12 ms·

Social media ruined the internet forever, even less than a decade ago there were websites, forums of all sorts and for all kinds of interests, now the internet

by trpc 8y ago

Social media ruined the internet forever, even less than a decade ago there were websites, forums of all sorts and for all kinds of interests, now the internet for most people is just these social websites/apps which intentionally lock users inside their services as long as possible to make more money from advertising and promoted posts. Unfortunately unless something big happens to fix this issue, the internet is lost forever.

smt88 8y ago
Those forums exist and are more widely-used than ever. They're just mostly hosted on reddit now.
- mikorym 8y ago
  I also wanted to point this out, but I guess Reddit does pose a risk that they make some system-wide decision and in the process all those subreddits either vanish or die a slow death. As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...
  - milquetoastaf 8y ago
    The same problem applies to forums. Everyone here is gushing about how great they were and yes i had fun too but so many forums were just one person running phpbb and if they got bored or whatnot the whole forum was shot, just like that. Or a mod or admin would power trip. It's not like the early internet was some freewheeling utopia, it was mostly shit. Just like now. Don't believe me? Go look at those old forums and usenet posts you remember so well
  - cirgue 8y ago
    > As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though... This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.
    - mikorym 8y ago
      So, getting back to OP's message. Do you think that there are currently forums like Reddit but with more substance? Let's take some of the DIY forums. Reddit can get pretty useful, but how does this relate to 1999? Back then, getting DIY videos was difficult. Now the trick is getting to the right kind of quality videos. But perhaps in 1999 if you read something and engaged online the experience was maybe more personal/fulfilling/substancial?
- seneca 8y ago
  Reddit is very far from a forum. It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive, it serves ads, has a terrible free speech record, and a slight amount of popularity means people will wander into your community and, generally, fill it with low content garbage. Reddit is a horrible place to host a community, and, in my eyes, is the actual cause of the death of forums more so than Facebook.
  - mr_overalls 8y ago
    Do you have any recommendations for a better general-discussion site? Personally, I have found myself resorting to discussion sites focused on a single topic, like Hacker News instead of /r/programming, or DharmaWheel.net instead of /r/Buddhism.
    - AlexB138 8y ago
      I don't, unfortunately. I'm in the same boat as you. I frequent a few narrowly focused sites, and spend some time in a couple IRC channels for more general discussion, but that's not quite the same. I wish I had a good recommendation, and would love to hear one from others.
  - de_watcher 8y ago
    > It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive The only thing that the administrators outside your community do is the shitty redesigns of the UI (big thanks to them for the "old.reddit.com" option though). Everything else is done by the community of a subreddit.
    - AlexB138 8y ago
      Reddit admins shut down communities without warning due to their own political whims, have edited the content of a users post with no indication of doing so, and, as said already, inject ads. Reddit's model is paternalistic at best.
      - 8y ago
- 0xcafecafe 8y ago
  Reddit also has its issues though. Recently they have increased policing of the subs and removed many in guise of breaching rules. Not to mention their terrible UX for the "new reddit" which has prompted me to change all my bookmarks to "old.reddit.com/r/<sub>".
- ZhuanXia 8y ago
  Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement. This ruins any of the forum-like qualities reddit had. It’s gross. Every subreddit is constantly in the process of eternal September, which kills the dynamics of getting to know one another that were common on forums. Social media that is good cannot have advertising and cannot be an algorithmic Skinner box that maximizes engagement. I am starting to think of competing with Facebook as creating online tribes that are costly, perhaps even financially very costly, but full of rich directed action. Sometimes like the dynamics of a church, where users are collated into tribes of limited size.
