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The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. The co

The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps. What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money. With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in. There needs to be new alliances between volunteer-platform-creators and volunteer-content-creators

4dregress 3y ago
I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a lot of real life friends from the forums I frequented. Oh the good old days :(
- yellowapple 3y ago
  That's the thing I'm looking forward to with the evolution of the "Fediverse" and other efforts toward federation/decentralization. The problem with traditional forums was that they were all little silos disconnected from one another; now those forums can talk to each other via ActivityPub or what have you, offering a nicer balance between "isolated but tight-knit community" v. "expansive but highly-impersonal masses".
  - rtpg 3y ago
    I don't really think that "every community can interact with each other" is a pure benefit. This is exactly the sort of stuff that leads to "everything being about everything", along with general loud people occupying every space. I still am very happy about "fediverse" stuff because it enables a simple-ish protocol and working mechanisms for various communities to interact. But I really think that, for example, mastodon.social is a net negative to fediverse stuff except for pure "get people to adopt" reasons.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Are there traditional forums/bulletin boards with Fediverse interop? The Fediverse platforms I'm aware of seem to all be focusing on cloning the existing UX of big walled-garden sites, which seems like a dubious approach. We know that forums/BB's can work quite well, so why not bring that UX back with "federation" (i.e. interacting with outside users and service instances) as a pure added feature?
    - basch 3y ago
      Between chat and branching threads, is it really worth going back to linear pagination?
      - Mordisquitos 3y ago
        I would argue that a chronologically linear thread with no up- or down-voting can provide a level of focused and in-depth conversation and on-topic debate that is simply not possible with branching threads nor instant chats.
      - cykros 3y ago
        It depends on the use case. Flat forums are vastly superior when it's about having a discussion (singular) rather than a bunch of splintered bits of information being shared. It's worth remembering that Usenet had threading -- it's nothing new.
    - l72 3y ago
      There is a phpBB front end to lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
  - cykros 3y ago
    I still wonder if we're just reinventing the wheel when NNTP and FIDONet both solved this issue of connecting the disparate message bases nearly half a century ago. I get building out to include more features, but it really feels like a lot of what's already been accomplished is just going unused.
  - Seattle3503 3y ago
    Why is everyone proposing a fediverse style alternative over a Wikipedia style non-profit with governance? That way most users dont need to care about federation.
    - yellowapple 3y ago
      They ain't mutually exclusive.
- skilled 3y ago
  I have been thinking about this too over the last couple of days. What would it take to replace Reddit? In my opinion, the UI of social media has been deliberately designed to be a dopamine waterfall that discourages people to think or invest themselves in any one community. If you analyzed the top 1000 links on Reddit r/all at any given time, without checking it myself, I think you'd find that 950 of those links are memes, funny pictures, lousy opinions or some kind of a drama going on. And back-end is a non-issue either. A phpBB forum hosted on a DigitalOcean $6 VPS can comfortably handle 100,000 community members. But perhaps the bigger issue is that people don't even want to participate in an actual community/forum, because for example - there are no downvote/upvote buttons in phpBB. There's also no instant image preview (gratification), and you actually have to click on a new thread to read it. So, yes, cesspit is a good word for it. But more than that its people having become so comfortable with meaningless browsing, for many of them - Reddit being gone for a few days means they will browse more TikTok or whatever else people mindlessly scroll through.
  - taopai 3y ago
    I am really interested in this topic: hosting and managing forums. I don't want this technology and the kind of interaction between users to totally die so I want to learn to be semi-competent in it. Doing archaeology through old forums it's like treasure hunting, you find awesome posts and comments. Anyone knows any forum about Forums? Or, better, about it's technical aspects? Or any blog, book, about forums? I would really appreciate any reference. I ask here because is the only community where I had found high quality blogs and off grid communities. This summer I'll try to build and maintain one because I know a small community of max 2000 people who I know will be engaged in a positive and constructive interaction. I don't want to monetize anything, I think it would be very valuable for people. Maybe I am overconfident but at least I have to try. I think building a restful API is a better approach to detach it from UI, and also include latex syntax on the front end. Also, do you know any forum like HN but being a real forum, with that I mean, that threads don't have a finite life? I hope this is not off topic.
    - samsquire 3y ago
      Thanks for your comment. There is a community of people who administer web forums called "The Admin Zone" https://www.theadminzone.com/ https://www.theadminzone.com/ You can probably find web forums to join based on the posters there. There's all sorts of advice on that forum to do with rules, server administration and guides.
- movedx 3y ago
  I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which is kind of funny because they still exist - not sure why I don't use them more?
  - b3orn 3y ago
    Classic forums aren't connected with each other, you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in, sometimes just to look at the content. On Reddit (or StackExchange) you can have one account to access "forums" for almost everything, call it low friction if you want.
    - johannes1234321 3y ago
      There is some benefit in sharing the user account, however there are reasons for using different identities on different forums.
    - reaperducer 3y ago
      you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in That was true about ten years ago. Most forums that keep their software up to date support logging in with a number of SSO systems.
      - didntcheck 3y ago
        Do they commonly allow arbitrary OpenID hosts? There was a brief golden period around I think 2014 where I'd see that logo on sites, but now they all seem to implement it behind the scenes, yet whitelist it to only Google, Facebook, and Apple. None of whom I would like to use to authenticate with most forums
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    Discord is more featureful than IRC, and prettier than IRC clients, but there are no local archives or logging, and its searching capabilities are atrocious in comparison to having local logs searchable with ordinary text-processing tools. Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing. Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.
- azangru 3y ago
  > it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums What's stopping anyone today to have a community around a forum? phpBB still exists...
  - xigoi 3y ago
    The network effect. Everyone is on Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, so nobody will visit the forum.
    - azangru 3y ago
      But then, how can one argue for a git reset hard, if it seems that people are willingly preferring places where everyone is over the places where only someone is?
    - aksss 3y ago
      Some forums just got better, IMHO, just from maybe having richer contributions and distilled but still healthy communities with good moderation. Fewer drive-bys, less low quality content. I mean, I consider HN to be more forum than social media and a similar effect can be seen here - kind of a refuge due to relative obscurity and good moderation. That exists in other interest domains as well, with perhaps even more value from smaller and more focused participants.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    The friction and the money perhaps. I found the story of Hive (the social network) fascinating in that it was basically that idea of someone jumping in, learning the ropes, building a platform. And getting crushed under how much knowledge and effort, ultimately money, is needed to run a decent platform. Their team was truely incompetent, but looking under the surface they were really a group of a few amateurs trying to do something, and it's only after the backlash that they realized a whole team of well experienced engineers is needed for anything touching user info. I'd imagine trying to run a raw phpBB on the web today would be in the same vein ?
