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Slight twist on dead internet theory. It's not that the internet is full of bots, it's that the internet is full of self promotion. Finding real people to have

Slight twist on dead internet theory. It's not that the internet is full of bots, it's that the internet is full of self promotion. Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand". Similar to the Black Mirror episode about social credit score.

rcme 3y ago
I’m not commenting on your theory, but what I love about HN is that, for the most part, people comment purely to talk about a topic. There’s very little self promotion. It’s very nice.
- pdntspa 3y ago
  Unless you're posting a show HN, in which case every brother and their mother chimes in with "this is nice but here's my cloud service that does a similar thing but better" sideswipes
  - wruza 3y ago
    Personally I find this useful, because it’s rarely just a pitch (at least I tend to assume some degree of honesty from an active HN user). Also it allows to explore a subject area even if you’re not interested right now. I often make bookmarks or simply threadshots of other products people talk about in show hns.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > Unless you're posting a show HN, in which case every brother and their mother chimes in with "this is nice but here's my cloud service that does a similar thing but better" sideswipes. I don't understand why you are classifying as "sideswipes" posts in a "Show HN" where others chime in to "Show HN". I mean, "Show HN" is about showing and discussing stuff, not a pulpit to worship a submitter.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Yeah but Ask HN is clearly marked. I don't have to click it if I don't want to see self promo stuff. With social networks, you don't get a choice at all, just an endless, unpredictable feed.
  - bodge5000 3y ago
    I seem to remember someone saying on here that if you're looking for suggestions on something, the best thing to do is put up a half baked version of your own and watch as swarms of people come in to talk about their version. I guess it tracks as well, in general on the internet I find you get better advice claiming something is the case and then getting corrected than just asking for advice
    - Forgeties79 3y ago
      Basically a variation of “the quickest way to get the correct answer on the internet is to confidently assert the wrong one.”
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    I have mixed feelings about this. From the perspective of the HN audience, it's useful to see what other startups are serving a particular need/niche. From the perspective of the poster of the Show HN, this is probably annoying. However, it is at least marginally useful to see what the competition looks like, so you can figure out how to differentiate your product (or whether there are too many free competitors, and you should give up).
  - throwaway675309 3y ago
    As long as it's done in relatively good faith, I'm not entirely opposed to this sort of thing. I'm especially OK with this if the OP is presenting their product as if it's the first of its kind.
- chaosbolt 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    I'm 44 and I remember back when politics was more or less left out of hacker news altogether. Noone cared about your libertarian values or my progressive ones, everyone just talked about tech.
    - lacrimacida 3y ago
      HN is one of the most stable platforms for discussion though. Sure, new influxes of users has brought different colors to the community but mostly people continue to discuss various topics, from philosphy to science or personal anecdotes. It continues to be a treasure’s trove of wisdom.
    - rewmie 3y ago
      > I'm 44 and I remember back when politics was more or less left out of hacker news altogether. Politics is still more or less left out of hacker news. How many politics-related posts fo you see daily on HN? Zero?
      - zdragnar 3y ago
        I've flagged a few myself. More frequently than posts, though, are politically charged comments. There's not a lot of thoughtful debate around them, mostly just people repeating the same tired points back and forth.
        foldr 3y ago
        That’s what it feels like if you’re not interested in politics. A lot of the threads on programming also consist of people repeatedly making the same points back and forth (see e.g. about 5000 threads on Go and generics). Most discussions are like this, really. New ideas don’t come along very often.
  - 3y ago
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  Eh, the big name corps/marketers/astroturfers are so good, its impossible to notice them. Especially as HN mods made it a bannable offense to call it out.
  - roarcher 3y ago
    They banned it because that sort of call out is meaningless in an age when everyone accuses everyone they disagree with of being a "shill", "astroturfer", "troll", "fake news", and what have you.
firecall 3y ago
At the risk of sounding mean, Threads really is the dumbest place on the Internet. It’s vapid beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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- kzrdude 3y ago
  It seems like it's too early to judge it on almost anything
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    It’s a Meta product directly tied to Instagram, I’d be genuinely shocked if this isn’t the high point.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > It seems like it's too early to judge it on almost anything It's specially too early due to the trainwreck which is Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition. If Musk continues to destroy Twitter, we might see the whole world drop it in favour of Threads.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      We are seeing corporate and brand promoting types and 50 million signups the first day. Compared to Mastodon where real people are having real conversations and the numbers are much lower even with a head start. This tells me threads will be a very corporate platform. At least it's offering something different
      - riidom 3y ago
26fingies 3y ago
That seems to be the logical conclusion of commodifying literally everything. Now that everything is commodity every interaction is a sales pitch.
matrix_overload 3y ago
Or a dead society theory. The less people need each other for creating value, the more of their communication goes down to attention seeking and identity pandering.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  I think attention seeking is either pathological or for making money. The great majority of people continue to need eachother to create value but that is mostly hijacked by venture capital trying to monetize, extract value, etc
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > I think attention seeking is either pathological or for making money. For a few decades we've been bombarded with the idea that our career depends mostly on our visibility instead of our qualifications and experience, that our next job will certainly be dictated by our social graph, and that getting ourselves known is key to have a good career. Consequently, we see a whole universe of self-promoting loudmouths generating noise just to get themselves out there. Perhaps this is a US thing that's leaking.
    - hospitalJail 3y ago
      >Perhaps this is a US thing that's leaking. This is a human thing. The US culture is less shameless about it.
    - idiotsecant 3y ago
      Ah yes that wonderful time more than a few decades ago where ... Knowing people didn't help you get better jobs?
      - rewmie 3y ago
