20 ms·

The internet wants to be fragmented

312 points by miletus 4y ago

lebaux 4y ago
agreed
CTDOCodebases 4y ago
Written on substack no less…
- hypfer 4y ago
  And yet you participate in society
  - doublepg23 4y ago
    I think it’s reasonable to say federated blogging platforms are a solved problem in 2022 (2023!) I don’t think this is analogous to debates about economic systems.
- smitty1e 4y ago
  "Fragmented" is not "eradicated". The Famous Article: > Why did this happen to the centralized internet when it hadn’t happened to the decentralized internet of previous decades? The reason is that people scale poorly. Dunbar's Number[1] is a thing, and every human effort in physical- or cyber-space, sacred or profane, tends toward a Tower of Babel[2] over time. Those that conform to Gall's Law[3] may prove relatively durable. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_la...
  - CTDOCodebases 4y ago
    > The reason is that people scale poorly. I would propose that humans scale magnificently. Our need for belonging and our propensity for conflict has spread us to all the corners of the earth and it continues to keep us there. Great from the collective perspective if you want to see humanity as a whole survive. Not so great for those who suffer from the conflict though.
    - smitty1e 4y ago
      >> The reason is that people scale poorly. > I would propose that humans scale magnificently. Certainly, apex predator on the food chain. But that is a different point than the human organizational one I was going after.
Jorengarenar 4y ago
>In fact, there were always Nazis around, and communists, and all the other toxic trolls and crazies. But they were only ever an annoyance, because if a community didn’t like those people, the moderators would just ban them. Even normal people got banned from forums where their personalities didn’t fit; even I got banned once or twice. It happened. You moved on and you found someone else to talk to. Doesn't this create an opposite problem: echo chambers?
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience already agrees with. They started getting negative feedback for doing the thing language was designed for. Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar opinions even closer and different opinions further apart. If the interaction stays the same of course fragmentation is inevitable - but that's not a good thing. This fragmentation extends to the real world and has real consequences. It will blow up. Even with Twitter being internally fragmented the polarization in society grew. Nobody wants to listen to the other side anymore, while there's always the most to be learned from listening to the other side. The core of the problem needs to be addressed: that social media has reprogrammed people to the purpose of speech. One of the reasons I'm even bothering with websites like HN as opposed to social media is because it still feels like there's a slight chance of making people change their minds here.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  Everything you say about the like button also applies to votes, so if the like button is what makes social media bad, I don't see why HN should be better.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    HN's vote count is not public, and negative count is capped at -4 so you can't downvote someone into oblivion.
    - amadeuspagel 4y ago
      Most social networks don't have an equivalent to downvotes at all.
nathias 4y ago
Not at all, we want to have a unified discourse, but we have vastly different values and therefore moderation preferences. The only solution to this is making moderation user-based, but with better UX than just block everyone you don't like. The user initiatives formed 'block lists' on twitter, which are kind of a good idea for this, you have decentralized decisions that get aggregated into a single filter which then the user simply applies if he chooses so.
- fexecve 4y ago
  This is already a solved problem. If I block every anti-vaxxer I see on Twitter, eventually Twitter will stop showing them to me. But if I view the tweet replies to President Biden, I see the anti-vaxxer replies right at the top. So they just need to apply the user preferences across the entire platform.
  - nathias 4y ago
    yea, thats what I mean, we have the solutions and they would also work for decentralized protocols which is always presented as the biggest obstacle for alternatives ...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lapcat 4y ago
I found myself agreeing with every word of this article. The penultimate paragraph summarizes it well: > People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. And the internet works when you can exit — when you can move to a different town if you don’t like the mayor or the local culture. > Disagreement in society is necessary for progress, but it’s most constructive when it’s mediated by bonds of trust and affinity and semi-privacy.
- adesanmi 4y ago
  Same here. The biggest annoyance for me was whenever people use the “town square” analogy, especially as a Brit. The idea that my “town square” is owned by a private American company is a nightmare.
  - wardedVibe 4y ago
    For what its worth, for a number of decades, American town squares have in many places been shopping malls, which are privately owned. There are several states where protestors can be thrown out of malls[0], free speech be damned. I'm frankly glad they're struggling. [0] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/12/22/protests-first-amendment-public-space-vs-private https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/12/22/protests-first-amen...
  - Thorentis 4y ago
    Go to the average British town square and tell me how many logos you can spot of American owned companies.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  People don't want actually want that though. They want everyone on twitter. Not a small circle of 200 people.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    I don't have super-strong opinions on network size necessarily, but assuming that what you say is true, and that this isn't a generational/cultural preference that might evolve over time, it still doesn't strike me as a particularly powerful critique? The argument here isn't that small towns are preferable, the argument is that they are better, and that they lead to overall healthier social groups. I don't want to exercise. I want to eat sugar, I don't want eat whole foods. I might as well say, "when are these doctors going to realize that eating healthy and exercising isn't what people actually want to do?" Whether or not smaller communities are healthier can be debated, but whether or not people want to have smaller social networks is kind of orthogonal to that debate. You can advocate for something that is healthier and that will make your life better and that will overall make you happier if you put in the effort to pursue it, while acknowledging that people are not generally biologically inclined to want to do that thing. In fact, most healthy things that we advocate for in life are not things that we instinctively want to do and are things that require conscious effort and conscious denial of behaviors that we might prefer -- that is in many ways the norm, not an exception.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
Chatrooms replace twitter like book clubs replace cities.
- seydor 4y ago
  Do they? Those are different behavior patterns. We have a lot of different behaviors as humans, we don't need to replace one with another
jacooper 4y ago
The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media. They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic. I agree with this article in general, and think that its worth it to spend time arguing with people you care about rather some rando on twitter. community run communities will probably have a resurge, the problem is the tech barrier, we have already seen how mastodon is seen as to complex or has "horrid UX" for normal users. So I doubt anything will change for the mainstream, techies and other geeky communities might go to mastodon or create a forum, but normal users won't bother doing any of this.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Adding to this, having run small communities I can see platforms like Mastodon growing into Twitter albeit with a different twist of behavior but eventually becoming equally toxic, just a different flavor of toxic. I believe one of the root causes is that the internet basically connected billions of people from many different cultures into one big pool without any arbiter mechanisms which is bound to get ugly fast. In this regard I agree with the article that the internet wants to be segmented. Mastodon will probably start with silos of similar thinking people but as it grows they too will run into culture clashes leading to groups of people being silenced. Then some other platform will come along to make smaller silos or tribes and this pattern will repeat.
  - poszlem 4y ago
    You can already see that. If you think Twitter moderation is arbitrary or weird, clearly you haven't seen some of the popular Mastodon servers. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.
    - jacooper 4y ago
      The difference, as the article mentions, is that you can just leave. You can follow the same content from another instance with other rules and not be effected by any of the weird laws on the main mastodon instance.
reidrac 4y ago
[flagged]
- lapcat 4y ago
  "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html FWIW I just disable JavaScript on Substack.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    I find the topic of annoying pop-ups interesting and was thinking, to align better with the site rules, maybe the OP could start an Ask HN topic about the pop-ups and we continue there.
frereubu 4y ago