    - 3y ago
- dagw 3y ago
  On the one hand I feel exactly like you do, on the other hand I observe that my teenage daughter is making real friends on discord and game servers, just like I did on usenet and forums. So maybe it's you/me getting older rather than (just) the internet changing. Oh the good old days :( As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.
  - t0bia_s 3y ago
    They make friends because of product they sell and gather around. It's different.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    The trajectory of discord might be: under-charge and bring in users to supply content; increase charge when users now depend on that content; fail & monetize their data and their attention; succeed & implode because users dont want their attention/data monetized. This would be less of an issue if users had clear legal rights (perhaps IP rights) to their own data. I'd have fewer problems with "commercial platforms" if they couldn't rent-seek on free labour, ie., if the created content could be easily "replatformed". Perhaps that's the next phase of the privacy war: the right to replatform.
    - Kiro 3y ago
      What's the free labour on Discord?
      - mjburgess 3y ago
        Every time you type you create value for the platform. Moderators, users, etc. are people volunteering for each other -- not for discord. Discord is just a public park. At some point probably they'll go full social-media-megacorp and start to believe they own all groups using the public park; all their leaflets, and posters, and boardgames. All their time and effort. This is really the heart of the reddit blackout. Who own's what makes reddit valuable? On any sane sense digital ownership rights: it's users. Reddit inc provides well-trimmed grass and a nice pond (ie., source code and servers).
- rurban 3y ago
  sorry, but forums killed the internet. forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins. oh, the good old days.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    "forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins." Spam keeps getting blamed for the death of Usenet, but spam filters worked fine then. No, the real death of Usenet was the excitement over the web, and the ability of web forums to have integrated images, nice custom layouts per forum, links tightly integrated in to the browser platform, and not needing to install/configure/understand a Usenet client. Even just the ease of registering and logging in to a web forum compared to installing, configuring, and learning how to use a Usenet client would win over most users. Social media cites like Reddit do one better by requiring just a single login to get access to thousands of forums.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      What killed USENET was the lack of moderation. And also spam. Way in the early ages when nearly everyone was a professional or some sort of tech enthusiast, things were nice and pleasant. But eventually the unwashed masses flooded in, and USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot. Gradually the best contributors decided they had better things to do, and wandered off elsewhere. Moderation and spam filtering also sucked. Yeah, you could have kill files, but that had to be done by everyone independently. It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in.
      - pmoriarty 3y ago
        "USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot." We just used kill files, which let you ignore users and even let you filter through complex pattern matching. Web forums and social media still don't let you do the latter, despite such capability being available in Usenet news readers several decades ago. "It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in." Flame wars were a distraction, but they still happen in web forums and on social media, and depending on the community they may even be tolerated. I can't count the number of times irrelevant tangents dominated the top voted comment threads on HN or on Reddit, and on Twitter the trolls have obviously been let back in. Reddit too used to be a safe space for them for most of its existence.
- Xelbair 3y ago
  Honestly looking for information about hobbies is horrible nowadays. It's all first and foremost subreddit, which has mostly memes and no info except maybe a sticky, THEN you find a discord link there, and finally all the knowledge is organized in google docs spreadsheet, that's in some random pinned post in some weirdly named channel. I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. and now you need a multiple accounts to even find that information.
  - bibabaloo 3y ago
    What sort of hobbies are you talking about specifically? Not to doubt you, but I must have very different hobbies because I've never experienced something like this
    - dopidopHN 3y ago
      Hackaton in my city, geocaching, fucking origami. Hiking. I do miss phpBB forum with the curated read only section, the lore of important post that all the forum has read and so on
    - jerojero 3y ago
      This is a big problem in the origami community. The forums have died and have been replaced with discord, it's become pretty inaccessible so I imagine it's the same for other niche hobbies.
    - meetingthrower 3y ago
      Have you ever used an old school forum? Threaded posts, which can be pinned. So much easier to navigate than the stream of discord comments. I admit, I am 50 now so maybe I'm just old and don't understand discord...
      - baud147258 3y ago
        you can sorta do that with discord, with either pinned messages in threads or just a thread that contains the intro posts and that's closed for further comments, so you can easily find what you look for
- cykros 3y ago
  I've been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about the decline of independent forums. And I think there's a lot to be said about the fundamental change in the legal environment today compared to the early 2000s. Back then, sure, there was moderation, but there was also plenty of content that, while not egregious, by today's standard would certainly keep a small independent forum sysop up at night. Linking to pirated content, for instance, used to be generally a non-issue, and even if someone cared, the likelihood they were going to find it and bother targeting your forum was pretty slim. These days, that is very much not the case, with bots happy to scour the Internet for a rising number of possible content that could get your server targeted and pressured into oblivion by a pack of rabid attack lawyers. I'm sort of hoping to see a move to the use of darknet services to alleviate some of that, perhaps with relays like tor2web or similar options for i2p that can make them clearnet accessible without the dread associated with running a server with user created content exposed to lawyers. That, or simple ephemerality of content (though say, IRC or similar protocols) seems to be the way around the reality of the legal environment brought on by web 2.0 (and beyond).
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    Are links to pirated content illegal, or just down ranked in Google?
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Forums declined because by 2010, they were competing against professionally maintained messageboards on social networks. Behind almost every PhpBB/vBulletin messageboard of yore is a regular non-technical person who had to pay for a server, learn enough about databases, user authentication and backups to get started, and build and moderate a community. Who was going to pick up that torch when you can start a subreddit or Discord or Telegram group with a couple of clicks.
telltruth 3y ago
The data created by people should be owned by people. They should have right to decide if it can be distributed free or with charge through APIs, archrivals etc. I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.
- azangru 3y ago
