5 ms·

Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums

Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. The Eternal September effect has been getting stronger ever since it's first been observed.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.
- lenderton 2y ago
  My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site). When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc. Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography. I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users. When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization. In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat. I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    > It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy No. It was profitable in 2019. Under the old ownership it could have easily become profitable again by correcting the overhiring and not pissing off advertisers.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app. Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
  - julianeon 2y ago
    Bluesky and Mastodon, for the average user, are G rated compared to the avalanche of smut on Twitter/X.
    - tbrownaw 2y ago
      > avalanche of smut on Twitter/X I haven't seen this. Maybe you only run into that sort of thing if you go looking for that sort of thing?
      - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
        The top replies to any big viral tweet are Onlyfans models and other spammers.
        tbrownaw 2y ago
        I usually have to expand the "more replies" and often also the "probably spam" sections to see those.
      - julianeon 2y ago
        Even if you accept this at face value (I don’t) note the problem: on Bluesky and Mastodon, you have to look for racy content and then follow it on purpose. It must be a deliberate, intentional choice. For the average user, my experience has been that Bluesky and Mastodon are, if anything, too tame and boring. Whereas Twitter/X is pushing for whatever brings engagement, damn the consequences.
whatshisface 2y ago
>It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. "Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:" ... 26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars. 27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <--- 28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either. ...
- Nihilartikel 2y ago
  Weeellll. Not every forum has a dang. Just saying.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Almost every one does.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      Most are nowhere near as thoughtful and effective as he is, though.
- rogers12 2y ago
  This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention. You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
  - GavinGruesome 2y ago
    Fluids can't be fragile.
  - ddulaney 2y ago
    As the guidelines [0] state: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
bhouston 2y ago
I think that AI generated personas who push an ideological direction on anonymous forums are more of a threat that just stupid people. Eg: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-internet-users/ https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-int...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
rtpg 2y ago
There's a gap between public fora and the blogosphere though. Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore. Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example. There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.
throwaway14356 2y ago
I had a hilarious time deleting comments from people who don't believe the topic is real. Specifically hard to believe stuff made the experience funny. People got really mad in private messages. As if it is a god given right to complain about others talking about something so elaborately that the conversation dies. All scaling issues solved. If you want to talk about the garden gnome liberation front you must believe they need to be rescued.
enugu 2y ago
It's not just that the social media is filled with low on substance posts with excess anger and snark, but this incentivizes everyone to be more forceful - as otherwise the louder voices can dominate the discussion. So, it's not just a quality of people issue but also an emergent dynamic which encourages tribalism instead of substantive posts. The same people can make reasonable posts in other contexts This need not be a unsolvable problem, and that one has to retreat places like HN relying on a single moderator(good, but doesn't scale). One can also rely on timelines/feeds being based on Distributed moderation - A user selects moderators or custom-algorithms who they find valuable. The moderation can be along different dimensions like accuracy, interest, or aligned with some political view. There could a moderator whose style is to purely check the soundness of the reasoning without taking any position on the issue itself. This can lead to improved standards of discussion. A key issue is how to reduce the energy required to moderate - typically a moderator evaluates the quality and rely on networks of other moderators each handling smaller domains. Current discourse encourages users to sort into strongly polarized groups, whereas more nuanced feeds in social media can lead to coalitions which don't neatly align with the standard fault lines. Platforms like Polis actively encourage common points of agreement across different groups.
bartread 2y ago
Yeah, but this sounds more like social media than the blogosphere. Blogs were always effort to set up and maintain, even if you were just going with one of the hosted platforms rather than self-hosting. And comment spam was certainly an issue but, firstly, systems for dealing with that became pretty good. And then, outside of major news sites - I'm thinking particularly here of BBC's HYS, but the same applies to other news sites - and other sites with very broad interest bases, you didn't tend to get loads of nasty or toxic comments on blogs. Plus, the moderation tools were - as previously mentioned - pretty decent. A lot of the bigger news websites did close comments, but I'm not so aware of this being an issue with blogs which were often more focussed around a particular community or interest anyway... just publicly available. I don't think the quantity of people online in itself had anything to do with the "death" of the blogosphere. It's just that most of those people don't read or write blogs. And it's become harder to find blogs and other long tail content because search results are now so heavily skewed towards paid results and commercial entities who invest huge amounts in SEO. FWIW I also think you're probably going a bit far with the moral pronouncements on those 7 billion people: neither you nor I have any real idea what the vast majority of them are actually like as human beings. Moreover, I'd suggest that writing off most people as "[not] very good" or branding a critical mass of them as "spectacularly awful" - and especially when you're speaking from a position of ignorance - is exactly the kind of rhetoric that's landed us with this grim tribal culture that permeates large areas of online - and offline - life.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.

