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Looking back, it's quite surprising how stagnant, in some sense, the social media space has become. How centralised and how... lame. The big hitters really did

Looking back, it's quite surprising how stagnant, in some sense, the social media space has become. How centralised and how... lame. The big hitters really did pillage and burn. Now, between moderation norms becoming increasingly sensitive and the hard turn the web took away from open... It's hard to see any new form take off. That said, perhaps that means it's a perfect time. Groups/Usenet has its limitations. Features invented over the last 30 years have value. Usenet can't be our YouTube or Facebook. But.. I refuse to believe open protocols got so much of the job done for so long, but the last mile requires a unicorn to platformize it. There aren't that many hurdles to taking social media back. Login/identity. HN demonstrates that this can be relatively simple. Hosting. Not quite as simple, apparently. Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway. There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again?

mschuster91 4y ago
> There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again? Because any kind of social media, especially when it allows binary assets, will be abused by CSAM and piracy spreaders, by Holocaust deniers, by scammers, by spammers shilling dick enlargement pills, questionably "legal" drugs, questionable dietary supplements or all kinds of other stuff, by trolls bullying people right up to suicide "for the lulz", or as we're seeing in the wake of the Russian invasion by enemy propaganda. > Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway. Nope. Reddit's various cesspools, from lolicon to the_donald [1], show that any platform needs centralized moderation lest it became overrun by any of the groups listed above. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Mastodon is social media, not a platform, and Gab (or Truth social), despite being bigger than all the other of its servers, haven't managed to "overrun" it.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  I don't agree. First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy. Reddit is, meanwhile and example of a lot of things. The variety there makes it a good place for examples. But, Reddit was a commery startup that got bought many moons ago into a media conglomerate. It's not the examle of free.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Lol what? Wikipedia has EXTREME moderation, from locking contentious articles, to hyper nerds spending all their free time browsing edit histories to revert dumb changes middle school kids made, to active efforts to undo the work that literal nation-state actors have done, to having to ban the offices of American politicians and political contractors who OFFER SERVICES TO REMOVE YOUR CONTENT FROM WIKIPEDIA It hasn't been "anyone can edit anything" since like 2008!
    - zamnos 4y ago
      I mean if you want to say vaccines cause autism, yeah, you're going to get shut down by the moderators. But if you, as an "anyone" who is a railway engineer who's able to write effectively about electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, or are a person living in, say, I don't know, East Palestine, Ohio, or now, Springfield, Ohio, and want to add things to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment, you can just click the edit button and add stuff. Anyone with an Internet connection can go to their website or load up their app and hit [edit] and make changes, and it's been that way since 2001. There's not even a user account required for most. There are those that get caught up by wide IP-based blocks against middle schooler spam, and they do have to create a user account.
      - chris_wot 4y ago
- drstewart 4y ago
  >You call it "alt-left", I proudly call it "Antifa". Yeah, I wonder why you're only concerned about right wing trolling - left wing abuse is a-okay with you?
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Do tell, where exactly is the left engaged in hate speech campaigns that come even close to the amount of abuse from the right wing? Not to mention domestic terrorism? Both in the US and Germany, the answer is "an utterly dominant majority comes from the right wing".
    - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
      Are you just blanking out on the whole of the 1965-1980? Domestic terrorism has always been the wheelhouse of the left for the USA. It's only very recently the right has been getting involved and still has a long way to go to get close. Once we start getting monthly bombings we can call it "even" and then push it father to get to "an utterly dominant majority comes from the right wing" what revisionist history. People seem to have forgotten just how much political violence used to happen in this country. I can't see any other reason you'd make such a ridiculous assertion.
      - ttkciar 4y ago
        > Are you just blanking out on the whole of the 1965-1980? If you have to dig back half a century to make your point about contemporary events, you have effectively ceded the point.
        tick_tock_tick 4y ago
        It was one of the politically violent periods that people are still alive, and it happened recently enough still working, from. I really don't think using the most extreme period in very recent history is ceding any point....
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  Honestly while not good "lolicon to the_donald" are the least of Reddit's problems and why it's gone crazy. The moderation of /r/politics /r/new and other massive/default subreddits combined with how the admins now step in on random communities to impose whatever moral view they happen to have that week has effectually caused the site to diverge hilariously far from reality. If anything Reddit is an example of how more moderation can make a community more extreme rather then less.
kerpotgh 4y ago
Because freedom is moderation. A place without moderation turns into a spam, gore, cp, racist, sexist shithole where no discourse happens. You may be nostalgic for usenets groups but that was a different time when a very small slice of society used those.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Perhaps the problem was bringing all of society online.
  - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
    100% this. It's too big now, and we need an alt net which is too technical and difficult for normal people, like in the 90s.