  - smt88 8y ago
    > Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement. Can't you just sort by new...?
    - Cpoll 8y ago
      You need to get everyone to sort by new.
- rchaud 8y ago
  The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums. Many niche subreddits have seen an entire change in culture and content quality simply because a single posts hit the front page, bringing with it a flood of new subscribers who simply post variations of that top-ranking post in order to gain upvotes, or "Reddit gold", a useless e-token that is somehow considered extremely valuable to some Redditors.
  - smt88 8y ago
    > The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums Well, that's the double-edged sword of reddit: it helps niche forums stay alive by constantly bringing in new users that originally visited reddit for other reasons. But that visibility can also kill them. Still, aren't there lots of private subreddits or subreddits where only subscribers can post? If mods are active and ban regularly, you can preserve a culture if you want.
BFLpL0QNek 8y ago
I really miss forums. Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites. A few of the communities I am interested in such as outdoors, adventure motorcycling have moved to google groups. It's frustrating as the content isn't publicly searchable so you can not discover it, it's also frustrating posts are displayed algorithmically so it may pop up in your feed, you navigate away to another page then are unable to find the post again. Facebook has been great in it's trivial to create communities but it's terrible in the sense content is only surfaced based on some algorithmic value biased around display adds.
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  > that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites i find myself having to explicitly add "forum" or "forums" to my google search to find things that might be in a forum, despite them being the most relevant to certain searches.
  - asark 8y ago
    Googling has gotten really hard. I used to be able to really nail exactly what I wanted, craft queries that'd "drag" obscure pages up to the first couple results by picking words likely to be used in links to those pages but rarely elsewhere, that kind of thing. No longer works at all. Attempts to narrow with quotes and phrases end in "no pages found" (bull. shit.) It's like they downranked everything not on the top 500 most trafficked sites so hard that they dropped right off their index entirely. Except blogspam. God they love blogspam.
    - type0 8y ago
      Google removed their discussion-search feature some years ago, any idea why?
    - whalabi 8y ago
armitron 8y ago
The Internet was ruined when the masses moved in. Let them have social media as their own little sandbox to play in and leave the rest of us alone. I don't use twitter, facebook, instagram, slack, discord, whatever-else-kids-use-these-days. I still use IRC and read newsgroups.
bluGill 8y ago
The internet of the past was not useful for family/friend communications. I don't want the world to see pictures of my kids (even though nobody cares it still isn't a good idea), but I do want my parents to see them. Social media solves this problem. The interesting things you list were too public and so didn't. Don't get me wrong, I do miss the forums of the past, but there is also some good in what we have today.
- DataWorker 8y ago
  No, Facebook and other social media websites do not provide value, they suck up value for the shareholders. Facebook and others like them are a disease, and they have effectively killed the internet. Your point about being able to show your grandparents pictures totally ignores email and other technologies that “solved” this problem more than a decade before Facebook. Hell, you could create a personal website with password protected pages if you were worried about the public finding certain photos. That’s how the world worked prefacebook, it was wonderful! But instead you are sending those private photos to Facebook, for free! They now own your private photos and will use them against you. Maybe you should have just used email. Of course you can’t monitize free/open, so the money people have convinced you that you need something better than a personal website, or email, or ftp or irc or Usenet or any of the superior technology that existed before the money people killed the internet.
