that actually scale within the reddit framework
| while maintaining that quality. Each league has its main
| subreddit, each team has its own sub, and the usual adversarial
| nature of reddit tribalism is far more subdued and good-
| natured, as at the end of the day it's all about games.
| williamcotton wrote:
| "Online community" has always felt like an oxymoron.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| Also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I can't claim to remember this personally, but I've heard that
| Usenet, in the pre-Web days, had a period every September when a
| big rush of new college students joined up, and had to be taught
| the rules.
|
| That was before it turned into a cesspit, I guess.
| collaborative wrote:
| I rarely visit Reddit or any other panopticon (this one however -
| HN - keeps tricking me into posting)
|
| Anyway, I recently contacted the mods of deGoogle to see if they
| would like to add to their side bar the ad-free search engine I
| have been working on all the time for a couple months now
|
| They basically said they didn't trust me (again, no karma) but
| asked me to post on the board to see feedback
|
| The post quickly drew ire from a user who accused me of
| disrespecting the community (although he later calmed down once
| he learned that the mods had "given their blessing" for me to
| post)
|
| Anyway, even though the post largely received positive feedback
| and was really upvoted (and user retention from that post has
| been amazing), the mods ended up dismissing me in a pretty cold
| way
|
| That's why I fail to feel sympathy for anyone involved in these
| "villages". As a "stranger", I fail to comprehend their struggle
| for fairness and virtue. As a side note, HN is starting to feel a
| bit alienating too. Lately, I find myself not posting for fear of
| being downvoted - or worse - downvoted and search indexed
|
| Here is the post I am talking about anyway (subreddit is
| currently on strike)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/13qpzy4/a_new_sea...
| hypron wrote:
| Sounds like the village did exactly what it was supposed to do
| - criticize a stranger who only wanted attention for themselves
| collaborative wrote:
| Thanks for the free accusation. I did try to join the
| community because I don't want to simply post and leave. For
| example, I posted on the sister subreddit deMicrosoft and
| engaged other users on how to best set up my daughter's first
| linux PC
|
| I suppose you failed to read the bit where the mods
| specifically asked me to create the post. Either way, the
| overwhelming majority of the village enjoyed the post
| the_shivers wrote:
| I desperately hope Reddits recent changes kill it. It's nothing
| personal towards reddit, but I can't think of anything else which
| will dissuade enshittification of other online places.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Don't count on it.
|
| I'm afraid Steve Huffman made the correct calculation that
| Reddit's network effect is large enough that the wound it'll
| sustain with the API lockout won't be enough to imperil the
| platform.
|
| On the scale of other platform enshittification (Digg in
| particular), this one isn't directly user-hostile enough, and
| the aren't any good enough alternatives.
|
| Enshittification is basically inevitable for
| (venture)capitalist-funded online platforms. My biggest
| disappointment is that Reddit went that venture-capitalist (or
| adjacent, whatever) route, I thought/hoped their "Reddit Gold"
| approach was good enough to be sustainable.
| shmatt wrote:
| People (for obvious reasons) like to compare Digg to whats
| going on at Reddit. It seems a lot closer to Facebook
|
| Facebook has always lead the fight to monetize users to the
| max. If its sudden API changes or shutdowns, or suing 3rd
| party app developers. Yet they still generate Billions and
| people are fine using them, instagram, or Whatsapp, even
| though they fully understand the enshitification the timeline
| has gone through throughout the years, and how aggressively
| they monetize their user base
|
| I also see Reddit as extremely similar to Facebook groups,
| which can also have millions of users, and are moderated for
| free by volunteers
| Macha wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to confuse the health of Meta, the
| company, with Facebook, the platform. I think as a company
| they made the right decision in the acquisitions of
| Instagram and Whatsapp because they captured some of the
| platforms that were stealing their important demographics.
| I think if they hadn't made these acquisitions and were
| still just Facebook.com, we'd be looking at Facebook the
| company not as a FAANG giant but as a Yahoo or IBM or
| similar.
| hummingly wrote:
| Unlike Reddit, most of Meta's apps are commonly used on
| mobile. Furthermore, all the apps you listed actually bring
| long term value in the form of real life social and
| business relationships. Emotionally and economically Reddit
| has not nearly as much of an impact.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The strongest theory I've seen for this killing reddit is
| that moderation quality goes down enough that being on the
| site is no longer fun. Even if Reddit replaces all the
| moderators who quit (which, yes, won't be hard), Reddit
| itself doesn't provide tools with the same power as what mods
| were using, to say nothing of the new mods' lack of
| experience and questionable motives and judgment (if you're
| smart and have good motives, you at least think really hard
| before going into a position left empty by mass resignation).
|
| But yes, long term it's on We The People to fund our own
| communities.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Enshittification is caused by greed, so unless you've fixed
| greed, it's going to continue. Every site that has deliberately
| made their site shitty probably has some "math with dollar
| signs" to back it up. We're lucky that HN is pretty much a
| side-show for YCombinator. If there was even a remote chance
| that it could make a significant amount of money (compared to
| YCombinator's actual business), I guarantee you we'll be
| reading "Announcing HN's Redesign" pinned to the top one day.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It'll continue iff it actually works to satisfy greed. If
| platform builders and funders see there's a limit to
| enshittification before a platform breaks, then they'll stop
| crossing that line out of self interest. I guess there will
| always be a few just trying to sell the platform to a sucker
| before it crashes, but you'd at least see the shit
| diminishing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Enshittification is caused by bad behavior _being
| profitable._ If bad behavior weren 't profitable, greed
| would make everything nice.
| nbadg wrote:
| I would put a slight caveat on that: it's caused by bad
| behavior being _perceived_ to be profitable. That doesn't
| mean it necessarily is. Nor that the bad actor
| necessarily has the tools (or desire) to evaluate the
| effectiveness of their behavior in realizing their greed.
| jll29 wrote:
| Would you say profitability is an issue per se?
|
| It seems to me that users should _want_ their community
| platform to be profitable in order to sustain, but not
| "too profitable" (=greed) or the sense of community
| vanishes.
|
| If that is true, is it the responsibility of the online
| citizen to interact/transact on a platform with the
| "right" degree of profitability (not too small, or it'll
| close tomorrow, but also not to greedy, or
| enshittification occurs)?
|
| PS: How profitable exactly is "right" - reminds me of the
| family game where the winner is the "most average" person
| - scoring points closest to the arithmetic mean instead
| of the person with the max. score.
| Levitz wrote:
| The death of tumblr made other communities worse.
