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I hate to see discussions moving to Facebook groups. Often the groups are closed, you have to join to see what's inside. Closed groups are not indexed by google

I hate to see discussions moving to Facebook groups. Often the groups are closed, you have to join to see what's inside. Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo. With web forums everything is indexed and you can find the relevant info even if it's written ten years ago, and you can see it without having to join first. There's lots of useful info written on the web and a lot of this info is hidden behind social network walled gardens.

tomduncalf 6y ago
100% this. I really hope this trend starts to reverse. Forums are one of my favourite things about the internet for all the niche knowledege you can find, but if it's locked behind Facebook (with a useless search feature and a terrible UI), it might as well not be there in my opinion.
- gbrown 6y ago
  I think the infrastructure has rusted a bit. A while back I wanted to spin up a forum, and I wasn't super impressed. There's a mix of new projects that don't really get the forum thing (they're often very focused on businesses rather than communities), and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s. This also goes for the infrastructure around forums - several turnkey sites I tried simply didn't work, and I ended up deploying one myself through a crufty Bluehost portal. Given that a lot of forum activity is driven by non-tech people, I'm not surprised they've started dying out. It's a shame, but the monoliths like FB have both the audience and the on-ramps. Edit: as a side note, I eventually gave up because I couldn't get my target community to join the forum. Most people were already on a Facebook group and uninterested in switching.
  - pbronez 6y ago
    This is because it's trivial to create a subreddit, which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      >which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting. A lot of forums want to not be joined at the hip with a cesspool of transient internet riff-raff which is exactly the problem that platforms that try to cater to everything (reddit, 4Chan) have. It's impossible to have real quality discussion about anything when the people who have deep interest in the subject are outnumbered 100:1 by people with passing interest.
      - pbronez 6y ago
        It's an interesting trade-off... toxic subreddits exist, and hitting the front page instantly creates an Eternal September. BUT Reddit also gives you a suite of moderation tools out of the box. You can set rules, and benefit from site-wide policies that keep you on the right side of the law most of the time. It's not perfect, but it's good enough that it seems to have won the segment by a fairly large margin.
        pavel_lishin 6y ago
        The moderation tools are pretty poor once you start needing to do anything more advanced than banning users.
    - macintux 6y ago
      Reddit has one missing feature in particular that’s important for some number of online communities: being able to include images in a comment.
      - Quarrelsome 6y ago
        RES kinda sorta helps with that in old.reddit.
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Reddit is a waste of time because threads get locked after a couple of months. (Sometimes, proper netiquette REQUIRES necroposting.)
  - criddell 6y ago
    Wasn't there a startup about 10 or 15 years ago dedicated to building communities of communities. I think it was called Nine-something and was started by one of the early internet big shots... I tried searching for this on Google but failed miserably.
    - codingclaws 6y ago
      ning.com?
      - criddell 6y ago
        Yes! That's it! Thank you. It was driving me nuts and I started to wonder if I imagined it. Looking at it today, it's changed a lot in the past 15 years...
      - oneng 6y ago
        I have a cousin that used to work there years ago when social media was still in its infancy. He was part of the initial wave of layoffs when they weren't able to get traction against Facebook. He's doing well for himself now, Director of Engineering at a FAANGM company, but it did cause him to abandon the startup game.
  - garaetjjte 6y ago
    >and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s. Hmm, I think things like phpBB or SMF are still alive.
    - syntheticnature 6y ago
      I think the usage of advanced didn't merely mean alive, but changing and growing. A membership org I help with their IT needs has come to realize that the member email lists have become moribund, and so we've been discussing forums... but the look of a lot of older forum software has become fixed in time and turned people off -- Discourse caught more interest than anything else I showed them.
      - garaetjjte 6y ago
        Oh, Discourse, probably most annoying forum software available thanks to its stupid scroll hijacking.
roenxi 6y ago
The not-indexed-by-Google thing is probably more a feature. The odds are slim but there is a tenancy for angry flash mobs to appear sometimes on the internet. It isn't desirable to invite the whole world in to every conversation. I do think it is unfortunate for these groups to be giving their data to Facebook. I heard a wild rumour that FB was doing a purge of some sort on right wing political groups. Gauging the truth of something like that from a distance is impossible, but it did raise the point to me that if your private group was kicked off Facebook there probably isn't a way to take your post history with you.