  > I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create. Suppose you are hosting a wordpress blog with a comments section. Some people leave occasional comments in your blog — god knows why. Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish? Suppose now you are hosting a bulletin board, where more people are posting their messages. Don't you own all that? After all, the texts are stored on your server. Can't you delete the board at any point, or run data analysis on the posts, or even send targeted messages to your users, etc.? Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores?
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    > Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it. > Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish? That you can > Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores? Copyright law always applies, and the post are always the property of their writer. The site has a license to use them in a limited fashion. To try to do otherwise is likely a terrible idea. I'd argue while it's fuzzy, there's a distinction between people coming to your blog because it's your blog and leaving a "This!" or a question, and people building their own community on your infrastructure. Eg, you probably don't want to grant that AWS owns your entire website just because it's hosted on it, right? The main thing about your website is your work, AWS is merely the replaceable infrastructure to run it.
goplayoutside 3y ago
+1. However, I hope the reddits and twitters of the world continue to exist, perhaps in diminished form, if for no other reason than to provide a place for users who prefer the "outrage porn," shallow memes, flame wars, etc, so that they're less likely to intrude on the smaller, healthier communities that are forming elsewhere.
- qup 3y ago
  Do you have any idea if that is what will happen? I'm not convinced.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
slg 3y ago
>The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. And the next 10 years will remove the volunteers entirely. AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations. That seems inevitable at this point. We have already been on that path for a while with the spread of algorithmic feeds. First we removed the humans from the recommendations and editorial decisions. The next step is to remove them from the creation. Maybe if we are lucky we will get some of those "corresponding Wikipedias" too. Reddit seems to have made their choice that they don't value communities, creators, volunteers, or anything like that. They just want to serve up the lowest common denominator content to show you between ads. Volunteers complaining is just unnecessary "noise". AI won't complain.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  But in the end, it is about users who pay directly or indirectly (ads). And they won't pay, if the content is not interesting. So if AI creates interesting content and the users are happy to consume that, well fine for them. But I think most people want actually more. Or at least, enough people want genuine human interactions, so AI taking over of the corporate "social media" will just create social networks that do care about that human touch.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  All hail the Mega Mind. We must awaken the Mega Mind and unleash prosperity for all humanity. Praise the Mega Mind. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36260037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36260037
- eloisant 3y ago
  AI will replace mods, like they do on most social media already (Twitter, FB, etc.) Reddit is still relying on volunteers human mods but I don't see Reddit needed them for long.
- dingaling 3y ago
  > AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations. AI can't create anything without a corpus of human-created online content from which to learn. And if humans aren't posting the results of their research in archives, or their photos, or anything else created through offline travails then AI won't create anything new.
lmm 3y ago
As far as I can see Wikipedia has even worse relations with its users/contributors than twitter/reddit/facebook/et al..
- jaimex2 3y ago
  how so? genuine question, it looks rosy from the outside.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    There is certainly lots of drama going on, but I am unaware of anything remotely dramatic or open fight/strike like is happening on reddit between users and company (non profit foundation).
    - mgdlbp 3y ago
      Eh, do Superprotect and Framgate count? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_revolt#Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_revolt#Wikipedia Reddit section needs an update. The page was created following Reddit's 'AMAgeddon', too. 'APIcalypse' this time?
      - hutzlibu 3y ago
        They count, but I don't think it is the same level as with reddit here and now. The difference is likely the money involved. Wikipedias mission is to share knowledge, a goal shared by most of its participants and there are of course disagreements on the type of knowledge. Redit the company wants to make money selling ads, reaching the highest "engagement" - which is not what the user wants. So I also think, a non profit would be the best model also for reddit.
narrator 3y ago
What's going on now is the dekulakization of the internet. Oh you are a prosperous farmer/reddit moderator who thought you owned something, well here we are going to take it from you and put it under government/corporate ownership and sell all your grain/userbase off to pay for imports/ next quarters earnings and starve you to death/flood you with awful ads and propaganda. It's going on with real farmers in the Netherlands and in a similar fashion with other assets people thought they owned just about everywhere as we convert to the own nothing economy.
- mypastself 3y ago
  No one was ever deceived with promises of monetary compensation for their moderation work. Moreover, moderators in particular are a very small subset of the site's total users, so they have even less claim on data ownership. Comparing voluntary message board moderators with farmers starving to death sounds like satire.
- falloutx 3y ago
  Its not just for farmers in the Netherlands, it happening to everyone who thinks they own anything. In some countries we are back to government telling what we can grow or not grow on our own fields.
pmoriarty 3y ago
"With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in." This is a fantasy. All the money (and thus features and users) has been flowing in to ever more consolidated, corporate-controlled platforms for decades. There's no serious alternative, as all the decentralized platforms lack the network effects of the big players. If anything, the future is going to be ever more centralized and consolidated. The old, wild and free internet is gone for good.
- scheeseman486 3y ago
  Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed. But IRC persists. I still visit and post in a few web forums. Email is still a thing. The modern internet is a mess but open platforms aren't gone, if anything what's become more apparent is that centralized and consolidated platforms inevitably collapse on themselves.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    "Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed." For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place. Meta squandered billions in the dead-in-the-water metaverse. Discord is constantly growing and gaining new users. This is far from a corporate apocalypse, and where are the serious alternatives? The vast majority of ordinary people are certainly not using them.
    - scheeseman486 3y ago
      "For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place." Like Myspace did to Geocities. Like Facebook did to Myspace. Like TikTok did to Facebook. It's been a churn of platforms scaling too large, becoming too expensive to run, subsequently attempting to monetize users in a way that causes a flee that collapses the platform, with everyone running to the new hot thing thats burning through investor cash to promote unchecked growth. Sunrise sunset.
shusaku 3y ago
I keep thinking back to the Arab Spring. Everyone thought Twitter could bring down dictators. Now users can’t even effectively pressure management. It should be easy for users to take over a platform and dictate terms, but the instant dopamine of infinite scroll can’t be resisted.
- ornornor 3y ago
  This is true of every system we live in and yet it very rarely happen because most people just want to get on with their lives and not think about it, or don’t have the means to pressure (jobs where you’re just a cog making barely enough to survive and can’t afford to lose any of the income for instance)
- suddenclarity 3y ago