mschuster91 4y ago

> There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again? Because any kind of social media, especially when it allows binary assets, will be abused by CSAM and piracy spreaders, by Holocaust deniers, by scammers, by spammers shilling dick enlargement pills, questionably "legal" drugs, questionable dietary supplements or all kinds of other stuff, by trolls bullying people right up to suicide "for the lulz", or as we're seeing in the wake of the Russian invasion by enemy propaganda. > Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway. Nope. Reddit's various cesspools, from lolicon to the_donald [1], show that any platform needs centralized moderation lest it became overrun by any of the groups listed above. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Mastodon is social media, not a platform, and Gab (or Truth social), despite being bigger than all the other of its servers, haven't managed to "overrun" it.
dalbasal 4y ago
I don't agree. First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy. Reddit is, meanwhile and example of a lot of things. The variety there makes it a good place for examples. But, Reddit was a commery startup that got bought many moons ago into a media conglomerate. It's not the examle of free.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Lol what? Wikipedia has EXTREME moderation, from locking contentious articles, to hyper nerds spending all their free time browsing edit histories to revert dumb changes middle school kids made, to active efforts to undo the work that literal nation-state actors have done, to having to ban the offices of American politicians and political contractors who OFFER SERVICES TO REMOVE YOUR CONTENT FROM WIKIPEDIA It hasn't been "anyone can edit anything" since like 2008!
  - zamnos 4y ago
    I mean if you want to say vaccines cause autism, yeah, you're going to get shut down by the moderators. But if you, as an "anyone" who is a railway engineer who's able to write effectively about electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, or are a person living in, say, I don't know, East Palestine, Ohio, or now, Springfield, Ohio, and want to add things to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment, you can just click the edit button and add stuff. Anyone with an Internet connection can go to their website or load up their app and hit [edit] and make changes, and it's been that way since 2001. There's not even a user account required for most. There are those that get caught up by wide IP-based blocks against middle schooler spam, and they do have to create a user account.
    - chris_wot 4y ago
drstewart 4y ago
>You call it "alt-left", I proudly call it "Antifa". Yeah, I wonder why you're only concerned about right wing trolling - left wing abuse is a-okay with you?
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Do tell, where exactly is the left engaged in hate speech campaigns that come even close to the amount of abuse from the right wing? Not to mention domestic terrorism? Both in the US and Germany, the answer is "an utterly dominant majority comes from the right wing".
  - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    Are you just blanking out on the whole of the 1965-1980? Domestic terrorism has always been the wheelhouse of the left for the USA. It's only very recently the right has been getting involved and still has a long way to go to get close. Once we start getting monthly bombings we can call it "even" and then push it father to get to "an utterly dominant majority comes from the right wing" what revisionist history. People seem to have forgotten just how much political violence used to happen in this country. I can't see any other reason you'd make such a ridiculous assertion.
    - ttkciar 4y ago
      > Are you just blanking out on the whole of the 1965-1980? If you have to dig back half a century to make your point about contemporary events, you have effectively ceded the point.
      - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
        It was one of the politically violent periods that people are still alive, and it happened recently enough still working, from. I really don't think using the most extreme period in very recent history is ceding any point....
tick_tock_tick 4y ago
Honestly while not good "lolicon to the_donald" are the least of Reddit's problems and why it's gone crazy. The moderation of /r/politics /r/new and other massive/default subreddits combined with how the admins now step in on random communities to impose whatever moral view they happen to have that week has effectually caused the site to diverge hilariously far from reality. If anything Reddit is an example of how more moderation can make a community more extreme rather then less.

kerpotgh 4y ago

Because freedom is moderation. A place without moderation turns into a spam, gore, cp, racist, sexist shithole where no discourse happens. You may be nostalgic for usenets groups but that was a different time when a very small slice of society used those.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Perhaps the problem was bringing all of society online.
- TheHappyOddish 4y ago
  100% this. It's too big now, and we need an alt net which is too technical and difficult for normal people, like in the 90s.