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We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twi

by moskie 3y ago

We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake.

pixl97 3y ago
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other... >Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  The anguish in that piece is visceral but the writing itself is beautiful.
mandmandam 3y ago
Yes! And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things. They're TEXT and LINKS ffs. Even Snapchat, which deals in video, costs about $2.50 per user per year to run. Honestly, we're some set of dopes to let people like Zuck and Huffman build yachts and apocalypse bunkers, with bloody advertising money, all for the genius idea of sharing text and links on the internet.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  At scale that’s relatively expensive though, $2.5x1billion is still 2.5 billion dollars. That money needs to come from somewhere…
  - epicureanideal 3y ago
    Membership fees. If we could get customers used to buying things again, $10/yr or $100/lifetime membership fees seems more than reasonable.
    - Narkov 3y ago
      So easy to say, so hard to actually do. Most HN readers wouldn't care about dropping $100 but the fact is Facebook, Reddit, Google users pay $0.
      - greiskul 3y ago
        Youtube gives you the option. Do you want no ads? Pay for Youtube Premium. I do not need to engage in a hostile user vs platform agaisnt Youtube, with me searching for better adblocks, and youtube trying to figure out how to block the adblockers, cause they go and give me the option. I doubt that reddit would be getting the pushback they are getting if they had come out with some sensible numbers per user, that people are actually ok with paying.
    - SteveNuts 3y ago
      The problem there is I think people are sick of seeing 15 small recurring charges on their credit card statements every month. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. There needs to be some sort of universal pay per view model that works across any site.
    - UncleMeat 3y ago
      And yet, people whine incessantly about YouTube Premium or about Netflix not letting people squat on each other's accounts.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    Pedantically, that's not how cost per user works. Whether you have a billion users or 3, $2.50 / user is $2.50 per user. And that infrastructure costs the same whether you riddle the platform with advertising and influence, or leave it pristine. In fact, leaving it pristine costs far far less to society, all things considered. Anyway, 'at scale', $2.5 bn is a drop in the ocean. There are thousands of people who could pay that all on their own. The global economy is 100 trillion dollars (as of 2021). And there's this thing called taxation, which sorts out public goods and services (such as communication) at scale.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is. I can't help but observe that for all of it being "just text and links," we sure do keep converging on monolithic service providers for... Some reason.
  - danudey 3y ago
    > It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is. I'm an awful programmer and I could build a reddit clone pretty trivially if I really set my mind to it. Then I'd have to figure out how to attract users, how to handle spam and abuse, how to filter content, how to age restrict things, what tools users need, how to host media content cheaply, how to hire people to help me keep the site online and scaled, how to.... probably a thousand other things. Building a forum is easy, building a business around a forum.... difficult.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      And not even a business, the other things you're describing are things you have to solve even if you want to provide the service for free (well, for cost at that point. Because if you're providing media content and hiring people, the whole thing costs you more than labor). And the other things you've described are table stakes... Filtering content and handling abuse in particular, if you get large enough for anybody to care you exist. No government is going to sit idly by and let a service just become the next CSAM haven. At the end of the day, most people don't want to put the labor in. If they did, we would have seen fediverse take off ages ago.
- elektor 3y ago
  Do you have a source for that $2.5 figure?
  - jorvi 3y ago
    That number seems incredibly unlikely. I’m a relatively casual Snapchat user, and from ~45GB of cellular use, ~3.5GB is from Snapchat. That’s just egress bandwidth (from Snapchat’s point of view), they also have to ingress my snaps as well as temporarily host stories and snaps in transit.
    - prattmic 3y ago
      Q1 earnings (https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2023/q1/Press-Release-Q1-2023.pdf https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2023/q1...) says 383M daily active users and $1.3B in costs (including sales, administrative, etc), for ~$3.50/user/quarter or ~$14/user/year. So far above $2.50/user/year. Even just using cost of revenue is ~$4.50/user/year.
      - mandmandam 3y ago
        I clarified that I meant just infrastructure costs, and posted the source. Even so - what's $4.50 per user per year - 40 minutes of minimum wage work? 45 seconds of a lawyer's time? For sending, and processing, and receiving GBs and GBs of video? For (not even) this cost, we give up control of political narratives? We let people like Huffman and Musk and Zuckerberg control what we get to see? They take money from tinpot dictators and a selection box of wealthy grifters. We let our parents and grandparents get taken advantage of by every scam artist on the planet with a few dollars. Why? To save $4.50 a year?
    - hotpotamus 3y ago
      I think the big cloud providers have warped peoples' sense of what these things actually cost (and also the massive scale of these userbases that allows the costs to be spread widely). Egress is one places where providers make their (significant) margins.
  - 3y ago
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  Well there are pictures and video too.
  - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
    Not until later in Reddit's history, when they (just like Facebook) wanted to wrestle some power away from the likes of YouTube and Imgur. (Smartly so, since these platforms had lots of leverage to be able to turn off embedding one day and sour the Reddit UX / drive users away from the site. But this change did not make Reddit more valuable to its users.)
- danudey 3y ago
  Text and links, but then also recommendation algorithms, spam filtering, image hosting, lightning-fast caching systems so that your main feed doesn't take hours to load fetching row by row from MySQL, geographically distributed data centres for redundancy and locality. Then there's the ad engine, which requires user data harvesting, and all of that analytics and analysis and machine learning, and that all gets expensive, so you have to do more of it and do it better so that you can make more ad dollars so you can afford to do more of it and do it better so that.... and so on and so on. You could just charge users, of course, but if you charge users then you hamstring your organic growth, so you have to find a way to only charge some users but charge them significantly more. Even if Twitter only costs $1/usr/mo to run, how many of those users will pay? You need to charge 1% of users $100/mo, or 0.1% of users $1000/mo, which means you need to offer them something tangible for their money, but none of these sites can really think of anything tangible to offer their users that's worth paying for so they're stuck with ad revenue and... Yeah, it's a gigantic mess.
  - hgs3 3y ago
    If you're a non-profit then you don't need a recommendation engine or an ad engine. You also don't need to self host video and images, at least initially. Reddit, for the longest time, relied on Imgur and embedded video players until they built their own infrastructure. Also, thanks to advances in AI, there is an opportunity for AI moderators for content curation. As far as caching and web scale in general, you don't need a full server farm initially. Even Google started with a single server rack.
    - rerdavies 3y ago
