8 ms·

I am a member of three (admittedly weird) niche communities. These have been orders of magnitude more impactful in my life than Facebook. The friends I met ther

by sago 9y ago

I am a member of three (admittedly weird) niche communities. These have been orders of magnitude more impactful in my life than Facebook. The friends I met there have become real-life friends. We've flown around the world to visit each other, we've laughed and cried, we send each other quirky gifts, and cheer on each other's kids. These are the only close new friends I've made in the last 10 years. Two of those communities are based around subreddits, the other a 90s era web forum. The thing that makes them work where Facebook groups simply don't, I think, is pseudonymity. One of those groups has been particularly powerful, and it is a group that inherently involves being mutually vulnerable, so I certainly would never have joined under my real name, and I enjoy being part of the community even though only a handful of people know my IRL identity. Reddit has some big problems, but is the best platform I have found so far for these niche communities. And my experience totally chimes with this article: big social media is as shallow as a puddle. Small niches are where real communities form.

dorfsmay 9y ago
I agree with your last paragraph, and IMO the reason is reddit is based on common interests, like Usenet used to be, while Facebook is based on random ways you met people in life and twitter is based on people trying to boost their ego.
- LV-426 9y ago
  I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it's a really horrible version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people who use it, but also due to the karma system - in theory a way to collectively highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an end in itself (karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people burying legit posts they simply don't like/agree with). On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber. Cliques did exist on newsgroups, but they had less tools at their disposal. In fact one of the reasons people left Usenet for inferior moderated web forums is because while they could (quite rightly) control their own experience, they (quite rightly) had no ability to control the group. Ironically, although Usenet is considered to be dead these days, it's in some ways in better shape than ever. 20 years ago it suffered from its popularity, under attack from spammers and trolls attempting and often succeeding in destroying newsgroups. These days it probably has more users than it had before the mid 90s internet explosion, whereas spammers and trolls have largely moved on to bigger audiences elsewhere. It's strange for me to read people talking nostalgically about how the internet was better in the past, about online forums they were a part of 15 years ago, or Reddit or 4chan, and seemingly have no experience or even knowledge of Usenet. And that something as similar and simple to use as email is ignored by people who rue the loss of old (web) forums. Unlike web options Usenet is no-nonsense, free, has no admin headaches, no advertising, no Evil Corp owner (or potential sell out to Evil Corp when the community grows enough), it's anonymous, private and allows unrestricted speech (within applicable law, obviously). All it requires is for people to use it.
  - etherealG 9y ago
    I agree about usenet, but must admit it’s not very accessible to people unfamiliar with it. I think a good web interface would go a long way to helping adoption. Perhaps one exists and I’m just not aware.
    - LV-426 9y ago
      The company providing the world's most popular email web interface should have been the prime candidate to provide web Usenet, but instead they saw Usenet only as a means to get people on to their own terrible Google-only groups (while producing such a monumental amount of spam, trolling and abuse to Usenet, many people to leave altogether). A better idea than a web interface IMO is Usenet access simply built into a browser by default. It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, because they are closely related, but not many people use email clients any more, so not many people are going to find Usenet that way. If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.
      - kakarot 9y ago
        > If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups One part of me believes this would be the best native addon coming from Mozilla in years. The other part of me worries it would bring on a new age of Eternal September to Usenet, which has been isolated long enough again to form a particular kind of culture that would seem fragile in the face of sudden mass immigration given the size of the Usenet community today.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        Google makes some IMO very weird decisions about seemingly low effort/cost offerings, even if a bit niche, that would seem to be very complementary to products/services that it does put its full weight behind. Dropping Reader didn't make a lot of sense to me for this reason. The lukewarm support for Scholar is another.
- pzone 9y ago
  You really hit the nail on the head describing the uses of these sites, lol
stinos 9y ago
Two other reasons Facebook really doesn't work, at least for me: a) the UI is not that of a proper forum or chat (small amount of characters per row, lack of controls for embedding content including quoting, content burried in between a ton of no-related content, etc). Actually, in my opinion the UI is abysmal when it comes to conveying information which is more than a picture of video or few words. b) when you're not in a closed group there's virtually an unlimited amount of people you don't even know who ca chime in and want to present their idea (which is almost like you're trying to have a serious discussion in real life and there's constantly a bunch of drunken people interrupting you st start spitting out whatever is on their mind). It just does not work for me for having proper discussions (it does have a ton of other features which do work great, but not that). Reddit is sort of ok, if you find the right community. And many of the forums I already visited before there even was a Reddit or Facebook stil exist nowadays and some of them are even more alive than all those years ago. Most of them are specific (eg. one sport, one music style), the general ones are mostly gone.
- maneesh 9y ago
  I believe that Facebook Groups are one of the most powerful features of FB, but I agree that the UI is limiting and the admin controls are lacking. Have you found any online communities with excellent interfaces? Ideally open-source?
  - nsomaru 9y ago
    I've been testing Discourse out and it seems pretty cool. Really fast UI too.
  - supergreg 9y ago
    If you are looking for open source, I think Discourse is the best out there. We tried to move a community from an old phpbb forum to a newer software some years ago and checked several projects and most projects are either unmaintained or old (with old style PHP programming) or new but lack features we needed. We ended up using NodeBB because the person who was going to maintain it was more comfortable with Javascript than Ruby.
  - 9y ago
taurath 9y ago
I agree with this despite probably talking about different communities. It is night and day different than communities based around school and childhood.
- Filligree 9y ago
  Ditto. I wonder if anyone else here spends time on Sufficient Velocity? It's an unusual place in many ways, not least for having been built by an idealistic (but pragmatic) lawyer who's been using it for, hmm, nation building?
Crontab 9y ago
Being able to find and converse with people who share my niche interests is one of my favorite things about the Internet. It was depressing to be interested in something and having no one to talk to about it.
pokemongoaway 9y ago
Sounds cool. Can you mention the 3 communities?
xor1 9y ago
I'm the opposite of this. I spent most of my life up to my mid-20s on internet communities -- first Usenet as a child (8 years old), then SA, then Reddit/4chan. I mostly read Reddit and HN now, but do not read and post compulsively like I did previously. I would easily clear 200+ posts a day on SA and 4chan. There's also the different pockets of people that I met through gaming. It's been hard, but I've finally broken away from relying on the internet for friends and community. 2017 was the first year that I can remember where I spent more time with RL friends than internet friends.
heedlessly2 9y ago
People are too busy "playing boring politcian" on Facebook. But Reddit allows you to geek about certain topics without getting judged. If i make 50+ posts on FB about my favorite tv show on Facebook, i get called "obsessed" or get defriended