- deepsun 6y ago
  I don't mind mobs appearing on my forums about ultralight aircrafts. Easy to clean, not much harm. Most of the members know each other or through a common friend IRL anyway. But the value in these forums are enormous, and helps saving lives. That knowledge doesn't stale either.
- ghaff 6y ago
  If you really want invite-only posting, your best bet is probably to have an invite-only (or subject to approval) mailing list and, optionally, post the archives.
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  Happened, but it targeted more than just right-wingers, though they bore the brunt of it. Pretty much every local political activist I know had their accounts restricted right before the election. In addition: Most libertarian groups and pages I know affiliated with the 'boogaloo' movement caught a ban Most of the pro-trump pages I know caught a ban, as well as pro-trump groups involved in on the ground activism A few left anarchist groups I was in caught a ban. It wasn't so much 'purge of the right', there's always a low-level purge of right wing pages going on, either because of moderator bias, or simply because leftists and/or liberals spend more of their free time infiltrating groups and reporting right wing content than vise-versa. Rather, it struck me as an attempt to suppress protests and potential violence in the streets on either side of the political divide in the days subsequent to the election.
29athrowaway 6y ago
Reddit is much better in that respect.
xwdv 6y ago
On the contrary, I hate searching the web for information and finding things written 10-20 years ago. At some point it feels like you’re doing archaeology more than research. I have to specify the time range I want to search in more and more these days. Sure, the information may not have changed, but I do not trust things that haven’t been updated in that long. Especially anything tech related. Imagine it’s the year 2050, you do a search for how to do some mundane thing in React, and you’re finding articles that were written today. Maybe some future person is even reading through this comment right now.
- robjan 6y ago
  Search engines already have a fresh content bias but at least all content is indexed. With silos, especially Facebook, after a day or two on an active group a post just disappears
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Content disappears off of Google as time goes on, too.
- dmortin 6y ago
  Tech is just one subject, there are lots of others which don't change as fast. And for tech you can define a search alias which defaults to the past year, for example, if you work in a field which changes very fast. With facebook groups people ask the same questions again and again, because the search is awful.
- ghaff 6y ago
  That's not an argument for throwing away the ability to search old information though. It's an argument for better metadata and better easy control over the search range. I may be looking for old information. Yes, if I'm searching on a current tech topic or to solve some computer issue I'm having, I probably don't want anything more than a year or two old. However, I frequently want to research some historical content and it can be really hard to cut through the recency bias of search engines.
- 6y ago
sneak 6y ago
Also, having to ID yourself to Facebook just to read the content is terrible. Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for society. It’s like we’ve all forgotten the necessity of anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  It's so annoying to have Facebook pop up those login notices whenever I try to look up something there. When I'm mapping local shops on OpenStreetMap sometimes the only contact info available is on Facebook, and sometimes they do have a proper website, but it doesn't show up in search engine results and I can find the link on Facebook. (At least Facebook is not quite as bad as Pinterest.) There is a very vocal group of people in every society that wants to abolish anonymity on the internet. It's scary.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > Also, having to ID yourself to Facebook just to read the content is terrible. > Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for society. It’s like we’ve all forgotten the necessity of anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society. To an extent, I'm okay with it being a bit harder to publish anonymously than otherwise I'm not okay with how difficult it has become to READ anonymously. That's REALLY double-plus-ungood. Consider the simple transaction of buying a copy of 2600 at a local newsstand. For a while, online advertising worked as a revenue stream for publications like that since ads were bought on a pay-per-impression, or even pay-per-click basis, without all the tracking infra surrounding it, but now, monetization only works to the extent that readers allow themselves to be identified and tracked. The other way to monetize is using subscriptions and paywalls, which is even more explicitly identifying and tracking readers and subscribers. The same goes for practically every way of getting money from readers to publishers and writer's. Nothing comes close to the anonymity of paying cash for a book, newspaper, or magazine. Practically everything we read is tracked, and most means we have of preventing that tracking also circumvent the flow of money to publishers and writers. It's a good thing that the costs and barriers of publishing and distribution have dropped, but the cost of writing hasn't.
