3 ms·

General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards. When you have no c

General purpose social media will be considered the greatest mistake of the early 21st century. Go back to topic-oriented discussion boards. When you have no common topic around which to organize, then people have to search each other's personalities for commonality. And in doing so, they stratify along political lines. This isn't enough, so then they micro-stratify into various, rabid subgroups within those political wings. But when you have the only message board dedicated to an obscure brand of motorcycle from the 1940s (or whatever, IDK), then you're stuck with those people. You're stuck with either having to learn to get along or lose out on your favorite thing. Go back to topic-oriented message boards. You don't need identity continuity between all the message boards you are membered in. That serves the corporate surveillance state more than it serves you. You don't need people on Board A to see what you're doing on Board B. If it's important and relevant, you can tell them. You dn't need to be friended with all your aunts and cousins and ex boyfriends. That shit is weird, family is for seeing at Thanksgiving to remember why you hate them and then go back to being happy for the rest of the year. Go back to topic-oriented message boards.

fsflover 5y ago
> Go back to topic-oriented message boards. This is essentially what Mastodon instances are. As a bonus, they can interact if they want it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rglullis 5y ago
  No, this is how a subset of its users treat it, and there is a significant amount of people (myself included) who think topic-based instances are a poorly conceived idea for federated systems [0]. [0] https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/ https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/
parksy 5y ago
This is not going against what you said in principle, I feel what you are saying, but I feel the need to add that I was admin of a few topic oriented message boards in the 90's and early 2000's, and yeah as you said it was pretty good simply to be able to be part of some group that cared about the same random stuff as me, and I think a big part of it is because humanity literally had not ever been able to connect so quickly on shared interests from such geographically diverse regions before, but it wasn't all roses there either. Personality cults were a regular theme. Honestly just one individual with no other goals in life could wreak havoc by constantly weaving between the rules, launching sock puppets to do some virtual Munchausen-by-proxy performance, painting admin as the bad guys, staging crises that didn't really exist to get more followers (in the social sense, there was not really a "follow" option in the platforms at the time). These topic-based forums were often in direct competition, and on more than one occasion it was revealed (usually by infiltrating via long-term social engineering so you could get to see the IP addresses of the members) that these users were from competitors trying to stir trouble and siphon off members. Diversity and cliquishness was an issue. Generally a community would kick off around some exciting new theme, or just a general shared interest and grow organically from there. This was great but the longer the same group hangs together, the more insular the atmosphere and inside references became. It's just what groups of people do in physical groups when they hang together a lot - they grow bonds with each other, their shared experiences strengthen these bonds, and newcomers see this and can see that it will take a lot of effort and patience to reach the same level of acceptance, and the older and more insular a community becomes, the less people are attracted to it. Then eventually the older members see there's nothing new to learn here and drift off. So the lifecycle of topic-based message boards followed a standard inception/growth/stagnation/diaspora pattern. Generalised social media puts everyone on an even platform - albeit a pretty shitty one - everyone sucks equally by default. You're correct in that the centralisation has a ton of other side effects and I don't disagree that many of these aren't what people want (if they're aware of it). Just that as I said it wasn't all roses and we can't just "go back". There were tons of reasons why the topic-oriented message boards faded away and it wasn't just laziness or convenience. It is human nature to desire connection and a sense of place, balanced with a need for novelty and invigoration of ideas. Generalised social media provides that routinely and formulaically, they basically hacked our brains. Also on practicality of your suggestion, we can't force people to go back. You can't put a gun to people's heads and force them to only use single issue forums. I get the nostalgia because I was a part of it and it was great for a time, but it did also have a ton of downsides. I think we need to move forward not go back. Federated social networks are one attempt at this. It's a lot to take on board as we have to learn new things like managing our identity / signatures and learning differences between providers, but efforts are underway to try and shift us away from the big old attention silos people have been trained to use these days.
layer8 5y ago
This gives me the thought that the focus should be on federating communities (boards/subreddits/forums/newsgroups/whatever you want to call it), and user identities only as a secondary aspect. The instances would choose which boards they want to host, and the contents of the boards would be synchronized between instances. The contents of the boards would be controlled by the community (board owners/moderators). Instances would decide which instances they want to synchronize with. Communities can also decide to fork. That’s actually similar to how Usenet works, except that we want built-in moderation, and cryptography for content integrity and cross-instance authentication.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  I think we really need to get over the idea of trying to get our content perpetually propagated out to the population, or trying to not miss out on consuming every single bit of content in a category. It's okay to live in a small community. Hell, it's okay to live in an enclave of a small community. There were whole sections of various topic boards I never visited, with active members there that I would not have recognized because they didn't visit the sections I frequented. It's okay to miss out on things. It's okay to not know about the latest JavaScript framework because it was developed in a community of stamp enthusiasts instead of your community of train enthusiasts. It's okay that fashion in Milan takes time to propagate to NYC and then to the country. It's okay to not hear about every single humanitarian crisis in the world when we can't reasonably do anything about it and we have our own to handle here at home. So much energy is put into pushing content, pushing pushing pushing. Boredom is okay! All this hyper optimization of content dissemination has started to feel like a system of control. Keep people preoccupied, overwhelmed with the enormity of the world. Then they won't question the coal plant in their back yard.
  - layer8 5y ago
    I’m not sure how that relates to my parent comment. What I outlined can apply both to private boards and public boards. Nevertheless, for the purpose of discoverability, I’m a fan of public forums. However that’s still more a pull model than a push model, and very different from “microblogging” platforms (e.g. Twitter).
phicoh 5y ago
In my opinion, social media like Facebook and Twitter were (mostly) fine before commercial interests killed them. There are plenty of reasons to connect with a group of people and have asynchronous communication. In many ways, current messaging groups are a poor replacement of early facebook and twitter. Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates. Over time, the initial concept of people who have something to say, watered down to liking or forwarding other people's updates. Topic-oriented discussion is great. But there is also a need to connect to a small group of people that just want to talk about random subjects that come up in everyday life.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  > Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates. I think where it went wrong was moneyed advertising interests forcing controversial content on people because they had a one-stop-shop to do it instead of the unmanageably costly operation it would have been to carpet bomb the PHPBBs of yor. Advertising was still a thing back then, but advertisers were not in a position of power. Popular boards like Penny-Arcade could demand a premium and had full editorial control. Smaller boards had less of a bargaining position, but only insofar as they were willing to annoy users. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth the day Gamedev.net introduced a one-time, full-page ad, that could be dismissed immediately, that only showed up when you first visited the site for the day. It lasted less than a week. Now you can't go 10 minutes on YouTube without getting essentially the same thing with a strict timer making sure you have suffered to a satisfactory degree before being allowed to continue on. If advertisers could track your eyes and make sure you were actually looking at the screen before engaging the timer, they would. It has nothing to do with user facing features on these platforms. It's the centralization and control that centralization gives to the owners of the platform that is the problem. Recall the 90/9/1 rule of the Internet. It's always been the case that 90% of people are nothing more than lurkers and the content is only created by 1% of people, with the missing middle commenting on it. Like buttons shifted the scale on how many people "engaged" with content, drawing from that 90% of lurkers, but didn't change the 9/1 part. That alone doesn't stratify people. It takes maliciously weaponizing that content against people.
moron4hire 5y ago
One more note on the family bit: I love my mother. I wish I talked to her more often. But I wish it were about whatever she's doing and not whatever stupid shit she's seen on Facebook. Some post from 8 years ago about killer mosquitos that are going to wipe us out so don't let the kids play outside. "This really happened to this person I've never met or even talked to on Facebook". Mom, I think we would have heard about towns getting wiped out by mosquitos. Though I guess she does have cataracts, so maybe she can't see the date field. But you used to only get that kind of shit from Reader's Digest. So you only had to hear about it once per month, not every day, with old topics you thought were long dead suddenly coming back with a vengeance. Society used to have bulkheads.