      Google's 1st server was housed in a cabinet of Lego bricks. No server rack. https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2011/googlegrewfr.jpg https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2011/googlegrewfr.jpg Google's first server farm consisted on row after row of regular desktop machines on the floor. Also no server racks. But sooner or later, you're going to need one of these: https://www.google.ca/about/datacenters/ https://www.google.ca/about/datacenters/ The thing I would live in constant fear of if I were to host a Mastodon server is that sooner or later, one of your users' posts is going to end up being linked to in a Wired feature article, or a New York Times article, or goes viral for any of a billion reason, and your server is going to end up getting hammered with 10,000 requests a second for a week or a month, which means you're going to be facing a sudden unexpected $3,000 AWS bill. (Not sure what it would actually cost. Anyone?) I've seen what being linked to in a Wired article does to a web server. It's ugly.
- this_user 3y ago
  Social networks derive their value from their size. $2.5 per year per user may not be much, but if you have just 1000 users, that is already $2500 per year. 100000 users is a quarter of a million per year. Are you going to pay for that out of pocket? It takes money to run a social network of meaningful size in even just a halfway professional manner. Who would do that while receiving nothing in return?
  - mjan22640 3y ago
    Design the network physically distributed on the users computers.
- paulmd 3y ago
  > And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things. They're TEXT and LINKS ffs. stop doing JAVASCRIPT documents were not meant to be turing-complete the frontend developers have played us like fools look at the user-focused experiences they have built for us with our attention-economy revenue: they have played us like fools
hn_version_0023 3y ago
It’s almost enough to make one reconsider the use of social media entirely. My hope is that one day the kids will just stop using it and it dies it’s natural death.
- moskie 3y ago
  I've wondered for a long time if social media is just a fad.
  - rukuu001 3y ago
    I've wondered about this, and what need it serves in people that they're not getting otherwise? Usenet was pretty popular from the beginning and maybe the first 'social media', and succeeded without marketing.
  - EA-3167 3y ago
    I think anonymous social media as the mainstream is a fad, the end-point is going to be more like Snow Crash, minus the artistic flair. I think text-based, possibly anonymous social media will persist, but it won't be what billions of people are doing. Most of the problems with social media come down to the ability of people to separate themselves from the consequences of their speech and actions. I don't think that lack of anonymity should be enforced, I just think it's the natural progression of people trying to gather in groups on or offline.
    - lordfrito 3y ago
      100% this. The problems of social media are largely already solved in the real world, where there are real consequences to bad behavior. Reputation is a thing in the real world. We're still in the medieval ages of the internet. People are regularly waylaid and conned by digital highwaymen. We need the digital equivalent of a reputation in the digital world. Will end up being similar to a SSN -- an identity that follows you around and can't be shaken. It's going to very unpopular with the libertarian minded, privacy focused, and religious mark-of-the beast types. But I see no other way forward.
soup10 3y ago
well said, this is an ugly part of capitalism, anything that can be turned into a product, will be turned into a product. And greed and the profit motive and the hunger for growth will usually lead to some corporatized version becoming the dominant product in the space while more idealistic indie operations operate smaller in the fringes if at all.
stalfosknight 3y ago
Perhaps this is a more a reflection of our current state of development as a species than a mistake we consciously chose to make. As gross as Reddit's behavior has been, it doesn't change the reality that nothing at all in this scarcity-based economy is free.
- bbor 3y ago
  “Is capitalism at fault? No, surely it’s the kids!”
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    Communist Cuba doesn't have a social network, but they do have a "sneakernet" [0]: > El Paquete Semanal ("The Weekly Package") or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
    - bbor 3y ago
      Lol thanks for the reminder TechBro8615. I don't really want to argue about communism being inherently authoritarian on here :) I was just responding to the parent comment, who was (to some extent) dismissing the ancestor: > We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake. I think we can agree that there are ways we could organize social media that are neither governed by the intense profit expectations of VCs, nor the work of Communist satan magic. For example, government funded!
      - stalfosknight 3y ago
harryf 3y ago
What gives me hope is if you ever take a break from social media you realize how worthless it all is. It really doesn’t hurt to disengage. For similar reasons it’s possible for new networks to show up which disrupt the old, such as TikTok. The point is as individuals we are way less dependent on social media than we imagine.
- moskie 3y ago
  I think this is a fine perspective for inconsequential (-ish) social interactions, but then I start to think about the political organizing that these sites have also facilitated. "The revolution will not be televised" and all that, but... man. I was all over twitter getting real-time information as I participated in Occupy and BLM marches. But, now Elon has it.....
  - kodah 3y ago
    Political organization on the internet definitely has its downsides too. In fact, as the activity has proliferated it's consumed the internet at times and that's been disappointing, to the extent that astroturfing occurs. On top of that it seems that politics has gotten more homogenous in viewpoints since it proliferated; people are now repeating talking points more than nuanced ideas. There's also a lot of harassment and bullying that occurs due to politics prevalence on the internet. When you go into real life the experience is generally very different and opt out by default.
    - moskie 3y ago
      I definitely agree, but I would also suggest that the need for social media companies to monetize on engagement incentivises them to exacerbate the issues you mention. Removing those incentives might improve political discussion.
- aliasxneo 3y ago
  I loaded Facebook for the first time in five years yesterday because there was a fire nearby that I was trying to track. That's about the only value it's provided to me in that time. So, not totally useless, but I certainly have no regrets being social-media free.
stefantalpalaru 3y ago
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jbrennan 3y ago
This is a great point, and I’m curious to hear what would be better alternatives. Like obviously there’s something great about having online connections with other people, but how could we do it better without surrendering to some big platform?
- moskie 3y ago
  Federated social media, and maybe a public cloud infrastructure as an alternative to things like AWS?
- williamcotton 3y ago
  We could make a public platform. In the US this all but guarantees a protection from censorship. Third parties could offer moderation services. The brave could suck on the firehose!
  - floren 3y ago
    The funny thing is that Usenet is already a highly censorship-resistant platform, and tools like NoCeM would let you subscribe to third party moderation streams!
    - Shilva 3y ago
      I genuinely forget Usenet is still technically around these days. I dabble in the idea of using it here and there, but the ease and convenience of the modern www has spoiled me quite a bit. If I go to a decentralized platform, it's more likely to be something fediverse.
tmn 3y ago
You can move those connections to other channels. But yeah without a free market / progress driven system you aren’t going to have a phone, mail service, etc either. It’s a double edge sword.
unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
Where's the non-profit foundation to replace them? Has someone already started it?
- 1ark 3y ago
  Signal, Session, Berty, Jami, and Nostr are some I can think of from the top of my head.
TechBro8615 3y ago
What choice did we have? A herd of sheep can only go through an open gate.
nailer 3y ago
> Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. I will point out that whenever somebody talks about a system where creators own and can profit from their own creations on HN someone responds with “crypto is a scam”.
camdenlock 3y ago
There is no such thing as “the internet community”. There is just humanity.
- zaat 3y ago
  Not sure what you mean, about half the people I know are not on the web at all, or just browsing mainstream news sites occasionally. Then there is the group of people who use social media to some degree and are online a lot. These are 2 distinctive groups, both are parts of humanity but only one of them is related to the internet community.
nine_zeros 3y ago
You are not wrong but the real problem is not profitability, but constantly increasing profitability, quarter over quarter.
NoboruWataya 3y ago
This is why I think federated alternatives like Lemmy are important and I would like to see communities migrate there instead of some other corporate walled garden. Otherwise we'll just be having the exact same discussion about some other website in five years. It pains me to see even a lot of FOSS-focused communities move their discussions to Discord, for example. Most of the criticisms of the federated platforms centre around how they are difficult to use for the average user and could never achieve the scale that Reddit has. The difficulty point is a valid one and work should probably be done on that. But at a certain point I just don't really care, particularly about the scale point. The communities that are valuable to me aren't the huge ones full of "average users", they are (mostly) smaller communities full of people interested in tech and FOSS in particular. I can figure out federation and so can most of the people I probably want to hear from. I don't mean any of this to sound elitist, I just feel like people who browse /r/pics and people who browse /r/selfhosted (for example) are probably different user bases with different preferences. If Reddit were to keep the former while the latter were to move to some other, slightly less seamless but more sustainable platform, maybe everyone wins. There are, of course, a few non-technical subreddits I like that would fall through the gaps here, in that their average user might not appreciate a federated alternative. In days of yore those communities would have inhabited forums; I wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of those.
- tensor 3y ago
  I'd love to see something without federation, but using a wikipedia style model to support it. I don't think federation will ever be sufficiently simple for the majority of people to adopt, and I think the world needs a world forum that is accessible for everyone, not just tech people.
  - ImaCake 3y ago
    I tentatively disagree here. The only required complexity for federation is choosing a server/instance. Once you are using it the experience could be made frictionless. I think a big problem people have had with trying to join federated socials is that they did it when everyone else tried it and thus the system failed. And so people think its really hard when its just been technical issues with onboarding people.
deepsun 3y ago
Yet every time I point to the root of the problem -- that most social media web properties are privately owned by their respective shareholders, who just benevolently let you store your* texts and photos at their premises for free -- I get downvoted heavily here on HN. The community doesn't want to hear that here.
- Kilgore54 3y ago
  Yeah absolutely The problem here is the profit motive. What we need are sustainable communities that are not controlled by sectors of private capital and they treat their users like products or widgets. I know some people are in America, especially above a certain age, refuse to think this way. Decades of Chicago school neoliberal propaganda has convinced them that anything good has to be driven by a profit motive. I would have hope this community would be a little bit better than that but I'm fairly new to it
  - aceazzameen 3y ago
    It's more than a profit motive. Profits can be fine. The bigger issue is the need to show unlimited growth on the books. That whole system drives the gradual enshittification of everything.
    - voisin 3y ago
      Everything, including our climate and other basic needs as humans. Wild that it hasn’t been overthrown yet.
      - aceazzameen 3y ago
        I'm hoping when the day comes, it isn't too violent. But history has its own thing to say about that.
        moskie 3y ago
        It is troubling that, in the US at least, one of the two major political constituencies has a lot more guns than the other....
camhart 3y ago
Except, the lockout is self imposed. Reddit's "crime" is closing down their API... users just need to use the actual reddit app and they can keep their connection/communities going. It does sucks for the people who've built their livelihood offering 3rd party reddit clients though. Sure it was always a risk. Big tech destroys entire businesses on a regular basis. Doesn't make it a bad choice on their part--the (american foot)ball simply bounced the wrong direction.
- btilly 3y ago
  Except, the actual Reddit app sucks. And it particularly sucks for busy moderators. So successful subreddits will be getting inexperienced moderators imposed, who don't know how the communities work, and who don't have the right tools to use. Care to take bets on how well this will turn out?
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    >Care to take bets on how well this will turn out? I'm betting many communities are going to turn very shitty, but ultimately it won't hurt Reddit's bottom line one iota. In fact, Reddit will probably be more profitable than before. Just look at TikTok: you don't need communities with intelligent discussion to have a highly profitable company. Instead, it's better to chase vapid morons who want to watch shitty 1-minute videos.
    - bbor 3y ago
      It is my opinion that viewing oneself as a special light in a world of vapid morons leads to a sad, angry life. Just thought I'd weigh in, one vapid moron to another :)
      - midoridensha 3y ago
        The world isn't completely full of vapid morons. There's plenty of intelligent people here, plus there's plenty of intelligent people on various Reddit subs, who are interested in intelligent discourse. There's plenty of popular media that isn't vapid and moronic: just look at Star Trek: it's been a cultural phenomenon for over a half-century and it's rather intellectual for a series aimed at the general public, yet it's rather difficult to find anyone these days who's never heard of it. There's nothing terribly special about people who are reasonably intelligent and are interested in intelligent discussions about various topics; we're not some vanishingly small minority. Civilization wouldn't have gotten this far if 99% of people were vapid morons. There are a lot of vapid morons out there, as evidenced by the rise of TikTok (and to be fair, not everything there is utter trash), but they're not the overwhelming majority of the population IMO.
neilv 3y ago
> We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. There was no mistake. Some pre-goldrush Internet/online people could and did point out these things, from the start. Meanwhile, tons of money rushed in, the money deployed the systems that were available and promoted to people, and the massive influx of people were not hearing from the altruistic types who could see things changing. I think the current Internet user base overall has mostly never known an online environment in which their associations weren't owned and controlled. Even the language was changed: "social network" was no longer something that was yours, or between you and others you knew, but "social network" is something some billionaire owns about everyone else's personal associations (power to monitor it, to mediate it, to inject into it). And when there's upset in one commercial property of power over people, usually the upstart alternatives (even some "decentralized" ones) that rush in are like a corrupt country's revolutionary -- who made grand populist speeches, until they gained power, and it turned out they only wanted to be the next dictator.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  >I think the current Internet user base overall has mostly never known an online environment in which their associations weren't owned and controlled. I think this isn't said enough (even with how often it is said). Switching to Matrix and setting up a fediverse node were big in realizing how used to controlled "sterile" environments me and my friend circle had gotten. Especially early on we found ourselves often saying that being on those platforms brought back the old "early internet" feeling (for us this would be the early/mid 2000s).