_the_inflator 6y ago
I side with you. However in FB groups you don't have to deal with so much spam and attacks.
- garbagetime 6y ago
  Urbit ID solves this. Scarce, stable IDs makes the cost of spamming much higher.
  - trianglem 6y ago
    Yeah I try to stay away from products founded by racist POS like Moldbug.
    - tylershuster 6y ago
      Nice ad hominem bro
      - trianglem 6y ago
        As an early contributer to Urbit before I knew about the founders, I wish I could take back the work I did for them.
        tylershuster 6y ago
        Ok fine, but you're not addressing the actual argument, which is that urbit solves the problems in this article. That's ad hominem. Is "racism" somehow ingrained in the project?
        trianglem 6y ago
        No it doesn’t Urbit is slow and offers no anonymity. It’s not a realistic project, just a naive person’s implementation of using symbology to “cash-in” on something that is artificially made to seem enigmatic. Edit: yes racism is ingrained in the project. They refuse to hire a woman, black or Latino developer explicitly.
weinzierl 6y ago
> Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo. Everything I wrote on Usenet has disappeared in the Google silo. So, there you have that - the inevitable fate of content is to disappear.
- roel_v 6y ago
  So has everything I wrote, thank god. We're too obsessed with 'keeping' things. It's good that the internet doesn't remember to the degree we all (used to) think. Things that are worth preserving will be, but 99% of all content should just die a natural death. We shouldn't start to conserve for the sake of conserving because we can now that things are digital.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    What's worth preserving can't be known in advance.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand I certainly tend towards a preservationist mindset and as the sibling comment notes, we don't really know what we should save for various reasons. The guy who is responsible for having saved a bunch of Usenet archives made a comment to the effect of: "I didn't realize that what we really should have prioritized was discussions about social issues, culture, etc.--not bug fixes for a long obsolete version of SunOS." OTOH, I'm kind of glad that nothing I wrote that wasn't filtered by an editor from before maybe age 30 or so exists online. (And even the filtered stuff you probably would need to know where to look.)
  - wl 6y ago
    What we think is worth preserving now isn't necessarily what the future will think we should have preserved. Most of papyrology is the study of ancient documents that were thrown in the trash.
  - weinzierl 6y ago
    I could 100% agree if things were gone for good, you know, like in real life. But the idea that what was meant for the public is no stowed away in a company silo and can be used, deleted or republished at their discretion rubs me the wrong way. Not that I would ever have posted something atrocious, but the idea that a company knows more about what I said than myself is deeply unsettling to me.
netsharc 6y ago
And the Facebook UI really hates conversations. There are only 1-deep threads, if a post has hundreds of replies you see maybe 5 (Facebook will say they're the "Most relevant" because probably the amount of Likes) and you have to click "Load more comments" dozens of times to try to read all the responses. Add to that people just commenting with their friends' names (tagging them) to notify those friends about the conversation, because they don't know about the "copy link" or "Share this comment" features...
- rbritton 6y ago
  Occasionally I stumble on a Facebook thread that allows multiple tiers, and I'm not sure what the enabler for that is. I'd love to see that extended to all threads even if I would vastly prefer a true forum over their groups.
- newsbinator 6y ago
  My pet peeve is the people that comment “following” or simply “F” because they don’t know they can subscribe to notifications on the post with 2 clicks.
baxtr 6y ago
Isn’t Reddit the go-to place nowadays?
- luckyshot 6y ago
  Pretty much yes... But I find it scary, specially after they got a $150M investment from Tencent (a huge Chinese company). Ironically, Reddit is blocked in China. I'm not sure about the ramifications of all this but it does sound scary and anything could be happening behind the scenes.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit. On forum X or Z where there is like 3000 users max at some point you get to learn people. Often reddit posts are optimized for "karma" and "gilding", not for QA or being really helpful. Also, for some reasons, reddit makes it really hard to find old content. Reddit also couldn't replace Q&A such as stack overflow for instance. There is a need for better, free and secure forum software though. I know Discourse tries to disrupt the market a bit.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    > Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit. Reflecting on my forum days, I don't think this is true. It's plain and simple to see subreddit members have STRONGLY held convictions that their subreddit is a unique and important community, just as they used to. I grew up on forums of < 100 people had made similar stupid arguments about the norms and salience of the forum to whatever topic it was aligned to. Yes, now there's karma farming, but it's not like people didn't make zounds of forum posts for the intended or subconsiously intended purpose of accruing social credit by demonstrating in group mentalities.