fsflover 5y ago

> Go back to topic-oriented message boards. This is essentially what Mastodon instances are. As a bonus, they can interact if they want it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rglullis 5y ago
No, this is how a subset of its users treat it, and there is a significant amount of people (myself included) who think topic-based instances are a poorly conceived idea for federated systems [0]. [0] https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/ https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/

parksy 5y ago

This is not going against what you said in principle, I feel what you are saying, but I feel the need to add that I was admin of a few topic oriented message boards in the 90's and early 2000's, and yeah as you said it was pretty good simply to be able to be part of some group that cared about the same random stuff as me, and I think a big part of it is because humanity literally had not ever been able to connect so quickly on shared interests from such geographically diverse regions before, but it wasn't all roses there either. Personality cults were a regular theme. Honestly just one individual with no other goals in life could wreak havoc by constantly weaving between the rules, launching sock puppets to do some virtual Munchausen-by-proxy performance, painting admin as the bad guys, staging crises that didn't really exist to get more followers (in the social sense, there was not really a "follow" option in the platforms at the time). These topic-based forums were often in direct competition, and on more than one occasion it was revealed (usually by infiltrating via long-term social engineering so you could get to see the IP addresses of the members) that these users were from competitors trying to stir trouble and siphon off members. Diversity and cliquishness was an issue. Generally a community would kick off around some exciting new theme, or just a general shared interest and grow organically from there. This was great but the longer the same group hangs together, the more insular the atmosphere and inside references became. It's just what groups of people do in physical groups when they hang together a lot - they grow bonds with each other, their shared experiences strengthen these bonds, and newcomers see this and can see that it will take a lot of effort and patience to reach the same level of acceptance, and the older and more insular a community becomes, the less people are attracted to it. Then eventually the older members see there's nothing new to learn here and drift off. So the lifecycle of topic-based message boards followed a standard inception/growth/stagnation/diaspora pattern. Generalised social media puts everyone on an even platform - albeit a pretty shitty one - everyone sucks equally by default. You're correct in that the centralisation has a ton of other side effects and I don't disagree that many of these aren't what people want (if they're aware of it). Just that as I said it wasn't all roses and we can't just "go back". There were tons of reasons why the topic-oriented message boards faded away and it wasn't just laziness or convenience. It is human nature to desire connection and a sense of place, balanced with a need for novelty and invigoration of ideas. Generalised social media provides that routinely and formulaically, they basically hacked our brains. Also on practicality of your suggestion, we can't force people to go back. You can't put a gun to people's heads and force them to only use single issue forums. I get the nostalgia because I was a part of it and it was great for a time, but it did also have a ton of downsides. I think we need to move forward not go back. Federated social networks are one attempt at this. It's a lot to take on board as we have to learn new things like managing our identity / signatures and learning differences between providers, but efforts are underway to try and shift us away from the big old attention silos people have been trained to use these days.