  - themoat 8y ago
    I completely comprehend the bad things the platforms introduce, but pre-social media it was just really inconvenient to stay in touch with people way out of your area. Blogs were alright for it, but not great for 2 way communication in my memories. I stayed in Peru for a couple years pre-facebook. I told friends and my host family I'd stay in touch and we all shared email addresses. I wrote less than 3 emails. Next couple years go by and they start shooting friend requests and suddenly I am interacting with long lost friends, talking about their kids, jobs, and reminiscing about the dumb things we did together. There are definitely other ways to communicate, but there's something about social media that reduces the effort required to connect with someone. It's irrelevant that you might change your address, phone number, or even email address. You have a fixed place that I can contact you and reach out. Oh, and it's the same website where I can find my favorite college roommate too...
tim333 8y ago
It seems slightly ironic that most HNers are agreeing social media ruined the internet while doing so on a Reddit like social media platform. I'm an oddball that quite likes social media though I'll give you it has flaws.
dragontamer 8y ago
Heh. I have a totally different perspective on that. The biggest forums were always toxic wastelands. Life, Universe, and Everything (the LUEsers of GameFAQs) has gone through this same trajectory. Toxic people attract OTHER toxic people, because trolls love trolling others. The forum gets more and more toxic as people prefer to mess with other people more than actually have solid conversation. Things get extreme: LUEsers start to post porn to an otherwise innocuous site known to have young people browsing (GameFAQs), and the admins are finally forced to shut LUEsers down. LUEsers exodus to another major forum, known to be more open to "free speech", and the toxicity cycle continues. Similar cycles happen for 4chan (exodus to 8chan), Something Awful, Reddit (/r/clopclop, /r/TheFappening, /r/Jailbait, /r/BeatingWomen) and other websites. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have NOT had their exodus moment yet. The admins still think doing nothing is the best move. Eventually, there will be a controversy so big that the admins will be forced to do something about it. (Youtube is beginning to enter this cycle). And "do something about it" inevitably means banning the toxic portion of the website. Its the most obvious choice. Guess what? GameFAQs, 4Chan, Something Awful all still exist today. The Exodus moment is always scary, its always "against free speech", but guess what? The websites are fine afterwards. --------- I see this all as part of the same cycle. The cycle seems to be slower for larger websites / social networks like Twitter / Facebook, but its the same cycle nonetheless.
netwanderer3 8y ago
Before social media came along, nobody really put much effort or invested into data mining. Yes Google existed but it was more or less serving as an information aggregator only, without the ability to connect the dots and identify individuals. The rise of all these trends of big data was corresponding to the wave of social media, and these companies are now holding so much public information that grant them an enormous power and opportunity to shape our world. With great power comes great responsibility. Their current capability potentially allows them to manipulate the world and our information at will, if they choose to do so. It can become extremely dangerous and open for abuse if not kept in check. Nobody is auditing their data so everything is a just a mystery black box with no transparency. You either choose to believe in what they say, or you don't. The data is irrelevant by itself, it's their intentions that could become dangerous. Does anyone even trust social media companies? Even their own employees don't let their kids come near it. I wonder what happens on their bring kids to work day?