I'm not sure this was anything new, even when the original tweet was posted. I remember back in around 2000 when someone put up a page on a random domain that simply said "Well done, you have reached the end of the internet. You can now go outside." It was early enough that people could still remember when one person could have visited most sites on the internet, but that was long enough ago that it was clearly impossible to do again. I remember reading that page when someone sent it to me and feeling a deep sense of relief at the idea, even though I knew it was impossible.
Puts 4y ago
Now the article was only talking about twitter and social media, but I can't help react on the title since there really is no evidence at all of internet wanting to be fragmented. In fact it's just the opposite. - Not even the most hardcore people are using IRC anymore - All web hosting is now in the cloud - There's basically only two rendering engines left, of which one is at the moment extremely marginalized - GIT that was supposed to be distributed is now used as a centralized versioning system in centralized services. If anything it seems that the internet wants to be consolidated.
- Wazako 4y ago
  What is important is, as the article says, "to be allowed to leave", this consists in having alternatives. - The web hosting is in the cloud, but if it's easy to change it, what's the problem? - Git a url and you can easily change the central backup server point.
- api 4y ago
  People don’t use IRC anymore because there are better open alternatives like Matrix and ActivityPub based systems. Those are what the “hard core” people use. As for the cloud there are loads of clouds. Web sites can be moved. Same with git hosting which just provides a convenient place to store the repo and post meta data like issues. Moving from GitHub to Gitea or GitLab is usually pretty easy. More and more people seem to be at least trying a less centralized approach. Personally I think we passed peak centralization in the middle 20-teens when there were just a few social platforms everyone used and federated stuff was primitive and new. We are well into the beginning of the unbundling phase.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  I rarely use IRC any more and I used to run some small IRC servers. Most moved to Discord but I refuse to use such platforms for their abuse of retaining both text and voice transcription chat history forever. Discord voice transcription can run silently in any public or private channel and nobody can prove otherwise. This was not impossible on IRC but far less likely. Public channels were recorded with publicly visible bots that had permission to be in the channel. Some IRCD's had modules that would allow a NetAdmin to monitor private chats but that can be mitigated with clients that support OTR. Nowadays if I need to spin up a chat with people I know I just give them a shell function that utilizes a self-hosted instance of devzat. # uncensored chat using self hosted https://github.com/quackduck/devzat.git # add to .bashrc or /etc/profile.d/functions.sh on a VM somewhere function chat() { # make us a temporary nickname Name=$(base64 /dev/urandom | tr -d '/+' | dd bs=12 count=1 2>/dev/null) # make us a temporary throw away ssh key. key is our ID. ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 2048 -N "" -C "${Name}" -f ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" # add +ssh-rsa in the event client restricts weaker ciphers ssh -i ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" -p 22 -4 -o "HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa" -o "PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa" "${Name}"@23.239.0.70 rm -vf ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}".pub } If things go sideways I just nuke that instance and what little chat history the daemon had is gone.
tshadley 4y ago
If twitter dies, where do I find a site where I can follow at least one expert/leader in every major discipline/social/political-movement to get a sort of snapshot of what's happening in the world? I don't need to agree with every expert/leader, I just want to know what they think.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  the way we did before massive corporate social walled gardens people keep a blog and you subscribe to the blog feed. bonus point: it's completely free, you don't even need to give away your personal data and be forced to watch ads. but it's 2023, realistically if Twitter dies these people will open a fediverse account that you can follow.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Blogs were awful. Lack of actual discussion, just pontification and ultimately you curate your own list of (mainly) like minded blogs. Give me a reddit thread anyday where some rando (whose blog I never would have followed) calls out the original post with differing thoughts/viewpoints. Sites like reddit/twitter broke me away from the trap of blogs by people with great credentials giving/polished public face giving them un-deserved authority over my thinking. Reddit causes me to re-evaluate and change my positions regularly, something that neither blogs nor mainstream media ever managed to do. Twitter makes me actively angry if I read replies, but it has also surfaced many interesting people who are deep thinkers with positions other than mine. But twitter's most powerful revelation is when it shows me I HATE so many of the people whose positions I used to align with, and whose slower more thoughtful blog posts swayed me. When I see their immediate response to something, and it is just awful and ugly and full of hate, not rational thought but just knee jerk reaction, then yeah, no thanks. I don't need a deeper insight into your thoughts. Twitter has weeded out so many ugly people from having influence on me. Reddit - injects thoughts/opinions I would never have sought out on my own. Twitter - Shows the true face of 'thought leaders',takes away their polished persona and shows me when I have been giving too much credit to horrible people.
    - 4y ago
INeedMoreRam 4y ago
[dead]
foddermange 4y ago
We can see this happening with Reddit. Either because they got fed up with the administration of the site, or were forcibly kicked off, a number of communities that were previously subreddits have branched off and made their own forums instead. Examples: https://rdrama.net https://rdrama.net https://ovarit.com https://ovarit.com https://patriots.win https://patriots.win https://hexbear.net https://hexbear.net https://www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com/forum https://www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com/forum https://www.saidit.net/s/TumblrInAction https://www.saidit.net/s/TumblrInAction
- weakfortress 4y ago
  [dead]
causality0 4y ago
Being the same person online as offline destroyed everything great about the internet. When you were an asshole you got banned from the website, and then you had to trim some of your sharp edges off so you didn't get banned from the next one. These days being an asshole results in either you aurrou ding yourself entirely with other assholes or getting your real life ruined by losing your job or even being arrested in some countries. There's no more opportunity to learn and grow. You either get it right the first try or you keep your online discourse rated PG so you don't cross the wrong people. Everything is so serious now. We couldn't even go back if we wanted to, because ignoring and banning xXWeedLuvurXx for calling you the n-word and moving on is a lot tougher when his name is John Smith and he works in accounting.
- giardini 4y ago
  aurrou ding !? Is this a new Australian metaphor?
  - burnished 4y ago
    Think it was intended to be surrounding
- Kenji 4y ago
  Very true.
- slater- 4y ago
  I think you're exactly right. In my youth, the internet was about having fun, about being INTERESTING, even if your mom or your boss wouldn't understand. And you could always just walk away from your Buffy Xanga and get into something else. Now, the language of ridiculous places like LinkedIn has become the norm, on pain of having your life derailed. "HI MY NAME IS JOHN (HE/HIM), I LIVE AND BREATHE ENTERPRISE SALES SUPPORT IN THE THRILLINGLY DYNAMIC ECOSYSTEM OF SAAS, MY DREAM EVER SINCE I WAS A CHILD WAS TO BE SERIOUS ABOUT WORK, I WEAR MANY HATS, MY DOG IS MY SON, IT WAS A BLESSING TO ATTEND THE BLACK EYED PEAS CONCERT, SINCERE THANKS TO UNITED PETROLEUM AND ALSO TO ROSA PARKS" I return again and again to the scene with the construction worker neighbor from Office Space: Peter: "does anyone ever say to you 'sounds like someone has a case of The Mondays?' Neighbor: "No, man. Shit, no, man! I believe you'd get your ass kicked saying something like that"
thenerdhead 4y ago
I don’t really get the premise here. The popular tweet relates because 15 years ago most people weren’t spending almost 1/3 of their day on a screen. Now that is definitely the case and backed with data throughout the years. The internet has always been fragmented. I think the arguments of Facebook or Twitter being some type of global consciousness is short sighted. It has maybe as many users as the population of the USA. The world has an estimated 5 billion people who have regular access to the internet. Is the world consciousness really representative of the most engaged internet users? That’s a huge problem in itself and the thought that journalists are stuck on Twitter makes no sense. If life is all about change and we see behemoths come and go, then surely journalism will evolve outside of a single platform.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
One of the most frightening bits of social science/philosophy I heard came from Slavoj Zizek, because it's about harbingers of big change. I have tried in vain to find a written reference. It's buried within some of his often tediously tangential talks - but I would love to know if any former Yugoslavians can attest to the truth or falsity of it. Zizek said that the former Yugoslavia was a tense but stable amalgam for decades in which good humour and brutally free speech - including "edgy but acceptable" racism - was permitted and even celebrated. Sometime before the 90s that changed, and a chilling taciturnity overcame the nation. The "politically correct" atmosphere was a lead up to civil war. It's possible Zizek completely misreads cause and effect. But I always take his point to be - as elementary psychoanalysis - that when people stop talking about how they really feel, it's the start of a road to trouble; jaw jaw jaw being better than war, war, war. The culture of faux "offence" created by Social media had definitely done the same to online discourse.