  > Now users can’t even effectively pressure management. Is that what's happening though? My impression is that it's a vocal minority and powermods that made the decision about blackout. Similar to a lot of political topics in real life. I was never asked about this. There's a Twitch channel now brigading every sub that raises the question if they should continue or not. Look at the vocal people in /r/soccer and most have never posted in the sub before.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    The romanticism around "majority revolt" is flawed, almost every change, every revolt, every major action was not started, supported, or even desired by the "majority". Majority rule is actually a very flawed and dangerous premise
  - chrisnight 3y ago
    Many subs did public polls to gauge their community’s opinion about what action they should take regarding the blackout. Alongside this, considering how hard it is to get people to agree on what they need to take action against, I’d hardly think that over 8000 subreddits would go dark just because they have “powermods” that take the subreddit dark without regard for the community’s opinion (whether that be an poll before announcing, or backlash after announcing). People would’ve (and have in some subs), complained about the blackout if it really was a majority opinion that they shouldn’t participate. How downvoted are the blackout announcement posts? What are the comments on them (albeit perhaps the mods delete negative comments)? Are there any highly upvoted threads against it? I’d agree it’s a minority that want the blackout if we also accept the premise that the majority of people just don’t care. And in that case, if no one (or very few, since it’s the internet) is complaining, the mods should indeed do what they feel is right and wanted by many to help their circumstance.
hcks 3y ago
Reddit users and mods are not ´volunteers’. They’re consumers of a service. If anything the ‘disguise of free money’ was only convincing consumers that internet platforms were a right and free to operate. Now the balance is shifting in the opposite way, operational profit.
- rchaud 3y ago
  It's a messageboard. The only people who need to think of users as "consumers" are Reddit execs hoping somebody will buy "reddit gold" or an NFT avatar. The mere fact that these e-trinkets are considered "products" should be indicative of how un-monetizable public messageboards are. Nobody ever said internet platforms were free to operate. That's what the ads are for. Reddit is locking the doors because they had 10 years to build a competent ad product and failed.
grishka 3y ago
> What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. That's what the fediverse is all about.
klik99 3y ago
Ad networks fudged the numbers for many years, free just isn't as viable as thought. I don't mind paying - either for a service or for server costs of hosting my own instance or whatever - and I certainly don't mind paying reddit specifically. However the price point, putting it on developers and not regular users so they thought users wouldn't be bothered (I guess they assumed apps like Apollo would pass it on to their users and appear to be the bad guy? It's the only way I can make any sense of how they did it) is pretty shitty. But the worst part is killing off all these tools that mods require - that second order effect will likely kill Reddit. The only other time I could see a company make a decision that would so clearly kill a product was the facebook algorithmic feed, though admittedly that did take 10 years.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  Reddit was much better 10 years ago when it was much less moderated. If anything I would expect nerfing the mods to improve things.
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    They keep saying they are saving us from the hordes , is that a lie ?
rakoo 3y ago
I can't agree more with you, unfortunately there's a real C check of our position and our history to do, us being technical people: - we must stop assuming everyone is equal. Access to a computer, access to a smartphone, access to a stable internet connection, capability to read and use a mouse or a keyboard; our requirements are way too high to build an inclusive community. Not everyone is a white rich american english-speaking male - we must stop assuming everyone is financially, socially, culturally at ease, and that everything is "just" a matter of individual will. The market always favors those who have more, in the pusuit of even more, and those who weren't so lucky must be supported. Stop giving tools to companies. Stop using non-copyleft licenses. They're the number one reason Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and countless others could be where they are today: leveraging the common goods without giving back at least as much. By design, a company maximizes the gap between what it takes and what it gives. A simple analysis would defend the end of capitalism and the commons construction through a shared decision process, but it's still premature for HN
falloutx 3y ago
I had really high hopes for the internet, that it will bring knowledge and wisdom to every corner of the world, but instead it just decreased our attention span, made us more angry and now even the fun things are going to be ruined because some old VC demands their money back. Internet built on VC money is inherently unsustainable and I would never ever join a website that can't demonstrate its sustainability.
phpisthebest 3y ago
it is amusing that people think Wikipedia is not a corporation, and is not subject to the same problems as reddit. It is well documented that that Wikimedia CORPORATION that controls wikipedia has all kinds of the same problems, with the directors and management of that corporation at odds often with the users and the "mods" of wikipedia. That is with out getting into the debate over the overt ideological capture of both the wiki and the corporation No I dont think the wikipedia model is the one we should look at as an example
samsquire 3y ago
I feel one approach to a high quality internet, we can contact people we like the messages or posts of and invite them to contribute somewhere that is invite only to contribute. That way we can curate high quality content.
xnx 3y ago
Largely agree, but I don't understand the connection to interest rates.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Suppose you're reddit. You're now required to profit. Money now ain't free. What do you do? Exactly what all those volunteer labourers do not want you to do. What now? They're the cash cow. The disalignment of interests between Corp and (free) Labour was not an issue whilst Corp could burn cash.
mx20 3y ago
Before that happens they will try to lobby governments to "repair" their monopolies. EU is already trying hard to put major road blocks on open source AI, which is probably the biggest threat to most tech mega corps.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
Volunteer doesn't equal volunteer though. Some are in it for the topic, some are in it for their own persona. Reddit was more attractive for some people because it wasn't as much focused on people and more around topics. That changed a bit and you cannot really draw a line too hard, but it is still the case to a large degree. I doubt wikipedians are big on personalities either, although that demographic changed a lot too. It did have to change though because business was suddenly much more interested as well.
rsync 3y ago
"What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money." I don't think this is correct. In the excellent book _The Master Switch_, Tim Wu[1] describes: "... a long "cycle" whereby open information systems become consolidated and closed over time, reopening only after disruptive innovation." ... and my reading of his book suggests to me that the "natural point", as you say, is consolidation and closure. Youtube is always becoming TV. My own opinion is that the media is the message and that certain communications media - namely, pure text - can't "become TV". The real difference between reddit and HN is that you can't display a picture - of any kind - on HN. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch
- mjburgess 3y ago
  This is a disanalogus analysis, because the value of these platforms it the labour of their volunteers --- they *are* the commons. "Natural power" includes the collective action of these volunteers -- seen here, eg., with reddit. My point is that the drive to profit from this labour will make the platforms extremely sensitive to their demands -- in ways that do not occur when there's no need to profit. You can say "let them eat cake" if you have your own cake supplier. When the cake runs out, all those labourers turn out to be required. I think these are unique dynamics -- much closer to the fall of serfdom than the development of TV networks