DashAnimal 3y ago
If I think of every community I was a part of during the 2000s, they've all shut down. In the end money played a part in all of them closing, or people who don't want to commit any longer to something that isn't making them money. In contrast, I've been on reddit since 2011 which is really good. I've spent zero money and learned and enjoyed a lot.
AwaAwa 3y ago
Try not paying your taxes and see what happens. We have always been reduced to producers of monetary value for an intermediary. We pretend we are in control of that intermediary, and maybe once we were. Much like the beginning of every social media site.
- Kilgore54 3y ago
  It's not really an apples to apples comparison. You're talking about taxation, governments can absolutely run stuff that is not profitable and do all the time. Better example would be to not pay your rent or your mortgage... But we don't want to make the mistake of equating governments with private capital. If anything governments are controlled by private capital disproportionately when they are often the only defense we have to try to defeat centers of power on such a scale.
  - AwaAwa 3y ago
    I think it is an apt comparison, since social media companies don't need to extract monetary value from every single individual, unlike rent, and do run their orgs for large amounts of time in the 'red' thanks to VC money. Which let's be honest, is another game of VC's leveraging credit/debt systems via financial institutions. Perhaps you feel this way because you still think the government is individually on our side, when every announcement sounds more and more for a vague concept of good, that seems to enrich the announcers, while doing nothing for my life, or any real person I have ever interacted with. Which puts paid to the concept of government being on the individual's side.
stefan_ 3y ago
"these companies need to make money" is a very weird way of saying "Reddit could have been perfectly profitable years ago but we went and got a shit ton of venture capital instead by selling investors on the idea that we were gonna be as big as Alphabet". Surprise, their level of execution is roughly "press conference at the Four Seasons" as this little episode so well demonstrates.
99_00 3y ago
You haven't said what the mistake is. Is it a mistake to use socially media because the connections aren't peremmant?
- moskie 3y ago
  The mistake was to commit to a system where social connections are only maintained / allowed to exist if they are profitable for an intermediary.
  - 99_00 3y ago
    As opposed to not having those social connections?
    - moskie 3y ago
      As opposed to recognizing these problems ahead of time, and instead creating a (public?) system for forming these social networks that doesn't need to monetize. One that wouldn't be corrupted by the needs for ever-increasing profits. I don't mean for that system to necessarily be a full replacement for the social networks we have now, but I'd argue there's room for something like a public alternative to them.
      - 99_00 3y ago
        Free systems always excited and and continue to do so. Commit to them. Correct the mistake. If committing to them doesn't fix the mistake, then the choice was to have the social connections you wanted or not to. And given those choices, and what you want, choosing social media isn't a mistake.
dotnet00 3y ago
Agreed. The nice part is that often those connections can be moved elsewhere, especially for us more tech savy people. Having first purged my posts on reddit and recently outright deleting my account, it's been refreshing to realize that I can indeed go without reddit, even without the few subs I found particularly useful. The few strong online friendships I've made have long since been "backed up" to Matrix and the Fediverse with self hosted instances after experiencing spurious bans on discord and realizing how fragile the centralized arrangement is.
hackerlight 3y ago
I question the word "mistake" here, because it puts the burden on us and implies that it could have turned out differently, in that we could have just decided to opt out. When it comes to products that prey on the dopamine system and have network power behind them, it probably couldn't have turned out any differently, short of policy that adjusts the incentives of the people who create these products.
yanderekko 3y ago
>We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. I would absolutely take profit-driven moderation over the petty tyranny of your stereotypical reddit mod. These mods are not heroically channeling some sort of vox populi.
redbell 3y ago
> but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system We all hope Hacker News remains the exception, otherwise, it might mark the end of “the internet as we love it”
- moskie 3y ago
  I don't think it's a good idea to assume / hope that HN remains that way. Money is still an aspect of the existence of HN. It exists because pg has enough money to run it, and its existence aligns with his current desires. This community could just as easily dissappear in a way equivalent to what we're seeing with Twitter and Reddit, if pg wanted. And it could not be easily replaced, because its existence is dependent on pg's money...
hliyan 3y ago
A few years ago, I came up with this idea: "...a social network that uses email as its communications protocol and regular mail servers as the “cloud”. There is no “platform”, but an app which is basically a re-skinned mail client with certain features disabled or abstracted. There is no advertising." https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-c33b175f3a9e https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-netwo...
- zo1 3y ago
  And "channels" or "pages" are really just email groups? There was a time a while back where that sort of thing was thriving, and I believe it was mediated by Google Groups at the time (I can't recall the specifics). I remember seeing such amazing visual content back then, shared as plain old emails.
chrismcb 3y ago
No one is saying you are only allowed to maintain certain connections.. First of all, what you say is mostly true in the real world as well. I was in a bowling league for 20 years. I want friend with anyone but they were acquaintances. The bowling alley closed. I no longer see anyone. I could have taken the friendship outside the bowling alley... But you can also take your social media friendship outside that particular social media. It wasn't a terrible mistake, and it isn't a problem self contained to social media.
- moskie 3y ago
  I understand your point, but I think an assumption that a lot of internet users have, and a fundamental pitch of the internet, is that the internet is the tool you use to _find_ people to bowl with in the first place.
rralian 3y ago
I agree with you. And in fact I have mostly removed myself from social media. But I can’t help pointing out the irony of sharing this sentiment in what is essentially a form of social media. Doesn’t dilute your point. Just made me smile a little.
res0nat0r 3y ago
Unfortunately sites the size of reddit can't exist without money. People gravitate to sites like github etc because they provide features, which cost money,that people want.
EchoReflection 3y ago
That is such an elegant, concise, and accurate description of the situation. Bravo
wvenable 3y ago
I disagree. 3rd spaces are often profit generating businesses. The problem is that these companies are VC backed enterprises mean to give many multiple return on investment. It's not merely enough to be profitable. Reddit certain could have been profitable already but they've continued to grow in headcount and stupid ideas (nft.reddit.com) basically chasing an unachieveable goal. It will eat itself to pursue that goal.
sgregnt 3y ago
They created the connections, without their facilitation this would probably never exists in the first place.
brvsft 3y ago
Some are harping on the sentence before this, but this is absurd: > How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. You are definitely allowed to form connections outside of the internet. That's where many of the best ones are.