|
| Even if Reddit dies, its users won't. This is a cancer that
| won't stop spreading.
| dahwolf wrote:
| It's true that as a small and intimate community grows, it will
| deteriorate.
|
| Once upon a time there was this optimistic idea that as we add
| voices to the internet it becomes exponentially better, like a
| super brain developing.
|
| This has become true in some parts (Wikipedia, open source
| software, stackoverflow, the like) but it doesn't seem to apply
| to social networking. On social networks, the larger it gets, the
| worse it becomes. The large size making it an attractive target
| for scammers, divisive posts, trolling, dunking, pile-ons,
| influencer tactics. It ends with the worst of us winning, the
| unreasonable ones.
|
| The size of the social network is a factor, its algorithms (what
| is amplified), but also the underlying dysfunctional political
| system. I've come to the conclusion that a large scale social
| network is near impossible to keep healthy, stable, useful. Or
| this slowly becoming clear at this point in time.
|
| My advise would be to not obsessively search for the next new
| thing, instead to pause and critically evaluate what you're
| getting out of it anyway. Make your goal as narrow and tangible
| as possible.
|
| As an example, say you have a particular professional/hobby
| interest. You follow experts on social networks. Instead you
| could just subscribe to the endless amount of newsletters that
| come weekly. Find the good one. Read it once per week and you're
| up to speed. No need to spend hours per day listening to noise. I
| cannot recommend this enough, it's so calming.
|
| The perhaps more controversial tip is about people "finding
| community". I respect and understand that in particular
| situations, people can find like-minded individuals that they
| would otherwise not find in the real world.
|
| Fine, but I'd also argue that this isn't true for many people,
| and "finding community" strongly aligns with being chronically
| online. If so, now would be a good moment to ask hard questions
| about this "community". Do you even know whom they are? Have you
| ever met any of them? Would they help you if something happens to
| you? Have they ever shown an active interest in you? Has the
| community in any shape or form tangibly improved your life? Do
| they like you unconditionally or drop you like a stone when you
| say the wrong thing?
|
| Perhaps your community is just a bunch of randos that do not care
| if you live or die, that happen to have the same suspiciously
| precise opinion, and you're just there to see it validated, for
| hours on end, day by day, without this making any difference
| whatsoever to anything at all.
|
| My point being, optimize your social network usage. Go to direct
| sources, exit communities where there is no real personal stake,
| then walk the dog in the nearby forest. Reclaim your real life.
|
| And yes, I'm hypocritical for posting here. I'm just as flawed in
| wasting time online. But I genuinely believe I should just exit
| 90% of it for the simple reason that it offers no tangible value,
| and quite a lot of negative value (lost quality time).
|
| What comes after Twitter and Reddit? How about fucking nothing?
| thot_experiment wrote:
| You can make a village in some interesting ways. 4chan is a
| village, that's why it's one of the best resources/communities on
| the internet today. I've learned much of what I know about LLMs
| and generative AI on /g/. The toxicity/chaos of the place is
| probably the main thing that enables it to continue to be a
| village for all these years. There's more than one way to shear a
| sheep, and I don't think the 4chan method is the best way to make
| a village, but a village make it does.
|
| I just mention it here because it's probably something that
| doesn't occur to most people, and maybe it should be something we
| think about more. I think 4chan has a very interesting property
| in that the gatekeeping is _only_ your ability to mentally filter
| every Nth (depending on the board) post being full of slurs.
| Outside of that it 's egalitarian and openly accessible to a
| greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's value
| to that that people miss.
| omoikane wrote:
| My impression of 2ch and 4chan is that the anonymous-by-default
| nature means we bring less of our own personalities to those
| boards, and the lack of individuality made them village-like.
|
| The fact there isn't any kind of karma system might also have
| something to do with it.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I am used to old school forum where everyone is called by a
| username. This creates some personalities, yet also the
| freedom to disappear if you want.
| swayvil wrote:
| 4chan's moderation style has allowed for a truly organic
| culture-growth. Of shocking depth. Nigh-unique.
|
| Other communities are rather shallow, comparatively. Mere
| implementations of conventional values.
|
| For good and ill, of course.
| basedbertram wrote:
| In my experience, you have to wade through too many unnecessary
| posts to find anything useful on 4chan.
| pamelafox wrote:
| My only interaction with 4chan is when one day I discovered a
| /d/ thread devoted entirely to insulting me. I had never posted
| on it before, never posted after.
|
| So, I think there is some additional gatekeeping: ability to
| ignore the fact that the one day the community decided to
| personally make me a target of their vitriol. :(
| drekipus wrote:
| I have no context on this but it doesn't make sense to me.
|
| Why would the "hentai/alternate" board be targeting you? Even
| "insulting" you, rather than the norm of posting hentai?
| ddorian43 wrote:
| Thanks for working on that flask-sqlalchemy typing issue
| #1140
| korse wrote:
| Why were you on /d/ in the first place? -_-
| sen_armstrong wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=7227074
| growingentropy wrote:
| [dead]
| msp26 wrote:
| I've gotten actual sources and explanations I used for my
| master's from /h/. I don't even go on anything there except
| /hdg/. Surprisingly helpful bunch.
| yedava wrote:
| When I try to think of a real world village analogue of 4chan,
| the only thing that fits is hazing. To people who participate
| in hazing, it builds character and brings people together. To
| everyone else, hazing is horrifying as it has led to enough
| suicides over the years.
| krapp wrote:
| > Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a
| greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's
| value to that that people miss.
|
| Let's be real - what people miss is being able to act like
| racist edgelords on the internet without consequence, and they
| confuse that freedom with something profound, when it's just a
| deeply ingrained culture of immaturity. But apart from that one
| aspect, there's nothing to the accessibility of 4chan that
| isn't available elsewhere, certainly not quality of
| conversation.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > edgelords
|
| I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV
| in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all seemed
| to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on everything.
| There was the occasional Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, but
| back then, even they tread _very_ carefully - they would
| deviate maybe a little bit from the maintstream opinion but
| not much, at least not looking back on it.
|
| I didn't see things the way the news saw them on almost
| anything. At the time, I thought I must be the only one who
| disagreed on so many points - after all, if anybody thought
| like I thought, there would have to be at least some
| newspaper somewhere that was printing it. But there wasn't.
|
| Then the internet came along, and people could chat and argue
| with each other without a newspaper or magazine or TV editor
| getting in between. I found out that there were a _lot_ of
| people who thought the way I did. A _lot_ of people who
| disagreed with the dominant news media viewpoint that was 90%
| identical.