        > Knowing people didn't help you get better jobs? I'm not sure you got the point. It really is not about your connections not leading to job opportunities. It's about the belief your job prospects are tied to the number of people you're connected in social network apps, and this belief leading people to try to attract followers by continuously generating noise in social networking services. Also, some of the most sought after jobs in tech, such as the covetted FANG positions, are not achieved by the depth and width of your social graph. How does knowing people help you with that?
bdw5204 3y ago
I think there's a good bit of truth to that. Even the platforms where self promotion is a rule violation such as Wikipedia and Reddit tend to be dominated by cliques of unpaid mods with an agenda either ideological or related to the interests of a government's national security apparatus. The main reason why I'm pessimistic about the prospects for Threads to be a success is because it seems to be leaning very strongly towards LinkedIn on the scale of authenticity vs inauthenticity and that is death for a social media platform unless people literally use it to find jobs. I don't think most actual human beings want to use a platform dominated by corporations and people trying to turn themselves into a "brand". They're basically attracting all of the spam accounts from Twitter and amplifying them which might be a good way to attract advertisers but it isn't a good way to attract users.
adventured 3y ago
> Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand". Humanity breaks into three groups: originators, amplifiers, mimics. Probably 95-97% of humanity or more are mimics. They will never produce much of anything original, that includes writing long-form blog posts or original media content (eg YouTube). They have little to no interest. This is backed up by stats on pretty much every platform, including Reddit and HN (the extreme majority are voyeurs not contributors). It's one of the reasons TikTok was so successful, it enabled the mimics to easily participate and pretend they were creating something new (while they were actually doing nothing but copying what someone else created, and getting a mental reward for it via likes/watches/followers). It's also why modern cameras in smartphones are so popular for the masses (+ Instagram), anybody can take a photo and feel at least ok about it (you don't have to be an expert photographer, you don't have to really create anything interesting and or new). It doesn't matter what you do or what you change, the extreme majority will never meaningfully contribute. Even on services like TikTok and Instagram the masses have little to no interest in meaningful contribution, they produce a couple of videos or photos and then largely stop; the same holds true on Facebook, most people don't contribute very much into the network. They don't want to. They lack the desire to put in the time and effort (people are tired after work, have children/lives to tend to, etc etc), and they lack the creativity to originate persistently (the feedback isn't there because what they're producing won't get much attention). Everybody isn't the same. Everybody isn't Picasso or Hunter S. Thompson and can't be. So what you're mostly left with are the people desperately seeking attention/self-promotion and the rare slice of originators. You have to specifically build a platform to cater to the smaller slice of originators and intentionally block/disrupt the aggressive self-promoters that often don't contribute much new value. And if you do that, your platform will never be overly popular (which isn't what most VC backed services aim for obviously).
- olddustytrail 3y ago
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  - Cpoll 3y ago
    Your comment isn't adding anything. Bizarre or no, they explain their reasoning, so it's worth explaining why you disagree. The "largely voyeurs" effect observed on Reddit is well attested to, and the idea that TikTok targets those is interesting (though I have no idea if the numbers agree).
fullshark 3y ago
Who else would want to talk to everyone on the planet simultaneously?
worrycue 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror) ? Reminds me of Reddit. Can’t post if your karma is too low - of course you start with zero as a new poster.
- flangola7 3y ago
  Do you have a better suggestion for mitigating spam and abuse? Reddit could do what everyone else does and tie your account to a phone number or video selfie, but I'm personally not hot on that idea.
- Kuinox 3y ago
  This is a rule put in place by people being drowned in spambots.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    I wonder if it’s worth the cost in a horrible new user experience. Spammers have also countered with karma farming bots that further pollute discussions - decreasing the value of such measures; reduced effectiveness and increased spam pollution. Redditers in turn countered with bot detection and banning tools … that may no longer work soon - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spam-overload-as-botdefense-leaves-antagonistic-reddit/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spa... Bad new user experience and increased spam … things are looking up for Reddit. /s
tiffanyg 3y ago
Big part of it, as far as I can tell. Slight further (and darker) twist: our economic model is dying, but nothing substantive is being done to make appropriate revisions. Essentially: we have excessive, but still increasing, numbers of people with skills and in economic classes / roles that are "tertiary" and beyond. As processes have been made more efficient over time, and the surplus wealth has been accrued in an ever more concentrated fashion, we increasingly seem to have a sort of "surplus" (oh boy, can it get more Dickensian?) of people in something of a "middle class limbo". Of course, the very efficiency that has pushed workers out of roles, is efficiency that means we (can) produce plenty for the people presently around. Further, it's basically always the case that people ultimately pushed out of roles contributed in substantial ways, even if just indirectly, to "our" ability to replace them. But, the "tally sheets" we use to divvy up resources, account for contributions and "deductions", etc., are more and more fundamentally broken. Throwing the so-called "AI" into the mix only makes this worse. ... I'm a bit too tired and pressed for time right now to try to really tie this off nicely, but, hopefully the outline of this (current iteration of this) hypothesis is clear enough. It's an argument (in the sense of dialectical &/ rhetorical debate) that has come up many times. For example, Vonnegut's "Player Piano" springs to mind. But, I do think we're finally at a point where there will need to be some adjustment in economics, culture, etc. Or, we're heading into "French Revolution" territory. Also, it's not as though humans haven't been through this before - not only at times like during the "Reign of Terror", but also, when people like John D. Rockefeller were in their heyday. At that time, Rockefeller, for example, became quite community-oriented himself. He made substantial contributions to the well-being of society / humanity, in ways that often went beyond simple provision of money for charitable efforts. No idea which way things go this time... Edit: correction - when I wrote "produce plenty", I was in a mindset focused on NA / Europe, in particular. Simply the areas I'm most familiar with. Throwing countries like India, China, etc., into the mix, makes the situation more complicated and difficult. Far too much there to touch on right now.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  I don't think the economic model is dying, it seems to be going stronger worldwide. Even with protectionist pushbacks, capitalism seems to come out on-top. (Sure there are issues like regulatory capture, but those are bumps in the road to a free-er market) > the surplus wealth has been accrued in an ever more concentrated fashion, we increasingly seem to have a sort of "surplus" (oh boy, can it get more Dickensian?) of people in something of a "middle class limbo". I know you are saying that billionaires have a ton of money. But I see this in the lower class. Every teen and every lower class person has an iphone, a Veblen good. Status seeking people have it even easier than ever to present an image of being rich. This means middle class people can pretend to be even more rich (A middle class person could afford a 250k car given the 8 year loans, or rent one for an IG photoshoot). It has people feeling insecure. The French revolution was driven by bad food harvests. This is an issue of status, not starvation. 100% of people can't be billionaires. Not sure what that will mean.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Yep, same has been happening here for years too. Whoops, what I meant to say was: Hi! As a developer at ACME inc (http://example.com/ACME http://example.com/ACME) I have been following the trend of self-promotion here too, while sitting at my utra-comfortable ACME Comfy(TM) chair, and I have noticed that some people, even the ones not using our ACME Inc. TNT-as-a-service(TM), have a tendency to self promote. I have written more about it on my block on our ACME site, http://example.com/ACME/blog http://example.com/ACME/blog.