- watwut 4y ago
  Escalating racial and ethnic hate was lead up to war. Just like, before Russia attacked now, the anti Ukrainian propaganda went up. And before WWII, nazi went up with hate and their anti Jews language went up both in lead up to war and during ir, culminating in holocaust.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > Escalating racial and ethnic hate was lead up to war. That's exactly what I'd think. And historically I'd wager every well documented example shows it. And yet Zizek gave that as a first hand account (that's where he is from please correct me if I am wrong), and it's an intriguing hypothesis. Certainly an unpopular one judging by my immediate down-vote for even mentioning it (as an open question no less) I don't think he was talking about "hate". He was talking about open acceptance of difference. That's what it seems is getting ever less permissible - and that's what I find concerning. Can we no longer make that distinction? Are we too timid to even discuss that? Is that what social media has done to us?
    - 4y ago
seydor 4y ago
The internet is vast. But if your attention is fully absorbed between twitter and substack (like the author is), you feel trapped, because, well, you are. Maybe try to venture out of your internet comfort zone. It's not all spam out there, nor is it worthless because it was not recommended by someone cool. Just don't be lazy
- Taek 4y ago
  This comment doesn't offer any practical advice on where to find content of higher quality, it just condescends people who don't feel like they have high quality options.
  - seydor 4y ago
    my comment is condescending to people who don't put the effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead spend their whole online time in the well beaten path. The content wont always be of "higher quality" , because quality is subjective. Here are two nearby sources of such content: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments
    - borski 4y ago
      > my comment is condescending to people who don't put the effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead spend their whole online time in the well beaten path. Another way of saying this is that your comment is condescending to… most people. Most people used to have an easy way to find forums on the internet, even if they were AOL chat rooms, where they could find moderated content that was interesting to them. That was the well beaten path. Nowadays, that’s no longer the case, and most people don’t seek out those needles in the haystack. My contention is that they shouldn’t have to, just as they didn’t have to before the 2010s. A corollary: “just don’t be lazy” is almost never good advice, as there is almost always a reason people are “lazy.” People make similar arguments about the impoverished and how “if they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and stopped being lazy” they could easily get out of it, but that’s really hard to do with two kids, three jobs, and no time to think about anything other than survival. They’re not lazy, they are overwhelmed. I’d say that applies to a lot of facets of life, including time spent on the internet; amid the firehose of nonsense, and given that most of the internet (read: where most people spend time now) is literally rigged against moving away from it, by using human psychology to generate hits of dopamine in the form of likes and views, it is hard to find a better path, and the people who don’t aren’t necessarily lazy. They just don’t live on the internet, and it shouldn’t be that hard.
superkuh 4y ago
Hah. Good joke website gets the point across. I cannot connect to or load https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragmented https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-f... from my comcast home IP. I can only load it by tunneling through one of my VPSes. Definitely fragmentation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- astrange 4y ago
  That seems like a you problem. Do you have a custom DNS or something set? It’s extremely unlikely anyone is blocking Comcast.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    No one is blocking Comcast. But Comcast does screw up their routes and tends to be really cheap about peering/transit.
EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
It's going to be paradise when we can find our natural best friends AT SCALE Here's my second most recent idea on how to do it, haven't written up the latest yet: http://zeroprecedent.com/A%E2%9D%AF%E2%9D%AEON%20deck%20v.3.pdf http://zeroprecedent.com/A%E2%9D%AF%E2%9D%AEON%20deck%20v.3....
- npilk 4y ago
  Interesting concept but what seems more compelling to me would be more like a Tiktok/Reddit hybrid. You log in and see content that "the algorithm" knows you'll like, but with an added element of community from people "the algorithm" knows you'll find cool/funny/insightful/etc. Like a simulacrum of the Facebook feed but instead of friends and family it's this "tribe". No need for labels or even naming those people. Feels like this is what social media is trying to achieve anyway but they're mostly stuck with the existing social graph as a starting point...
  - EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
    I actually mention extremely good content aggregation in there, but more as a byproduct of good matching than as a way to arrive at it. But it really could work the other way around, with the things you and everyone else likes providing strong signal that can be correlated. I hope this is the year we all get a thousand true friends! Instant connection every time
- telehaxor 4y ago
  "Machine learning will help you find your best friends." Yes, but how? How will it avoid optimizing on the wrong thing? "It will gather a lot of data and then use algorithms to predict your affinities from it." Yes, but how? What algorithm would do that? Ordinary recommender systems, neural networks, something else? And tight knit communities of close friends rarely have a lot of churn, but at-scale systems often do - how will it reconcile these tendencies? I guess I was looking for something a little more like a research paper.
  - EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
waspight 4y ago
In the spirit of the article, how do you start your own community these days? I think it was phpbb that was popular last time I checked (perhaps 15 y ago).
- ultra_nick 4y ago
  Marketing is the eternal way. Software changes frequently.
  - waspight 4y ago
    What do you mean?
- sboomer 4y ago
  I believe Discord and Telegram may fill in the gap. WhatsApp is kind of personal, where you communicate with your real world friends.
  - waspight 4y ago
    But these are all closed communities. I just think that it would be a point in having a community that is also searchable from google? Why is closed communities like Discord so popular?
    - doublepg23 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse If you’re thinking closer to forum software of yore. If you don’t mind being centralized Reddit is what really killed forums and is still very good despite a drive to make it worse every year. There are many Reddit clones as well.
      - astrange 4y ago
        Generally, what kills forums is they’re too much work to administer. When spammers are working full time, the only services that can survive also have full time admins. And that’s ignoring that phpbb/wordpress are insecure and need patching all the time.
sboomer 4y ago
There are many people who haven't seen the internet before 2010. Their internet experience of limited to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp.
nunez 4y ago
Heavily agree with this. The internet of 1998 or even 2006 is very very different than the Internet of today. However, I think this desire for fragmentation and divisiveness was inevitable. People were always in conflict with each other; we just didn't have the means to butt heads like we can now. If the Internet existed in 1920, I think we would (a) have some amazing historical artifacts, and (b) see a lot of the same behaviors we're seeing today.
TobyTheDog123 4y ago
This is a brilliantly potent and beautifully written article, and plan on sourcing it on an upcoming business plan of mine.
- borski 4y ago
  We should chat, because I plan on doing the same. Email’s in my profile. :)
isaacremuant 4y ago
> weirdos mad about video game journalism. Funny how being interested in accountability, transparency and good journalism makes you "a weirdo" worth ignoring. Oh well, if you're moderately effective about highlighting a problem you'll always get attacked with labels. Funny too how he lumps them and other groups with "Nazis". Feels like yet another person who is suddenly whining because their authoritarian websites are no longer controlled by their authoritarian ideologues they agreed with. The Elon musk takeover has been very positive, if anything to display how hypocritical some of the authortiarians from any side are. It's all about censoring ideas they don't like because "they're righteous (TM)". Having destroyed alternatives like Parler every time they got popular, makes it feel that no competition will be allowed and theres a sudden desperate turn to descentralization, which is awesome, but it will come with the same ridículous shouts of censorship when any idea authoritarians don't like, gets mainstream notoriety. Suddenly the interest of society will be to censor that descentralized network. The excuse will be one of the typical scares: terrorism, harm, crime, etc Interesting times but not an interesting article. Just the typical "how do we go back to what I liked and agreed with me"