|
| I think there was an initial rush of people who took voicing
| that disagreement to a bit of an extreme when the internet
| was new, but that's sort of subsided now - there are full
| grown adults with college degrees and jobs and mortgages
| who've been on the internet their whole lives and can't
| _remember_ when all media was as tightly controlled as
| Reddit's /r/politics subreddit.
|
| Now the push back is becoming more serious, less "edgy" and
| more potentially disruptive and even a threat to the people
| who've made their livings and fortunes censoring debate - it
| should come as no surprise that there's such a push to get
| the genie back into the bottle.
| com2kid wrote:
| > I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching
| TV in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all
| seemed to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on
| everything.
|
| This was the era of satantic panic[1], D&D being
| controversial due to devil worship, and when democrats and
| republicans joined hand in hand to try and outlaw
| vulgarity.
|
| The 80s was absurdly conservative.
|
| A regular talking point on 90s TV newscasts was about if it
| is ok for a man to _kill another man_ who (romantically)
| hits on him. That was an actual topic the country was
| divided over.
|
| 1990s America, also not a bastion of radial left thinking.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic
| commandlinefan wrote:
| If that's the way you remember it (I don't remember it
| that way, but to each their own) then an unfettered
| medium like 4chan is _still_ a positive break from a
| handful of stodgy old ideologues controlling the
| conversation.
|
| (I even disagree with both the left _and_ the right on
| some things).
| com2kid wrote:
| This is not a matter of memory, I'm talking about actual
| court cases, laws passed, and people killed.
|
| https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1268/tipper-
| gor...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense#Use_of_th
| e_g...
|
| Then there was the incredible level of controversy over
| an out of the closet lesbian on nationwide TV!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppy_Episode#Reception
|
| Finally, I'll note that Rush Limbaugh was one of the
| nations most listened to media voices during this time
| period.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| I don't mean to argue that you should go on 4chan or
| whatever, but as someone who's been on the site on and off
| for 15 years now I don't even _see_ the hateful stuff really,
| it just slides past my brain. I think you 're wrong about the
| level of humanity that exists on 4chan, but if it's not for
| you that's totally fine. 4chan runs the gamut, that's what
| I'm trying to get across, the good comes with the bad.
| There's a cost associated, there are tradeoffs, but to paint
| it the way you have is not matched to the reality of the
| situation. There are incredibly kind, thoughtful and well
| intentioned people on there, and I think the anonymity and
| lack of consequence is one of the things that enables that.
| What's more, I have a high degree of confidence they're
| genuine, there's no point in chasing clout on an anonymous
| messageboard.
| krapp wrote:
| You misunderstand my point. Kind, considerate, thoughtful
| and well intentioned people can be found anywhere online.
| Bringing them up as an example of the unique nature and
| power of 4chan's community is disingenuous. 4chan is unique
| in its tolerance for hate speech, but with any other kind
| of speech, it's no more or less free than elsewhere.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| You're right that 4chan has a high level of tolerance for
| hatespeech, but that's a secondary, derived
| characteristic from the anonymity and free speech
| absolutism. There's a level of humanity enabled by that
| that you don't see elsewhere.
| anononaut wrote:
| I beg to differ. There are genuine, profound, even
| Socratic conversations which freely happen on various
| threads that essentially can not occur elsewhere on the
| clearnet. No idea is invalid, no topic taboo, and each
| thread and each post must stand alone on their own merit.
| This is all on top of a large number of deep and wide
| recurring hobby generals that are both beginner friendly
| and highly technical. It is more free than any website
| you can think of off the top of your head.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I personally disagree with the parent but you are
| misrepresenting their argument. The person you are
| responding to is referring to the thesis of the article
| which is 'as a community grows and strangers saturate the
| regular encounters, so declines the ability of that
| community to exist in a meaningful way'. They are using
| 4chan as an example of this thesis in action since the
| community of 4chan has a self-imposed growth limit due to
| the nature of its culture (most people couldn't handle
| it).
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > The toxicity/chaos of the place is probably the main thing
| that enables it to continue to be a village
|
| How so, are you thinking?
|
| After reading OP, my guess is that maybe you're suggesting it's
| the way the toxicity/chaos keeps too many people from joining,
| that helps keep it a village? Helps keep it smaller, or less
| rate of newcomers, since so many find it distasteful?
|
| But maybe you mean something else? What are you thinking about
| how the toxicity/chaos might be the main thing that enables it
| to continue as a village? How might it do that?
| drumhead wrote:
| There's a real time experiment happening right now on 4chan.
| What happens when echo chambers meet and cant censor each
| other. Left and right are clashing and they cant ignore one
| another or run away. They're having to talk to each other for
| the first time in years probably. This is what the internet was
| like before the siloed communities of social media platforms
| and their harsh censorship and moderation.
| ink_13 wrote:
| Nonsense. People can absolutely choose to disengage.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Kind of reminds of Urbit where Yarvin has hinted that some of
| the political controversy and inscrutable design were on
| purpose to keep away leftists. That also goes along with Peter
| Thiel's (who funded Yarvin) efforts since college to build and
| nurture rightwing-only networks of techies.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I think 4chan's "solution" to the moderation problem is more or
| less the way it will end up being at most places which have a
| long-term (approaching two decades) survival rate.
|
| Absolutely nobody can agree on what should and should not be
| moderated to some perfect degree, and here the perfect is not
| only the enemy of the good, it's the enemy of sanity. It always
| starts off with some easy low-hanging fruit, and then it ends
| up with people rage-quitting because some moderator has taken
| the "wrong" stance on discussions about Israel and Palestine,
| something small like that. The more control, the more that
| needs to be controlled. It just invites people to filter ever-
| finer, based on the narcissism of small differences.
|
| Ideally, offer some kind of client-side filtration. Let the
| user maintain it, let them run into the Scunthorpe Problem for
| themselves. Rate-limit the spam, and be robust about that, but
| everything else is up to the individual. And frankly, the
| people who have selected fragility as a kind of lifestyle
| rarely have much to offer a community anyway.
|
| I say this as an Old who has watched communities arise,
| develop, and fold over decades, on platform after platform,
| protocol after protocol. Most deaths are the kind of slow-
| motion suicide that in humans would be reflected in lousy
| lifestyle choices. And one I see so, so very often is becoming
| intensely rulebound so that everyone will behave. It never
| _works_.