- passwordoops 3y ago
  Would be interesting to see the rate of this self-promotion here. It's definitely not as present or in-your-face as other places, but it is noticeable
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    I find that HNers are generally respectful about this. There are some outliers, but the posts they make tend to get downvoted and therefore rendered invisible. But there are probably at least as many instances where someone refers to their experience with a topic and pointedly leaves out the name of their company, and then other commenters ask for more details and the company name.
theknocker 3y ago
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akira2501 3y ago
The internet is full of monopolies. They stifle innovation. They lock up funding. They buy anything that looks remotely competitive then stick it inside their walled garden. They demand 30% of your revenue for simply being middlemen. Of course, in this environment, all that's left for people is to constantly self aggrandize in the hopes that one of these monopolies will hire them and give them a decent salary.
thomasz 3y ago
The hyper commercialization of the internet has turned people into spam bots. That’s why todays internet, with billions of users feels less populated than what we had in the early to mid 2000s.
- jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
  I know it sounds very “old man yells at cloud” but I truly miss many parts of the old internet, when YouTube was new and social media was still in its fledgling phase. There are a lot of perks and quality of life improvements thanks to all the advancements, but being subjected to 4 ads per 11 minutes on YouTube, Google being much less useful thanks to SEO optimization and all the self-indulgent self- promotion on just about every site has gotten incredibly old. It’s all so boring and repetitive yet seemingly impossible to escape.
  - thomasz 3y ago
    That’s not really what I meant. Ads rarely get through my Adblock anyways. No, the problem with the dead internet isn’t that powerful entities flooded it with artificially generated bullshit, the problem is that the hyper commercialization incentivized real, living people to behave like inauthentic robots, mindlessly maximizing everything they do to drive engagement metrics.
  - motoxpro 3y ago
    Grab YouTube premium to not see ads. You have to pay for it somehow, either you watch ads for free or you swap out your LTV for cash by just paying outright. This isn’t a mark of degradation at all. “Back in the day” of non-monetization isn’t sustainable for any decent length of time because eventually the people donating (VCs) will want a return or will run out of money.
    - CuriousSkeptic 3y ago
      Are there truly no ads? Have been putting it of thinking it just removes the google injected ads, but keeping all the promotions and such
deleted 3y ago
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endofreach 3y ago
I find that experience a lot in real life too though. Just recently, i went to an event i have heard of with a variety of topics. It almost felt like the schedule was picked was designed with a good diverse hn homepage. I was so hyped, because i don‘t know anyone in real life to talk about a variety of topics like that in depth. I went there. After the first day, i was so incredibly disappointed. Everyone, even the „anti capatialist“ speakers, were so eager to hand out their business card. It‘s not like the were scharlatans, they were experts in deed, much more knowledgeable than me in their fields of course, but it seemed all they truly cared about, is being expert in something that way easy to them. It was just one of those marketing events, that exists for companies to feel good & important to find people to transfer big loads of money to, to get a pet on their back by the boss. I mean business tickets were about 1000 euros. OT: All i wanted was to find people like here, who love to jump from discussing coding, AI and climate change, to explorations silly ideas, like how beauty is a weird thing, as it’s just the product of natures waste… the green nature we love, is just their of excess energies and a fun evolutionary luck for our eyes, that we see color & reality like that. Because if we perceived the basic reality much differently, who knows what sense of beauty was the filter for source of true inspiration: the urge to live, which is, the need for control (at least whatever makes our mind feel we are in control, which is much easier & keeps humanity going), because of what color actually is the frequencies of the excess energy, „thrown away“, for stupid humans to come along, and adore the nature for it… oh, when did people start planting plants for beautys sake? Or was the beauty in the protectice plants / good plants, there, before we learned and adapted our human reality? Was this a hint from the nature? Does it reward us for something? Lure us in? Is natures poop, what we perceive as powers, but are just by design uncapable to see it? Are humans like GPT to GOD(s)? Now, what if this was a simulation? It must be like a room with no windows or doors, you just woke up in this room, and don’t even know words, have no memory, nothing to hunt, no need to fulfill, no one to learn from, because of lack of other beings like you and even if, no needs means no need to learn anything, or teach, or remember, there is nothing and you don‘t even think about what difference could exist… there is no light in this room, no features or any similarities of the real laws of physics, no light, nothing happens, no time, no need, no pain, „consciousness“ (whatever that is), but nothing else… how could humans, possibly breakout? Or just grasp, what that is? How would you view the outside of the room, from the inside, if no windows, no doors, no experience(s)? Either through technology which works in a dimension we either haven‘t fully figured out yet, or, don‘t even know about… maybe, yet. If not, it must be Phantasia. If we develop such a technology, then it must serve a purpose within that room, right? And even if no purpose or even if this just a stupid question, but wouldn‘t that mean, that either looking for the „real“ technology, might lead us into a trap? If the room is constructed like that, it must be, because no one wants you to look outside. And if there was, why is it there? Which makes me think: even if Phantasia is not the actual key to making us look at the outside, how would we find the real way? Probably not, without imagining what it could be like, which shouldn‘t be too close to the reality of the outside… which means two things: either way, phantasia is the only thing we could rely on, in that case… and: if true, it means, that the further away from reality, the