by sago 9y ago

dorfsmay 9y ago

I agree with your last paragraph, and IMO the reason is reddit is based on common interests, like Usenet used to be, while Facebook is based on random ways you met people in life and twitter is based on people trying to boost their ego.

LV-426 9y ago
I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it's a really horrible version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people who use it, but also due to the karma system - in theory a way to collectively highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an end in itself (karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people burying legit posts they simply don't like/agree with). On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber. Cliques did exist on newsgroups, but they had less tools at their disposal. In fact one of the reasons people left Usenet for inferior moderated web forums is because while they could (quite rightly) control their own experience, they (quite rightly) had no ability to control the group. Ironically, although Usenet is considered to be dead these days, it's in some ways in better shape than ever. 20 years ago it suffered from its popularity, under attack from spammers and trolls attempting and often succeeding in destroying newsgroups. These days it probably has more users than it had before the mid 90s internet explosion, whereas spammers and trolls have largely moved on to bigger audiences elsewhere. It's strange for me to read people talking nostalgically about how the internet was better in the past, about online forums they were a part of 15 years ago, or Reddit or 4chan, and seemingly have no experience or even knowledge of Usenet. And that something as similar and simple to use as email is ignored by people who rue the loss of old (web) forums. Unlike web options Usenet is no-nonsense, free, has no admin headaches, no advertising, no Evil Corp owner (or potential sell out to Evil Corp when the community grows enough), it's anonymous, private and allows unrestricted speech (within applicable law, obviously). All it requires is for people to use it.
- etherealG 9y ago
  I agree about usenet, but must admit it’s not very accessible to people unfamiliar with it. I think a good web interface would go a long way to helping adoption. Perhaps one exists and I’m just not aware.
  - LV-426 9y ago
    The company providing the world's most popular email web interface should have been the prime candidate to provide web Usenet, but instead they saw Usenet only as a means to get people on to their own terrible Google-only groups (while producing such a monumental amount of spam, trolling and abuse to Usenet, many people to leave altogether). A better idea than a web interface IMO is Usenet access simply built into a browser by default. It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, because they are closely related, but not many people use email clients any more, so not many people are going to find Usenet that way. If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.
    - kakarot 9y ago
      > If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups One part of me believes this would be the best native addon coming from Mozilla in years. The other part of me worries it would bring on a new age of Eternal September to Usenet, which has been isolated long enough again to form a particular kind of culture that would seem fragile in the face of sudden mass immigration given the size of the Usenet community today.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Google makes some IMO very weird decisions about seemingly low effort/cost offerings, even if a bit niche, that would seem to be very complementary to products/services that it does put its full weight behind. Dropping Reader didn't make a lot of sense to me for this reason. The lukewarm support for Scholar is another.
pzone 9y ago
You really hit the nail on the head describing the uses of these sites, lol