| Lapha wrote:
| There's definitely smart people on 4chan, but accessibility
| only exists insofar as there's enough of a culture to punch
| through the noise floor. Mentally filtering posts only gets you
| so far, if there's any sort of counterculture then discussion
| becomes impossible as people actively attempt to derail the
| thread, see any thread about Rust in the past couple of years
| for an example.
|
| If you're lucky there won't be a counterculture, but the
| culture of the board won't always be conductive to discussion.
| I stopped browsing /g/ years ago but I remember a distinct
| decline in the quality of discussion around Linux and FOSS
| topics as the board shifted to more towards more general
| consumer technology, FOSS threads naturally became lower effort
| and more memetic* as a result to compete with the influx of new
| users who didn't care about this subculture. When Linus
| Torvalds announced that he would try to be more polite it gave
| some ammo to the anti-Linux culture and things deteriorated
| more. There was a particularly pertinent post around the
| attitude of NixOS users on /g/ that reflects this period pretty
| well I think.
|
| * This sort of trend isn't unique to 4chan of course, the
| quality of discussion on hobby subreddits tends to decline when
| mods start allowing memes and low effort posts. Even if
| discussion continues it's never the primary focus and becomes
| harder to find.
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36274681
| [deleted]
| narrator wrote:
| It's kind of like Burning Man in that regard. If you're overly
| sensitive and can't handle something that is in no way a first
| class resort experience, and where you have to bring all your
| own food and water, you're not going to have a good time.
| omoikane wrote:
| Burning Man is another village that is repeatedly ruined by
| strangers:
|
| https://journal.burningman.org/2016/10/philosophical-
| center/...
| Kiro wrote:
| > I've learned much of what I know about LLMs and generative AI
| on /g/.
|
| I was about to say "I keep hearing this" but then realized you
| are the same person I heard it from last time. Every time I go
| to /g/ I find it hard to believe you can distill actual useful
| information from there. Maybe it's just me who don't know how
| to navigate it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a
| greater degree than anywhere else on the internet
|
| Except for all of the hate, vitriol, prejudice, and disregard
| for the basic humanity of others, it's egalitarian and
| accessible??
| treprinum wrote:
| You can have a freedom or order, but not both at the same
| time. Most social networks decided for the order, suppressing
| freedom. Freedom brings some positives and many negatives,
| that's life I guess.
| brookst wrote:
| Well, sure, if you're not one of _those people_ , the abuse
| isn't even targeted at you.
| [deleted]
| JohnFen wrote:
| > the abuse isn't even targeted at you.
|
| This doesn't actually make a difference one way or another.
| Abuse is abuse.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Not true. As a member of one of the largest, mainstream
| segments of America, I constantly feel attacked while
| browsing 4chan. Your choice to engage is entirely based on
| your ability to filter and rationalize
| [deleted]
| eindiran wrote:
| This is a deep misunderstanding of 4chan, enough so that I
| find it difficult to believe you've even seen any board on
| the site you are discussing. The abuse is directed at
| _everyone_ ; no matter what opinion you share, no matter
| who you are, you will be verbally abused in a variety of
| ways. Totally innocuous opinions that you would be lauded
| for or totally ignored for on another site are just cause
| for being berated and harassed on 4chan, though the extent
| of it is largely governed by the culture of the particular
| board.
|
| I think this is what OP meant by "egalitarian" (though I
| certainly wouldn't have chosen that word) -- equal
| opportunity abuse. This shared constant toxicity plus no
| karma/upvotes and no attachment to an online persona
| through anonymity mean that the playing ground is perhaps
| uniquely level.
| bmarquez wrote:
| > The abuse is directed at everyone; no matter what
| opinion you share, no matter who you are, you will be
| verbally abused in a variety of ways.
|
| Yeah, this is what people misunderstand about 4chan.
| Obviously my race gets a lot of flak, but I've even seen
| racial slurs about white Europeans I've never heard
| anywhere else.
|
| I'm not saying it's morally right, but it feels more of a
| hazing tactic than legitimate hatred. Once you pass that
| filter you have access to some interesting information.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| They're not misunderstanding it they just don't accept
| your model of its value.
|
| No matter what your ethnicity someone on 4chan will make
| a joke about genociding you. The difference is that some
| people in the world actually are doing genocides. And
| someone from one of those groups, knowing that, is going
| to experience those jokes differently.
|
| 4chan, (and to a serious degree, HN) places the duty and
| the transgression on the person who has the bad
| experience with the genocide joke. But a completely valid
| model is actually that no, the genocide joke is the
| transgression and the one making it the transgressor.
|
| 4chan is not separate from the world it is part of it.
| And by fostering this environment you're providing cover
| for atrocities. Because not everyone is there just to
| have a fun time saying slurs! Some of them really do want
| us to die, and 4chan isn't just a diversion it is an
| actual site of conversion and radicalization towards
| their goals.
| eindiran wrote:
| > And by fostering this environment you're providing
| cover for atrocities.
|
| To be clear, I am not "fostering [an] environment" or
| defending 4chan here at all, I am just pointing out that
| this is a misunderstanding of what the culture of 4chan
| is.
|
| Like the person I was replying to, I somehow doubt you
| have spent any time there. Where on the site are you even
| talking about? /g/? /lgbt/? /k/? /mu/? /pol/? /bant/?
| /sci/? /b/? Even though they share the cultural features
| I was talking about, they are quite distinct otherwise.
| Many people read threads on a topical board like /mu/ or
| /g/ and haven't spent any time on the more offensive or
| stomach-churning parts of the site like /pol/ or /b/.
|
| > Because not everyone is there just to have a fun time
| saying slurs
|
| I resent this implication that merely because I suggest
| people understand the things they are talking about that
| I am on 4chan using slurs. This style of argumentation
| would be right at home on the worst boards of 4chan...
|
| > it is an actual site of conversion and radicalization
| towards their goals
|
| 4chan is not a person, it doesn't have "goals" or
| opinions any more than heterogenous online communities
| like eg HN or Reddit do. I would agree that 4chan as a
| community does house more polarized opinions than most
| online communities, though that seems to be largely a
| function of not having upvotes and allowing anonymous
| posting.
|
| To your overall point, that this is a value difference
| between myself and the GP, I fully disagree. I am making
| a factual (and not value-centric) claim that toxicity
| towards anyone posting on the site is an integral part of
| the culture there.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I stopped using 4chan 15 years ago when I realized that a
| huge portion of the people on there are not merely
| roleplaying nazis, but honestly hold the views they
| obscure behind the atmosphere of joking.