  - aqsalose 6y ago
    Got to disagree here, r/AskHistorians is a top-tier academically-minded Q&A forums, and their wiki is possibly one of the best resources on the current internet for layman interested in history. They are not necessarily the best Q&A resource (MathOverflow maybe?) but worth a mention. This is not to say AskHistorians is very forum-like, they now moderate the answers with the spirit of journal editor. In general, there are good subreddits that sometimes develop community spirit. Unfortunately they are a fleeting phenomenon: either they grow too big, or die off (or in the rare case of AskHistorians, become something that can manage the flood), and if you don't find them by accident, it probable one heard about them because they are becoming too popular.
OscarCunningham 6y ago
Lots of old web forums are actually not indexed. For example try finding https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=95 https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=95 by searching for "Getting RLE in Golly" in Google. I get zero results. (Although of course that page might be indexed now that I've linked to it from HN. You can find a similarly old post on that site to check.)
- dzdt 6y ago
  In my experience Microsoft Bing does much better than Google at returning search results from old forums. Google has a bunch of things just flat out missing in its search index, even things I'm sure I found by Google years ago and that still exist on the same sites. I obviously didn't check before you posted your comment, but I checked before I posted mine and Bing found your test case with no difficulty.
  - Seanambers 6y ago
    In my experience Google search results have gotten less and less informative for a very long time(last 4-6 years). Seems to me Google at some point in the past decided it wasn't going to show everything, only what it meant i needed to see, monetization on the other hand has gone up.
    - ksec 6y ago
      Agreed , although I give them the benefits of doubt because modern internet can make far more web pages than Google could keep up with indexing. Especially after the Smartphone took off and Internet seems to be exploding with Content Farm.
- kapitalx 6y ago
  HN comment links have a rel=nofollow. I'm not versed in SEO, but I've assumed this means linking here won't affect indexing.
  - luckyshot 6y ago
gambiting 6y ago
Also facebook groups are absolutely awful for finding the knowledge that's already there. I'm in a few facebook groups for car enthusiasts, and why the general experience is positive, every few days we get people joining and asking the same questions over and over and over again. Search is abysmal and there really is no ability to create "sticky" posts like on old forums, so it's just bad.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Also, Facebook discourages anonymous accounts, even going as far as locking you out of the platform unless you supply the company with your cell phone number and driver's license. As a result, there are many communities that I don't join, and there are communities that I stay silent in. For example, in the Facebook group for the area that I currently live in, it is common place to doxx people who disagree with majority of users. It's gone as far as having the mayor doxx a single mother because she was critical of decisions the city made, and I want no part of that.
- ianai 6y ago
  What state is that in?
keithnz 6y ago
you have to be a bit careful, you aren't inherently entitled to the useful information written by everyone else as part of communities. In some situations the only reason the information exists is because they think what they write is just for the community they are talking with. The problem comes when communities are built around things like facebook simply because it's convenient and easy to discover but the intent is for an open community with freely available information.
Sharlin 6y ago
> Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo. Not only that, but they're not indexed even by Facebook itself. Facebook's search tools are and always have been a joke. Probably on purpose.
zone411 6y ago
My company owns a forum with 56 million posts and unfortunately we had issues getting Google to index older threads.
Nacdor 6y ago
Same, for all those reasons and more. I hate Facebook discussions along with any other site that uses this nested comment + magical sorting algorithm format (e.g. Reddit, Hacker News). It's impossible to have a lengthy discussion about anything of substance on sites like this. The nested comment format immediately splinters every discussion into multiple "mini-threads" rather than a single coherent conversation. Each of those mini-threads splinters even further, making it impossible to follow anything. Then the upvotes and algorithm fuck it up even more by pushing "popular" replies to the top while burying anything controversial. Every thread is dead within hours, not just because discussions are fractured into a million pieces but because variety is prioritized over substance and the front page MUST have new content every time users visit the site. On forums there were threads that would live for years, some have probably even spanned more than a decade at this point.

