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> regular folk don’t care about any of this Regular people don't care about operating systems, yet many of us are able to have a superior desktop experience by

> regular folk don’t care about any of this Regular people don't care about operating systems, yet many of us are able to have a superior desktop experience by using Linux. Regular people don't care about fine music, but we're still able to listen to Mussorgsky and are not forced to listen to Ariane Grande. Regular people don't care enough about technology to sit around discussing it in their spare time, and yet here we are. There's a lot of things that regular people don't care about. Let's concentrate on making something good, that enough people will use, rather than winning a popularity contest.

dgb23 5y ago
I very much agree with this sentiment. But given that, I don’t care about social platforms anymore. I don’t use FB since years, I use Signal with those who care, I visit reddit very irregularly since a while and twitter only if I get a link from someone outside of it. What I’m trying to say to say is that I find the whole model just not very compelling anymore, maybe even harmful. There are some subreddits that are more like forums (like this one) but the general experience is just not something I think is worth striving for, whether it is decentralized or not. What I do care about very much is communicating with interesting people and to read or watch interesting content. The signal to noise ratio is typically disappointing on these platforms.
tomc1985 5y ago
I agree. Fuck the regular folks! They are a cross upon our backs
lioeters 5y ago
That's the spirit! I'm glad someone is able to express this clearly. We need more people to be innovators and early adopters, to guide and consciously participate in the technology adoption life cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
semitones 5y ago
For the desktop experience, or listening to music, that logic works well. But the network effect (winning the "popularity contest") is crucial for services that are much more network-dependent, i.e. what's being described in the article, or even hackernews (if there were only 100 people on this site we'd have much lower quality links/discussions)

dgb23 5y ago

I very much agree with this sentiment. But given that, I don’t care about social platforms anymore. I don’t use FB since years, I use Signal with those who care, I visit reddit very irregularly since a while and twitter only if I get a link from someone outside of it. What I’m trying to say to say is that I find the whole model just not very compelling anymore, maybe even harmful. There are some subreddits that are more like forums (like this one) but the general experience is just not something I think is worth striving for, whether it is decentralized or not. What I do care about very much is communicating with interesting people and to read or watch interesting content. The signal to noise ratio is typically disappointing on these platforms.

tomc1985 5y ago

I agree. Fuck the regular folks! They are a cross upon our backs

lioeters 5y ago

That's the spirit! I'm glad someone is able to express this clearly. We need more people to be innovators and early adopters, to guide and consciously participate in the technology adoption life cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle

semitones 5y ago

For the desktop experience, or listening to music, that logic works well. But the network effect (winning the "popularity contest") is crucial for services that are much more network-dependent, i.e. what's being described in the article, or even hackernews (if there were only 100 people on this site we'd have much lower quality links/discussions)