|
| Up to date knowledge of their internal jargon and
| shibboleths doesn't discredit my view of the site, it's
| still right there and it doesn't take long to confirm
| that my worst opinions of it from 2008 are still valid
| now.
|
| I never claimed that the site itself has opinions or
| goals. But its members do! and they emerge in the
| patterns of interaction and rhetoric eg its culture.
| swozey wrote:
| I find it absolutely ridiculous that you keep telling
| people that they haven't visited 4chan and are wrong.
| This is hackernews. Most of us are in our 30s and were
| perpetually online during the rise of 4chan and are not
| ignorant whatsoever to what chan boards are like.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| But it is absolutely not the case that the abuse is the
| same magnitude at everyone.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| It's absolutely not for everyone, but I think the anonymous
| nature makes it so low stakes it's trivially easy for me to
| just not care, not engage. You can just ignore things you
| don't like!
| JohnFen wrote:
| Sure, which is why I ignore 4chan. I don't want or need to
| be associated with/exposed to that crowd. I was just very
| surprised to hear it described as egalitarian and
| accessible. It's the cesspool that all other cesspools are
| measured by.
| c22 wrote:
| The most accessible places tend to become cesspools since
| being anti-social is one of the main traits that limits
| people's access to more exclusive places.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > You can just ignore things you don't like!
|
| I do think this is one of the big hidden problems with
| upvote/like systems.
|
| Seeing a post you don't like or disagree with on
| Twitter/Facebook/Reddit with a lot of
| likes/retweets/upvotes/etc psychologically puts you on the
| defensive. 10,000 likes on a post you disagree with means
| you're up against an _army_ of 10,000 people who disagreed
| with you! So you do what 's natural: you fight back, you
| summon your _own_ army of people (hoping to get a
| respectable counter-army of likes). This creates a toxic
| environment and you can see it play out on Twitter: every
| Democrat-leaning tweet will have its top reply be a
| Republican-leaning tweet with a counter-point, and every
| Republican with a Democrat.
|
| Meanwhile, on 4chan or other old-style message board
| withouts those systems... yeah, it's just some asshole with
| a stupid opinion. Just ignore them, no need to waste effort
| engaging.
| ddq wrote:
| Arguably, the addition of showing links to all the
| replies to a comment could have contributed towards
| 4chan's drift further into engagement-baiting content.
| It's the closest analogue to the visual, numeric feedback
| mechanism you describe.
|
| Interesting because from a functional user experience
| perspective, it's an objectively useful feature for
| navigating discussions. An obvious addition in terms of
| web design, yet with unforeseen repercussions. The medium
| is the message, after all.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Very true! But even then, the dynamic is a bit different.
| Reply-links on a post that's an obvious joke are
| analogous to upvotes, but reply-links on a politically
| controversial topic could be anything, though most likely
| disagreements. Plus the absolute number is going to be
| orders of magnitudes smaller than likes.
|
| But I do agree it's contributed to bait posts a lot,
| yeah. Interesting to see the impact of such a seemingly
| small UX change.
| Levitz wrote:
| It's more egalitarian and accessible than any other social
| media I can think of, yes.
|
| In 4chan a literal nazi, a drag queen, a bona-fide pedophile
| and a luddite can exchange opinions with no prejudice,
| because none of them know anyone else's background.
|
| You might think that these people can't talk about certain
| things, but any subject in which discussion becomes too
| caustic simply doesn't even take place in other platforms,
| and not every discussion is a life or death discussion, they
| can talk about photography just fine.
| Fricken wrote:
| Other social media platforms are by and large just more
| passive aggressive variants of 4chan.
| anononaut wrote:
| It's a deliberate gatekeeping mechanism. 4chan isn't a
| monolith, either. Some communities are tucked well enough
| away that it isn't _as_ needed. Furthermore, it isn't hate of
| "others" so much as it's a hate of all.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Plenty of people on 4chan don't hate anyone.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Furthermore, it isn't hate of "others" so much as it's a
| hate of all.
|
| I don't understand what you mean, unless you mean posters
| on 4chan hate themselves. Anyone who isn't you is an other,
| after all.
| anononaut wrote:
| You will never find a more self-loathing bunch, in fact!
| However, there are several recurring threads, some older
| than Reddit, dedicated to self improvement and escaping
| neetdom. There are also threads openly embracing it.
| thegodtsar wrote:
| 4chan is the perfect example of what society looks like when
| nobody plays control nazi with a zen stick! The people that
| can't stand it are more fucked up than the ones on it. They
| just don't know it yet or bothered to look.
| colordrops wrote:
| Yes. It's anonymous, so no one knows who you are. It's
| unfiltered, so anyone can post. Some community members can be
| assholes, but that doesn't change those two basic ground
| rules.
|
| Those problems you list are present on every online forum and
| are orthogonal to being free and egalitarian.
| korse wrote:
| I really value places where discussion can happen without
| gatekeeping. The worst is 2FA or a phone number IMHO, however
| nothing compares to being able to jump straight into the
| pool. IRC is one such place and 4chan is another. Even the HN
| crowd appears to agree[1].
|
| For everything else there is documentation, experimentation,
| social clubs and entertainment.
|
| 1. There is a 'account system' for reputation, but it is
| trivial to auto generate throwaway accounts for 'hot takes'
| or counter group-think. There are even simple mirror websites
| that allow for browsing without hiding flagged posts. No
| Edit:[I don't think any] attempts have been made to reign
| this behavior in, likely for good reason. Perhaps it keeps
| the discourse interesting and encourages lateral thinking?
| pessimizer wrote:
| None of those things prevent you from using the site or limit
| any of its features (accessibility), and your voice is
| exactly as loud as everyone else's and their judgment of you
| is only a judgment of what you've just said (egalitarian.)
|
| Just listing a bunch of unrelated shit that upsets you isn't
| responsive to the comment you're replying to.
| tuple wrote:
| "gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth
| ... post being full of slurs"
|
| Well, and filter out the CP, dead and butchered bodies, nazis &
| any number of other horrifying things I ran across when I've
| looked at the site. Granted that was years ago but it's not
| really the type of thing you check up on to see if things have
| gotten better...
|
| Sure maybe not on /g/ but that leaves lots of people just one
| mistaken click away from potential nightmares. That's not a
| value people are missing, it's a cost they aren't willing to
| pay for someone else's concept of being egalitarian.
|
| You could fill every post on every site with slurs and I would
| barely notice. Slurs aren't 4chan's problem though, the crowd
| of unrestrained sadists is.