tomduncalf 6y ago

100% this. I really hope this trend starts to reverse. Forums are one of my favourite things about the internet for all the niche knowledege you can find, but if it's locked behind Facebook (with a useless search feature and a terrible UI), it might as well not be there in my opinion.

gbrown 6y ago
I think the infrastructure has rusted a bit. A while back I wanted to spin up a forum, and I wasn't super impressed. There's a mix of new projects that don't really get the forum thing (they're often very focused on businesses rather than communities), and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s. This also goes for the infrastructure around forums - several turnkey sites I tried simply didn't work, and I ended up deploying one myself through a crufty Bluehost portal. Given that a lot of forum activity is driven by non-tech people, I'm not surprised they've started dying out. It's a shame, but the monoliths like FB have both the audience and the on-ramps. Edit: as a side note, I eventually gave up because I couldn't get my target community to join the forum. Most people were already on a Facebook group and uninterested in switching.
- pbronez 6y ago
  This is because it's trivial to create a subreddit, which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting. A lot of forums want to not be joined at the hip with a cesspool of transient internet riff-raff which is exactly the problem that platforms that try to cater to everything (reddit, 4Chan) have. It's impossible to have real quality discussion about anything when the people who have deep interest in the subject are outnumbered 100:1 by people with passing interest.
    - pbronez 6y ago
      It's an interesting trade-off... toxic subreddits exist, and hitting the front page instantly creates an Eternal September. BUT Reddit also gives you a suite of moderation tools out of the box. You can set rules, and benefit from site-wide policies that keep you on the right side of the law most of the time. It's not perfect, but it's good enough that it seems to have won the segment by a fairly large margin.
      - pavel_lishin 6y ago
        The moderation tools are pretty poor once you start needing to do anything more advanced than banning users.
  - macintux 6y ago
    Reddit has one missing feature in particular that’s important for some number of online communities: being able to include images in a comment.
    - Quarrelsome 6y ago
      RES kinda sorta helps with that in old.reddit.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Reddit is a waste of time because threads get locked after a couple of months. (Sometimes, proper netiquette REQUIRES necroposting.)
- criddell 6y ago
  Wasn't there a startup about 10 or 15 years ago dedicated to building communities of communities. I think it was called Nine-something and was started by one of the early internet big shots... I tried searching for this on Google but failed miserably.
  - codingclaws 6y ago
    ning.com?
    - criddell 6y ago
      Yes! That's it! Thank you. It was driving me nuts and I started to wonder if I imagined it. Looking at it today, it's changed a lot in the past 15 years...
    - oneng 6y ago
      I have a cousin that used to work there years ago when social media was still in its infancy. He was part of the initial wave of layoffs when they weren't able to get traction against Facebook. He's doing well for himself now, Director of Engineering at a FAANGM company, but it did cause him to abandon the startup game.
- garaetjjte 6y ago
  >and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s. Hmm, I think things like phpBB or SMF are still alive.
  - syntheticnature 6y ago
    I think the usage of advanced didn't merely mean alive, but changing and growing. A membership org I help with their IT needs has come to realize that the member email lists have become moribund, and so we've been discussing forums... but the look of a lot of older forum software has become fixed in time and turned people off -- Discourse caught more interest than anything else I showed them.
    - garaetjjte 6y ago
      Oh, Discourse, probably most annoying forum software available thanks to its stupid scroll hijacking.

roenxi 6y ago

The not-indexed-by-Google thing is probably more a feature. The odds are slim but there is a tenancy for angry flash mobs to appear sometimes on the internet. It isn't desirable to invite the whole world in to every conversation. I do think it is unfortunate for these groups to be giving their data to Facebook. I heard a wild rumour that FB was doing a purge of some sort on right wing political groups. Gauging the truth of something like that from a distance is impossible, but it did raise the point to me that if your private group was kicked off Facebook there probably isn't a way to take your post history with you.

