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Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in

Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches, as do most sites I view as reasonable sources of information. Most discoverability comes from feeds (blogs, HN, Reddit)--searching limits you to terms you've already thought of. General search seems to lead either to the places already mentioned in good cases, and to low-quality results that waste time and mislead you in bad cases. You can save time and improve thought process by going more directly to sources. Email: Fastmail. But again, just using email less is helpful. My most common form of communication is using text messages to set up meeting in person. Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? I haven't made any intentional effort to replace Facebook since I stopped using it, and don't feel any sense of loss. The same goes for Twitter/Instagram. The only thing these services ever did for me was make me feel angry, lonely, or inadequate. Random side note: Stack Overflow has a serious content quality and up-to-date-ness issue. An alternative is using documentation, reading code, and mastering debuggers/REPLs. This gives you a much better understanding of your tools, and gives you much better solutions as a result.

fossuser 7y ago
General search is still valuable for finding random programming examples that don't appear on Stack Overflow - there are a lot of blogs that usually have some helpful example. For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text). It'd be nice if this extended to optional accounts that had up to date contact information - this is the main thing I'd worry about missing (though I think Apple could just implement this by optionally pushing changes to the people in your phone with your contact information when it changes). For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there. Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > there are a lot of blogs that usually have some helpful example. Each with their own search, usually! I can see the downsides to this, but in trade you're getting a bubble that protects you from a lot of nonsense. > For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text). That sounds like a fairly small project, and I can see the value. Maybe I'll code it up in the near future. > For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there. > Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people. I'll concede this, but in my brief Twitter experience it was very easy for the noise to drown out the signal, and I didn't feel it was worth it to work around that problem. It doesn't solve a data problem I have: my data problem isn't that I don't have enough data sources, it's that I have too many, and too low quality.
  - fossuser 7y ago
    I'd push that the real value of Twitter is less the additional data sources and more the available discussion that's possible with smart people doing interesting things that you would not have as much access to. Only mentioning this because I personally didn't understand the value of Twitter for a long time and didn't understand why people used it, but now I think I do.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      Is this really unique to Twitter, though? I've had very little difficulty contacting, i.e. academics whose papers I've read, or programmers who have written blog posts. You do miss some randos interjecting into the conversation, but these interjections detract from the conversation more often than they contribute. When I'm conversing with Joe Armstrong I'm not interested in the interjections of some rando who did an Erlang tutorial once and feels that qualifies him to have opinions.
skyyler 7y ago
>Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? Do you go to parties? Serious question. It's hard to discover events without Facebook these days. It's the only place some promoters advertise.
- jumpman500 7y ago
  I mean all my friends contact me when they're having a party or an event... Don't most people just do group messages? I've never really been interested in going to a random party or event I wasn't directly invited to. I mostly got spam when I was using Facebook.
  - glaslong 7y ago
    What do they use for group messages? WhatsApp? Messenger?
    - skyyler 7y ago
      My friends use Telegram.
- arexxbifs 7y ago
  I'm in a demographic that's very heavily invested in Facebook. FOMO was real when quitting, and I'm sure I've missed some event, someplace, sometime. But the neat thing is, people actually use other means of contacting me if they really want to hang out. I mean, it's not even hard: a text, a mail, whatever. What I've noticed is that I actually meet people IRL more often now, because the events I get information about are the ones that really matter to me, and they don't get lost in a constant buzz of less important but attention-grabbing stuff. I also realize I can miss talking to someone. It's a feeling I haven't had in a long time, because people used to show up in my feed every day and it was like they were there anyway. Now I can get a sudden urge to just shoot a few texts back and forth with someone about something that's actually meaningful and not just the usual facebook wall banter. I'm quite introverted, so being selective is something that suits me well, but facebook also made me even more socially lazy and avoidant than I really am.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
Facebook is the gold standard for events, still.
dcow 7y ago
The only remaining value I see in FB is the contacts. Someone should just make ContactBook...
SubuSS 7y ago
Facebook without probably putting in a ton of effort cornered the ad hoc grouping market. I can talk to my family/friends whenever yes, but almost all my cycling groups lean on fb for example - it is the lowest common denominator. This too in a world where many teams have their own websites, boards and the participants almost uniformly posting their rides to strava. Strava has been trying its clubs / posts stuff with very minimal success sadly :/
ken 7y ago
> Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? Not all of us use it for reading the 'timeline' and seeing what our friends' cats are doing this week. Organizations also use it for updates, scheduling, sharing ideas, etc. Email could work, but mailing lists lack many little features that make Facebook practical here. I guess the modern alternative would be something like Discourse, but it's hard to tell a non-profit to replace "free, and add people with a couple clicks" with "$100/month, and make everybody create new separate accounts".
- filoleg 7y ago
  This. I feel like a lot of people don’t realize that a very significant portion of FB users dont scroll the timeline and strictly use it for messaging, event scheduling, checking out businesses, and other things that mostly deal with organizing stuff. I know it is a silly anecdote, but i end up checking out my facebook feed out of boredom about once every few months, get disappointed in it, and then forget about it for another few months. It also helps that FB has dedicated first party apps for a lot of fb functionality that doesnt require the main fb app. I havent had the FB app on any of my phones since about 8 years ago, simply because i didnt feel the need, not because I felt some strong conviction against FB. Messenger app + Local app (for FB messaging and events respectively) has been a golden combo that worked great for me. Local, surprisingly, has amazingly clean UIUX that combines both event discovery and organization of your current events in a very seamless way. Just a note, i am not affiliated with FB as a company in any way, and neither have i worked there. I just think that a lot of people tend to focus on the trashy common denominator part of FB (timeline) and ignore the good stuff. And FB makes it really easy to avoid the trashy stuff by having clean dedicated apps for functionality that i actually care about.
clubm8 7y ago
>Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches One upside of DDG is the bangs. If I know what I want is on wikipedia, just prepend !w. I think folks need to learn how people searched pre-pagerank. People treat google queries like a venn diagram with their top result being at the intersection, rather than using logical operators like AND, quotes, and -. (Ex: "yoda -baby")
- jmiskovic 7y ago
  Why search wikipedia through DDG? Use address bar search shortcuts. In firefox any website search bar can be assigned a shortcut by right-clicking it. These shortcuts for wikipedia, HN, maps, powerthesaurus, reddit and others makes for ~80% of my searches.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Not all browsers have address-bar shortcuts. Bangs are a common term across DDG users, and can be shared references, personal shortcuts not so much. It's a bit like language as a common understanding rather than individual headspaces. In a sense, bangs are social. How useful that is or isn't I don't know entirely, but bang-based search seems to be a distinctive class of activity, and gives rise to its own forms of communication and discovery. I've learned (and shared) new sites/services through bangs.