- andrepd 4y ago
  >The Elon musk takeover has been very positive Of course it has. Twitter stopped censoring neonazis and harassment and started censoring things Musk doesn't like. >authortiarians from any side. It's all about censoring ideas they don't like How ironic
  - isaacremuant 4y ago
    He's doing very similar things than what other authortiarians were. Censoring what he doesn't like or doesn't follow his ideology. Problem is, the people who agree with doing this before are mad because now it's against them. It's a positive. As for the NNs labels. Well, it's the typical scaremongering argument that holds no water when you realize that, again, people will be inconsistent about who they apply X labels too and why they should be censored. As for your ironic comment, it's really not. You can't call out hypocrisy on me because my stance has not changed. I'll give you the opportunity to speak and them. I'll call out your censorship and their censorship. I would've hoped the guy in the article and many who foam at the mouth about EM and NN realized that "censorship was bad all along, we shouldn't have done it because it can turn against us" but alas, it wasn't meant to be.
fleddr 4y ago
I tend to agree with the conclusions of the article but at the same time I think it leaves out a few important factors in comparing the old internet versus today's internet. First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars. This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember centralized social media as being far less "political" just a few years ago. Second, the mobile revolution. Which leads to a dumbing down of engagement. Before, people would sit behind a PC with a large screen and functional keyboard, enabling deep engagement as seen here on HN. Today, people sit on the toilet, look at a tiny screen with endless content, and any engagement (most never engage at all) is very shallow and lazy: a like, a retweet. It's not a conversation, it's amplification. In the rare case where somebody produces original content (a self-composed tweet), Twitter's format incentivizes hot takes and makes context and nuance impossible or impractical. Third, amplification. It's a specific choice by Twitter (UX, algorithms) to promote and reward the worst opinions. It's a complete inversion from real life. Hence, rather than stating that human conversation absolutely does not scale, I'd refine that conclusion. It does not scale in these particular conditions.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  > First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars. This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember centralized social media as being far less "political" just a few years ago. But social media is widely credited with causing this polarization. I would tend to agree. But I'm curious, do you have some other explanation?
aWidebrant 4y ago
"Why did such a bland observation resonate with so many people?" Asked and answered.
rc-1140 4y ago
I mostly agree with the author in that everyone shouldn't be on one platform and that yes, Twitter, Facebook, etc., aren't anywhere close to ideal sites for actually forming strong relationships and having good discussions. I also agree that the separation of internet self and real self has all but vanished from the internet, despite my own personal attempts to retain it. Additionally, as someone who has spent their formative, adolescent, and even current years being parts of independent communities on the internet, I can assure you that there were people out there who knew what was being lost and what the problems were as Reddit, Facebook, and the others became the hubs for everything. However, the author makes references to things like MUDs, IRC chats, web forums, and then antagonists like "random internet Nazis" (come on dude) and Gamergate of all things, and I can't help but feel that the author of the article is part of a intellectual group that appeared after things like internet forums, transient chatrooms, and video game servers. It's very popular to try to "dunk" on sowing doubt in a case like this because everyone cites that "Yet you participate in it. Curious!" comic in some way or another, but I think the doubt is warranted in this case. The author may have been around when those things were active, but expressed no deep interest at worst or a passing interest at best in any of them until centralization became a problem to think about, and SUDDENLY all of those things captured their attention. A HN poster who doesn't really care about non-techie niche communities but puts on big airs about caring because rebelling against centralized monoliths like Twitter is part of (hacker) counterculture/social signaling. The author didn't have to deal with being a powerless normal user as internet Nazi groups infiltrating communities they were a part of, never had to watch independent sites and projects get absorbed into Reddit and its abhorrent community; it's all just a fun intellectual thought puzzle to ruminate on with a buddy at a bar and philosophical soapbox to stand on with their web blog and Twitter account. The author even boils it down to political pundits retreating to private circles, which completely separates it from the real experiences of loss of and yearning for smaller communities. We've read this same song and dance here on HN almost weekly if not daily here on HN: everyone's glued to their smartphones, Twitter and Facebook control all online content, return to tradition, yadda yadda. I don't really know how this comment is going to be taken but because of all these things, I find it very difficult to believe the author isn't subject to the tyranny of likes and internet attention himself, and that the post reads more as disingenuous intellectual fellatio than anything else, intended to resonate with those who closely follow hacker culture on HN for traction.
brnaftr361 4y ago
It was the smartphone. Not necessarily the phones themselves, but the wide reaching accessibility. Internet users skyrocketed and if phoneposters we're any indication of the aggregate impact - the quality of conversation deteriorated. And yes, mobile accessible platforms caused a sort of gravity and viola. Also I'm reasonably sure this is just a truism. "Schismogenesis" in addition to the fact that everybody wants to be on the same page with their community. The nature of the internet in that it's basically just a huge, permanent log of interactions just allows us to observe this shit more easily and remark on it in post.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Blah blah blah. This is all blah. Noah is perpetually, painfully online. He has to be, because he makes his living (a) pointing out when people are wrong on the internet and (b) trying to convince people that he's really smart. All of his interactions with reality are through that lens. Seriously, It's January 1. Go look at how many tweets and retweets the guy has on twitter in the last 24 hours. The internet does not want to be fragmented, because the internet seeks status. People on the internet will seek status (see: Smith, Noah), and barring that, will seek the knowledge of those who have claimed status. And as long as those with the MOST clout congregate on a single platform, the rest of the people on the internet will follow. It makes logical sense for all of the actually important journalists to centralize around a hub like twitter because it's a way for them to keep their ear to the pavement. They are expected to report quickly on issues and it gives them the ability to stay up to date on quickly changing issues. Even for things as mundane as sports, almost all sports journalism is broken first or simultaneously on twitter. Twitter is the tool. The true value is in who is using it. It's what Musk has gotten hilariously backwards and why it will eventually bite him in the ass. The right-wing sphere has Gab, Parler, AND Truth Social. Nobody reads them. Donald Trump's own posts on his own platform get far more reach by second-hand screenshots on twitter than on the platform he owns. Candace Owens doesn't gain any visibility by fighting with a nazi on Gab. She can get a lot of views by nitpicking a post from Maggie Haberman though. The internet has ALWAYS wanted to gravitate to central locations. The post-Usenet years were an abberation because it was a time when a centralized source for information and conversation was disrupted. Those people sought out Digg, and then reddit. They're still on reddit. If it wanted to fragment, it'd have done it already.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
>>> Community moderation works Meh. Community moderation upholds the values and standards of the community. So a community of neo-nazis will moderate themselves and protect their values and standards. As will community of flat earthers etc etc And this is why it's really hard to have any sort of "truth based ML moderation" - because in the extreme and obvious cases "the earth is actually round" directly threatens the community. And in the middle case "excluding Mary simply because you'all don't like her or her family is unfair" also threatens the community. In between those two is a spectrum of truth and decency that threatens every community Humans are rubbish
Thorentis 4y ago
> People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. The Internet is simply following our current Globalist trend, where yes, there may be different physical towns, but there is only one acceptable way to think about the world, one acceptable form of government, and one acceptable set of morals. Cities are becoming harder to distinguish since every new building looks the same. The same shops and chains are available. The clothing is the same. These aren't different town squares. These are the global monoculture made manifest. The Internet is simply another small part of this larger trend.