deepsun 6y ago
I don't mind mobs appearing on my forums about ultralight aircrafts. Easy to clean, not much harm. Most of the members know each other or through a common friend IRL anyway. But the value in these forums are enormous, and helps saving lives. That knowledge doesn't stale either.
ghaff 6y ago
If you really want invite-only posting, your best bet is probably to have an invite-only (or subject to approval) mailing list and, optionally, post the archives.
crocodiletears 6y ago
Happened, but it targeted more than just right-wingers, though they bore the brunt of it. Pretty much every local political activist I know had their accounts restricted right before the election. In addition: Most libertarian groups and pages I know affiliated with the 'boogaloo' movement caught a ban Most of the pro-trump pages I know caught a ban, as well as pro-trump groups involved in on the ground activism A few left anarchist groups I was in caught a ban. It wasn't so much 'purge of the right', there's always a low-level purge of right wing pages going on, either because of moderator bias, or simply because leftists and/or liberals spend more of their free time infiltrating groups and reporting right wing content than vise-versa. Rather, it struck me as an attempt to suppress protests and potential violence in the streets on either side of the political divide in the days subsequent to the election.

29athrowaway 6y ago

Reddit is much better in that respect.

xwdv 6y ago

On the contrary, I hate searching the web for information and finding things written 10-20 years ago. At some point it feels like you’re doing archaeology more than research. I have to specify the time range I want to search in more and more these days. Sure, the information may not have changed, but I do not trust things that haven’t been updated in that long. Especially anything tech related. Imagine it’s the year 2050, you do a search for how to do some mundane thing in React, and you’re finding articles that were written today. Maybe some future person is even reading through this comment right now.

robjan 6y ago
Search engines already have a fresh content bias but at least all content is indexed. With silos, especially Facebook, after a day or two on an active group a post just disappears
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Content disappears off of Google as time goes on, too.
dmortin 6y ago
Tech is just one subject, there are lots of others which don't change as fast. And for tech you can define a search alias which defaults to the past year, for example, if you work in a field which changes very fast. With facebook groups people ask the same questions again and again, because the search is awful.
ghaff 6y ago
That's not an argument for throwing away the ability to search old information though. It's an argument for better metadata and better easy control over the search range. I may be looking for old information. Yes, if I'm searching on a current tech topic or to solve some computer issue I'm having, I probably don't want anything more than a year or two old. However, I frequently want to research some historical content and it can be really hard to cut through the recency bias of search engines.
6y ago

sneak 6y ago

Also, having to ID yourself to Facebook just to read the content is terrible. Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for society. It’s like we’ve all forgotten the necessity of anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society.

Freak_NL 6y ago
It's so annoying to have Facebook pop up those login notices whenever I try to look up something there. When I'm mapping local shops on OpenStreetMap sometimes the only contact info available is on Facebook, and sometimes they do have a proper website, but it doesn't show up in search engine results and I can find the link on Facebook. (At least Facebook is not quite as bad as Pinterest.) There is a very vocal group of people in every society that wants to abolish anonymity on the internet. It's scary.
webmaven 6y ago
> Also, having to ID yourself to Facebook just to read the content is terrible. > Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for society. It’s like we’ve all forgotten the necessity of anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society. To an extent, I'm okay with it being a bit harder to publish anonymously than otherwise I'm not okay with how difficult it has become to READ anonymously. That's REALLY double-plus-ungood. Consider the simple transaction of buying a copy of 2600 at a local newsstand. For a while, online advertising worked as a revenue stream for publications like that since ads were bought on a pay-per-impression, or even pay-per-click basis, without all the tracking infra surrounding it, but now, monetization only works to the extent that readers allow themselves to be identified and tracked. The other way to monetize is using subscriptions and paywalls, which is even more explicitly identifying and tracking readers and subscribers. The same goes for practically every way of getting money from readers to publishers and writer's. Nothing comes close to the anonymity of paying cash for a book, newspaper, or magazine. Practically everything we read is tracked, and most means we have of preventing that tracking also circumvent the flow of money to publishers and writers. It's a good thing that the costs and barriers of publishing and distribution have dropped, but the cost of writing hasn't.