realer it gets. But not as a figure of speech, and not just based on the assumption that in that room, the „perceived“ (whatever that is) laws of physics couldn‘t resemble the ones outside of the room. Even within this very weird explorative silly idea, this assumption seems a stretch. But that doesnt matter still. Because the idea Phantasia must be the furthest away from reality, is the way our minds work either way. Most ideas are based on reality. Even the thoughts i find unique, they aren‘t for most of you. But i haven‘t read many of them yet anywhere. But they are just combinations of my experiences of the way i perceive the world. So even as unique as they seem to myself, the experiences creating these ideas, only exist because of the reality, so the ideas are real… and if reality is the room, then these ideas are based on what‘s in the room. But if there was any „beam of light“ (or any other physical ground for the real reality) coming from the outside of the room „shining“ (not real light, just examplatory– if it wasn‘t light but sound, that we imagine as coming into the room from the outside, i‘d write „being audible“) into the room, in a way, so that we can perceive it, can either come from, yet again, technology or phantasia. But even if the former: the route to this technology leads to an end, without phantasia itself… this seems like actually phantasia is the basis for reality either way… Or imagine, as weird as a lot of the „aliens“ and „ufo“ stuff sounds, what if… i mean a species that would come here to this planet, must have interesting technology (or whatever that ability would be to them, maybe no technology, maybe something natural, if they even have „nature“ as a concept as the basis of reality), if they had abilities to come here and thus „travel“ faster than light, faster than time, couldn‘t a million human years be nothing to them, so maybe once every 50k-10m years they come here? Or maybe they haven‘t… maybe they have put one of their own into some kind of advanced jail, just like the room i described above, and maybe this jail is not constructed as a physical space confinement, but a state of nil… and because it has nothing to do, since 10m human hears, it end up briefly thinking „thinking“ about a world like ours, as if it was a thought, a phantasie of that prisoner, who somehow by doing that „creates“ us, which we can‘t understand because of these multiple nested realities, and maybe we only exist for an equivalent of a split second in the respective mother-reality. And maybe less in the real reality?… and then talk about how all the fear mongering should be under punishment, because if all our minds have the same fantasies, we end up changing „reality“ (whatever that is)… i mean the opposite effect seems to be easily visible, but is garnered with facts & logic… i mean, i am typing this on my phone via mobile internet access, just because a long, long, long time ago someone started the idea of „more advanced“, or even a „future“ at all which is only possible because of the way humans perceive reality and how this artificial concept of reality based on time, is a lie but it works much better than not having one, and no other seems reasonable from this biased point of view, this one human looked at a stone, and found inspiration in „natures“ (whatever that is) poop (which seems like it is all there is), which led everything after that… all the way up to me with a smartphone… doing nothing, but typing symbols into the void, being lonely, thinking how interesting these thoughts are to me, and nothing else excited me, but how pointless, because even if they weren‘t as silly, i ain‘t even smart enough to be a good software developer… and even if, it would still just be pointless… will i be a good father? Will my mind still be occupied when my child is here? Must i stay in this room forever? Why not make the best out of the room? Can’t see shit in here anyway… might as well be naked… so that’s why i just post this random chain of thoughts. I wish they wouldn’t captivate my mind, i can’t focus on the things that matter… i always wanted to create, now that i did, i didn’t… aaaand then back to the next thought that i had much earlier when gyping this but totally lost the way… the thought was about how the octopus mind might have unimaginable potential, but is limited by their short life span & anti-social behaviour, excluding them from having culture & knowledge transfer… which made me think about how i behave anti-social with my weird arrogance… and rather writing crazy words that i know people will perceive as crazy and that i didn‘t even proof-read because i know it wouldn‘t be worth the effort any way… which might limit my potential as well… just like the octopus… hmm… maybe i must… hm… well… maybe… revelation… why don‘t you just follow me on twitter to find out more about this journey? There is also a book, podcast, vlog, social-media, influencing stuff & propaganda (that i myself am unaware of) & of course: advertisement deals! … Back to reality: sorry, usually i would delete all of this again, after writing (if i don‘t write this into my notes or on pen & paper). I just wish i‘d know what to do with this… i wish i could somehow spend all day thinking about things like that… but i am mute and blind… at least in real life… i think…
Buttons840 3y ago
I started participating in a Discord server and it was awful in all the ways that have been said. Strange UI, info scattered everywhere, mediocre search, can't find anything. I can chat with real people though. Then I realized, maybe all this is good in a way. Discord allows you to chat with real people, but if you want to promote yourself or do some stealth advertising, it sucks. In the end it seems to be full of honest to goodness normal people who share an interest.
manuelmoreale 3y ago
I believe it’s still possible to have that experience but you have to go down the personal site + email route. There you’ll still find people willing to have thoughtful conversations. At least, that’s my experience.
winternett 3y ago
Hrmmm.... People act like self promotion is almost braggadocious and it bewilders me... The problem is spammers and promo shills that spam for commercial entities and brands under the cover of acting as if they are honest human beings. The enemy is not the individual tring to promote their mixtape, legal advice, or knitted hats. Social media and sites like Reddit have shut out honest individual self promoters based on moderator arrogance that is very self destructive, anti-competitive, and also very hostile to everyone's ability to be an independent entrepreneur. They shut out small promoters because it leaves room for larger companies to shill all day while using celebrities, manufactured celebrities, and even well known personalities that are already very wealthy. I think it's disgusting how marketing works now, charging the smallest creators the same price as wealthy {fully staffed} big companies for online ads even before small entities are properly profitable is deeply unethical. It creates a business economy in which only the wealthy thrive. As the cost of living rises. None of us normals are safe from this unfair financial manipulation. And the threat to devaluation of our ability to create and run a successful business of our own/ If that attitude of banning self promotion prevails, no one will be upwardly mobile, because as social media is already throttling everyone for money. Eventually if this attitude prevails, there will be no way to let anyone know about your business or skills, and we'll all be at the mercy of only working for large corporations because business promotional costs will be prohibitive to success. I have noticed data working across even competing social sites, which worries me greatly. I think there is already a social score at plat for most of us even when we aren't signed up for web apps... Our phones are the likely underhanded snitch//

