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I never used social media, because of privacy concerns, and because I'm somewhat of a veteran, having started with Fidonet, and continued later with Usenet. Th

I never used social media, because of privacy concerns, and because I'm somewhat of a veteran, having started with Fidonet, and continued later with Usenet. These problem are nothing new, they existed back then already, they were only less severe, because not many people were using those services back then, and the broad audience did know nothing about them. Having already experienced such things on a small level, I was too sceptical to use social media, and I was right. But I started using Mastodon about a year ago, assuming that a distributed, censorship resistant network would do something better. Boy, was I wrong. After the Wil Wheaton incident, I deleted all of my Mastodon accounts, and this will surely be my last experiment with social media. I have a Threema account, that only my friends and relatives know, and I have my own blogs, that'll be enough. I survided without social media before, and I'll continue to do so.

vjeux 8y ago
Don’t you consider Hacker News to be social media? All the links are sourced and ranked from the community, plus all the comments.
- repolfx 8y ago
  It sort of is, but it benefits a lot from the (virtually) unlimited number of characters you can use. It's possible to express complex and nuanced points on HN, which is impossible on Twitter by the nature of their decision to cap everyone to tiny messages. The Twitter length limit is a great growth hack because you ensure nobody can excel, so everyone feels they can tweet just as well as anyone else can. But is atrocious if your goal is to promote debate and intelligent discussion. It's a medium explicitly designed to prevent any kind of complex conversation - big surprise how it turns out. HN has its own set of problems of course: like most discussion forum software it confuses "I disagree with your view" with "I disagree with how you expressed your view", so people routinely downvote well reasoned and polite posts that simply cause them cognitive dissonance or that they find inconveniently true. It'd be better to explicitly separate the two, but I never saw any forums that did so. But it's at least got the basics right: the screen space is devoted to high density text.

vjeux 8y ago

Don’t you consider Hacker News to be social media? All the links are sourced and ranked from the community, plus all the comments.

repolfx 8y ago
It sort of is, but it benefits a lot from the (virtually) unlimited number of characters you can use. It's possible to express complex and nuanced points on HN, which is impossible on Twitter by the nature of their decision to cap everyone to tiny messages. The Twitter length limit is a great growth hack because you ensure nobody can excel, so everyone feels they can tweet just as well as anyone else can. But is atrocious if your goal is to promote debate and intelligent discussion. It's a medium explicitly designed to prevent any kind of complex conversation - big surprise how it turns out. HN has its own set of problems of course: like most discussion forum software it confuses "I disagree with your view" with "I disagree with how you expressed your view", so people routinely downvote well reasoned and polite posts that simply cause them cognitive dissonance or that they find inconveniently true. It'd be better to explicitly separate the two, but I never saw any forums that did so. But it's at least got the basics right: the screen space is devoted to high density text.