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Man, I wish we could convince people to just stop using these **** "platforms" and go back to cheap selfhosted forums/blogs Of course a giant faceless low-marg

Man, I wish we could convince people to just stop using these **** "platforms" and go back to cheap selfhosted forums/blogs Of course a giant faceless low-margin corporation is going to do a bad job of moderation. I wish it weren't such a big deal when they fail at it

ferrocarraiges 4y ago
Too ambitious. Platforms like MySpace or GeoCities would be closer to the mark, if we could find a way to incentivize a hand-off approach to data collection. Site builders like SquareSpace, Wix, and WordPress are also close, but they're mostly designed and marketed as professional tools rather than personal spaces. Most people don't ever want to hear words like "DNS record" or "PHP version", but they do want to express themselves, and they can figure out a markdown or markup language in pursuit of that.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
Or go back to, I don't know, cruising down Main Street, spending time at their local library, walking downtown....
tsimionescu 4y ago
Honestly, taking down a fake blog using your name or pictures would probably be much harder than taking down a FB/LinkedIn etc profile, wouldn't it?
ericmay 4y ago
> cheap selfhosted forums/blogs Tbh I think most people just don't need to even be posting on a blog, myself included. It's nice to think you have something important to say but we mostly don't. How did our self-worth get tied up in this mess? Of course if you want to start a blog you should. Maybe you do have something interesting, thoughtful, or worthwhile to say. Maybe you just want to keep a diary of sorts or post for a few friends or family members. But moving from social media platforms to self-hosted blogs misses the key step that most people just need to get the hell of the Internet instead of starting a blog or posting on social media.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Early on blogs and local forums got flooded with spam bots, and trolls, though come to think of it; Trolls were never a huge problem before, as Netiquette helped separate wheat from the chaff. In hindsight it seems like a more concerted effort ending in disabling of public comment threads, and consolidation on social media sites. Nowadays anti-spam bots are more accessible, so it should be possible to revive local forums.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Maybe you just want to keep a diary of sorts or post for a few friends or family members. I disagree in that I think that a lot more people should be doing this. The problem is that it is a lot harder to do this than to speak to the entire world. Private networks have been discouraged, not facilitated. Or more accurately, people were pulled into social networking with the promise of small private networks, and these companies wait until they reach a particular size to start a constant push towards opening up the networks and hiding the statistics about them. Myspace was entirely a bunch of interlinked small private networks of friends. Everybody presented themselves as they liked to people that they knew (maybe barely knew, if you were an extrovert.) This was compromised by the networks deciding to automatically broadcast unrequested information, obviously like Facebook Beacon, but also "Bill just joined the group Guys Who Like Beer" and resetting/redesigning everyone's privacy settings every time they added a new beacon. It was a very short step to exercising full editorial control over everyone's presence, which is the product. So they manipulate User A's presence to motivate User B whose presence they're manipulating to motivate User A. All in the service of increasing time browsing and the amount of information shared, hopefully maximizing the value of selling a few inches of the screen during that time browsing. There will never be a significant incentive to stop intentionally alienating User A from User B. It would take away the primary tool that they use to maintain and grow the business and be a phase change in profitability. These are not companies providing real value, they are companies that hope to disrupt the production of real value and extract it. They only work as protected monopolies or trusts, because if there were commodity services that did what they do as a dumb pipe, their sites would be wastelands. > most people just need to get the hell of the Internet instead of starting a blog or posting on social media. No, people need a quiet, secure, consistent presence on the internet that does what they want and no more, doesn't try to hurt or confuse them for money, and doesn't need to be constantly futzed with to combat incursions by the host. If I put a poster on the wall, I just have to dust it once or twice a year, and it will never decide to start associating my medical information to my Amazon purchases. That poster will tell my friends the types of paintings I like, without trying to tell its clients who my friends are (i.e. who would be friends with people who like the kinds of paintings I like), or even testing that poster for misinformation and removing it from the wall without telling me (or waiting to remove it and counting how many people put it up on their own wall as a result.) People deserve a place to be safe on the internet. Instead, the motivations seem to be to make everything on the internet dangerous and constantly in flux so it a) constantly has to be engaged with, which serves eyeballs, and b) incursions of companies into your private life and your pockets can be successful. Self-hosted blogs are a bad solution because they are hard to create, secure and maintain. Getting off the internet is a bad solution because it's a request to drop the cheapest, most comprehensive communications system imaginable because if you're a normal person you have nothing worth saying. My grandmother disagrees.