| cmilton wrote:
| Who do you trust to be the filter?
| pwb25 wrote:
| that's nothing like that on biz or g, stop FUDing
| [deleted]
| 0x69420 wrote:
| >maybe not on /g/
|
| weeeeeell, people did spam lolicon and gay furry porn in like
| 2011 for a couple months but the mods swooped in and it's
| been a well-enforced blue board since
|
| the real problem with /g/ in the current age though is the
| thought-terminating memes. it's no longer really the bastion
| of oblique insight it once was. opinions on the board have
| ossified to the point you're not going to find out about
| anything cool from them first. this is common across most
| blue boards these days honestly; they are no longer really
| tastemakers
| LV123 wrote:
| Perhaps /g/ is worse, but I feel that applies to most
| established forums on the internet. It's particularly
| noticeable if you've bounced around various subreddits that
| it's just the same 5 opinions rehashed endlessly, and
| anyone who disagrees has left the building. You just get a
| different set of 5 opinions when you jump to a new
| subreddit.
| noodles_nomore wrote:
| That's exactly right. You've been successfully filtered.
| dmonitor wrote:
| what the fuck kind of boards are you browsing to see that?
| jchw wrote:
| People always hype up 4chan nowadays like it's LiveLeak on
| steroids, but generally speaking any time I browse 4chan it's
| felt much more mundane. The only major culture shock that
| most people are in for is the degree of hatefulness and
| shamelessness that you encounter on 4chan, especially in the
| memes and vernacular. It's the one place left on the internet
| where truly Nothing is sacred, and the userbase is happy to
| make that clear whenever possible.
|
| That said, it's absolutely not worth the time, unless you are
| bored and feel like most of the internet is too sanitized for
| your tastes. It's just, unquestionably a big waste of time
| _at best_.
|
| I don't think it'll ruin your brain, but it probably won't
| expand it either.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yeah, the legendary exploits led me to visit it a few times
| but the signal:noise was abysmal.
|
| Visit 1: porn, porn, porn, funny creative joke, porn porn
| porn
|
| Visit 2: porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn
|
| Visit 3: porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn
|
| Visit 4: porn, anti-muslim rant , porn, porn, porn, porn
|
| Visit 5: porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn
| wooque wrote:
| You know that tech is not discussed on /gif/, right?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I thought I was on /b/. I tried a few, nothing inspired
| me. This was 15 years ago.
| adamrezich wrote:
| /b/ hasn't been "/b/" for longer than /b/ ever was "/b/"
| to begin with. if that makes sense.
| dmonitor wrote:
| /b/ is practically a containment board. even the
| dedicated containment board, /trash/ is more browsable
| than /b/
| wooque wrote:
| Well /b/ is mostly porn, along with few other boards.
| Relatively "normal" boards are hosted on 4channel.org
| domain. That said, 4chan is mostly "shitposting" and
| memes, don't expect serious discussions.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| tbf people even post born on /biz/, they just eat the ban
| for it, and even when it isn't outright porn it's often
| very overtly sexual images. The only thing that makes it
| browsable is the Wingman browser plugin.
| aedocw wrote:
| Except an environment that is highly toxic does not attract
| decent people with good community intentions. While you have
| learned a lot about LLMs and generative AI for instance, it is
| _extremely_ unlikely you have learned from the most well
| informed sources. It 's definitely a community, but nobody can
| reasonably argue 4chan is a community that creates the
| best/most useful content.
| 1337biz wrote:
| You assume that complying with social norms attracts the most
| brilliant/informed people.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| It's very 'reddit' to assume the brightest people share the
| same societal conventions as themselves.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| You really need to reevaluate where a lot of the tooling and
| focus is on by the community. It's a ton of porn and 4chan is
| really big in the space and absolutely creates some of the
| best content.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > While you have learned a lot about LLMs and generative AI
| for instance, it is extremely unlikely you have learned from
| the most well informed sources.
|
| 4chan is certainly not the best source compared to, say,
| scientific papers or technical conferences, but is there any
| evidence it's any worse than Reddit? A _lot_ of the work
| pushing Stable Diffusion forward came out of 4chan IIRC. I
| believe the most popular UI (automatic1111) came out of
| 4chan.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| I don't know about that, there's info there that's
| unavailable anywhere else. I've on a few occasions found that
| an anon I was interacting with was the primary author on a
| project I was contributing to or had written a paper on the
| subject. It's a very diverse bunch.
| [deleted]
| musha68k wrote:
| VC angle and usual shortsightedness that comes with boundless
| profit motive one correct angle in there.
|
| OTOH I don't think the train station analogy holds as eg funnily
| enough NYC subway stations to me usually show everything that can
| be great about "big city scaled up village culture where
| strangers meet strangers".
|
| I'm not sure if still the case but I do miss NYC just for this
| sense of belonging, everyone being in conversation with everyone
| and general readiness to help out ("I <3 NY" isn't just
| marketing). To me a clear testament that this can work IRL and it
| probably works online as well (and did, for a long time, on
| Reddit actually).
|
| Although not "permaculture" per se these "free open / public
| spaces" remind me a lot of it (again, even / especially NYC): No
| over-bearing central organizing force (VC/capitalist, what have
| you) will be able to "let go" enough in order to "let it grow"
| from common experience so far.
|
| Fediverse etc hence to me the only potential way out at this
| point.
| UberFly wrote:
| This is insightful and really beautifully written. Thank you.
| EGreg wrote:
| Finally, all you HN people are coming around to my critique of
| capitalism and venture capital. It leads to this almost by
| design, and much more... also leads to the polarization of our
| society: https://rational.app
|
| _I think the model demonstrate how the 'enshittification'
| process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on
| a venture capital model._
|
| Yes, it is called "extracting rents" in economics, and it is why,
| say, Uber drivers pay 50% of their salary to a company with 1
| worker per 1 million people. It's the shareholders. You see, to
| build Uber requires a few million dollars, but the "dream" is
| sold to entrepreneurs that they can become billionaires. VCs
| discover the startup and "reduce friction" with money-losing
| economics until it goes IPO. Then the whole thing is dumped on
| the public, and everyone who bought at X dollars a share wants
| the price to go up, and that means extracting rents from all the
| sides of the market.
|
| There is a far better model of funding projects without this
| failure mode of shareholders, namely utility tokens, where the
| community owns the network. I know, I know... "web3 sux" and all
| that. Well, it doesn't have to be Web3. Check this:
| https://qbix.com/Twitternomics.pdf
|
| If you're interested in joining us in building an open source
| alternative to all this venture-funded stuff, email me (details
| in bio).