stinos 9y ago

Two other reasons Facebook really doesn't work, at least for me: a) the UI is not that of a proper forum or chat (small amount of characters per row, lack of controls for embedding content including quoting, content burried in between a ton of no-related content, etc). Actually, in my opinion the UI is abysmal when it comes to conveying information which is more than a picture of video or few words. b) when you're not in a closed group there's virtually an unlimited amount of people you don't even know who ca chime in and want to present their idea (which is almost like you're trying to have a serious discussion in real life and there's constantly a bunch of drunken people interrupting you st start spitting out whatever is on their mind). It just does not work for me for having proper discussions (it does have a ton of other features which do work great, but not that). Reddit is sort of ok, if you find the right community. And many of the forums I already visited before there even was a Reddit or Facebook stil exist nowadays and some of them are even more alive than all those years ago. Most of them are specific (eg. one sport, one music style), the general ones are mostly gone.

maneesh 9y ago
I believe that Facebook Groups are one of the most powerful features of FB, but I agree that the UI is limiting and the admin controls are lacking. Have you found any online communities with excellent interfaces? Ideally open-source?
- nsomaru 9y ago
  I've been testing Discourse out and it seems pretty cool. Really fast UI too.
- supergreg 9y ago
  If you are looking for open source, I think Discourse is the best out there. We tried to move a community from an old phpbb forum to a newer software some years ago and checked several projects and most projects are either unmaintained or old (with old style PHP programming) or new but lack features we needed. We ended up using NodeBB because the person who was going to maintain it was more comfortable with Javascript than Ruby.
- 9y ago

taurath 9y ago

I agree with this despite probably talking about different communities. It is night and day different than communities based around school and childhood.

Filligree 9y ago
Ditto. I wonder if anyone else here spends time on Sufficient Velocity? It's an unusual place in many ways, not least for having been built by an idealistic (but pragmatic) lawyer who's been using it for, hmm, nation building?

Crontab 9y ago

Being able to find and converse with people who share my niche interests is one of my favorite things about the Internet. It was depressing to be interested in something and having no one to talk to about it.

pokemongoaway 9y ago

Sounds cool. Can you mention the 3 communities?

xor1 9y ago

I'm the opposite of this. I spent most of my life up to my mid-20s on internet communities -- first Usenet as a child (8 years old), then SA, then Reddit/4chan. I mostly read Reddit and HN now, but do not read and post compulsively like I did previously. I would easily clear 200+ posts a day on SA and 4chan. There's also the different pockets of people that I met through gaming. It's been hard, but I've finally broken away from relying on the internet for friends and community. 2017 was the first year that I can remember where I spent more time with RL friends than internet friends.

heedlessly2 9y ago

People are too busy "playing boring politcian" on Facebook. But Reddit allows you to geek about certain topics without getting judged. If i make 50+ posts on FB about my favorite tv show on Facebook, i get called "obsessed" or get defriended