lenderton 2y ago
My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site). When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc. Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography. I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users. When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization. In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat. I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  > It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy No. It was profitable in 2019. Under the old ownership it could have easily become profitable again by correcting the overhiring and not pissing off advertisers.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app. Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
- julianeon 2y ago
  Bluesky and Mastodon, for the average user, are G rated compared to the avalanche of smut on Twitter/X.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    > avalanche of smut on Twitter/X I haven't seen this. Maybe you only run into that sort of thing if you go looking for that sort of thing?
    - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
      The top replies to any big viral tweet are Onlyfans models and other spammers.
      - tbrownaw 2y ago
        I usually have to expand the "more replies" and often also the "probably spam" sections to see those.
    - julianeon 2y ago
      Even if you accept this at face value (I don’t) note the problem: on Bluesky and Mastodon, you have to look for racy content and then follow it on purpose. It must be a deliberate, intentional choice. For the average user, my experience has been that Bluesky and Mastodon are, if anything, too tame and boring. Whereas Twitter/X is pushing for whatever brings engagement, damn the consequences.

whatshisface 2y ago

>It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. "Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:" ... 26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars. 27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <--- 28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either. ...

Nihilartikel 2y ago
Weeellll. Not every forum has a dang. Just saying.
- immibis 2y ago
  Almost every one does.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Most are nowhere near as thoughtful and effective as he is, though.
rogers12 2y ago
This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention. You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
- GavinGruesome 2y ago
  Fluids can't be fragile.
- ddulaney 2y ago
  As the guidelines [0] state: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bhouston 2y ago

I think that AI generated personas who push an ideological direction on anonymous forums are more of a threat that just stupid people. Eg: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-internet-users/ https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-int...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

rtpg 2y ago

There's a gap between public fora and the blogosphere though. Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore. Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example. There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.

throwaway14356 2y ago

I had a hilarious time deleting comments from people who don't believe the topic is real. Specifically hard to believe stuff made the experience funny. People got really mad in private messages. As if it is a god given right to complain about others talking about something so elaborately that the conversation dies. All scaling issues solved. If you want to talk about the garden gnome liberation front you must believe they need to be rescued.

enugu 2y ago

It's not just that the social media is filled with low on substance posts with excess anger and snark, but this incentivizes everyone to be more forceful - as otherwise the louder voices can dominate the discussion. So, it's not just a quality of people issue but also an emergent dynamic which encourages tribalism instead of substantive posts. The same people can make reasonable posts in other contexts This need not be a unsolvable problem, and that one has to retreat places like HN relying on a single moderator(good, but doesn't scale). One can also rely on timelines/feeds being based on Distributed moderation - A user selects moderators or custom-algorithms who they find valuable. The moderation can be along different dimensions like accuracy, interest, or aligned with some political view. There could a moderator whose style is to purely check the soundness of the reasoning without taking any position on the issue itself. This can lead to improved standards of discussion. A key issue is how to reduce the energy required to moderate - typically a moderator evaluates the quality and rely on networks of other moderators each handling smaller domains. Current discourse encourages users to sort into strongly polarized groups, whereas more nuanced feeds in social media can lead to coalitions which don't neatly align with the standard fault lines. Platforms like Polis actively encourage common points of agreement across different groups.

bartread 2y ago

Yeah, but this sounds more like social media than the blogosphere. Blogs were always effort to set up and maintain, even if you were just going with one of the hosted platforms rather than self-hosting. And comment spam was certainly an issue but, firstly, systems for dealing with that became pretty good. And then, outside of major news sites - I'm thinking particularly here of BBC's HYS, but the same applies to other news sites - and other sites with very broad interest bases, you didn't tend to get loads of nasty or toxic comments on blogs. Plus, the moderation tools were - as previously mentioned - pretty decent. A lot of the bigger news websites did close comments, but I'm not so aware of this being an issue with blogs which were often more focussed around a particular community or interest anyway... just publicly available. I don't think the quantity of people online in itself had anything to do with the "death" of the blogosphere. It's just that most of those people don't read or write blogs. And it's become harder to find blogs and other long tail content because search results are now so heavily skewed towards paid results and commercial entities who invest huge amounts in SEO. FWIW I also think you're probably going a bit far with the moral pronouncements on those 7 billion people: neither you nor I have any real idea what the vast majority of them are actually like as human beings. Moreover, I'd suggest that writing off most people as "[not] very good" or branding a critical mass of them as "spectacularly awful" - and especially when you're speaking from a position of ignorance - is exactly the kind of rhetoric that's landed us with this grim tribal culture that permeates large areas of online - and offline - life.