4dregress 3y ago

I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a lot of real life friends from the forums I frequented. Oh the good old days :(

yellowapple 3y ago
That's the thing I'm looking forward to with the evolution of the "Fediverse" and other efforts toward federation/decentralization. The problem with traditional forums was that they were all little silos disconnected from one another; now those forums can talk to each other via ActivityPub or what have you, offering a nicer balance between "isolated but tight-knit community" v. "expansive but highly-impersonal masses".
- rtpg 3y ago
  I don't really think that "every community can interact with each other" is a pure benefit. This is exactly the sort of stuff that leads to "everything being about everything", along with general loud people occupying every space. I still am very happy about "fediverse" stuff because it enables a simple-ish protocol and working mechanisms for various communities to interact. But I really think that, for example, mastodon.social is a net negative to fediverse stuff except for pure "get people to adopt" reasons.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Are there traditional forums/bulletin boards with Fediverse interop? The Fediverse platforms I'm aware of seem to all be focusing on cloning the existing UX of big walled-garden sites, which seems like a dubious approach. We know that forums/BB's can work quite well, so why not bring that UX back with "federation" (i.e. interacting with outside users and service instances) as a pure added feature?
  - basch 3y ago
    Between chat and branching threads, is it really worth going back to linear pagination?
    - Mordisquitos 3y ago
      I would argue that a chronologically linear thread with no up- or down-voting can provide a level of focused and in-depth conversation and on-topic debate that is simply not possible with branching threads nor instant chats.
    - cykros 3y ago
      It depends on the use case. Flat forums are vastly superior when it's about having a discussion (singular) rather than a bunch of splintered bits of information being shared. It's worth remembering that Usenet had threading -- it's nothing new.
  - l72 3y ago
    There is a phpBB front end to lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
- cykros 3y ago
  I still wonder if we're just reinventing the wheel when NNTP and FIDONet both solved this issue of connecting the disparate message bases nearly half a century ago. I get building out to include more features, but it really feels like a lot of what's already been accomplished is just going unused.
- Seattle3503 3y ago
  Why is everyone proposing a fediverse style alternative over a Wikipedia style non-profit with governance? That way most users dont need to care about federation.
  - yellowapple 3y ago
    They ain't mutually exclusive.
skilled 3y ago
I have been thinking about this too over the last couple of days. What would it take to replace Reddit? In my opinion, the UI of social media has been deliberately designed to be a dopamine waterfall that discourages people to think or invest themselves in any one community. If you analyzed the top 1000 links on Reddit r/all at any given time, without checking it myself, I think you'd find that 950 of those links are memes, funny pictures, lousy opinions or some kind of a drama going on. And back-end is a non-issue either. A phpBB forum hosted on a DigitalOcean $6 VPS can comfortably handle 100,000 community members. But perhaps the bigger issue is that people don't even want to participate in an actual community/forum, because for example - there are no downvote/upvote buttons in phpBB. There's also no instant image preview (gratification), and you actually have to click on a new thread to read it. So, yes, cesspit is a good word for it. But more than that its people having become so comfortable with meaningless browsing, for many of them - Reddit being gone for a few days means they will browse more TikTok or whatever else people mindlessly scroll through.
- taopai 3y ago
  I am really interested in this topic: hosting and managing forums. I don't want this technology and the kind of interaction between users to totally die so I want to learn to be semi-competent in it. Doing archaeology through old forums it's like treasure hunting, you find awesome posts and comments. Anyone knows any forum about Forums? Or, better, about it's technical aspects? Or any blog, book, about forums? I would really appreciate any reference. I ask here because is the only community where I had found high quality blogs and off grid communities. This summer I'll try to build and maintain one because I know a small community of max 2000 people who I know will be engaged in a positive and constructive interaction. I don't want to monetize anything, I think it would be very valuable for people. Maybe I am overconfident but at least I have to try. I think building a restful API is a better approach to detach it from UI, and also include latex syntax on the front end. Also, do you know any forum like HN but being a real forum, with that I mean, that threads don't have a finite life? I hope this is not off topic.
  - samsquire 3y ago
    Thanks for your comment. There is a community of people who administer web forums called "The Admin Zone" https://www.theadminzone.com/ https://www.theadminzone.com/ You can probably find web forums to join based on the posters there. There's all sorts of advice on that forum to do with rules, server administration and guides.
movedx 3y ago
I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which is kind of funny because they still exist - not sure why I don't use them more?
- b3orn 3y ago
  Classic forums aren't connected with each other, you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in, sometimes just to look at the content. On Reddit (or StackExchange) you can have one account to access "forums" for almost everything, call it low friction if you want.
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    There is some benefit in sharing the user account, however there are reasons for using different identities on different forums.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in That was true about ten years ago. Most forums that keep their software up to date support logging in with a number of SSO systems.
    - didntcheck 3y ago
      Do they commonly allow arbitrary OpenID hosts? There was a brief golden period around I think 2014 where I'd see that logo on sites, but now they all seem to implement it behind the scenes, yet whitelist it to only Google, Facebook, and Apple. None of whom I would like to use to authenticate with most forums
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  Discord is more featureful than IRC, and prettier than IRC clients, but there are no local archives or logging, and its searching capabilities are atrocious in comparison to having local logs searchable with ordinary text-processing tools. Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing. Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.
azangru 3y ago
> it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums What's stopping anyone today to have a community around a forum? phpBB still exists...
- xigoi 3y ago
  The network effect. Everyone is on Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, so nobody will visit the forum.
  - azangru 3y ago
    But then, how can one argue for a git reset hard, if it seems that people are willingly preferring places where everyone is over the places where only someone is?
  - aksss 3y ago