by trpc 8y ago

smt88 8y ago

Those forums exist and are more widely-used than ever. They're just mostly hosted on reddit now.

mikorym 8y ago
I also wanted to point this out, but I guess Reddit does pose a risk that they make some system-wide decision and in the process all those subreddits either vanish or die a slow death. As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...
- milquetoastaf 8y ago
  The same problem applies to forums. Everyone here is gushing about how great they were and yes i had fun too but so many forums were just one person running phpbb and if they got bored or whatnot the whole forum was shot, just like that. Or a mod or admin would power trip. It's not like the early internet was some freewheeling utopia, it was mostly shit. Just like now. Don't believe me? Go look at those old forums and usenet posts you remember so well
- cirgue 8y ago
  > As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though... This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.
  - mikorym 8y ago
    So, getting back to OP's message. Do you think that there are currently forums like Reddit but with more substance? Let's take some of the DIY forums. Reddit can get pretty useful, but how does this relate to 1999? Back then, getting DIY videos was difficult. Now the trick is getting to the right kind of quality videos. But perhaps in 1999 if you read something and engaged online the experience was maybe more personal/fulfilling/substancial?
seneca 8y ago
Reddit is very far from a forum. It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive, it serves ads, has a terrible free speech record, and a slight amount of popularity means people will wander into your community and, generally, fill it with low content garbage. Reddit is a horrible place to host a community, and, in my eyes, is the actual cause of the death of forums more so than Facebook.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  Do you have any recommendations for a better general-discussion site? Personally, I have found myself resorting to discussion sites focused on a single topic, like Hacker News instead of /r/programming, or DharmaWheel.net instead of /r/Buddhism.
  - AlexB138 8y ago
    I don't, unfortunately. I'm in the same boat as you. I frequent a few narrowly focused sites, and spend some time in a couple IRC channels for more general discussion, but that's not quite the same. I wish I had a good recommendation, and would love to hear one from others.
- de_watcher 8y ago
  > It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive The only thing that the administrators outside your community do is the shitty redesigns of the UI (big thanks to them for the "old.reddit.com" option though). Everything else is done by the community of a subreddit.
  - AlexB138 8y ago
    Reddit admins shut down communities without warning due to their own political whims, have edited the content of a users post with no indication of doing so, and, as said already, inject ads. Reddit's model is paternalistic at best.
    - 8y ago
0xcafecafe 8y ago
Reddit also has its issues though. Recently they have increased policing of the subs and removed many in guise of breaching rules. Not to mention their terrible UX for the "new reddit" which has prompted me to change all my bookmarks to "old.reddit.com/r/<sub>".
ZhuanXia 8y ago
Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement. This ruins any of the forum-like qualities reddit had. It’s gross. Every subreddit is constantly in the process of eternal September, which kills the dynamics of getting to know one another that were common on forums. Social media that is good cannot have advertising and cannot be an algorithmic Skinner box that maximizes engagement. I am starting to think of competing with Facebook as creating online tribes that are costly, perhaps even financially very costly, but full of rich directed action. Sometimes like the dynamics of a church, where users are collated into tribes of limited size.
- smt88 8y ago
  > Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement. Can't you just sort by new...?
  - Cpoll 8y ago
    You need to get everyone to sort by new.
rchaud 8y ago
The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums. Many niche subreddits have seen an entire change in culture and content quality simply because a single posts hit the front page, bringing with it a flood of new subscribers who simply post variations of that top-ranking post in order to gain upvotes, or "Reddit gold", a useless e-token that is somehow considered extremely valuable to some Redditors.
- smt88 8y ago
  > The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums Well, that's the double-edged sword of reddit: it helps niche forums stay alive by constantly bringing in new users that originally visited reddit for other reasons. But that visibility can also kill them. Still, aren't there lots of private subreddits or subreddits where only subscribers can post? If mods are active and ban regularly, you can preserve a culture if you want.

BFLpL0QNek 8y ago

I really miss forums. Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites. A few of the communities I am interested in such as outdoors, adventure motorcycling have moved to google groups. It's frustrating as the content isn't publicly searchable so you can not discover it, it's also frustrating posts are displayed algorithmically so it may pop up in your feed, you navigate away to another page then are unable to find the post again. Facebook has been great in it's trivial to create communities but it's terrible in the sense content is only surfaced based on some algorithmic value biased around display adds.

nikofeyn 8y ago
> that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites i find myself having to explicitly add "forum" or "forums" to my google search to find things that might be in a forum, despite them being the most relevant to certain searches.
- asark 8y ago
  Googling has gotten really hard. I used to be able to really nail exactly what I wanted, craft queries that'd "drag" obscure pages up to the first couple results by picking words likely to be used in links to those pages but rarely elsewhere, that kind of thing. No longer works at all. Attempts to narrow with quotes and phrases end in "no pages found" (bull. shit.) It's like they downranked everything not on the top 500 most trafficked sites so hard that they dropped right off their index entirely. Except blogspam. God they love blogspam.
  - type0 8y ago
    Google removed their discussion-search feature some years ago, any idea why?
  - whalabi 8y ago

armitron 8y ago

The Internet was ruined when the masses moved in. Let them have social media as their own little sandbox to play in and leave the rest of us alone. I don't use twitter, facebook, instagram, slack, discord, whatever-else-kids-use-these-days. I still use IRC and read newsgroups.

bluGill 8y ago

The internet of the past was not useful for family/friend communications. I don't want the world to see pictures of my kids (even though nobody cares it still isn't a good idea), but I do want my parents to see them. Social media solves this problem. The interesting things you list were too public and so didn't. Don't get me wrong, I do miss the forums of the past, but there is also some good in what we have today.