312 points by miletus 4y ago

lebaux 4y ago

agreed

CTDOCodebases 4y ago

Written on substack no less…

hypfer 4y ago
And yet you participate in society
- doublepg23 4y ago
  I think it’s reasonable to say federated blogging platforms are a solved problem in 2022 (2023!) I don’t think this is analogous to debates about economic systems.
smitty1e 4y ago
"Fragmented" is not "eradicated". The Famous Article: > Why did this happen to the centralized internet when it hadn’t happened to the decentralized internet of previous decades? The reason is that people scale poorly. Dunbar's Number[1] is a thing, and every human effort in physical- or cyber-space, sacred or profane, tends toward a Tower of Babel[2] over time. Those that conform to Gall's Law[3] may prove relatively durable. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_la...
- CTDOCodebases 4y ago
  > The reason is that people scale poorly. I would propose that humans scale magnificently. Our need for belonging and our propensity for conflict has spread us to all the corners of the earth and it continues to keep us there. Great from the collective perspective if you want to see humanity as a whole survive. Not so great for those who suffer from the conflict though.
  - smitty1e 4y ago
    >> The reason is that people scale poorly. > I would propose that humans scale magnificently. Certainly, apex predator on the food chain. But that is a different point than the human organizational one I was going after.

Jorengarenar 4y ago

>In fact, there were always Nazis around, and communists, and all the other toxic trolls and crazies. But they were only ever an annoyance, because if a community didn’t like those people, the moderators would just ban them. Even normal people got banned from forums where their personalities didn’t fit; even I got banned once or twice. It happened. You moved on and you found someone else to talk to. Doesn't this create an opposite problem: echo chambers?

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience already agrees with. They started getting negative feedback for doing the thing language was designed for. Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar opinions even closer and different opinions further apart. If the interaction stays the same of course fragmentation is inevitable - but that's not a good thing. This fragmentation extends to the real world and has real consequences. It will blow up. Even with Twitter being internally fragmented the polarization in society grew. Nobody wants to listen to the other side anymore, while there's always the most to be learned from listening to the other side. The core of the problem needs to be addressed: that social media has reprogrammed people to the purpose of speech. One of the reasons I'm even bothering with websites like HN as opposed to social media is because it still feels like there's a slight chance of making people change their minds here.

amadeuspagel 4y ago
Everything you say about the like button also applies to votes, so if the like button is what makes social media bad, I don't see why HN should be better.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  HN's vote count is not public, and negative count is capped at -4 so you can't downvote someone into oblivion.
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    Most social networks don't have an equivalent to downvotes at all.

nathias 4y ago

Not at all, we want to have a unified discourse, but we have vastly different values and therefore moderation preferences. The only solution to this is making moderation user-based, but with better UX than just block everyone you don't like. The user initiatives formed 'block lists' on twitter, which are kind of a good idea for this, you have decentralized decisions that get aggregated into a single filter which then the user simply applies if he chooses so.

fexecve 4y ago
This is already a solved problem. If I block every anti-vaxxer I see on Twitter, eventually Twitter will stop showing them to me. But if I view the tweet replies to President Biden, I see the anti-vaxxer replies right at the top. So they just need to apply the user preferences across the entire platform.
- nathias 4y ago
  yea, thats what I mean, we have the solutions and they would also work for decentralized protocols which is always presented as the biggest obstacle for alternatives ...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lapcat 4y ago

I found myself agreeing with every word of this article. The penultimate paragraph summarizes it well: > People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. And the internet works when you can exit — when you can move to a different town if you don’t like the mayor or the local culture. > Disagreement in society is necessary for progress, but it’s most constructive when it’s mediated by bonds of trust and affinity and semi-privacy.

adesanmi 4y ago
Same here. The biggest annoyance for me was whenever people use the “town square” analogy, especially as a Brit. The idea that my “town square” is owned by a private American company is a nightmare.
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  For what its worth, for a number of decades, American town squares have in many places been shopping malls, which are privately owned. There are several states where protestors can be thrown out of malls[0], free speech be damned. I'm frankly glad they're struggling. [0] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/12/22/protests-first-amendment-public-space-vs-private https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/12/22/protests-first-amen...
- Thorentis 4y ago
  Go to the average British town square and tell me how many logos you can spot of American owned companies.
nonethewiser 4y ago
People don't want actually want that though. They want everyone on twitter. Not a small circle of 200 people.
- danShumway 4y ago
  I don't have super-strong opinions on network size necessarily, but assuming that what you say is true, and that this isn't a generational/cultural preference that might evolve over time, it still doesn't strike me as a particularly powerful critique? The argument here isn't that small towns are preferable, the argument is that they are better, and that they lead to overall healthier social groups. I don't want to exercise. I want to eat sugar, I don't want eat whole foods. I might as well say, "when are these doctors going to realize that eating healthy and exercising isn't what people actually want to do?" Whether or not smaller communities are healthier can be debated, but whether or not people want to have smaller social networks is kind of orthogonal to that debate. You can advocate for something that is healthier and that will make your life better and that will overall make you happier if you put in the effort to pursue it, while acknowledging that people are not generally biologically inclined to want to do that thing. In fact, most healthy things that we advocate for in life are not things that we instinctively want to do and are things that require conscious effort and conscious denial of behaviors that we might prefer -- that is in many ways the norm, not an exception.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

Chatrooms replace twitter like book clubs replace cities.

seydor 4y ago
Do they? Those are different behavior patterns. We have a lot of different behaviors as humans, we don't need to replace one with another

jacooper 4y ago

The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media. They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic. I agree with this article in general, and think that its worth it to spend time arguing with people you care about rather some rando on twitter. community run communities will probably have a resurge, the problem is the tech barrier, we have already seen how mastodon is seen as to complex or has "horrid UX" for normal users. So I doubt anything will change for the mainstream, techies and other geeky communities might go to mastodon or create a forum, but normal users won't bother doing any of this.

LinuxBender 4y ago
Adding to this, having run small communities I can see platforms like Mastodon growing into Twitter albeit with a different twist of behavior but eventually becoming equally toxic, just a different flavor of toxic. I believe one of the root causes is that the internet basically connected billions of people from many different cultures into one big pool without any arbiter mechanisms which is bound to get ugly fast. In this regard I agree with the article that the internet wants to be segmented. Mastodon will probably start with silos of similar thinking people but as it grows they too will run into culture clashes leading to groups of people being silenced. Then some other platform will come along to make smaller silos or tribes and this pattern will repeat.
- poszlem 4y ago
  You can already see that. If you think Twitter moderation is arbitrary or weird, clearly you haven't seen some of the popular Mastodon servers. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    The difference, as the article mentions, is that you can just leave. You can follow the same content from another instance with other rules and not be effected by any of the weird laws on the main mastodon instance.

reidrac 4y ago

[flagged]

lapcat 4y ago
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html FWIW I just disable JavaScript on Substack.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  I find the topic of annoying pop-ups interesting and was thinking, to align better with the site rules, maybe the OP could start an Ask HN topic about the pop-ups and we continue there.

frereubu 4y ago

I'm not sure this was anything new, even when the original tweet was posted. I remember back in around 2000 when someone put up a page on a random domain that simply said "Well done, you have reached the end of the internet. You can now go outside." It was early enough that people could still remember when one person could have visited most sites on the internet, but that was long enough ago that it was clearly impossible to do again. I remember reading that page when someone sent it to me and feeling a deep sense of relief at the idea, even though I knew it was impossible.