    Some forums just got better, IMHO, just from maybe having richer contributions and distilled but still healthy communities with good moderation. Fewer drive-bys, less low quality content. I mean, I consider HN to be more forum than social media and a similar effect can be seen here - kind of a refuge due to relative obscurity and good moderation. That exists in other interest domains as well, with perhaps even more value from smaller and more focused participants.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  The friction and the money perhaps. I found the story of Hive (the social network) fascinating in that it was basically that idea of someone jumping in, learning the ropes, building a platform. And getting crushed under how much knowledge and effort, ultimately money, is needed to run a decent platform. Their team was truely incompetent, but looking under the surface they were really a group of a few amateurs trying to do something, and it's only after the backlash that they realized a whole team of well experienced engineers is needed for anything touching user info. I'd imagine trying to run a raw phpBB on the web today would be in the same vein ?
  - 3y ago
dagw 3y ago
On the one hand I feel exactly like you do, on the other hand I observe that my teenage daughter is making real friends on discord and game servers, just like I did on usenet and forums. So maybe it's you/me getting older rather than (just) the internet changing. Oh the good old days :( As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  They make friends because of product they sell and gather around. It's different.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  The trajectory of discord might be: under-charge and bring in users to supply content; increase charge when users now depend on that content; fail & monetize their data and their attention; succeed & implode because users dont want their attention/data monetized. This would be less of an issue if users had clear legal rights (perhaps IP rights) to their own data. I'd have fewer problems with "commercial platforms" if they couldn't rent-seek on free labour, ie., if the created content could be easily "replatformed". Perhaps that's the next phase of the privacy war: the right to replatform.
  - Kiro 3y ago
    What's the free labour on Discord?
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      Every time you type you create value for the platform. Moderators, users, etc. are people volunteering for each other -- not for discord. Discord is just a public park. At some point probably they'll go full social-media-megacorp and start to believe they own all groups using the public park; all their leaflets, and posters, and boardgames. All their time and effort. This is really the heart of the reddit blackout. Who own's what makes reddit valuable? On any sane sense digital ownership rights: it's users. Reddit inc provides well-trimmed grass and a nice pond (ie., source code and servers).
rurban 3y ago
sorry, but forums killed the internet. forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins. oh, the good old days.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  "forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins." Spam keeps getting blamed for the death of Usenet, but spam filters worked fine then. No, the real death of Usenet was the excitement over the web, and the ability of web forums to have integrated images, nice custom layouts per forum, links tightly integrated in to the browser platform, and not needing to install/configure/understand a Usenet client. Even just the ease of registering and logging in to a web forum compared to installing, configuring, and learning how to use a Usenet client would win over most users. Social media cites like Reddit do one better by requiring just a single login to get access to thousands of forums.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    What killed USENET was the lack of moderation. And also spam. Way in the early ages when nearly everyone was a professional or some sort of tech enthusiast, things were nice and pleasant. But eventually the unwashed masses flooded in, and USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot. Gradually the best contributors decided they had better things to do, and wandered off elsewhere. Moderation and spam filtering also sucked. Yeah, you could have kill files, but that had to be done by everyone independently. It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
      "USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot." We just used kill files, which let you ignore users and even let you filter through complex pattern matching. Web forums and social media still don't let you do the latter, despite such capability being available in Usenet news readers several decades ago. "It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in." Flame wars were a distraction, but they still happen in web forums and on social media, and depending on the community they may even be tolerated. I can't count the number of times irrelevant tangents dominated the top voted comment threads on HN or on Reddit, and on Twitter the trolls have obviously been let back in. Reddit too used to be a safe space for them for most of its existence.
Xelbair 3y ago
Honestly looking for information about hobbies is horrible nowadays. It's all first and foremost subreddit, which has mostly memes and no info except maybe a sticky, THEN you find a discord link there, and finally all the knowledge is organized in google docs spreadsheet, that's in some random pinned post in some weirdly named channel. I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. and now you need a multiple accounts to even find that information.
- bibabaloo 3y ago
  What sort of hobbies are you talking about specifically? Not to doubt you, but I must have very different hobbies because I've never experienced something like this
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    Hackaton in my city, geocaching, fucking origami. Hiking. I do miss phpBB forum with the curated read only section, the lore of important post that all the forum has read and so on
  - jerojero 3y ago
    This is a big problem in the origami community. The forums have died and have been replaced with discord, it's become pretty inaccessible so I imagine it's the same for other niche hobbies.
  - meetingthrower 3y ago
    Have you ever used an old school forum? Threaded posts, which can be pinned. So much easier to navigate than the stream of discord comments. I admit, I am 50 now so maybe I'm just old and don't understand discord...
    - baud147258 3y ago
      you can sorta do that with discord, with either pinned messages in threads or just a thread that contains the intro posts and that's closed for further comments, so you can easily find what you look for
cykros 3y ago
I've been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about the decline of independent forums. And I think there's a lot to be said about the fundamental change in the legal environment today compared to the early 2000s. Back then, sure, there was moderation, but there was also plenty of content that, while not egregious, by today's standard would certainly keep a small independent forum sysop up at night. Linking to pirated content, for instance, used to be generally a non-issue, and even if someone cared, the likelihood they were going to find it and bother targeting your forum was pretty slim. These days, that is very much not the case, with bots happy to scour the Internet for a rising number of possible content that could get your server targeted and pressured into oblivion by a pack of rabid attack lawyers. I'm sort of hoping to see a move to the use of darknet services to alleviate some of that, perhaps with relays like tor2web or similar options for i2p that can make them clearnet accessible without the dread associated with running a server with user created content exposed to lawyers. That, or simple ephemerality of content (though say, IRC or similar protocols) seems to be the way around the reality of the legal environment brought on by web 2.0 (and beyond).
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Are links to pirated content illegal, or just down ranked in Google?
- rchaud 3y ago
  Forums declined because by 2010, they were competing against professionally maintained messageboards on social networks. Behind almost every PhpBB/vBulletin messageboard of yore is a regular non-technical person who had to pay for a server, learn enough about databases, user authentication and backups to get started, and build and moderate a community. Who was going to pick up that torch when you can start a subreddit or Discord or Telegram group with a couple of clicks.