rcme 3y ago

I’m not commenting on your theory, but what I love about HN is that, for the most part, people comment purely to talk about a topic. There’s very little self promotion. It’s very nice.

pdntspa 3y ago
Unless you're posting a show HN, in which case every brother and their mother chimes in with "this is nice but here's my cloud service that does a similar thing but better" sideswipes
- wruza 3y ago
  Personally I find this useful, because it’s rarely just a pitch (at least I tend to assume some degree of honesty from an active HN user). Also it allows to explore a subject area even if you’re not interested right now. I often make bookmarks or simply threadshots of other products people talk about in show hns.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > Unless you're posting a show HN, in which case every brother and their mother chimes in with "this is nice but here's my cloud service that does a similar thing but better" sideswipes. I don't understand why you are classifying as "sideswipes" posts in a "Show HN" where others chime in to "Show HN". I mean, "Show HN" is about showing and discussing stuff, not a pulpit to worship a submitter.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Yeah but Ask HN is clearly marked. I don't have to click it if I don't want to see self promo stuff. With social networks, you don't get a choice at all, just an endless, unpredictable feed.
- bodge5000 3y ago
  I seem to remember someone saying on here that if you're looking for suggestions on something, the best thing to do is put up a half baked version of your own and watch as swarms of people come in to talk about their version. I guess it tracks as well, in general on the internet I find you get better advice claiming something is the case and then getting corrected than just asking for advice
  - Forgeties79 3y ago
    Basically a variation of “the quickest way to get the correct answer on the internet is to confidently assert the wrong one.”
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I have mixed feelings about this. From the perspective of the HN audience, it's useful to see what other startups are serving a particular need/niche. From the perspective of the poster of the Show HN, this is probably annoying. However, it is at least marginally useful to see what the competition looks like, so you can figure out how to differentiate your product (or whether there are too many free competitors, and you should give up).
- throwaway675309 3y ago
  As long as it's done in relatively good faith, I'm not entirely opposed to this sort of thing. I'm especially OK with this if the OP is presenting their product as if it's the first of its kind.
chaosbolt 3y ago
[flagged]
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  I'm 44 and I remember back when politics was more or less left out of hacker news altogether. Noone cared about your libertarian values or my progressive ones, everyone just talked about tech.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    HN is one of the most stable platforms for discussion though. Sure, new influxes of users has brought different colors to the community but mostly people continue to discuss various topics, from philosphy to science or personal anecdotes. It continues to be a treasure’s trove of wisdom.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > I'm 44 and I remember back when politics was more or less left out of hacker news altogether. Politics is still more or less left out of hacker news. How many politics-related posts fo you see daily on HN? Zero?
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      I've flagged a few myself. More frequently than posts, though, are politically charged comments. There's not a lot of thoughtful debate around them, mostly just people repeating the same tired points back and forth.
      - foldr 3y ago
        That’s what it feels like if you’re not interested in politics. A lot of the threads on programming also consist of people repeatedly making the same points back and forth (see e.g. about 5000 threads on Go and generics). Most discussions are like this, really. New ideas don’t come along very often.
- 3y ago
hospitalJail 3y ago
Eh, the big name corps/marketers/astroturfers are so good, its impossible to notice them. Especially as HN mods made it a bannable offense to call it out.
- roarcher 3y ago
  They banned it because that sort of call out is meaningless in an age when everyone accuses everyone they disagree with of being a "shill", "astroturfer", "troll", "fake news", and what have you.

firecall 3y ago

At the risk of sounding mean, Threads really is the dumbest place on the Internet. It’s vapid beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.

PM_me_your_math 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kzrdude 3y ago
It seems like it's too early to judge it on almost anything
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  It’s a Meta product directly tied to Instagram, I’d be genuinely shocked if this isn’t the high point.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > It seems like it's too early to judge it on almost anything It's specially too early due to the trainwreck which is Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition. If Musk continues to destroy Twitter, we might see the whole world drop it in favour of Threads.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    We are seeing corporate and brand promoting types and 50 million signups the first day. Compared to Mastodon where real people are having real conversations and the numbers are much lower even with a head start. This tells me threads will be a very corporate platform. At least it's offering something different
    - riidom 3y ago

26fingies 3y ago

That seems to be the logical conclusion of commodifying literally everything. Now that everything is commodity every interaction is a sales pitch.

matrix_overload 3y ago

Or a dead society theory. The less people need each other for creating value, the more of their communication goes down to attention seeking and identity pandering.

lacrimacida 3y ago
I think attention seeking is either pathological or for making money. The great majority of people continue to need eachother to create value but that is mostly hijacked by venture capital trying to monetize, extract value, etc
- rewmie 3y ago
  > I think attention seeking is either pathological or for making money. For a few decades we've been bombarded with the idea that our career depends mostly on our visibility instead of our qualifications and experience, that our next job will certainly be dictated by our social graph, and that getting ourselves known is key to have a good career. Consequently, we see a whole universe of self-promoting loudmouths generating noise just to get themselves out there. Perhaps this is a US thing that's leaking.
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    >Perhaps this is a US thing that's leaking. This is a human thing. The US culture is less shameless about it.
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    Ah yes that wonderful time more than a few decades ago where ... Knowing people didn't help you get better jobs?
    - rewmie 3y ago
      > Knowing people didn't help you get better jobs? I'm not sure you got the point. It really is not about your connections not leading to job opportunities. It's about the belief your job prospects are tied to the number of people you're connected in social network apps, and this belief leading people to try to attract followers by continuously generating noise in social networking services. Also, some of the most sought after jobs in tech, such as the covetted FANG positions, are not achieved by the depth and width of your social graph. How does knowing people help you with that?