DataWorker 8y ago
No, Facebook and other social media websites do not provide value, they suck up value for the shareholders. Facebook and others like them are a disease, and they have effectively killed the internet. Your point about being able to show your grandparents pictures totally ignores email and other technologies that “solved” this problem more than a decade before Facebook. Hell, you could create a personal website with password protected pages if you were worried about the public finding certain photos. That’s how the world worked prefacebook, it was wonderful! But instead you are sending those private photos to Facebook, for free! They now own your private photos and will use them against you. Maybe you should have just used email. Of course you can’t monitize free/open, so the money people have convinced you that you need something better than a personal website, or email, or ftp or irc or Usenet or any of the superior technology that existed before the money people killed the internet.
- themoat 8y ago
  I completely comprehend the bad things the platforms introduce, but pre-social media it was just really inconvenient to stay in touch with people way out of your area. Blogs were alright for it, but not great for 2 way communication in my memories. I stayed in Peru for a couple years pre-facebook. I told friends and my host family I'd stay in touch and we all shared email addresses. I wrote less than 3 emails. Next couple years go by and they start shooting friend requests and suddenly I am interacting with long lost friends, talking about their kids, jobs, and reminiscing about the dumb things we did together. There are definitely other ways to communicate, but there's something about social media that reduces the effort required to connect with someone. It's irrelevant that you might change your address, phone number, or even email address. You have a fixed place that I can contact you and reach out. Oh, and it's the same website where I can find my favorite college roommate too...

tim333 8y ago

It seems slightly ironic that most HNers are agreeing social media ruined the internet while doing so on a Reddit like social media platform. I'm an oddball that quite likes social media though I'll give you it has flaws.

dragontamer 8y ago

Heh. I have a totally different perspective on that. The biggest forums were always toxic wastelands. Life, Universe, and Everything (the LUEsers of GameFAQs) has gone through this same trajectory. Toxic people attract OTHER toxic people, because trolls love trolling others. The forum gets more and more toxic as people prefer to mess with other people more than actually have solid conversation. Things get extreme: LUEsers start to post porn to an otherwise innocuous site known to have young people browsing (GameFAQs), and the admins are finally forced to shut LUEsers down. LUEsers exodus to another major forum, known to be more open to "free speech", and the toxicity cycle continues. Similar cycles happen for 4chan (exodus to 8chan), Something Awful, Reddit (/r/clopclop, /r/TheFappening, /r/Jailbait, /r/BeatingWomen) and other websites. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have NOT had their exodus moment yet. The admins still think doing nothing is the best move. Eventually, there will be a controversy so big that the admins will be forced to do something about it. (Youtube is beginning to enter this cycle). And "do something about it" inevitably means banning the toxic portion of the website. Its the most obvious choice. Guess what? GameFAQs, 4Chan, Something Awful all still exist today. The Exodus moment is always scary, its always "against free speech", but guess what? The websites are fine afterwards. --------- I see this all as part of the same cycle. The cycle seems to be slower for larger websites / social networks like Twitter / Facebook, but its the same cycle nonetheless.

netwanderer3 8y ago

Before social media came along, nobody really put much effort or invested into data mining. Yes Google existed but it was more or less serving as an information aggregator only, without the ability to connect the dots and identify individuals. The rise of all these trends of big data was corresponding to the wave of social media, and these companies are now holding so much public information that grant them an enormous power and opportunity to shape our world. With great power comes great responsibility. Their current capability potentially allows them to manipulate the world and our information at will, if they choose to do so. It can become extremely dangerous and open for abuse if not kept in check. Nobody is auditing their data so everything is a just a mystery black box with no transparency. You either choose to believe in what they say, or you don't. The data is irrelevant by itself, it's their intentions that could become dangerous. Does anyone even trust social media companies? Even their own employees don't let their kids come near it. I wonder what happens on their bring kids to work day?