by moskie 3y ago

pixl97 3y ago

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other... >Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
The anguish in that piece is visceral but the writing itself is beautiful.

mandmandam 3y ago

Yes! And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things. They're TEXT and LINKS ffs. Even Snapchat, which deals in video, costs about $2.50 per user per year to run. Honestly, we're some set of dopes to let people like Zuck and Huffman build yachts and apocalypse bunkers, with bloody advertising money, all for the genius idea of sharing text and links on the internet.

vxNsr 3y ago
At scale that’s relatively expensive though, $2.5x1billion is still 2.5 billion dollars. That money needs to come from somewhere…
- epicureanideal 3y ago
  Membership fees. If we could get customers used to buying things again, $10/yr or $100/lifetime membership fees seems more than reasonable.
  - Narkov 3y ago
    So easy to say, so hard to actually do. Most HN readers wouldn't care about dropping $100 but the fact is Facebook, Reddit, Google users pay $0.
    - greiskul 3y ago
      Youtube gives you the option. Do you want no ads? Pay for Youtube Premium. I do not need to engage in a hostile user vs platform agaisnt Youtube, with me searching for better adblocks, and youtube trying to figure out how to block the adblockers, cause they go and give me the option. I doubt that reddit would be getting the pushback they are getting if they had come out with some sensible numbers per user, that people are actually ok with paying.
  - SteveNuts 3y ago
    The problem there is I think people are sick of seeing 15 small recurring charges on their credit card statements every month. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. There needs to be some sort of universal pay per view model that works across any site.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    And yet, people whine incessantly about YouTube Premium or about Netflix not letting people squat on each other's accounts.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  Pedantically, that's not how cost per user works. Whether you have a billion users or 3, $2.50 / user is $2.50 per user. And that infrastructure costs the same whether you riddle the platform with advertising and influence, or leave it pristine. In fact, leaving it pristine costs far far less to society, all things considered. Anyway, 'at scale', $2.5 bn is a drop in the ocean. There are thousands of people who could pay that all on their own. The global economy is 100 trillion dollars (as of 2021). And there's this thing called taxation, which sorts out public goods and services (such as communication) at scale.
shadowgovt 3y ago
It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is. I can't help but observe that for all of it being "just text and links," we sure do keep converging on monolithic service providers for... Some reason.
- danudey 3y ago
  > It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is. I'm an awful programmer and I could build a reddit clone pretty trivially if I really set my mind to it. Then I'd have to figure out how to attract users, how to handle spam and abuse, how to filter content, how to age restrict things, what tools users need, how to host media content cheaply, how to hire people to help me keep the site online and scaled, how to.... probably a thousand other things. Building a forum is easy, building a business around a forum.... difficult.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    And not even a business, the other things you're describing are things you have to solve even if you want to provide the service for free (well, for cost at that point. Because if you're providing media content and hiring people, the whole thing costs you more than labor). And the other things you've described are table stakes... Filtering content and handling abuse in particular, if you get large enough for anybody to care you exist. No government is going to sit idly by and let a service just become the next CSAM haven. At the end of the day, most people don't want to put the labor in. If they did, we would have seen fediverse take off ages ago.
elektor 3y ago
Do you have a source for that $2.5 figure?
- jorvi 3y ago
  That number seems incredibly unlikely. I’m a relatively casual Snapchat user, and from ~45GB of cellular use, ~3.5GB is from Snapchat. That’s just egress bandwidth (from Snapchat’s point of view), they also have to ingress my snaps as well as temporarily host stories and snaps in transit.
  - prattmic 3y ago
    Q1 earnings (https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2023/q1/Press-Release-Q1-2023.pdf https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2023/q1...) says 383M daily active users and $1.3B in costs (including sales, administrative, etc), for ~$3.50/user/quarter or ~$14/user/year. So far above $2.50/user/year. Even just using cost of revenue is ~$4.50/user/year.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      I clarified that I meant just infrastructure costs, and posted the source. Even so - what's $4.50 per user per year - 40 minutes of minimum wage work? 45 seconds of a lawyer's time? For sending, and processing, and receiving GBs and GBs of video? For (not even) this cost, we give up control of political narratives? We let people like Huffman and Musk and Zuckerberg control what we get to see? They take money from tinpot dictators and a selection box of wealthy grifters. We let our parents and grandparents get taken advantage of by every scam artist on the planet with a few dollars. Why? To save $4.50 a year?
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    I think the big cloud providers have warped peoples' sense of what these things actually cost (and also the massive scale of these userbases that allows the costs to be spread widely). Egress is one places where providers make their (significant) margins.
- 3y ago
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
Well there are pictures and video too.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  Not until later in Reddit's history, when they (just like Facebook) wanted to wrestle some power away from the likes of YouTube and Imgur. (Smartly so, since these platforms had lots of leverage to be able to turn off embedding one day and sour the Reddit UX / drive users away from the site. But this change did not make Reddit more valuable to its users.)
danudey 3y ago
Text and links, but then also recommendation algorithms, spam filtering, image hosting, lightning-fast caching systems so that your main feed doesn't take hours to load fetching row by row from MySQL, geographically distributed data centres for redundancy and locality. Then there's the ad engine, which requires user data harvesting, and all of that analytics and analysis and machine learning, and that all gets expensive, so you have to do more of it and do it better so that you can make more ad dollars so you can afford to do more of it and do it better so that.... and so on and so on. You could just charge users, of course, but if you charge users then you hamstring your organic growth, so you have to find a way to only charge some users but charge them significantly more. Even if Twitter only costs $1/usr/mo to run, how many of those users will pay? You need to charge 1% of users $100/mo, or 0.1% of users $1000/mo, which means you need to offer them something tangible for their money, but none of these sites can really think of anything tangible to offer their users that's worth paying for so they're stuck with ad revenue and... Yeah, it's a gigantic mess.
- hgs3 3y ago
  If you're a non-profit then you don't need a recommendation engine or an ad engine. You also don't need to self host video and images, at least initially. Reddit, for the longest time, relied on Imgur and embedded video players until they built their own infrastructure. Also, thanks to advances in AI, there is an opportunity for AI moderators for content curation. As far as caching and web scale in general, you don't need a full server farm initially. Even Google started with a single server rack.
  - rerdavies 3y ago
    Google's 1st server was housed in a cabinet of Lego bricks. No server rack. https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2011/googlegrewfr.jpg https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2011/googlegrewfr.jpg Google's first server farm consisted on row after row of regular desktop machines on the floor. Also no server racks. But sooner or later, you're going to need one of these: https://www.google.ca/about/datacenters/ https://www.google.ca/about/datacenters/ The thing I would live in constant fear of if I were to host a Mastodon server is that sooner or later, one of your users' posts is going to end up being linked to in a Wired feature article, or a New York Times article, or goes viral for any of a billion reason, and your server is going to end up getting hammered with 10,000 requests a second for a week or a month, which means you're going to be facing a sudden unexpected $3,000 AWS bill. (Not sure what it would actually cost. Anyone?) I've seen what being linked to in a Wired article does to a web server. It's ugly.
this_user 3y ago
Social networks derive their value from their size. $2.5 per year per user may not be much, but if you have just 1000 users, that is already $2500 per year. 100000 users is a quarter of a million per year. Are you going to pay for that out of pocket? It takes money to run a social network of meaningful size in even just a halfway professional manner. Who would do that while receiving nothing in return?
- mjan22640 3y ago
  Design the network physically distributed on the users computers.
paulmd 3y ago
> And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things. They're TEXT and LINKS ffs. stop doing JAVASCRIPT documents were not meant to be turing-complete the frontend developers have played us like fools look at the user-focused experiences they have built for us with our attention-economy revenue: they have played us like fools