Puts 4y ago

Now the article was only talking about twitter and social media, but I can't help react on the title since there really is no evidence at all of internet wanting to be fragmented. In fact it's just the opposite. - Not even the most hardcore people are using IRC anymore - All web hosting is now in the cloud - There's basically only two rendering engines left, of which one is at the moment extremely marginalized - GIT that was supposed to be distributed is now used as a centralized versioning system in centralized services. If anything it seems that the internet wants to be consolidated.

Wazako 4y ago
What is important is, as the article says, "to be allowed to leave", this consists in having alternatives. - The web hosting is in the cloud, but if it's easy to change it, what's the problem? - Git a url and you can easily change the central backup server point.
api 4y ago
People don’t use IRC anymore because there are better open alternatives like Matrix and ActivityPub based systems. Those are what the “hard core” people use. As for the cloud there are loads of clouds. Web sites can be moved. Same with git hosting which just provides a convenient place to store the repo and post meta data like issues. Moving from GitHub to Gitea or GitLab is usually pretty easy. More and more people seem to be at least trying a less centralized approach. Personally I think we passed peak centralization in the middle 20-teens when there were just a few social platforms everyone used and federated stuff was primitive and new. We are well into the beginning of the unbundling phase.
LinuxBender 4y ago
I rarely use IRC any more and I used to run some small IRC servers. Most moved to Discord but I refuse to use such platforms for their abuse of retaining both text and voice transcription chat history forever. Discord voice transcription can run silently in any public or private channel and nobody can prove otherwise. This was not impossible on IRC but far less likely. Public channels were recorded with publicly visible bots that had permission to be in the channel. Some IRCD's had modules that would allow a NetAdmin to monitor private chats but that can be mitigated with clients that support OTR. Nowadays if I need to spin up a chat with people I know I just give them a shell function that utilizes a self-hosted instance of devzat. # uncensored chat using self hosted https://github.com/quackduck/devzat.git # add to .bashrc or /etc/profile.d/functions.sh on a VM somewhere function chat() { # make us a temporary nickname Name=$(base64 /dev/urandom | tr -d '/+' | dd bs=12 count=1 2>/dev/null) # make us a temporary throw away ssh key. key is our ID. ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 2048 -N "" -C "${Name}" -f ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" # add +ssh-rsa in the event client restricts weaker ciphers ssh -i ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" -p 22 -4 -o "HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa" -o "PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa" "${Name}"@23.239.0.70 rm -vf ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}".pub } If things go sideways I just nuke that instance and what little chat history the daemon had is gone.

tshadley 4y ago

If twitter dies, where do I find a site where I can follow at least one expert/leader in every major discipline/social/political-movement to get a sort of snapshot of what's happening in the world? I don't need to agree with every expert/leader, I just want to know what they think.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
the way we did before massive corporate social walled gardens people keep a blog and you subscribe to the blog feed. bonus point: it's completely free, you don't even need to give away your personal data and be forced to watch ads. but it's 2023, realistically if Twitter dies these people will open a fediverse account that you can follow.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Blogs were awful. Lack of actual discussion, just pontification and ultimately you curate your own list of (mainly) like minded blogs. Give me a reddit thread anyday where some rando (whose blog I never would have followed) calls out the original post with differing thoughts/viewpoints. Sites like reddit/twitter broke me away from the trap of blogs by people with great credentials giving/polished public face giving them un-deserved authority over my thinking. Reddit causes me to re-evaluate and change my positions regularly, something that neither blogs nor mainstream media ever managed to do. Twitter makes me actively angry if I read replies, but it has also surfaced many interesting people who are deep thinkers with positions other than mine. But twitter's most powerful revelation is when it shows me I HATE so many of the people whose positions I used to align with, and whose slower more thoughtful blog posts swayed me. When I see their immediate response to something, and it is just awful and ugly and full of hate, not rational thought but just knee jerk reaction, then yeah, no thanks. I don't need a deeper insight into your thoughts. Twitter has weeded out so many ugly people from having influence on me. Reddit - injects thoughts/opinions I would never have sought out on my own. Twitter - Shows the true face of 'thought leaders',takes away their polished persona and shows me when I have been giving too much credit to horrible people.
  - 4y ago

INeedMoreRam 4y ago

[dead]

foddermange 4y ago

We can see this happening with Reddit. Either because they got fed up with the administration of the site, or were forcibly kicked off, a number of communities that were previously subreddits have branched off and made their own forums instead. Examples: https://rdrama.net https://rdrama.net https://ovarit.com https://ovarit.com https://patriots.win https://patriots.win https://hexbear.net https://hexbear.net https://www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com/forum https://www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com/forum https://www.saidit.net/s/TumblrInAction https://www.saidit.net/s/TumblrInAction

weakfortress 4y ago
[dead]

causality0 4y ago

Being the same person online as offline destroyed everything great about the internet. When you were an asshole you got banned from the website, and then you had to trim some of your sharp edges off so you didn't get banned from the next one. These days being an asshole results in either you aurrou ding yourself entirely with other assholes or getting your real life ruined by losing your job or even being arrested in some countries. There's no more opportunity to learn and grow. You either get it right the first try or you keep your online discourse rated PG so you don't cross the wrong people. Everything is so serious now. We couldn't even go back if we wanted to, because ignoring and banning xXWeedLuvurXx for calling you the n-word and moving on is a lot tougher when his name is John Smith and he works in accounting.

giardini 4y ago
aurrou ding !? Is this a new Australian metaphor?
- burnished 4y ago
  Think it was intended to be surrounding
Kenji 4y ago
Very true.
slater- 4y ago
I think you're exactly right. In my youth, the internet was about having fun, about being INTERESTING, even if your mom or your boss wouldn't understand. And you could always just walk away from your Buffy Xanga and get into something else. Now, the language of ridiculous places like LinkedIn has become the norm, on pain of having your life derailed. "HI MY NAME IS JOHN (HE/HIM), I LIVE AND BREATHE ENTERPRISE SALES SUPPORT IN THE THRILLINGLY DYNAMIC ECOSYSTEM OF SAAS, MY DREAM EVER SINCE I WAS A CHILD WAS TO BE SERIOUS ABOUT WORK, I WEAR MANY HATS, MY DOG IS MY SON, IT WAS A BLESSING TO ATTEND THE BLACK EYED PEAS CONCERT, SINCERE THANKS TO UNITED PETROLEUM AND ALSO TO ROSA PARKS" I return again and again to the scene with the construction worker neighbor from Office Space: Peter: "does anyone ever say to you 'sounds like someone has a case of The Mondays?' Neighbor: "No, man. Shit, no, man! I believe you'd get your ass kicked saying something like that"

thenerdhead 4y ago

I don’t really get the premise here. The popular tweet relates because 15 years ago most people weren’t spending almost 1/3 of their day on a screen. Now that is definitely the case and backed with data throughout the years. The internet has always been fragmented. I think the arguments of Facebook or Twitter being some type of global consciousness is short sighted. It has maybe as many users as the population of the USA. The world has an estimated 5 billion people who have regular access to the internet. Is the world consciousness really representative of the most engaged internet users? That’s a huge problem in itself and the thought that journalists are stuck on Twitter makes no sense. If life is all about change and we see behemoths come and go, then surely journalism will evolve outside of a single platform.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