fossuser 7y ago

General search is still valuable for finding random programming examples that don't appear on Stack Overflow - there are a lot of blogs that usually have some helpful example. For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text). It'd be nice if this extended to optional accounts that had up to date contact information - this is the main thing I'd worry about missing (though I think Apple could just implement this by optionally pushing changes to the people in your phone with your contact information when it changes). For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there. Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people.

kerkeslager 7y ago
> there are a lot of blogs that usually have some helpful example. Each with their own search, usually! I can see the downsides to this, but in trade you're getting a bubble that protects you from a lot of nonsense. > For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text). That sounds like a fairly small project, and I can see the value. Maybe I'll code it up in the near future. > For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there. > Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people. I'll concede this, but in my brief Twitter experience it was very easy for the noise to drown out the signal, and I didn't feel it was worth it to work around that problem. It doesn't solve a data problem I have: my data problem isn't that I don't have enough data sources, it's that I have too many, and too low quality.
- fossuser 7y ago
  I'd push that the real value of Twitter is less the additional data sources and more the available discussion that's possible with smart people doing interesting things that you would not have as much access to. Only mentioning this because I personally didn't understand the value of Twitter for a long time and didn't understand why people used it, but now I think I do.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Is this really unique to Twitter, though? I've had very little difficulty contacting, i.e. academics whose papers I've read, or programmers who have written blog posts. You do miss some randos interjecting into the conversation, but these interjections detract from the conversation more often than they contribute. When I'm conversing with Joe Armstrong I'm not interested in the interjections of some rando who did an Erlang tutorial once and feels that qualifies him to have opinions.

skyyler 7y ago

>Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? Do you go to parties? Serious question. It's hard to discover events without Facebook these days. It's the only place some promoters advertise.