hn_version_0023 3y ago

It’s almost enough to make one reconsider the use of social media entirely. My hope is that one day the kids will just stop using it and it dies it’s natural death.

moskie 3y ago
I've wondered for a long time if social media is just a fad.
- rukuu001 3y ago
  I've wondered about this, and what need it serves in people that they're not getting otherwise? Usenet was pretty popular from the beginning and maybe the first 'social media', and succeeded without marketing.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  I think anonymous social media as the mainstream is a fad, the end-point is going to be more like Snow Crash, minus the artistic flair. I think text-based, possibly anonymous social media will persist, but it won't be what billions of people are doing. Most of the problems with social media come down to the ability of people to separate themselves from the consequences of their speech and actions. I don't think that lack of anonymity should be enforced, I just think it's the natural progression of people trying to gather in groups on or offline.
  - lordfrito 3y ago
    100% this. The problems of social media are largely already solved in the real world, where there are real consequences to bad behavior. Reputation is a thing in the real world. We're still in the medieval ages of the internet. People are regularly waylaid and conned by digital highwaymen. We need the digital equivalent of a reputation in the digital world. Will end up being similar to a SSN -- an identity that follows you around and can't be shaken. It's going to very unpopular with the libertarian minded, privacy focused, and religious mark-of-the beast types. But I see no other way forward.

soup10 3y ago

well said, this is an ugly part of capitalism, anything that can be turned into a product, will be turned into a product. And greed and the profit motive and the hunger for growth will usually lead to some corporatized version becoming the dominant product in the space while more idealistic indie operations operate smaller in the fringes if at all.

stalfosknight 3y ago

Perhaps this is a more a reflection of our current state of development as a species than a mistake we consciously chose to make. As gross as Reddit's behavior has been, it doesn't change the reality that nothing at all in this scarcity-based economy is free.

bbor 3y ago
“Is capitalism at fault? No, surely it’s the kids!”
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  Communist Cuba doesn't have a social network, but they do have a "sneakernet" [0]: > El Paquete Semanal ("The Weekly Package") or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
  - bbor 3y ago
    Lol thanks for the reminder TechBro8615. I don't really want to argue about communism being inherently authoritarian on here :) I was just responding to the parent comment, who was (to some extent) dismissing the ancestor: > We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake. I think we can agree that there are ways we could organize social media that are neither governed by the intense profit expectations of VCs, nor the work of Communist satan magic. For example, government funded!
    - stalfosknight 3y ago

harryf 3y ago

What gives me hope is if you ever take a break from social media you realize how worthless it all is. It really doesn’t hurt to disengage. For similar reasons it’s possible for new networks to show up which disrupt the old, such as TikTok. The point is as individuals we are way less dependent on social media than we imagine.

moskie 3y ago
I think this is a fine perspective for inconsequential (-ish) social interactions, but then I start to think about the political organizing that these sites have also facilitated. "The revolution will not be televised" and all that, but... man. I was all over twitter getting real-time information as I participated in Occupy and BLM marches. But, now Elon has it.....
- kodah 3y ago
  Political organization on the internet definitely has its downsides too. In fact, as the activity has proliferated it's consumed the internet at times and that's been disappointing, to the extent that astroturfing occurs. On top of that it seems that politics has gotten more homogenous in viewpoints since it proliferated; people are now repeating talking points more than nuanced ideas. There's also a lot of harassment and bullying that occurs due to politics prevalence on the internet. When you go into real life the experience is generally very different and opt out by default.
  - moskie 3y ago
    I definitely agree, but I would also suggest that the need for social media companies to monetize on engagement incentivises them to exacerbate the issues you mention. Removing those incentives might improve political discussion.
aliasxneo 3y ago
I loaded Facebook for the first time in five years yesterday because there was a fire nearby that I was trying to track. That's about the only value it's provided to me in that time. So, not totally useless, but I certainly have no regrets being social-media free.

stefantalpalaru 3y ago

[dead]

jbrennan 3y ago

This is a great point, and I’m curious to hear what would be better alternatives. Like obviously there’s something great about having online connections with other people, but how could we do it better without surrendering to some big platform?

moskie 3y ago
Federated social media, and maybe a public cloud infrastructure as an alternative to things like AWS?
williamcotton 3y ago
We could make a public platform. In the US this all but guarantees a protection from censorship. Third parties could offer moderation services. The brave could suck on the firehose!
- floren 3y ago
  The funny thing is that Usenet is already a highly censorship-resistant platform, and tools like NoCeM would let you subscribe to third party moderation streams!
  - Shilva 3y ago
    I genuinely forget Usenet is still technically around these days. I dabble in the idea of using it here and there, but the ease and convenience of the modern www has spoiled me quite a bit. If I go to a decentralized platform, it's more likely to be something fediverse.

tmn 3y ago

You can move those connections to other channels. But yeah without a free market / progress driven system you aren’t going to have a phone, mail service, etc either. It’s a double edge sword.

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago

Where's the non-profit foundation to replace them? Has someone already started it?

1ark 3y ago
Signal, Session, Berty, Jami, and Nostr are some I can think of from the top of my head.