One of the most frightening bits of social science/philosophy I heard came from Slavoj Zizek, because it's about harbingers of big change. I have tried in vain to find a written reference. It's buried within some of his often tediously tangential talks - but I would love to know if any former Yugoslavians can attest to the truth or falsity of it. Zizek said that the former Yugoslavia was a tense but stable amalgam for decades in which good humour and brutally free speech - including "edgy but acceptable" racism - was permitted and even celebrated. Sometime before the 90s that changed, and a chilling taciturnity overcame the nation. The "politically correct" atmosphere was a lead up to civil war. It's possible Zizek completely misreads cause and effect. But I always take his point to be - as elementary psychoanalysis - that when people stop talking about how they really feel, it's the start of a road to trouble; jaw jaw jaw being better than war, war, war. The culture of faux "offence" created by Social media had definitely done the same to online discourse.

watwut 4y ago
Escalating racial and ethnic hate was lead up to war. Just like, before Russia attacked now, the anti Ukrainian propaganda went up. And before WWII, nazi went up with hate and their anti Jews language went up both in lead up to war and during ir, culminating in holocaust.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Escalating racial and ethnic hate was lead up to war. That's exactly what I'd think. And historically I'd wager every well documented example shows it. And yet Zizek gave that as a first hand account (that's where he is from please correct me if I am wrong), and it's an intriguing hypothesis. Certainly an unpopular one judging by my immediate down-vote for even mentioning it (as an open question no less) I don't think he was talking about "hate". He was talking about open acceptance of difference. That's what it seems is getting ever less permissible - and that's what I find concerning. Can we no longer make that distinction? Are we too timid to even discuss that? Is that what social media has done to us?
  - 4y ago

seydor 4y ago

The internet is vast. But if your attention is fully absorbed between twitter and substack (like the author is), you feel trapped, because, well, you are. Maybe try to venture out of your internet comfort zone. It's not all spam out there, nor is it worthless because it was not recommended by someone cool. Just don't be lazy

Taek 4y ago
This comment doesn't offer any practical advice on where to find content of higher quality, it just condescends people who don't feel like they have high quality options.
- seydor 4y ago
  my comment is condescending to people who don't put the effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead spend their whole online time in the well beaten path. The content wont always be of "higher quality" , because quality is subjective. Here are two nearby sources of such content: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments
  - borski 4y ago
    > my comment is condescending to people who don't put the effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead spend their whole online time in the well beaten path. Another way of saying this is that your comment is condescending to… most people. Most people used to have an easy way to find forums on the internet, even if they were AOL chat rooms, where they could find moderated content that was interesting to them. That was the well beaten path. Nowadays, that’s no longer the case, and most people don’t seek out those needles in the haystack. My contention is that they shouldn’t have to, just as they didn’t have to before the 2010s. A corollary: “just don’t be lazy” is almost never good advice, as there is almost always a reason people are “lazy.” People make similar arguments about the impoverished and how “if they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and stopped being lazy” they could easily get out of it, but that’s really hard to do with two kids, three jobs, and no time to think about anything other than survival. They’re not lazy, they are overwhelmed. I’d say that applies to a lot of facets of life, including time spent on the internet; amid the firehose of nonsense, and given that most of the internet (read: where most people spend time now) is literally rigged against moving away from it, by using human psychology to generate hits of dopamine in the form of likes and views, it is hard to find a better path, and the people who don’t aren’t necessarily lazy. They just don’t live on the internet, and it shouldn’t be that hard.

superkuh 4y ago

Hah. Good joke website gets the point across. I cannot connect to or load https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragmented https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-f... from my comcast home IP. I can only load it by tunneling through one of my VPSes. Definitely fragmentation.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
astrange 4y ago
That seems like a you problem. Do you have a custom DNS or something set? It’s extremely unlikely anyone is blocking Comcast.
- superkuh 4y ago
  No one is blocking Comcast. But Comcast does screw up their routes and tends to be really cheap about peering/transit.

EZ-Cheeze 4y ago

It's going to be paradise when we can find our natural best friends AT SCALE Here's my second most recent idea on how to do it, haven't written up the latest yet: http://zeroprecedent.com/A%E2%9D%AF%E2%9D%AEON%20deck%20v.3.pdf http://zeroprecedent.com/A%E2%9D%AF%E2%9D%AEON%20deck%20v.3....

npilk 4y ago
Interesting concept but what seems more compelling to me would be more like a Tiktok/Reddit hybrid. You log in and see content that "the algorithm" knows you'll like, but with an added element of community from people "the algorithm" knows you'll find cool/funny/insightful/etc. Like a simulacrum of the Facebook feed but instead of friends and family it's this "tribe". No need for labels or even naming those people. Feels like this is what social media is trying to achieve anyway but they're mostly stuck with the existing social graph as a starting point...
- EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
  I actually mention extremely good content aggregation in there, but more as a byproduct of good matching than as a way to arrive at it. But it really could work the other way around, with the things you and everyone else likes providing strong signal that can be correlated. I hope this is the year we all get a thousand true friends! Instant connection every time
telehaxor 4y ago
"Machine learning will help you find your best friends." Yes, but how? How will it avoid optimizing on the wrong thing? "It will gather a lot of data and then use algorithms to predict your affinities from it." Yes, but how? What algorithm would do that? Ordinary recommender systems, neural networks, something else? And tight knit communities of close friends rarely have a lot of churn, but at-scale systems often do - how will it reconcile these tendencies? I guess I was looking for something a little more like a research paper.
- EZ-Cheeze 4y ago

waspight 4y ago

In the spirit of the article, how do you start your own community these days? I think it was phpbb that was popular last time I checked (perhaps 15 y ago).

ultra_nick 4y ago
Marketing is the eternal way. Software changes frequently.
- waspight 4y ago
  What do you mean?
sboomer 4y ago
I believe Discord and Telegram may fill in the gap. WhatsApp is kind of personal, where you communicate with your real world friends.
- waspight 4y ago
  But these are all closed communities. I just think that it would be a point in having a community that is also searchable from google? Why is closed communities like Discord so popular?
  - doublepg23 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse If you’re thinking closer to forum software of yore. If you don’t mind being centralized Reddit is what really killed forums and is still very good despite a drive to make it worse every year. There are many Reddit clones as well.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Generally, what kills forums is they’re too much work to administer. When spammers are working full time, the only services that can survive also have full time admins. And that’s ignoring that phpbb/wordpress are insecure and need patching all the time.

sboomer 4y ago

There are many people who haven't seen the internet before 2010. Their internet experience of limited to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp.

nunez 4y ago

Heavily agree with this. The internet of 1998 or even 2006 is very very different than the Internet of today. However, I think this desire for fragmentation and divisiveness was inevitable. People were always in conflict with each other; we just didn't have the means to butt heads like we can now. If the Internet existed in 1920, I think we would (a) have some amazing historical artifacts, and (b) see a lot of the same behaviors we're seeing today.