layer8 5y ago

This gives me the thought that the focus should be on federating communities (boards/subreddits/forums/newsgroups/whatever you want to call it), and user identities only as a secondary aspect. The instances would choose which boards they want to host, and the contents of the boards would be synchronized between instances. The contents of the boards would be controlled by the community (board owners/moderators). Instances would decide which instances they want to synchronize with. Communities can also decide to fork. That’s actually similar to how Usenet works, except that we want built-in moderation, and cryptography for content integrity and cross-instance authentication.

moron4hire 5y ago
I think we really need to get over the idea of trying to get our content perpetually propagated out to the population, or trying to not miss out on consuming every single bit of content in a category. It's okay to live in a small community. Hell, it's okay to live in an enclave of a small community. There were whole sections of various topic boards I never visited, with active members there that I would not have recognized because they didn't visit the sections I frequented. It's okay to miss out on things. It's okay to not know about the latest JavaScript framework because it was developed in a community of stamp enthusiasts instead of your community of train enthusiasts. It's okay that fashion in Milan takes time to propagate to NYC and then to the country. It's okay to not hear about every single humanitarian crisis in the world when we can't reasonably do anything about it and we have our own to handle here at home. So much energy is put into pushing content, pushing pushing pushing. Boredom is okay! All this hyper optimization of content dissemination has started to feel like a system of control. Keep people preoccupied, overwhelmed with the enormity of the world. Then they won't question the coal plant in their back yard.
- layer8 5y ago
  I’m not sure how that relates to my parent comment. What I outlined can apply both to private boards and public boards. Nevertheless, for the purpose of discoverability, I’m a fan of public forums. However that’s still more a pull model than a push model, and very different from “microblogging” platforms (e.g. Twitter).

phicoh 5y ago

In my opinion, social media like Facebook and Twitter were (mostly) fine before commercial interests killed them. There are plenty of reasons to connect with a group of people and have asynchronous communication. In many ways, current messaging groups are a poor replacement of early facebook and twitter. Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates. Over time, the initial concept of people who have something to say, watered down to liking or forwarding other people's updates. Topic-oriented discussion is great. But there is also a need to connect to a small group of people that just want to talk about random subjects that come up in everyday life.

moron4hire 5y ago
> Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates. I think where it went wrong was moneyed advertising interests forcing controversial content on people because they had a one-stop-shop to do it instead of the unmanageably costly operation it would have been to carpet bomb the PHPBBs of yor. Advertising was still a thing back then, but advertisers were not in a position of power. Popular boards like Penny-Arcade could demand a premium and had full editorial control. Smaller boards had less of a bargaining position, but only insofar as they were willing to annoy users. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth the day Gamedev.net introduced a one-time, full-page ad, that could be dismissed immediately, that only showed up when you first visited the site for the day. It lasted less than a week. Now you can't go 10 minutes on YouTube without getting essentially the same thing with a strict timer making sure you have suffered to a satisfactory degree before being allowed to continue on. If advertisers could track your eyes and make sure you were actually looking at the screen before engaging the timer, they would. It has nothing to do with user facing features on these platforms. It's the centralization and control that centralization gives to the owners of the platform that is the problem. Recall the 90/9/1 rule of the Internet. It's always been the case that 90% of people are nothing more than lurkers and the content is only created by 1% of people, with the missing middle commenting on it. Like buttons shifted the scale on how many people "engaged" with content, drawing from that 90% of lurkers, but didn't change the 9/1 part. That alone doesn't stratify people. It takes maliciously weaponizing that content against people.

moron4hire 5y ago

One more note on the family bit: I love my mother. I wish I talked to her more often. But I wish it were about whatever she's doing and not whatever stupid shit she's seen on Facebook. Some post from 8 years ago about killer mosquitos that are going to wipe us out so don't let the kids play outside. "This really happened to this person I've never met or even talked to on Facebook". Mom, I think we would have heard about towns getting wiped out by mosquitos. Though I guess she does have cataracts, so maybe she can't see the date field. But you used to only get that kind of shit from Reader's Digest. So you only had to hear about it once per month, not every day, with old topics you thought were long dead suddenly coming back with a vengeance. Society used to have bulkheads.