TechBro8615 3y ago

What choice did we have? A herd of sheep can only go through an open gate.

nailer 3y ago

> Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. I will point out that whenever somebody talks about a system where creators own and can profit from their own creations on HN someone responds with “crypto is a scam”.

camdenlock 3y ago

There is no such thing as “the internet community”. There is just humanity.

zaat 3y ago
Not sure what you mean, about half the people I know are not on the web at all, or just browsing mainstream news sites occasionally. Then there is the group of people who use social media to some degree and are online a lot. These are 2 distinctive groups, both are parts of humanity but only one of them is related to the internet community.

nine_zeros 3y ago

You are not wrong but the real problem is not profitability, but constantly increasing profitability, quarter over quarter.

NoboruWataya 3y ago

This is why I think federated alternatives like Lemmy are important and I would like to see communities migrate there instead of some other corporate walled garden. Otherwise we'll just be having the exact same discussion about some other website in five years. It pains me to see even a lot of FOSS-focused communities move their discussions to Discord, for example. Most of the criticisms of the federated platforms centre around how they are difficult to use for the average user and could never achieve the scale that Reddit has. The difficulty point is a valid one and work should probably be done on that. But at a certain point I just don't really care, particularly about the scale point. The communities that are valuable to me aren't the huge ones full of "average users", they are (mostly) smaller communities full of people interested in tech and FOSS in particular. I can figure out federation and so can most of the people I probably want to hear from. I don't mean any of this to sound elitist, I just feel like people who browse /r/pics and people who browse /r/selfhosted (for example) are probably different user bases with different preferences. If Reddit were to keep the former while the latter were to move to some other, slightly less seamless but more sustainable platform, maybe everyone wins. There are, of course, a few non-technical subreddits I like that would fall through the gaps here, in that their average user might not appreciate a federated alternative. In days of yore those communities would have inhabited forums; I wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of those.

tensor 3y ago
I'd love to see something without federation, but using a wikipedia style model to support it. I don't think federation will ever be sufficiently simple for the majority of people to adopt, and I think the world needs a world forum that is accessible for everyone, not just tech people.
- ImaCake 3y ago
  I tentatively disagree here. The only required complexity for federation is choosing a server/instance. Once you are using it the experience could be made frictionless. I think a big problem people have had with trying to join federated socials is that they did it when everyone else tried it and thus the system failed. And so people think its really hard when its just been technical issues with onboarding people.

deepsun 3y ago

Yet every time I point to the root of the problem -- that most social media web properties are privately owned by their respective shareholders, who just benevolently let you store your* texts and photos at their premises for free -- I get downvoted heavily here on HN. The community doesn't want to hear that here.

Kilgore54 3y ago
Yeah absolutely The problem here is the profit motive. What we need are sustainable communities that are not controlled by sectors of private capital and they treat their users like products or widgets. I know some people are in America, especially above a certain age, refuse to think this way. Decades of Chicago school neoliberal propaganda has convinced them that anything good has to be driven by a profit motive. I would have hope this community would be a little bit better than that but I'm fairly new to it
- aceazzameen 3y ago
  It's more than a profit motive. Profits can be fine. The bigger issue is the need to show unlimited growth on the books. That whole system drives the gradual enshittification of everything.
  - voisin 3y ago
    Everything, including our climate and other basic needs as humans. Wild that it hasn’t been overthrown yet.
    - aceazzameen 3y ago
      I'm hoping when the day comes, it isn't too violent. But history has its own thing to say about that.
      - moskie 3y ago
        It is troubling that, in the US at least, one of the two major political constituencies has a lot more guns than the other....

camhart 3y ago

Except, the lockout is self imposed. Reddit's "crime" is closing down their API... users just need to use the actual reddit app and they can keep their connection/communities going. It does sucks for the people who've built their livelihood offering 3rd party reddit clients though. Sure it was always a risk. Big tech destroys entire businesses on a regular basis. Doesn't make it a bad choice on their part--the (american foot)ball simply bounced the wrong direction.

btilly 3y ago
Except, the actual Reddit app sucks. And it particularly sucks for busy moderators. So successful subreddits will be getting inexperienced moderators imposed, who don't know how the communities work, and who don't have the right tools to use. Care to take bets on how well this will turn out?
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >Care to take bets on how well this will turn out? I'm betting many communities are going to turn very shitty, but ultimately it won't hurt Reddit's bottom line one iota. In fact, Reddit will probably be more profitable than before. Just look at TikTok: you don't need communities with intelligent discussion to have a highly profitable company. Instead, it's better to chase vapid morons who want to watch shitty 1-minute videos.
  - bbor 3y ago
    It is my opinion that viewing oneself as a special light in a world of vapid morons leads to a sad, angry life. Just thought I'd weigh in, one vapid moron to another :)
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      The world isn't completely full of vapid morons. There's plenty of intelligent people here, plus there's plenty of intelligent people on various Reddit subs, who are interested in intelligent discourse. There's plenty of popular media that isn't vapid and moronic: just look at Star Trek: it's been a cultural phenomenon for over a half-century and it's rather intellectual for a series aimed at the general public, yet it's rather difficult to find anyone these days who's never heard of it. There's nothing terribly special about people who are reasonably intelligent and are interested in intelligent discussions about various topics; we're not some vanishingly small minority. Civilization wouldn't have gotten this far if 99% of people were vapid morons. There are a lot of vapid morons out there, as evidenced by the rise of TikTok (and to be fair, not everything there is utter trash), but they're not the overwhelming majority of the population IMO.

neilv 3y ago

> We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. There was no mistake. Some pre-goldrush Internet/online people could and did point out these things, from the start. Meanwhile, tons of money rushed in, the money deployed the systems that were available and promoted to people, and the massive influx of people were not hearing from the altruistic types who could see things changing. I think the current Internet user base overall has mostly never known an online environment in which their associations weren't owned and controlled. Even the language was changed: "social network" was no longer something that was yours, or between you and others you knew, but "social network" is something some billionaire owns about everyone else's personal associations (power to monitor it, to mediate it, to inject into it). And when there's upset in one commercial property of power over people, usually the upstart alternatives (even some "decentralized" ones) that rush in are like a corrupt country's revolutionary -- who made grand populist speeches, until they gained power, and it turned out they only wanted to be the next dictator.

dotnet00 3y ago
>I think the current Internet user base overall has mostly never known an online environment in which their associations weren't owned and controlled. I think this isn't said enough (even with how often it is said). Switching to Matrix and setting up a fediverse node were big in realizing how used to controlled "sterile" environments me and my friend circle had gotten. Especially early on we found ourselves often saying that being on those platforms brought back the old "early internet" feeling (for us this would be the early/mid 2000s).