ferrocarraiges 4y ago

Too ambitious. Platforms like MySpace or GeoCities would be closer to the mark, if we could find a way to incentivize a hand-off approach to data collection. Site builders like SquareSpace, Wix, and WordPress are also close, but they're mostly designed and marketed as professional tools rather than personal spaces. Most people don't ever want to hear words like "DNS record" or "PHP version", but they do want to express themselves, and they can figure out a markdown or markup language in pursuit of that.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

Or go back to, I don't know, cruising down Main Street, spending time at their local library, walking downtown....

tsimionescu 4y ago

Honestly, taking down a fake blog using your name or pictures would probably be much harder than taking down a FB/LinkedIn etc profile, wouldn't it?

ericmay 4y ago

> cheap selfhosted forums/blogs Tbh I think most people just don't need to even be posting on a blog, myself included. It's nice to think you have something important to say but we mostly don't. How did our self-worth get tied up in this mess? Of course if you want to start a blog you should. Maybe you do have something interesting, thoughtful, or worthwhile to say. Maybe you just want to keep a diary of sorts or post for a few friends or family members. But moving from social media platforms to self-hosted blogs misses the key step that most people just need to get the hell of the Internet instead of starting a blog or posting on social media.

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Early on blogs and local forums got flooded with spam bots, and trolls, though come to think of it; Trolls were never a huge problem before, as Netiquette helped separate wheat from the chaff. In hindsight it seems like a more concerted effort ending in disabling of public comment threads, and consolidation on social media sites. Nowadays anti-spam bots are more accessible, so it should be possible to revive local forums.
pessimizer 4y ago
> Maybe you just want to keep a diary of sorts or post for a few friends or family members. I disagree in that I think that a lot more people should be doing this. The problem is that it is a lot harder to do this than to speak to the entire world. Private networks have been discouraged, not facilitated. Or more accurately, people were pulled into social networking with the promise of small private networks, and these companies wait until they reach a particular size to start a constant push towards opening up the networks and hiding the statistics about them. Myspace was entirely a bunch of interlinked small private networks of friends. Everybody presented themselves as they liked to people that they knew (maybe barely knew, if you were an extrovert.) This was compromised by the networks deciding to automatically broadcast unrequested information, obviously like Facebook Beacon, but also "Bill just joined the group Guys Who Like Beer" and resetting/redesigning everyone's privacy settings every time they added a new beacon. It was a very short step to exercising full editorial control over everyone's presence, which is the product. So they manipulate User A's presence to motivate User B whose presence they're manipulating to motivate User A. All in the service of increasing time browsing and the amount of information shared, hopefully maximizing the value of selling a few inches of the screen during that time browsing. There will never be a significant incentive to stop intentionally alienating User A from User B. It would take away the primary tool that they use to maintain and grow the business and be a phase change in profitability. These are not companies providing real value, they are companies that hope to disrupt the production of real value and extract it. They only work as protected monopolies or trusts, because if there were commodity services that did what they do as a dumb pipe, their sites would be wastelands. > most people just need to get the hell of the Internet instead of starting a blog or posting on social media. No, people need a quiet, secure, consistent presence on the internet that does what they want and no more, doesn't try to hurt or confuse them for money, and doesn't need to be constantly futzed with to combat incursions by the host. If I put a poster on the wall, I just have to dust it once or twice a year, and it will never decide to start associating my medical information to my Amazon purchases. That poster will tell my friends the types of paintings I like, without trying to tell its clients who my friends are (i.e. who would be friends with people who like the kinds of paintings I like), or even testing that poster for misinformation and removing it from the wall without telling me (or waiting to remove it and counting how many people put it up on their own wall as a result.) People deserve a place to be safe on the internet. Instead, the motivations seem to be to make everything on the internet dangerous and constantly in flux so it a) constantly has to be engaged with, which serves eyeballs, and b) incursions of companies into your private life and your pockets can be successful. Self-hosted blogs are a bad solution because they are hard to create, secure and maintain. Getting off the internet is a bad solution because it's a request to drop the cheapest, most comprehensive communications system imaginable because if you're a normal person you have nothing worth saying. My grandmother disagrees.