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The analogy to Cixin Liu's "dark forest" concept also seems apt and enlightening. (Basically: it's a game theoretic response to the Fermi Paradox that suggests
by 1propionyl 6y ago
The analogy to Cixin Liu's "dark forest" concept also seems apt and enlightening. (Basically: it's a game theoretic response to the Fermi Paradox that suggests that any sensible galactic civilization would avoid making contact with any other civilization and attempt to stay hidden.)
More and more over the past few years, I've seen my own social circles migrate away from public forums like Facebook and Twitter and into private WhatsApp group chats, Discord groups, and so on.
In some cases these are groups of people I know in real life, and in some cases everyone is anonymous or pseudonymous.
And there is definitely an unspoken rule of "don't unilaterally invite anyone, don't advertise that this group exists, stay hidden, we like what we have going on here."
It's in some ways a reversion to the style of older private Usenet/BBS/IRC channels, but in other respects it's a lateral move. For one, it's still mostly happening on centralized platforms.
What I think is interesting is how our media ecology (in the sense of media as means we communicate and express ourselves, not "mass media") is an interplay between these big public spaces and a proliferation of smaller private spaces. It's not _just_ a dark forest, there's also a bright canopy into which people emerge, forage, and carry back down into the forest.
- jaspax 6y agoThe Dark Forest analogy strikes me as apt as well. All of the best (most interesting, most active, most insightful) groups that I belong to are off of the public internet these days. Some of them are just small Discord servers, some are even more heavily encrypted groups on Signal, Mattermost, or Mastadon. But what they have in common is that not everyone is welcome, and we don't even advertise our presence.
- dghlsakjg 6y agoThe thing that I hate about what social media has done is that it is resistant to persistance of knowledge. I grew up in the heyday of forums (late 90s to mid-late 00s). It seems like a lot of these groups have moved to facebook (or discord, or whatsapp), and now a lot of that knowledge for specialty stuff is unsearchable and behind a wall. One of my hobbies is boatbuilding, and there is a LOT of good material that is still available on forums since they just happily sit there seemingly forever, and are easy to archive. But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive. My feeling is that the switch to algorithmic feed-based discussion is a serious regression for a lot of interest groups. An excellent illustration of this is Stack Overflow. They take after the forum model of preserving knowledge to the degree that they shut down discussions that have happened before. Stack Overflow's database of solutions brings literally billions in value to the world, and it simply would not work without persistance of information.
- tablespoon 6y ago> But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive. Are there any maintained Facebook scrapers, akin to youtube-dl? I think there's definitely a need for /r/datahoarder style archiving of certain parts of social media.
- datavirtue 6y agoThat was the beginning of the end for me. Trying to search for a post I saw a few hours ago resulted in nothing but frustration. What a joke.