DashAnimal 3y ago

If I think of every community I was a part of during the 2000s, they've all shut down. In the end money played a part in all of them closing, or people who don't want to commit any longer to something that isn't making them money. In contrast, I've been on reddit since 2011 which is really good. I've spent zero money and learned and enjoyed a lot.

AwaAwa 3y ago

Try not paying your taxes and see what happens. We have always been reduced to producers of monetary value for an intermediary. We pretend we are in control of that intermediary, and maybe once we were. Much like the beginning of every social media site.

Kilgore54 3y ago
It's not really an apples to apples comparison. You're talking about taxation, governments can absolutely run stuff that is not profitable and do all the time. Better example would be to not pay your rent or your mortgage... But we don't want to make the mistake of equating governments with private capital. If anything governments are controlled by private capital disproportionately when they are often the only defense we have to try to defeat centers of power on such a scale.
- AwaAwa 3y ago
  I think it is an apt comparison, since social media companies don't need to extract monetary value from every single individual, unlike rent, and do run their orgs for large amounts of time in the 'red' thanks to VC money. Which let's be honest, is another game of VC's leveraging credit/debt systems via financial institutions. Perhaps you feel this way because you still think the government is individually on our side, when every announcement sounds more and more for a vague concept of good, that seems to enrich the announcers, while doing nothing for my life, or any real person I have ever interacted with. Which puts paid to the concept of government being on the individual's side.

stefan_ 3y ago

"these companies need to make money" is a very weird way of saying "Reddit could have been perfectly profitable years ago but we went and got a shit ton of venture capital instead by selling investors on the idea that we were gonna be as big as Alphabet". Surprise, their level of execution is roughly "press conference at the Four Seasons" as this little episode so well demonstrates.

99_00 3y ago

You haven't said what the mistake is. Is it a mistake to use socially media because the connections aren't peremmant?

moskie 3y ago
The mistake was to commit to a system where social connections are only maintained / allowed to exist if they are profitable for an intermediary.
- 99_00 3y ago
  As opposed to not having those social connections?
  - moskie 3y ago
    As opposed to recognizing these problems ahead of time, and instead creating a (public?) system for forming these social networks that doesn't need to monetize. One that wouldn't be corrupted by the needs for ever-increasing profits. I don't mean for that system to necessarily be a full replacement for the social networks we have now, but I'd argue there's room for something like a public alternative to them.
    - 99_00 3y ago
      Free systems always excited and and continue to do so. Commit to them. Correct the mistake. If committing to them doesn't fix the mistake, then the choice was to have the social connections you wanted or not to. And given those choices, and what you want, choosing social media isn't a mistake.

dotnet00 3y ago

Agreed. The nice part is that often those connections can be moved elsewhere, especially for us more tech savy people. Having first purged my posts on reddit and recently outright deleting my account, it's been refreshing to realize that I can indeed go without reddit, even without the few subs I found particularly useful. The few strong online friendships I've made have long since been "backed up" to Matrix and the Fediverse with self hosted instances after experiencing spurious bans on discord and realizing how fragile the centralized arrangement is.

hackerlight 3y ago

I question the word "mistake" here, because it puts the burden on us and implies that it could have turned out differently, in that we could have just decided to opt out. When it comes to products that prey on the dopamine system and have network power behind them, it probably couldn't have turned out any differently, short of policy that adjusts the incentives of the people who create these products.

yanderekko 3y ago

>We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. I would absolutely take profit-driven moderation over the petty tyranny of your stereotypical reddit mod. These mods are not heroically channeling some sort of vox populi.

redbell 3y ago

> but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system We all hope Hacker News remains the exception, otherwise, it might mark the end of “the internet as we love it”

moskie 3y ago
I don't think it's a good idea to assume / hope that HN remains that way. Money is still an aspect of the existence of HN. It exists because pg has enough money to run it, and its existence aligns with his current desires. This community could just as easily dissappear in a way equivalent to what we're seeing with Twitter and Reddit, if pg wanted. And it could not be easily replaced, because its existence is dependent on pg's money...

hliyan 3y ago

A few years ago, I came up with this idea: "...a social network that uses email as its communications protocol and regular mail servers as the “cloud”. There is no “platform”, but an app which is basically a re-skinned mail client with certain features disabled or abstracted. There is no advertising." https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-c33b175f3a9e https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-netwo...

zo1 3y ago
And "channels" or "pages" are really just email groups? There was a time a while back where that sort of thing was thriving, and I believe it was mediated by Google Groups at the time (I can't recall the specifics). I remember seeing such amazing visual content back then, shared as plain old emails.

chrismcb 3y ago

No one is saying you are only allowed to maintain certain connections.. First of all, what you say is mostly true in the real world as well. I was in a bowling league for 20 years. I want friend with anyone but they were acquaintances. The bowling alley closed. I no longer see anyone. I could have taken the friendship outside the bowling alley... But you can also take your social media friendship outside that particular social media. It wasn't a terrible mistake, and it isn't a problem self contained to social media.

moskie 3y ago
I understand your point, but I think an assumption that a lot of internet users have, and a fundamental pitch of the internet, is that the internet is the tool you use to _find_ people to bowl with in the first place.

rralian 3y ago

I agree with you. And in fact I have mostly removed myself from social media. But I can’t help pointing out the irony of sharing this sentiment in what is essentially a form of social media. Doesn’t dilute your point. Just made me smile a little.

res0nat0r 3y ago

Unfortunately sites the size of reddit can't exist without money. People gravitate to sites like github etc because they provide features, which cost money,that people want.

EchoReflection 3y ago

That is such an elegant, concise, and accurate description of the situation. Bravo

wvenable 3y ago

I disagree. 3rd spaces are often profit generating businesses. The problem is that these companies are VC backed enterprises mean to give many multiple return on investment. It's not merely enough to be profitable. Reddit certain could have been profitable already but they've continued to grow in headcount and stupid ideas (nft.reddit.com) basically chasing an unachieveable goal. It will eat itself to pursue that goal.

sgregnt 3y ago

They created the connections, without their facilitation this would probably never exists in the first place.

brvsft 3y ago

Some are harping on the sentence before this, but this is absurd: > How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. You are definitely allowed to form connections outside of the internet. That's where many of the best ones are.