jumpman500 7y ago
I mean all my friends contact me when they're having a party or an event... Don't most people just do group messages? I've never really been interested in going to a random party or event I wasn't directly invited to. I mostly got spam when I was using Facebook.
- glaslong 7y ago
  What do they use for group messages? WhatsApp? Messenger?
  - skyyler 7y ago
    My friends use Telegram.
arexxbifs 7y ago
I'm in a demographic that's very heavily invested in Facebook. FOMO was real when quitting, and I'm sure I've missed some event, someplace, sometime. But the neat thing is, people actually use other means of contacting me if they really want to hang out. I mean, it's not even hard: a text, a mail, whatever. What I've noticed is that I actually meet people IRL more often now, because the events I get information about are the ones that really matter to me, and they don't get lost in a constant buzz of less important but attention-grabbing stuff. I also realize I can miss talking to someone. It's a feeling I haven't had in a long time, because people used to show up in my feed every day and it was like they were there anyway. Now I can get a sudden urge to just shoot a few texts back and forth with someone about something that's actually meaningful and not just the usual facebook wall banter. I'm quite introverted, so being selective is something that suits me well, but facebook also made me even more socially lazy and avoidant than I really am.

oarabbus_ 7y ago

Facebook is the gold standard for events, still.

dcow 7y ago

The only remaining value I see in FB is the contacts. Someone should just make ContactBook...

SubuSS 7y ago

Facebook without probably putting in a ton of effort cornered the ad hoc grouping market. I can talk to my family/friends whenever yes, but almost all my cycling groups lean on fb for example - it is the lowest common denominator. This too in a world where many teams have their own websites, boards and the participants almost uniformly posting their rides to strava. Strava has been trying its clubs / posts stuff with very minimal success sadly :/

ken 7y ago

> Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? Not all of us use it for reading the 'timeline' and seeing what our friends' cats are doing this week. Organizations also use it for updates, scheduling, sharing ideas, etc. Email could work, but mailing lists lack many little features that make Facebook practical here. I guess the modern alternative would be something like Discourse, but it's hard to tell a non-profit to replace "free, and add people with a couple clicks" with "$100/month, and make everybody create new separate accounts".

filoleg 7y ago
This. I feel like a lot of people don’t realize that a very significant portion of FB users dont scroll the timeline and strictly use it for messaging, event scheduling, checking out businesses, and other things that mostly deal with organizing stuff. I know it is a silly anecdote, but i end up checking out my facebook feed out of boredom about once every few months, get disappointed in it, and then forget about it for another few months. It also helps that FB has dedicated first party apps for a lot of fb functionality that doesnt require the main fb app. I havent had the FB app on any of my phones since about 8 years ago, simply because i didnt feel the need, not because I felt some strong conviction against FB. Messenger app + Local app (for FB messaging and events respectively) has been a golden combo that worked great for me. Local, surprisingly, has amazingly clean UIUX that combines both event discovery and organization of your current events in a very seamless way. Just a note, i am not affiliated with FB as a company in any way, and neither have i worked there. I just think that a lot of people tend to focus on the trashy common denominator part of FB (timeline) and ignore the good stuff. And FB makes it really easy to avoid the trashy stuff by having clean dedicated apps for functionality that i actually care about.

clubm8 7y ago

>Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches One upside of DDG is the bangs. If I know what I want is on wikipedia, just prepend !w. I think folks need to learn how people searched pre-pagerank. People treat google queries like a venn diagram with their top result being at the intersection, rather than using logical operators like AND, quotes, and -. (Ex: "yoda -baby")

jmiskovic 7y ago
Why search wikipedia through DDG? Use address bar search shortcuts. In firefox any website search bar can be assigned a shortcut by right-clicking it. These shortcuts for wikipedia, HN, maps, powerthesaurus, reddit and others makes for ~80% of my searches.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Not all browsers have address-bar shortcuts. Bangs are a common term across DDG users, and can be shared references, personal shortcuts not so much. It's a bit like language as a common understanding rather than individual headspaces. In a sense, bangs are social. How useful that is or isn't I don't know entirely, but bang-based search seems to be a distinctive class of activity, and gives rise to its own forms of communication and discovery. I've learned (and shared) new sites/services through bangs.