_the_inflator 6y ago

I side with you. However in FB groups you don't have to deal with so much spam and attacks.

garbagetime 6y ago
Urbit ID solves this. Scarce, stable IDs makes the cost of spamming much higher.
- trianglem 6y ago
  Yeah I try to stay away from products founded by racist POS like Moldbug.
  - tylershuster 6y ago
    Nice ad hominem bro
    - trianglem 6y ago
      As an early contributer to Urbit before I knew about the founders, I wish I could take back the work I did for them.
      - tylershuster 6y ago
        Ok fine, but you're not addressing the actual argument, which is that urbit solves the problems in this article. That's ad hominem. Is "racism" somehow ingrained in the project?
        trianglem 6y ago
        No it doesn’t Urbit is slow and offers no anonymity. It’s not a realistic project, just a naive person’s implementation of using symbology to “cash-in” on something that is artificially made to seem enigmatic. Edit: yes racism is ingrained in the project. They refuse to hire a woman, black or Latino developer explicitly.

weinzierl 6y ago

> Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo. Everything I wrote on Usenet has disappeared in the Google silo. So, there you have that - the inevitable fate of content is to disappear.

roel_v 6y ago
So has everything I wrote, thank god. We're too obsessed with 'keeping' things. It's good that the internet doesn't remember to the degree we all (used to) think. Things that are worth preserving will be, but 99% of all content should just die a natural death. We shouldn't start to conserve for the sake of conserving because we can now that things are digital.
- throwanem 6y ago
  What's worth preserving can't be known in advance.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand I certainly tend towards a preservationist mindset and as the sibling comment notes, we don't really know what we should save for various reasons. The guy who is responsible for having saved a bunch of Usenet archives made a comment to the effect of: "I didn't realize that what we really should have prioritized was discussions about social issues, culture, etc.--not bug fixes for a long obsolete version of SunOS." OTOH, I'm kind of glad that nothing I wrote that wasn't filtered by an editor from before maybe age 30 or so exists online. (And even the filtered stuff you probably would need to know where to look.)
- wl 6y ago
  What we think is worth preserving now isn't necessarily what the future will think we should have preserved. Most of papyrology is the study of ancient documents that were thrown in the trash.
- weinzierl 6y ago
  I could 100% agree if things were gone for good, you know, like in real life. But the idea that what was meant for the public is no stowed away in a company silo and can be used, deleted or republished at their discretion rubs me the wrong way. Not that I would ever have posted something atrocious, but the idea that a company knows more about what I said than myself is deeply unsettling to me.

netsharc 6y ago

And the Facebook UI really hates conversations. There are only 1-deep threads, if a post has hundreds of replies you see maybe 5 (Facebook will say they're the "Most relevant" because probably the amount of Likes) and you have to click "Load more comments" dozens of times to try to read all the responses. Add to that people just commenting with their friends' names (tagging them) to notify those friends about the conversation, because they don't know about the "copy link" or "Share this comment" features...

rbritton 6y ago
Occasionally I stumble on a Facebook thread that allows multiple tiers, and I'm not sure what the enabler for that is. I'd love to see that extended to all threads even if I would vastly prefer a true forum over their groups.
newsbinator 6y ago
My pet peeve is the people that comment “following” or simply “F” because they don’t know they can subscribe to notifications on the post with 2 clicks.

baxtr 6y ago

Isn’t Reddit the go-to place nowadays?

luckyshot 6y ago
Pretty much yes... But I find it scary, specially after they got a $150M investment from Tencent (a huge Chinese company). Ironically, Reddit is blocked in China. I'm not sure about the ramifications of all this but it does sound scary and anything could be happening behind the scenes.
throw_m239339 6y ago
Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit. On forum X or Z where there is like 3000 users max at some point you get to learn people. Often reddit posts are optimized for "karma" and "gilding", not for QA or being really helpful. Also, for some reasons, reddit makes it really hard to find old content. Reddit also couldn't replace Q&A such as stack overflow for instance. There is a need for better, free and secure forum software though. I know Discourse tries to disrupt the market a bit.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  > Yes, but you don't really build "communities" on reddit. Reflecting on my forum days, I don't think this is true. It's plain and simple to see subreddit members have STRONGLY held convictions that their subreddit is a unique and important community, just as they used to. I grew up on forums of < 100 people had made similar stupid arguments about the norms and salience of the forum to whatever topic it was aligned to. Yes, now there's karma farming, but it's not like people didn't make zounds of forum posts for the intended or subconsiously intended purpose of accruing social credit by demonstrating in group mentalities.
- aqsalose 6y ago
  Got to disagree here, r/AskHistorians is a top-tier academically-minded Q&A forums, and their wiki is possibly one of the best resources on the current internet for layman interested in history. They are not necessarily the best Q&A resource (MathOverflow maybe?) but worth a mention. This is not to say AskHistorians is very forum-like, they now moderate the answers with the spirit of journal editor. In general, there are good subreddits that sometimes develop community spirit. Unfortunately they are a fleeting phenomenon: either they grow too big, or die off (or in the rare case of AskHistorians, become something that can manage the flood), and if you don't find them by accident, it probable one heard about them because they are becoming too popular.