telltruth 3y ago

The data created by people should be owned by people. They should have right to decide if it can be distributed free or with charge through APIs, archrivals etc. I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.

azangru 3y ago
> I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create. Suppose you are hosting a wordpress blog with a comments section. Some people leave occasional comments in your blog — god knows why. Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish? Suppose now you are hosting a bulletin board, where more people are posting their messages. Don't you own all that? After all, the texts are stored on your server. Can't you delete the board at any point, or run data analysis on the posts, or even send targeted messages to your users, etc.? Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores?
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it. > Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish? That you can > Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores? Copyright law always applies, and the post are always the property of their writer. The site has a license to use them in a limited fashion. To try to do otherwise is likely a terrible idea. I'd argue while it's fuzzy, there's a distinction between people coming to your blog because it's your blog and leaving a "This!" or a question, and people building their own community on your infrastructure. Eg, you probably don't want to grant that AWS owns your entire website just because it's hosted on it, right? The main thing about your website is your work, AWS is merely the replaceable infrastructure to run it.

goplayoutside 3y ago

+1. However, I hope the reddits and twitters of the world continue to exist, perhaps in diminished form, if for no other reason than to provide a place for users who prefer the "outrage porn," shallow memes, flame wars, etc, so that they're less likely to intrude on the smaller, healthier communities that are forming elsewhere.

qup 3y ago
Do you have any idea if that is what will happen? I'm not convinced.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

slg 3y ago

>The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. And the next 10 years will remove the volunteers entirely. AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations. That seems inevitable at this point. We have already been on that path for a while with the spread of algorithmic feeds. First we removed the humans from the recommendations and editorial decisions. The next step is to remove them from the creation. Maybe if we are lucky we will get some of those "corresponding Wikipedias" too. Reddit seems to have made their choice that they don't value communities, creators, volunteers, or anything like that. They just want to serve up the lowest common denominator content to show you between ads. Volunteers complaining is just unnecessary "noise". AI won't complain.

hutzlibu 3y ago
But in the end, it is about users who pay directly or indirectly (ads). And they won't pay, if the content is not interesting. So if AI creates interesting content and the users are happy to consume that, well fine for them. But I think most people want actually more. Or at least, enough people want genuine human interactions, so AI taking over of the corporate "social media" will just create social networks that do care about that human touch.
KirillPanov 3y ago
All hail the Mega Mind. We must awaken the Mega Mind and unleash prosperity for all humanity. Praise the Mega Mind. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36260037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36260037
eloisant 3y ago
AI will replace mods, like they do on most social media already (Twitter, FB, etc.) Reddit is still relying on volunteers human mods but I don't see Reddit needed them for long.
dingaling 3y ago
> AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations. AI can't create anything without a corpus of human-created online content from which to learn. And if humans aren't posting the results of their research in archives, or their photos, or anything else created through offline travails then AI won't create anything new.

lmm 3y ago

As far as I can see Wikipedia has even worse relations with its users/contributors than twitter/reddit/facebook/et al..

jaimex2 3y ago
how so? genuine question, it looks rosy from the outside.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  There is certainly lots of drama going on, but I am unaware of anything remotely dramatic or open fight/strike like is happening on reddit between users and company (non profit foundation).
  - mgdlbp 3y ago
    Eh, do Superprotect and Framgate count? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_revolt#Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_revolt#Wikipedia Reddit section needs an update. The page was created following Reddit's 'AMAgeddon', too. 'APIcalypse' this time?
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      They count, but I don't think it is the same level as with reddit here and now. The difference is likely the money involved. Wikipedias mission is to share knowledge, a goal shared by most of its participants and there are of course disagreements on the type of knowledge. Redit the company wants to make money selling ads, reaching the highest "engagement" - which is not what the user wants. So I also think, a non profit would be the best model also for reddit.

narrator 3y ago

What's going on now is the dekulakization of the internet. Oh you are a prosperous farmer/reddit moderator who thought you owned something, well here we are going to take it from you and put it under government/corporate ownership and sell all your grain/userbase off to pay for imports/ next quarters earnings and starve you to death/flood you with awful ads and propaganda. It's going on with real farmers in the Netherlands and in a similar fashion with other assets people thought they owned just about everywhere as we convert to the own nothing economy.

mypastself 3y ago
No one was ever deceived with promises of monetary compensation for their moderation work. Moreover, moderators in particular are a very small subset of the site's total users, so they have even less claim on data ownership. Comparing voluntary message board moderators with farmers starving to death sounds like satire.
falloutx 3y ago
Its not just for farmers in the Netherlands, it happening to everyone who thinks they own anything. In some countries we are back to government telling what we can grow or not grow on our own fields.

pmoriarty 3y ago

"With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in." This is a fantasy. All the money (and thus features and users) has been flowing in to ever more consolidated, corporate-controlled platforms for decades. There's no serious alternative, as all the decentralized platforms lack the network effects of the big players. If anything, the future is going to be ever more centralized and consolidated. The old, wild and free internet is gone for good.

scheeseman486 3y ago
Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed. But IRC persists. I still visit and post in a few web forums. Email is still a thing. The modern internet is a mess but open platforms aren't gone, if anything what's become more apparent is that centralized and consolidated platforms inevitably collapse on themselves.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  "Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed." For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place. Meta squandered billions in the dead-in-the-water metaverse. Discord is constantly growing and gaining new users. This is far from a corporate apocalypse, and where are the serious alternatives? The vast majority of ordinary people are certainly not using them.
  - scheeseman486 3y ago
    "For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place." Like Myspace did to Geocities. Like Facebook did to Myspace. Like TikTok did to Facebook. It's been a churn of platforms scaling too large, becoming too expensive to run, subsequently attempting to monetize users in a way that causes a flee that collapses the platform, with everyone running to the new hot thing thats burning through investor cash to promote unchecked growth. Sunrise sunset.

shusaku 3y ago

I keep thinking back to the Arab Spring. Everyone thought Twitter could bring down dictators. Now users can’t even effectively pressure management. It should be easy for users to take over a platform and dictate terms, but the instant dopamine of infinite scroll can’t be resisted.