| RagnarD wrote:
| The premise is wrong. New York City is hardly a "village" and any
| given person knows a tiny, tiny fraction of anyone else there -
| but to the extent it's adhered to a capitalist model (ever
| decreasingly), it's been extremely successful. That's because
| _strangers_ trading value for value (i.e. the essence of
| capitalism) without the use of force, is peaceful and productive.
| This extends to the entire planet. You 're reading this on a
| computer using at least some components made halfway around the
| world, sourced from materials acquired all around the world, from
| people who don't have any idea about the people who make stuff
| from them or ultimately use them.
|
| It's the system and people able to act peacefully within it - not
| their personal relationships.
|
| The problem with Reddit is that it's run by a guy who doesn't
| respect the people who make it possible. He isn't a trader of
| value for value - he's a parasite.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > sourced from materials acquired all around the world
|
| Without the use of force?
| RagnarD wrote:
| Sadly, force has certainly been used, but that's ultimately
| to the detriment of all involved. Voluntary trade for mutual
| benefit is what grows economies and resources.
| mjfl wrote:
| People seem to be under the impression that Reddit is a _good_
| place, unless the new API changes take place. I 'd like to take a
| stance... contra to that?
|
| - Reddit is a collection of echo chambers where users pile on and
| moderators ban those who disagree even on fair points.
|
| - Reddit is a politically biased organization that banned the
| subreddit associated with former president and current candidate
| Donald Trump.
|
| - Reddit uses shady tactics to hide the fact that they are
| banning a subreddit that has content they find disagreeable such
| as clearing out the moderation team and replacing them with a
| hostile mod that bans the normal users of the sub.
|
| - Despite all this censorship there remains tons of creepy
| behavior hosted on Reddit such as adults hanging out on
| /r/teenagers pretending to be teenagers and trying to lure teens
| into sharing nudes and such.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| The difference between a well run subreddit in a niche topic or
| with a smaller community vs. a huge default sub can be huge.
| Both can have their problems, and moderation is always an issue
| with online communities; but I think people are less insistent
| that Reddit is a "good" place and moreso that as it currently
| exists, warts and all, Reddit is _useful_ and provides an
| enormous amount of utility to the internet, for better or
| worse. For some people using Reddit is "going on the internet"
| and they'll go to very few other websites --- the two are
| linked.
|
| The recent changes to Reddit, to a certain extent, highlight a
| trend in the internet where the things that people find
| extremely useful end up transitioning in a way that seems
| actively user hostile.
| SweetestRug wrote:
| > You're in a train station, you're not part of it.
|
| Thank you for posting this. This captures something that I had
| trouble putting into words.
|
| As someone who started using Reddit back in 2006 pre-Digg
| migration, this is probably one the best explanations of the
| immense loss I have felt in experiencing Reddit change over the
| past decade and a half. All the parts I enjoyed were pushed to
| the periphery, and while you could still find "villages" there,
| the bulk of the experience was "just passing through". This isn't
| a "get off my lawn" sentiment, it's about what value you place on
| the places you inhabit, whether in person or online. Whether I
| kept returning to Reddit out of habit or because I was still
| looking for that old experience almost doesn't matter, because
| it's not there anymore.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Most Reddit subs are ruined by moderators who are very pushy
| for their own political ideals instead of being a place of
| healthy discussions.
| QuiDortDine wrote:
| As someone who was on reddit for about as long, I miss that.
| But I wonder if it's really reddit I miss, or the naive web we
| had back then, that allowed people to get excited? Back when
| everything was not engineered specifically to grab the most
| attention, I felt more like we were actually communicating.
| Nowadays we're just collectively filtering noise it seems.
| nicbou wrote:
| I remember taking part in an early Reddit gift exchange.
| People were gifting members in need computer monitors and and
| pizza. There was the jackdraw facts biologist guy. The
| website definitely felt smaller back then. It was toxic, but
| still cozy.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| I miss the long posts that explain a thoughtful, technical,
| essay on a subject. I vaguely remember from the ~2010s
| internet reading some very informative posts on bulletin
| boards and reddit.
|
| Mostly gaming stuff, but there was some great work on math,
| science, and DIY. Today even the "Reddit gold" posts are
| garbage by the standards of those days.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I'm with you here.
|
| I was in the world record secret Santa and it was the funnest
| coolest thing ever (they sent me my world record letter even!)
|
| Pre-subreddits, it felt very similar to HN (which they ofc have
| the same birthplace) and the real gold was in the comments,
| which made it stand out from all others and made it less about
| you and more about us.
|
| When subreddits started it was totally game changing and from
| there on it was great.
|
| The Conde Nast thing was weird but it didn't really change
| anything, but slowly it felt like it was trying to always "grow
| up" but never figured out that it didn't need to
|
| All this nonsense going public is expected but it's sad and
| another victim of late stage thunderdome capitalism.
| Kye wrote:
| I always forget Reddit came out of Y Combinator.
| benatkin wrote:
| Gah. I feel like I belong when I'm in a train station. It's
| part of the commonwealth.
| marssaxman wrote:
| It's a great metaphor.
|
| The first time I saw this happen was clear back in 1997 with an
| IRC system called "Talk City". It was a dot-com startup that
| grew out of the incredibly vibrant, close-knit chat-room
| community which developed on Apple's short-lived "eWorld"
| service, carrying forward most of its people and culture...
| right up until the company signed a couple of big money-making
| deals, one with WebTV and the other with some ISP in India,
| connecting their customers to Talk City's network.
|
| It was amazing to watch, in a kind of natural-disaster way, as
| hordes of strangers showed up practically overnight - far too
| quickly to be assimilated - and the whole social fabric
| dissolved. A community I had spent at least an hour a day on
| for several years simply _disappeared_ under the flood.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Eternal September.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I'm afraid I only got to see _that_ transition from the
| incoming side.
| bad_alloc wrote:
| > You're in a train station, you're not part of it.
|
| This makes a lot of sense. Then again, people flock to the
| largest communities because that where they are most likely to
| get quick answers or just find a stream of novelty. Being in a
| small forum feels like "missing out". I think the fediverse can
| solve it, if it allows for aggregated communities.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Hold on to your villages. Support them with your wallet if you
| care about them.