bdw5204 3y ago

I think there's a good bit of truth to that. Even the platforms where self promotion is a rule violation such as Wikipedia and Reddit tend to be dominated by cliques of unpaid mods with an agenda either ideological or related to the interests of a government's national security apparatus. The main reason why I'm pessimistic about the prospects for Threads to be a success is because it seems to be leaning very strongly towards LinkedIn on the scale of authenticity vs inauthenticity and that is death for a social media platform unless people literally use it to find jobs. I don't think most actual human beings want to use a platform dominated by corporations and people trying to turn themselves into a "brand". They're basically attracting all of the spam accounts from Twitter and amplifying them which might be a good way to attract advertisers but it isn't a good way to attract users.

adventured 3y ago

> Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand". Humanity breaks into three groups: originators, amplifiers, mimics. Probably 95-97% of humanity or more are mimics. They will never produce much of anything original, that includes writing long-form blog posts or original media content (eg YouTube). They have little to no interest. This is backed up by stats on pretty much every platform, including Reddit and HN (the extreme majority are voyeurs not contributors). It's one of the reasons TikTok was so successful, it enabled the mimics to easily participate and pretend they were creating something new (while they were actually doing nothing but copying what someone else created, and getting a mental reward for it via likes/watches/followers). It's also why modern cameras in smartphones are so popular for the masses (+ Instagram), anybody can take a photo and feel at least ok about it (you don't have to be an expert photographer, you don't have to really create anything interesting and or new). It doesn't matter what you do or what you change, the extreme majority will never meaningfully contribute. Even on services like TikTok and Instagram the masses have little to no interest in meaningful contribution, they produce a couple of videos or photos and then largely stop; the same holds true on Facebook, most people don't contribute very much into the network. They don't want to. They lack the desire to put in the time and effort (people are tired after work, have children/lives to tend to, etc etc), and they lack the creativity to originate persistently (the feedback isn't there because what they're producing won't get much attention). Everybody isn't the same. Everybody isn't Picasso or Hunter S. Thompson and can't be. So what you're mostly left with are the people desperately seeking attention/self-promotion and the rare slice of originators. You have to specifically build a platform to cater to the smaller slice of originators and intentionally block/disrupt the aggressive self-promoters that often don't contribute much new value. And if you do that, your platform will never be overly popular (which isn't what most VC backed services aim for obviously).

olddustytrail 3y ago
[flagged]
- Cpoll 3y ago
  Your comment isn't adding anything. Bizarre or no, they explain their reasoning, so it's worth explaining why you disagree. The "largely voyeurs" effect observed on Reddit is well attested to, and the idea that TikTok targets those is interesting (though I have no idea if the numbers agree).

fullshark 3y ago

Who else would want to talk to everyone on the planet simultaneously?

worrycue 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror) ? Reminds me of Reddit. Can’t post if your karma is too low - of course you start with zero as a new poster.

flangola7 3y ago
Do you have a better suggestion for mitigating spam and abuse? Reddit could do what everyone else does and tie your account to a phone number or video selfie, but I'm personally not hot on that idea.
Kuinox 3y ago
This is a rule put in place by people being drowned in spambots.
- worrycue 3y ago
  I wonder if it’s worth the cost in a horrible new user experience. Spammers have also countered with karma farming bots that further pollute discussions - decreasing the value of such measures; reduced effectiveness and increased spam pollution. Redditers in turn countered with bot detection and banning tools … that may no longer work soon - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spam-overload-as-botdefense-leaves-antagonistic-reddit/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spa... Bad new user experience and increased spam … things are looking up for Reddit. /s

tiffanyg 3y ago

Big part of it, as far as I can tell. Slight further (and darker) twist: our economic model is dying, but nothing substantive is being done to make appropriate revisions. Essentially: we have excessive, but still increasing, numbers of people with skills and in economic classes / roles that are "tertiary" and beyond. As processes have been made more efficient over time, and the surplus wealth has been accrued in an ever more concentrated fashion, we increasingly seem to have a sort of "surplus" (oh boy, can it get more Dickensian?) of people in something of a "middle class limbo". Of course, the very efficiency that has pushed workers out of roles, is efficiency that means we (can) produce plenty for the people presently around. Further, it's basically always the case that people ultimately pushed out of roles contributed in substantial ways, even if just indirectly, to "our" ability to replace them. But, the "tally sheets" we use to divvy up resources, account for contributions and "deductions", etc., are more and more fundamentally broken. Throwing the so-called "AI" into the mix only makes this worse. ... I'm a bit too tired and pressed for time right now to try to really tie this off nicely, but, hopefully the outline of this (current iteration of this) hypothesis is clear enough. It's an argument (in the sense of dialectical &/ rhetorical debate) that has come up many times. For example, Vonnegut's "Player Piano" springs to mind. But, I do think we're finally at a point where there will need to be some adjustment in economics, culture, etc. Or, we're heading into "French Revolution" territory. Also, it's not as though humans haven't been through this before - not only at times like during the "Reign of Terror", but also, when people like John D. Rockefeller were in their heyday. At that time, Rockefeller, for example, became quite community-oriented himself. He made substantial contributions to the well-being of society / humanity, in ways that often went beyond simple provision of money for charitable efforts. No idea which way things go this time... Edit: correction - when I wrote "produce plenty", I was in a mindset focused on NA / Europe, in particular. Simply the areas I'm most familiar with. Throwing countries like India, China, etc., into the mix, makes the situation more complicated and difficult. Far too much there to touch on right now.

hospitalJail 3y ago
I don't think the economic model is dying, it seems to be going stronger worldwide. Even with protectionist pushbacks, capitalism seems to come out on-top. (Sure there are issues like regulatory capture, but those are bumps in the road to a free-er market) > the surplus wealth has been accrued in an ever more concentrated fashion, we increasingly seem to have a sort of "surplus" (oh boy, can it get more Dickensian?) of people in something of a "middle class limbo". I know you are saying that billionaires have a ton of money. But I see this in the lower class. Every teen and every lower class person has an iphone, a Veblen good. Status seeking people have it even easier than ever to present an image of being rich. This means middle class people can pretend to be even more rich (A middle class person could afford a 250k car given the 8 year loans, or rent one for an IG photoshoot). It has people feeling insecure. The French revolution was driven by bad food harvests. This is an issue of status, not starvation. 100% of people can't be billionaires. Not sure what that will mean.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