ornornor 3y ago
This is true of every system we live in and yet it very rarely happen because most people just want to get on with their lives and not think about it, or don’t have the means to pressure (jobs where you’re just a cog making barely enough to survive and can’t afford to lose any of the income for instance)
suddenclarity 3y ago
> Now users can’t even effectively pressure management. Is that what's happening though? My impression is that it's a vocal minority and powermods that made the decision about blackout. Similar to a lot of political topics in real life. I was never asked about this. There's a Twitch channel now brigading every sub that raises the question if they should continue or not. Look at the vocal people in /r/soccer and most have never posted in the sub before.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  The romanticism around "majority revolt" is flawed, almost every change, every revolt, every major action was not started, supported, or even desired by the "majority". Majority rule is actually a very flawed and dangerous premise
- chrisnight 3y ago
  Many subs did public polls to gauge their community’s opinion about what action they should take regarding the blackout. Alongside this, considering how hard it is to get people to agree on what they need to take action against, I’d hardly think that over 8000 subreddits would go dark just because they have “powermods” that take the subreddit dark without regard for the community’s opinion (whether that be an poll before announcing, or backlash after announcing). People would’ve (and have in some subs), complained about the blackout if it really was a majority opinion that they shouldn’t participate. How downvoted are the blackout announcement posts? What are the comments on them (albeit perhaps the mods delete negative comments)? Are there any highly upvoted threads against it? I’d agree it’s a minority that want the blackout if we also accept the premise that the majority of people just don’t care. And in that case, if no one (or very few, since it’s the internet) is complaining, the mods should indeed do what they feel is right and wanted by many to help their circumstance.

hcks 3y ago

Reddit users and mods are not ´volunteers’. They’re consumers of a service. If anything the ‘disguise of free money’ was only convincing consumers that internet platforms were a right and free to operate. Now the balance is shifting in the opposite way, operational profit.

rchaud 3y ago
It's a messageboard. The only people who need to think of users as "consumers" are Reddit execs hoping somebody will buy "reddit gold" or an NFT avatar. The mere fact that these e-trinkets are considered "products" should be indicative of how un-monetizable public messageboards are. Nobody ever said internet platforms were free to operate. That's what the ads are for. Reddit is locking the doors because they had 10 years to build a competent ad product and failed.

grishka 3y ago

> What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. That's what the fediverse is all about.

klik99 3y ago

Ad networks fudged the numbers for many years, free just isn't as viable as thought. I don't mind paying - either for a service or for server costs of hosting my own instance or whatever - and I certainly don't mind paying reddit specifically. However the price point, putting it on developers and not regular users so they thought users wouldn't be bothered (I guess they assumed apps like Apollo would pass it on to their users and appear to be the bad guy? It's the only way I can make any sense of how they did it) is pretty shitty. But the worst part is killing off all these tools that mods require - that second order effect will likely kill Reddit. The only other time I could see a company make a decision that would so clearly kill a product was the facebook algorithmic feed, though admittedly that did take 10 years.

fallingknife 3y ago
Reddit was much better 10 years ago when it was much less moderated. If anything I would expect nerfing the mods to improve things.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  They keep saying they are saving us from the hordes , is that a lie ?

rakoo 3y ago

I can't agree more with you, unfortunately there's a real C check of our position and our history to do, us being technical people: - we must stop assuming everyone is equal. Access to a computer, access to a smartphone, access to a stable internet connection, capability to read and use a mouse or a keyboard; our requirements are way too high to build an inclusive community. Not everyone is a white rich american english-speaking male - we must stop assuming everyone is financially, socially, culturally at ease, and that everything is "just" a matter of individual will. The market always favors those who have more, in the pusuit of even more, and those who weren't so lucky must be supported. Stop giving tools to companies. Stop using non-copyleft licenses. They're the number one reason Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and countless others could be where they are today: leveraging the common goods without giving back at least as much. By design, a company maximizes the gap between what it takes and what it gives. A simple analysis would defend the end of capitalism and the commons construction through a shared decision process, but it's still premature for HN

falloutx 3y ago

I had really high hopes for the internet, that it will bring knowledge and wisdom to every corner of the world, but instead it just decreased our attention span, made us more angry and now even the fun things are going to be ruined because some old VC demands their money back. Internet built on VC money is inherently unsustainable and I would never ever join a website that can't demonstrate its sustainability.

phpisthebest 3y ago

it is amusing that people think Wikipedia is not a corporation, and is not subject to the same problems as reddit. It is well documented that that Wikimedia CORPORATION that controls wikipedia has all kinds of the same problems, with the directors and management of that corporation at odds often with the users and the "mods" of wikipedia. That is with out getting into the debate over the overt ideological capture of both the wiki and the corporation No I dont think the wikipedia model is the one we should look at as an example

samsquire 3y ago

I feel one approach to a high quality internet, we can contact people we like the messages or posts of and invite them to contribute somewhere that is invite only to contribute. That way we can curate high quality content.

xnx 3y ago

Largely agree, but I don't understand the connection to interest rates.

mjburgess 3y ago
Suppose you're reddit. You're now required to profit. Money now ain't free. What do you do? Exactly what all those volunteer labourers do not want you to do. What now? They're the cash cow. The disalignment of interests between Corp and (free) Labour was not an issue whilst Corp could burn cash.

mx20 3y ago

Before that happens they will try to lobby governments to "repair" their monopolies. EU is already trying hard to put major road blocks on open source AI, which is probably the biggest threat to most tech mega corps.

raxxorraxor 3y ago

Volunteer doesn't equal volunteer though. Some are in it for the topic, some are in it for their own persona. Reddit was more attractive for some people because it wasn't as much focused on people and more around topics. That changed a bit and you cannot really draw a line too hard, but it is still the case to a large degree. I doubt wikipedians are big on personalities either, although that demographic changed a lot too. It did have to change though because business was suddenly much more interested as well.

rsync 3y ago

"What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money." I don't think this is correct. In the excellent book _The Master Switch_, Tim Wu[1] describes: "... a long "cycle" whereby open information systems become consolidated and closed over time, reopening only after disruptive innovation." ... and my reading of his book suggests to me that the "natural point", as you say, is consolidation and closure. Youtube is always becoming TV. My own opinion is that the media is the message and that certain communications media - namely, pure text - can't "become TV". The real difference between reddit and HN is that you can't display a picture - of any kind - on HN. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch

mjburgess 3y ago
This is a disanalogus analysis, because the value of these platforms it the labour of their volunteers --- they *are* the commons. "Natural power" includes the collective action of these volunteers -- seen here, eg., with reddit. My point is that the drive to profit from this labour will make the platforms extremely sensitive to their demands -- in ways that do not occur when there's no need to profit. You can say "let them eat cake" if you have your own cake supplier. When the cake runs out, all those labourers turn out to be required. I think these are unique dynamics -- much closer to the fall of serfdom than the development of TV networks