| titzer wrote:
| One of my first online experiences (around 1996 or so) was the
| chat room that my local (dialup) ISP hosted. There might have
| been a couple dozen or a hundred people that hung out on that
| chat room back then, but it was fairly diverse in terms of age
| ranges and experience...at least as far as tech/net early
| adopters could have been back then. I think I only met one person
| IRL from that chat room, but it was, in comparison to today,
| surprisingly chill. Not only that, but people just as a matter of
| course used pseudonyms and were careful about privacy. Knowing
| someone's (temporary) IP address was already _a lot_.
|
| But as the internet grew forums and news sites and blogs, I
| bounced around, and through, many. I lost interest in most of
| them before they got enshittified, but it does, in retrospect,
| seem that most suffered either of two fates: irrelevance,
| stagnation, and evaporation, or enshittification to one degree or
| another. I count among my past lives the past online communities
| that I participated in. I don't long for those pasts but I do
| feel a loss that not only are those specific ones gone, but the
| striking inevitability of them all dying. It seems like a law--a
| tragic one at that. Anyway, RIP <nostalgic online forum>.
| nologic01 wrote:
| I remember some MOO circa 1992 or 93. It seemed a fantastical
| something.
|
| It incredible how badly malformed the "future" has become.
| nicbou wrote:
| Wow, that was one fantastic writeup. I appreciate that the author
| is a familiar face in this community.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Right on
| btown wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > The central thesis is that what these villages can't tolerate
| is a sustained large influx of strangers [...] A slow trickle of
| strangers is tolerable, a brief large influx is fine; the
| strangers' average interaction is eventually stabilizes and
| biases toward the a stable group of members, and they quickly
| find shared values and become villagers too.
|
| The tragedy of Reddit is that I believe this thesis is
| _fundamentally wrong_. Reddit has shown that villages _can_
| tolerate a sustained large influx of strangers _if they are given
| the tools_ to scale the onboarding process - ensuring people
| understand those shared values, and ensuring that bad-faith
| actors are identified and prevented from destroying the fabric of
| the overall community.
|
| These tools exist - they are the ecosystem of API-based moderator
| tools! People have been iterating on them for years to serve the
| needs of the moderators of Reddit's diverse communities. And
| these are the very tools that Reddit is destroying without
| providing sufficient replacements, without providing time to
| adapt, and with a remarkably sardonic and vitriolic corporate
| communication strategy.
|
| I'm a member of multiple subreddits that are shutting down
| indefinitely because the thinly-stretched moderation staff is
| constantly under attack - by everything from karma bot farmers to
| politically motivated aggressors (including would-be infiltrators
| applying for moderation positions). The moderators' ability to
| use third-party apps was the only thing keeping the effective
| DDoS at bay.
|
| And I truly don't think that those moderators would ever say that
| the _number_ of strangers was the problem, because the tools
| _did_ scale, and they were able to provide supportive and
| positive communities to thousands of those "strangers" who would
| never have had access to those communities before.
|
| I always saw Reddit as a model of how communities could scale
| beyond physical constraints - and how some of the learnings of
| scalable community governance could perhaps be ported to real-
| world scenarios. Now, people will read posts like OP's and simply
| think that this was always impossible, and that's just sad.
| evilotto wrote:
| The article stated that explicitly as its central thesis, yet I
| came away with a different insight.
|
| > In this context, the defining trait of a village is that it's
| group of people where the average interaction over time is with
| people you've seen before.
|
| What I find especially insightful in this description is that
| it applies to lots of communities at all scales, both online
| and off, as diverse as a childhood friend group, a technical
| project team, a corporation, or an alliance of world
| superpowers. What defines the village is that the members you
| interact with are mostly the ones you have been interacting
| with. Change happens, but it is gradual.
|
| What destroys the village is whatever upsets that defining
| trait. In the article's telling, a sustained influx of
| strangers is one way to kill it; there are others (for example,
| a large set of village members exiting, or the village
| splitting in two would also work.) And as you rightly point
| out, a way to effectively manage that change can allow the
| village to survive, be it tools to manage onboarding, or
| gradual acceptance (ala SO's points-based permissions), or a
| well-led corporate merger where changes are introduced
| gradually and with the buy-in of all participants.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Interesting. I had a superficially similar thought, which is
| that subreddits look like a path to keeping "villages" while
| letting the platform grow. That would tend to entail multiple
| "villages" for the fast-growing interest groups, which is
| weird. I don't know how well that could work/be worked around.
| btown wrote:
| Many groups and identities (e.g. geographical areas,
| marginalized groups, and various large fandoms) each have a
| variety of subreddits (and corresponding Discord servers)
| with their own unique roles: memes & humor, _meta_ memes &
| humor that elevate obscure in-references to a type of
| absurdist canon, serious support groups for various
| situations, places to gather and coordinate social events and
| remote gaming sessions, places for non-members of the group
| to ask questions and be answered seriously, etc.
|
| Each of these "villages" have different subcultures and
| distinct moderation needs, especially to the extent they are
| targeted in different ways by bad-faith actors and repost
| bots. And it's good that they have different needs! No single
| moderation team should need to maintain all those subcultures
| with one single set of policies, nor do they have the same
| on-ramps and levels of traffic. Together they form a web of
| meta-communities. Web platforms can easily allow overlapping
| spheres to coexist; the dimensionality of the platform, so to
| speak, is practically infinite.
|
| But part-and-parcel with this is that the number of potential
| moderators in any group is spread across those sub-groups. If
| Reddit wanted to continue to grow, it would make sure the
| barrier to entry to maintain these communities was low. It is
| doing quite the opposite at this precise moment.
| swizzler wrote:
| To me, on the internet, I mostly recognize "people [I've] seen
| before" via the username. Most of the good internet villages I
| venture to, a username is secondary to me. I care about the
| content first, which can come from lots of people, and the
| users/faces/people second, which are mostly just the extremes
| of my (dis)favor.
|
| I think mod tools are huge. I also think voting on content is
| big, though. Finding a village that aligns with my value of
| content is more important than recognizing specific people
| online.
| nologic01 wrote:
| The problem of online communities is not solved. We have a lot of
| data points of failure but I am not sure we have a good overview
| of why _everything_ failed.
|
| There should be like a wikipedia table like this one [1] but
| where explanatory factors (funding model, corporate structure,
| moderation tools, algorithmic timelines, discovery modes,
| anonymity, upvoting/downvoting mechanisms etc etc) would be
| tabulated against failure modes (toxicity, inanity, obsolescence
| etc etc)
|
| You then run an ML model and find the pattern. The problem is
| that our sample is totally imbalanced. We don't know what _good_
| looks like.
|
| The solution might be to take life expectancy before
| enshitification into account.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
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