Yep, same has been happening here for years too. Whoops, what I meant to say was: Hi! As a developer at ACME inc (http://example.com/ACME http://example.com/ACME) I have been following the trend of self-promotion here too, while sitting at my utra-comfortable ACME Comfy(TM) chair, and I have noticed that some people, even the ones not using our ACME Inc. TNT-as-a-service(TM), have a tendency to self promote. I have written more about it on my block on our ACME site, http://example.com/ACME/blog http://example.com/ACME/blog.

passwordoops 3y ago
Would be interesting to see the rate of this self-promotion here. It's definitely not as present or in-your-face as other places, but it is noticeable
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I find that HNers are generally respectful about this. There are some outliers, but the posts they make tend to get downvoted and therefore rendered invisible. But there are probably at least as many instances where someone refers to their experience with a topic and pointedly leaves out the name of their company, and then other commenters ask for more details and the company name.

theknocker 3y ago

[dead]

akira2501 3y ago

The internet is full of monopolies. They stifle innovation. They lock up funding. They buy anything that looks remotely competitive then stick it inside their walled garden. They demand 30% of your revenue for simply being middlemen. Of course, in this environment, all that's left for people is to constantly self aggrandize in the hopes that one of these monopolies will hire them and give them a decent salary.

thomasz 3y ago

The hyper commercialization of the internet has turned people into spam bots. That’s why todays internet, with billions of users feels less populated than what we had in the early to mid 2000s.

jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
I know it sounds very “old man yells at cloud” but I truly miss many parts of the old internet, when YouTube was new and social media was still in its fledgling phase. There are a lot of perks and quality of life improvements thanks to all the advancements, but being subjected to 4 ads per 11 minutes on YouTube, Google being much less useful thanks to SEO optimization and all the self-indulgent self- promotion on just about every site has gotten incredibly old. It’s all so boring and repetitive yet seemingly impossible to escape.
- thomasz 3y ago
  That’s not really what I meant. Ads rarely get through my Adblock anyways. No, the problem with the dead internet isn’t that powerful entities flooded it with artificially generated bullshit, the problem is that the hyper commercialization incentivized real, living people to behave like inauthentic robots, mindlessly maximizing everything they do to drive engagement metrics.
- motoxpro 3y ago
  Grab YouTube premium to not see ads. You have to pay for it somehow, either you watch ads for free or you swap out your LTV for cash by just paying outright. This isn’t a mark of degradation at all. “Back in the day” of non-monetization isn’t sustainable for any decent length of time because eventually the people donating (VCs) will want a return or will run out of money.
  - CuriousSkeptic 3y ago
    Are there truly no ads? Have been putting it of thinking it just removes the google injected ads, but keeping all the promotions and such