OscarCunningham 6y ago

Lots of old web forums are actually not indexed. For example try finding https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=95 https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=95 by searching for "Getting RLE in Golly" in Google. I get zero results. (Although of course that page might be indexed now that I've linked to it from HN. You can find a similarly old post on that site to check.)

dzdt 6y ago
In my experience Microsoft Bing does much better than Google at returning search results from old forums. Google has a bunch of things just flat out missing in its search index, even things I'm sure I found by Google years ago and that still exist on the same sites. I obviously didn't check before you posted your comment, but I checked before I posted mine and Bing found your test case with no difficulty.
- Seanambers 6y ago
  In my experience Google search results have gotten less and less informative for a very long time(last 4-6 years). Seems to me Google at some point in the past decided it wasn't going to show everything, only what it meant i needed to see, monetization on the other hand has gone up.
  - ksec 6y ago
    Agreed , although I give them the benefits of doubt because modern internet can make far more web pages than Google could keep up with indexing. Especially after the Smartphone took off and Internet seems to be exploding with Content Farm.
kapitalx 6y ago
HN comment links have a rel=nofollow. I'm not versed in SEO, but I've assumed this means linking here won't affect indexing.
- luckyshot 6y ago

gambiting 6y ago

Also facebook groups are absolutely awful for finding the knowledge that's already there. I'm in a few facebook groups for car enthusiasts, and why the general experience is positive, every few days we get people joining and asking the same questions over and over and over again. Search is abysmal and there really is no ability to create "sticky" posts like on old forums, so it's just bad.

heavyset_go 6y ago

Also, Facebook discourages anonymous accounts, even going as far as locking you out of the platform unless you supply the company with your cell phone number and driver's license. As a result, there are many communities that I don't join, and there are communities that I stay silent in. For example, in the Facebook group for the area that I currently live in, it is common place to doxx people who disagree with majority of users. It's gone as far as having the mayor doxx a single mother because she was critical of decisions the city made, and I want no part of that.

ianai 6y ago
What state is that in?

keithnz 6y ago

you have to be a bit careful, you aren't inherently entitled to the useful information written by everyone else as part of communities. In some situations the only reason the information exists is because they think what they write is just for the community they are talking with. The problem comes when communities are built around things like facebook simply because it's convenient and easy to discover but the intent is for an open community with freely available information.

Sharlin 6y ago

> Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo. Not only that, but they're not indexed even by Facebook itself. Facebook's search tools are and always have been a joke. Probably on purpose.

zone411 6y ago

My company owns a forum with 56 million posts and unfortunately we had issues getting Google to index older threads.

Nacdor 6y ago

Same, for all those reasons and more. I hate Facebook discussions along with any other site that uses this nested comment + magical sorting algorithm format (e.g. Reddit, Hacker News). It's impossible to have a lengthy discussion about anything of substance on sites like this. The nested comment format immediately splinters every discussion into multiple "mini-threads" rather than a single coherent conversation. Each of those mini-threads splinters even further, making it impossible to follow anything. Then the upvotes and algorithm fuck it up even more by pushing "popular" replies to the top while burying anything controversial. Every thread is dead within hours, not just because discussions are fractured into a million pieces but because variety is prioritized over substance and the front page MUST have new content every time users visit the site. On forums there were threads that would live for years, some have probably even spanned more than a decade at this point.