TobyTheDog123 4y ago

This is a brilliantly potent and beautifully written article, and plan on sourcing it on an upcoming business plan of mine.

borski 4y ago
We should chat, because I plan on doing the same. Email’s in my profile. :)

isaacremuant 4y ago

> weirdos mad about video game journalism. Funny how being interested in accountability, transparency and good journalism makes you "a weirdo" worth ignoring. Oh well, if you're moderately effective about highlighting a problem you'll always get attacked with labels. Funny too how he lumps them and other groups with "Nazis". Feels like yet another person who is suddenly whining because their authoritarian websites are no longer controlled by their authoritarian ideologues they agreed with. The Elon musk takeover has been very positive, if anything to display how hypocritical some of the authortiarians from any side are. It's all about censoring ideas they don't like because "they're righteous (TM)". Having destroyed alternatives like Parler every time they got popular, makes it feel that no competition will be allowed and theres a sudden desperate turn to descentralization, which is awesome, but it will come with the same ridículous shouts of censorship when any idea authoritarians don't like, gets mainstream notoriety. Suddenly the interest of society will be to censor that descentralized network. The excuse will be one of the typical scares: terrorism, harm, crime, etc Interesting times but not an interesting article. Just the typical "how do we go back to what I liked and agreed with me"

andrepd 4y ago
>The Elon musk takeover has been very positive Of course it has. Twitter stopped censoring neonazis and harassment and started censoring things Musk doesn't like. >authortiarians from any side. It's all about censoring ideas they don't like How ironic
- isaacremuant 4y ago
  He's doing very similar things than what other authortiarians were. Censoring what he doesn't like or doesn't follow his ideology. Problem is, the people who agree with doing this before are mad because now it's against them. It's a positive. As for the NNs labels. Well, it's the typical scaremongering argument that holds no water when you realize that, again, people will be inconsistent about who they apply X labels too and why they should be censored. As for your ironic comment, it's really not. You can't call out hypocrisy on me because my stance has not changed. I'll give you the opportunity to speak and them. I'll call out your censorship and their censorship. I would've hoped the guy in the article and many who foam at the mouth about EM and NN realized that "censorship was bad all along, we shouldn't have done it because it can turn against us" but alas, it wasn't meant to be.

fleddr 4y ago

I tend to agree with the conclusions of the article but at the same time I think it leaves out a few important factors in comparing the old internet versus today's internet. First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars. This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember centralized social media as being far less "political" just a few years ago. Second, the mobile revolution. Which leads to a dumbing down of engagement. Before, people would sit behind a PC with a large screen and functional keyboard, enabling deep engagement as seen here on HN. Today, people sit on the toilet, look at a tiny screen with endless content, and any engagement (most never engage at all) is very shallow and lazy: a like, a retweet. It's not a conversation, it's amplification. In the rare case where somebody produces original content (a self-composed tweet), Twitter's format incentivizes hot takes and makes context and nuance impossible or impractical. Third, amplification. It's a specific choice by Twitter (UX, algorithms) to promote and reward the worst opinions. It's a complete inversion from real life. Hence, rather than stating that human conversation absolutely does not scale, I'd refine that conclusion. It does not scale in these particular conditions.

nonethewiser 4y ago
> First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars. This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember centralized social media as being far less "political" just a few years ago. But social media is widely credited with causing this polarization. I would tend to agree. But I'm curious, do you have some other explanation?

aWidebrant 4y ago

"Why did such a bland observation resonate with so many people?" Asked and answered.

rc-1140 4y ago

I mostly agree with the author in that everyone shouldn't be on one platform and that yes, Twitter, Facebook, etc., aren't anywhere close to ideal sites for actually forming strong relationships and having good discussions. I also agree that the separation of internet self and real self has all but vanished from the internet, despite my own personal attempts to retain it. Additionally, as someone who has spent their formative, adolescent, and even current years being parts of independent communities on the internet, I can assure you that there were people out there who knew what was being lost and what the problems were as Reddit, Facebook, and the others became the hubs for everything. However, the author makes references to things like MUDs, IRC chats, web forums, and then antagonists like "random internet Nazis" (come on dude) and Gamergate of all things, and I can't help but feel that the author of the article is part of a intellectual group that appeared after things like internet forums, transient chatrooms, and video game servers. It's very popular to try to "dunk" on sowing doubt in a case like this because everyone cites that "Yet you participate in it. Curious!" comic in some way or another, but I think the doubt is warranted in this case. The author may have been around when those things were active, but expressed no deep interest at worst or a passing interest at best in any of them until centralization became a problem to think about, and SUDDENLY all of those things captured their attention. A HN poster who doesn't really care about non-techie niche communities but puts on big airs about caring because rebelling against centralized monoliths like Twitter is part of (hacker) counterculture/social signaling. The author didn't have to deal with being a powerless normal user as internet Nazi groups infiltrating communities they were a part of, never had to watch independent sites and projects get absorbed into Reddit and its abhorrent community; it's all just a fun intellectual thought puzzle to ruminate on with a buddy at a bar and philosophical soapbox to stand on with their web blog and Twitter account. The author even boils it down to political pundits retreating to private circles, which completely separates it from the real experiences of loss of and yearning for smaller communities. We've read this same song and dance here on HN almost weekly if not daily here on HN: everyone's glued to their smartphones, Twitter and Facebook control all online content, return to tradition, yadda yadda. I don't really know how this comment is going to be taken but because of all these things, I find it very difficult to believe the author isn't subject to the tyranny of likes and internet attention himself, and that the post reads more as disingenuous intellectual fellatio than anything else, intended to resonate with those who closely follow hacker culture on HN for traction.

brnaftr361 4y ago

It was the smartphone. Not necessarily the phones themselves, but the wide reaching accessibility. Internet users skyrocketed and if phoneposters we're any indication of the aggregate impact - the quality of conversation deteriorated. And yes, mobile accessible platforms caused a sort of gravity and viola. Also I'm reasonably sure this is just a truism. "Schismogenesis" in addition to the fact that everybody wants to be on the same page with their community. The nature of the internet in that it's basically just a huge, permanent log of interactions just allows us to observe this shit more easily and remark on it in post.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Blah blah blah. This is all blah. Noah is perpetually, painfully online. He has to be, because he makes his living (a) pointing out when people are wrong on the internet and (b) trying to convince people that he's really smart. All of his interactions with reality are through that lens. Seriously, It's January 1. Go look at how many tweets and retweets the guy has on twitter in the last 24 hours. The internet does not want to be fragmented, because the internet seeks status. People on the internet will seek status (see: Smith, Noah), and barring that, will seek the knowledge of those who have claimed status. And as long as those with the MOST clout congregate on a single platform, the rest of the people on the internet will follow. It makes logical sense for all of the actually important journalists to centralize around a hub like twitter because it's a way for them to keep their ear to the pavement. They are expected to report quickly on issues and it gives them the ability to stay up to date on quickly changing issues. Even for things as mundane as sports, almost all sports journalism is broken first or simultaneously on twitter. Twitter is the tool. The true value is in who is using it. It's what Musk has gotten hilariously backwards and why it will eventually bite him in the ass. The right-wing sphere has Gab, Parler, AND Truth Social. Nobody reads them. Donald Trump's own posts on his own platform get far more reach by second-hand screenshots on twitter than on the platform he owns. Candace Owens doesn't gain any visibility by fighting with a nazi on Gab. She can get a lot of views by nitpicking a post from Maggie Haberman though. The internet has ALWAYS wanted to gravitate to central locations. The post-Usenet years were an abberation because it was a time when a centralized source for information and conversation was disrupted. Those people sought out Digg, and then reddit. They're still on reddit. If it wanted to fragment, it'd have done it already.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

>>> Community moderation works Meh. Community moderation upholds the values and standards of the community. So a community of neo-nazis will moderate themselves and protect their values and standards. As will community of flat earthers etc etc And this is why it's really hard to have any sort of "truth based ML moderation" - because in the extreme and obvious cases "the earth is actually round" directly threatens the community. And in the middle case "excluding Mary simply because you'all don't like her or her family is unfair" also threatens the community. In between those two is a spectrum of truth and decency that threatens every community Humans are rubbish

Thorentis 4y ago

> People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. The Internet is simply following our current Globalist trend, where yes, there may be different physical towns, but there is only one acceptable way to think about the world, one acceptable form of government, and one acceptable set of morals. Cities are becoming harder to distinguish since every new building looks the same. The same shops and chains are available. The clothing is the same. These aren't different town squares. These are the global monoculture made manifest. The Internet is simply another small part of this larger trend.