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

endofreach 3y ago

I find that experience a lot in real life too though. Just recently, i went to an event i have heard of with a variety of topics. It almost felt like the schedule was picked was designed with a good diverse hn homepage. I was so hyped, because i don‘t know anyone in real life to talk about a variety of topics like that in depth. I went there. After the first day, i was so incredibly disappointed. Everyone, even the „anti capatialist“ speakers, were so eager to hand out their business card. It‘s not like the were scharlatans, they were experts in deed, much more knowledgeable than me in their fields of course, but it seemed all they truly cared about, is being expert in something that way easy to them. It was just one of those marketing events, that exists for companies to feel good & important to find people to transfer big loads of money to, to get a pet on their back by the boss. I mean business tickets were about 1000 euros. OT: All i wanted was to find people like here, who love to jump from discussing coding, AI and climate change, to explorations silly ideas, like how beauty is a weird thing, as it’s just the product of natures waste… the green nature we love, is just their of excess energies and a fun evolutionary luck for our eyes, that we see color & reality like that. Because if we perceived the basic reality much differently, who knows what sense of beauty was the filter for source of true inspiration: the urge to live, which is, the need for control (at least whatever makes our mind feel we are in control, which is much easier & keeps humanity going), because of what color actually is the frequencies of the excess energy, „thrown away“, for stupid humans to come along, and adore the nature for it… oh, when did people start planting plants for beautys sake? Or was the beauty in the protectice plants / good plants, there, before we learned and adapted our human reality? Was this a hint from the nature? Does it reward us for something? Lure us in? Is natures poop, what we perceive as powers, but are just by design uncapable to see it? Are humans like GPT to GOD(s)? Now, what if this was a simulation? It must be like a room with no windows or doors, you just woke up in this room, and don’t even know words, have no memory, nothing to hunt, no need to fulfill, no one to learn from, because of lack of other beings like you and even if, no needs means no need to learn anything, or teach, or remember, there is nothing and you don‘t even think about what difference could exist… there is no light in this room, no features or any similarities of the real laws of physics, no light, nothing happens, no time, no need, no pain, „consciousness“ (whatever that is), but nothing else… how could humans, possibly breakout? Or just grasp, what that is? How would you view the outside of the room, from the inside, if no windows, no doors, no experience(s)? Either through technology which works in a dimension we either haven‘t fully figured out yet, or, don‘t even know about… maybe, yet. If not, it must be Phantasia. If we develop such a technology, then it must serve a purpose within that room, right? And even if no purpose or even if this just a stupid question, but wouldn‘t that mean, that either looking for the „real“ technology, might lead us into a trap? If the room is constructed like that, it must be, because no one wants you to look outside. And if there was, why is it there? Which makes me think: even if Phantasia is not the actual key to making us look at the outside, how would we find the real way? Probably not, without imagining what it could be like, which shouldn‘t be too close to the reality of the outside… which means two things: either way, phantasia is the only thing we could rely on, in that case… and: if true, it means, that the further away from reality, the realer it gets. But not as a figure of speech, and not just based on the assumption that in that room, the „perceived“ (whatever that is) laws of physics couldn‘t resemble the ones outside of the room. Even within this very weird explorative silly idea, this assumption seems a stretch. But that doesnt matter still. Because the idea Phantasia must be the furthest away from reality, is the way our minds work either way. Most ideas are based on reality. Even the thoughts i find unique, they aren‘t for most of you. But i haven‘t read many of them yet anywhere. But they are just combinations of my experiences of the way i perceive the world. So even as unique as they seem to myself, the experiences creating these ideas, only exist because of the reality, so the ideas are real… and if reality is the room, then these ideas are based on what‘s in the room. But if there was any „beam of light“ (or any other physical ground for the real reality) coming from the outside of the room „shining“ (not real light, just examplatory– if it wasn‘t light but sound, that we imagine as coming into the room from the outside, i‘d write „being audible“) into the room, in a way, so that we can perceive it, can either come from, yet again, technology or phantasia. But even if the former: the route to this technology leads to an end, without phantasia itself… this seems like actually phantasia is the basis for reality either way… Or imagine, as weird as a lot of the „aliens“ and „ufo“ stuff sounds, what if… i mean a species that would come here to this planet, must have interesting technology (or whatever that ability would be to them, maybe no technology, maybe something natural, if they even have „nature“ as a concept as the basis of reality), if they had abilities to come here and thus „travel“ faster than light, faster than time, couldn‘t a million human years be nothing to them, so maybe once every 50k-10m years they come here? Or maybe they haven‘t… maybe they have put one of their own into some kind of advanced jail, just like the room i described above, and maybe this jail is not constructed as a physical space confinement, but a state of nil… and because it has nothing to do, since 10m human hears, it end up briefly thinking „thinking“ about a world like ours, as if it was a thought, a phantasie of that prisoner, who somehow by doing that „creates“ us, which we can‘t understand because of these multiple nested realities, and maybe we only exist for an equivalent of a split second in the respective mother-reality. And maybe less in the real reality?… and then talk about how all the fear mongering should be under punishment, because if all our minds have the same fantasies, we end up changing „reality“ (whatever that is)… i mean the opposite effect seems to be easily visible, but is garnered with facts & logic… i mean, i am typing this on my phone via mobile internet access, just because a long, long, long time ago someone started the idea of „more advanced“, or even a „future“ at all which is only possible because of the way humans perceive reality and how this artificial concept of reality based on time, is a lie but it works much better than not having one, and no other seems reasonable from this biased point of view, this one human looked at a stone, and found inspiration in „natures“ (whatever that is) poop (which seems like it is all there is), which led everything after that… all the way up to me with a smartphone… doing nothing, but typing symbols into the void, being lonely, thinking how interesting these thoughts are to me, and nothing else excited me, but how pointless, because even if they weren‘t as silly, i ain‘t even smart enough to be a good software developer… and even if, it would still just be pointless… will i be a good father? Will my mind still be occupied when my child is here? Must i stay in this room forever? Why not make the best out of the room? Can’t see shit in here anyway… might as well be naked… so that’s why i just post this random chain of thoughts. I wish they wouldn’t captivate my mind, i can’t focus on the things that matter… i always wanted to create, now that i did, i didn’t… aaaand then back to the next thought that i had much earlier when gyping this but totally lost the way… the thought was about how the octopus mind might have unimaginable potential, but is limited by their short life span & anti-social behaviour, excluding them from having culture & knowledge transfer… which made me think about how i behave anti-social with my weird arrogance… and rather writing crazy words that i know people will perceive as crazy and that i didn‘t even proof-read because i know it wouldn‘t be worth the effort any way… which might limit my potential as well… just like the octopus… hmm… maybe i must… hm… well… maybe… revelation… why don‘t you just follow me on twitter to find out more about this journey? There is also a book, podcast, vlog, social-media, influencing stuff & propaganda (that i myself am unaware of) & of course: advertisement deals! … Back to reality: sorry, usually i would delete all of this again, after writing (if i don‘t write this into my notes or on pen & paper). I just wish i‘d know what to do with this… i wish i could somehow spend all day thinking about things like that… but i am mute and blind… at least in real life… i think…

Buttons840 3y ago

I started participating in a Discord server and it was awful in all the ways that have been said. Strange UI, info scattered everywhere, mediocre search, can't find anything. I can chat with real people though. Then I realized, maybe all this is good in a way. Discord allows you to chat with real people, but if you want to promote yourself or do some stealth advertising, it sucks. In the end it seems to be full of honest to goodness normal people who share an interest.

manuelmoreale 3y ago

I believe it’s still possible to have that experience but you have to go down the personal site + email route. There you’ll still find people willing to have thoughtful conversations. At least, that’s my experience.

winternett 3y ago

Hrmmm.... People act like self promotion is almost braggadocious and it bewilders me... The problem is spammers and promo shills that spam for commercial entities and brands under the cover of acting as if they are honest human beings. The enemy is not the individual tring to promote their mixtape, legal advice, or knitted hats. Social media and sites like Reddit have shut out honest individual self promoters based on moderator arrogance that is very self destructive, anti-competitive, and also very hostile to everyone's ability to be an independent entrepreneur. They shut out small promoters because it leaves room for larger companies to shill all day while using celebrities, manufactured celebrities, and even well known personalities that are already very wealthy. I think it's disgusting how marketing works now, charging the smallest creators the same price as wealthy {fully staffed} big companies for online ads even before small entities are properly profitable is deeply unethical. It creates a business economy in which only the wealthy thrive. As the cost of living rises. None of us normals are safe from this unfair financial manipulation. And the threat to devaluation of our ability to create and run a successful business of our own/ If that attitude of banning self promotion prevails, no one will be upwardly mobile, because as social media is already throttling everyone for money. Eventually if this attitude prevails, there will be no way to let anyone know about your business or skills, and we'll all be at the mercy of only working for large corporations because business promotional costs will be prohibitive to success. I have noticed data working across even competing social sites, which worries me greatly. I think there is already a social score at plat for most of us even when we aren't signed up for web apps... Our phones are the likely underhanded snitch//