3 ms·

> Those "social networks" were small, and never made front-page news (or any news at all), and were more concerned with keeping to themselves than recruiting ne

> Those "social networks" were small, and never made front-page news (or any news at all), and were more concerned with keeping to themselves than recruiting new members. And I'm supposed to be convinced that those small forums weren't anti-social in their own important ways?

throwanem 9y ago
Such as? It wasn't that you never brought new people in. It was that you weren't operating under a perverse incentive to bring in as many new people as you could.
- jancsika 9y ago
  Such as being subject to the whims of random administrator/moderators and whatever random set of principles they wished to apply to their users. The most striking example I can remember was with Rick and Morty creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that is no longer alive, but it appears someone kept some of Dan's insults from that thread[1]. But that pales in comparison to more technically-oriented forums and mailing lists where insidious forms of passive-aggression flourished. These include: * making the new user feel stupid for failing to comprehend the poor documentation or poorly considered forum guidelines * making the new user feel stupid for asking a question and failing to read a relevant footnote from a message posted three years ago with an unrelated message topic * endlessly blathering on about top-posting, asking-about-asking, proper quoting, on-topic vs off-topic, reading-the-stickies, formats for uploading images/attachments, instead of making the software better so that humans don't have to deal with that bs. (The same way git makes it so that humans don't have to bicker about who gets repository permissions) * telling a user they will be ignored, then mentioning in a meta-discussion about the forum who is ignoring whom * other users rationalizing the behavior of trolls because those trolls were veteran members * general lack of mentors to help new users (if the purpose of the forum was to be a sort of community) There are of course exceptions. But I still remember the feeling of just crossing my fingers in the hopes that my query about a technical topic wouldn't trigger Socratic bombs from a forum's resident jerk. Stack Overflow proves there's a way to at least a way to discover and read relevant responses without that pain. I have no idea what the antidote to Facebook/Google is. But pining for single-point-of-failure, buggy backends serving up poor UIs with content that cannot easily bubble up to a wider audience isn't going to help. And forget the anti-social part-- you can't even technically achieve the spirit of such forums today because sock puppets and Sybil have become so sophisticated. Unless we confine ourselves to topics so ineffectual that nobody on the internet would ever decide to hate us. [1] http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Okay first of all I've seen Rick and Morty and there is no way in the world I'd spend one millisecond I didn't have to around the people who create that show. If I ran a bar in a Western and Dan Justiharmoroiland walked in, I'd go for the shotgun. The show is occasionally funny and constantly evidence that the minds behind it are deadly toxic to everyone in their blast radius. Like Bill Hicks with a sack of crystal meth and a great big hard-on. So I'm not sure how much Dan Harmon being Dan Harmon counts as an example, is what I'm saying. That guy's going to ruin whoever he's around just by being who he is. But this all misses the point. What we're talking about here isn't "content" bubbling up to "audiences". It's people keeping in touch with one another, and making themselves places to hang out on the Internet and arrange to hang out off it. I mean, yeah, some people are going to be assholes. That's not really a problem for technology to solve. "Don't hang out with assholes" is maybe not that hard? But this isn't, like, Buffy or X-Files forums we're talking about here. It's "hey, let's put up a thing so we can talk to each other". If anyone can just sign up to join whatever you're thinking of, then whatever you're thinking of isn't really what we're talking about here, because what we're talking about here is more than anything like long-running group chats avant la lettre, using whatever technology happens to be available. Using technology, shaping it to fit one's purpose, and not the other way around. That's the distinction toward which we're struggling here, I think.

throwanem 9y ago

Such as? It wasn't that you never brought new people in. It was that you weren't operating under a perverse incentive to bring in as many new people as you could.

jancsika 9y ago
Such as being subject to the whims of random administrator/moderators and whatever random set of principles they wished to apply to their users. The most striking example I can remember was with Rick and Morty creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that is no longer alive, but it appears someone kept some of Dan's insults from that thread[1]. But that pales in comparison to more technically-oriented forums and mailing lists where insidious forms of passive-aggression flourished. These include: * making the new user feel stupid for failing to comprehend the poor documentation or poorly considered forum guidelines * making the new user feel stupid for asking a question and failing to read a relevant footnote from a message posted three years ago with an unrelated message topic * endlessly blathering on about top-posting, asking-about-asking, proper quoting, on-topic vs off-topic, reading-the-stickies, formats for uploading images/attachments, instead of making the software better so that humans don't have to deal with that bs. (The same way git makes it so that humans don't have to bicker about who gets repository permissions) * telling a user they will be ignored, then mentioning in a meta-discussion about the forum who is ignoring whom * other users rationalizing the behavior of trolls because those trolls were veteran members * general lack of mentors to help new users (if the purpose of the forum was to be a sort of community) There are of course exceptions. But I still remember the feeling of just crossing my fingers in the hopes that my query about a technical topic wouldn't trigger Socratic bombs from a forum's resident jerk. Stack Overflow proves there's a way to at least a way to discover and read relevant responses without that pain. I have no idea what the antidote to Facebook/Google is. But pining for single-point-of-failure, buggy backends serving up poor UIs with content that cannot easily bubble up to a wider audience isn't going to help. And forget the anti-social part-- you can't even technically achieve the spirit of such forums today because sock puppets and Sybil have become so sophisticated. Unless we confine ourselves to topics so ineffectual that nobody on the internet would ever decide to hate us. [1] http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes
- throwanem 9y ago
  Okay first of all I've seen Rick and Morty and there is no way in the world I'd spend one millisecond I didn't have to around the people who create that show. If I ran a bar in a Western and Dan Justiharmoroiland walked in, I'd go for the shotgun. The show is occasionally funny and constantly evidence that the minds behind it are deadly toxic to everyone in their blast radius. Like Bill Hicks with a sack of crystal meth and a great big hard-on. So I'm not sure how much Dan Harmon being Dan Harmon counts as an example, is what I'm saying. That guy's going to ruin whoever he's around just by being who he is. But this all misses the point. What we're talking about here isn't "content" bubbling up to "audiences". It's people keeping in touch with one another, and making themselves places to hang out on the Internet and arrange to hang out off it. I mean, yeah, some people are going to be assholes. That's not really a problem for technology to solve. "Don't hang out with assholes" is maybe not that hard? But this isn't, like, Buffy or X-Files forums we're talking about here. It's "hey, let's put up a thing so we can talk to each other". If anyone can just sign up to join whatever you're thinking of, then whatever you're thinking of isn't really what we're talking about here, because what we're talking about here is more than anything like long-running group chats avant la lettre, using whatever technology happens to be available. Using technology, shaping it to fit one's purpose, and not the other way around. That's the distinction toward which we're struggling here, I think.