9 ms·

Incredibly repetitive for being only 2 minutes long. We get it, VC funded social networks become worse over time so you have to periodically jump ship to somet

Incredibly repetitive for being only 2 minutes long. We get it, VC funded social networks become worse over time so you have to periodically jump ship to something new, which will quickly let you down again once it gains critical mass.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
Really? I thought the best part was about the autonomous armored car that learned to be anti-Semitic on terabytes of unmoderated Nazi posts. Repetitive is the point, because we repeat ourselves, but in time periods long enough that we forget and don't notice. This is our stupidity, compressed.
- rob74 3y ago
  Yeah, I guess that's one of the points that the video tries to make: the repetitiveness is so numbing that you stop noticing that the behavior of the platforms is getting more and more egregious...
rglullis 3y ago
Or maybe: Stop. Get some help. Stop chasing "VC funded social networks". Let's look at the indieweb for a sustainable model. Let's patronize separate, small, independent service providers to keep the servers running. That's all that it takes to fix this mess.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Like Mastodon/Fediverse? They in turn have problems with censorship.
  - rob74 3y ago
    You either have problems with censorship (or moderation, if you want to use a more moderate term), or you have problems with raving lunatics and trolls scaring everyone else off your platform...
    - cubefox 3y ago
      You can't justify censorship by across the board smearing censored people as "raving lunatics" or "trolls". The "scaring off" excuse for censorship works for forums like HN, but it doesn't work for social media sites, since on those you choose whom to follow yourself, and even in the replies to posts (of yourself or people you voluntarily follow, and whose followers are likely similar in opinion to yourself!) you can selectively mute or block people. So individuals do not actually need any additional censorship.
      - chimprich 3y ago
        > you can selectively mute or block people That's a fantasy solution. Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people. They might be a minority but even if you block them all, you've still received 10,000 hate messages and you have to spend a lot of time doing your own policing. And then everyone else still has to wade through all this crap, or see "blocked message" everywhere. Moderation is essential for most online communities. And then those 10,000 people can do the same to everyone else.
        cubefox 3y ago
        > Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people. That's a completely fantastical example. A normal person will never have close to unmanageably many replies. This is at most a problem for celebrities, which can be granted other solutions, e.g. only people they follow can reply, which solves the problem. > Moderation is essential for most online communities. There is a big difference between forums and social media, where you choose your own filter bubble anyway.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      It's not that "moderation" is a more moderate term, it's that this is entirely a misuse of the word "censorship".
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Which "they" are you specifically referring to? Yeah, it's a trick question.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      The majority of Mastodon servers. And if you are on a minority, your server is probably blocked by the majority. So it's a general problem on Mastodon, not just one of specific servers.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        This is categorically false. I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship. If each instance is a home, we should expect to follow their owner's rules when we are there. No owner is forced to give you a soapbox in their home for you to talk. If you want to have your own space, with your own rules, you are free to do so. You can invite whoever you want to your home and no one is going to come after you for the things you say in your home.
        cubefox 3y ago
        > I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship. It has a lot to do with system wide censorship, as in the end the effect is approximately similar. > If each instance is a home That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy. You could even say that each country is "a home", and if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.
        rglullis 3y ago
        > That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy. And that would be perfectly justifiable. None of the big social media networks are forced to provide service to a customer that they don't want. It's not an utility, it should not be treated as such. > if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc. - The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself is negligible compared to the cost of moving to a different country - To "emigrate" to a different country implies having to abandon your original home country. In some cases, it even means having to renounce your original citizenship. Online, you can have different digital identities. All that is being asked of you is to respect the rules of the home you are in. If this is difficult for you to understand, it's not a problem of your social peers.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Every network has problem with censorship. You can only choose which kind of problem impacts you less.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      I'm just saying that Fediverse solutions aren't automatically better than centralized ones.
    - Pannoniae 3y ago
      4chan is pretty good in that regard. Not social media per se, though. I wish there were more "only as much censorship as necessary" platforms.
      - viraptor 3y ago
        Almost every platform is "only as much censorship as necessary". The threshold for necessary is just different. (4chan gets away with a lower threshold since the posts are very ephemeral)
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        Pannoniae 3y ago
        I don't really agree.... many censor things they shouldn't out of scaremongering for "safety" and "brand integrity" and "protecting the users"
        sanderjd 3y ago
        They do it because the overwhelmingly vast majority of people don't like all that crap, and they are more interested in catering to that large group of normies than to the tiny group of edgelords out there. You just aren't their audience, and as you say, there are other places you can go for that experience.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    You mean with the people who host servers choosing not to host certain content? That isn't censorship, it's just people making their own choices.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      It's server admins making their choices for/against users, by blocking entire instances whose politics they don't like. There is a big difference between users making their own choices and admins making them for them.
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Ok, so what? Server admins are just private people hosting their own thing. They can do whatever they want. It's honestly none of your business what they choose to do.
        cubefox 3y ago
        I argued that there is a lot of censorship on Mastodon. You may be okay with this (presumably because the censorship doesn't affect your own political opinions) but that's a different point.
        sanderjd 3y ago
        It isn't "censorship", it's private people choosing not to host stuff they don't want to host. That's their choice, and it's good for them to be able to choose.
        cubefox 3y ago
        Call it what you want, the effect is the same.
        sanderjd 3y ago
        No it isn't. For instance, even though you seem to be mad about having your reach there limited by the choices of mastodon server admins, here you are freely expressing your opinions on a different website. You have not been censored.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  No, that gets you a different shaped mess.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Actually, I'd argue that it makes different messes. Plural. However, these messes are of a much smaller scale, have less long-lasting effects and are easier to work around.
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  Indieweb is by definition not sustainable. Either you are a generous person who is paying out of his pocket to host a platform, or you require people to pay for usage (or your platform it truly p2p but good luck with people having the means to self-host nodes). Fact is, most people are freeloaders so this is not sustainable either way. Let's just say it like it is: most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat. If I had $20 to spend I'd rather buy a bunch of books instead of 4 months of whatever mastodon server would ask me to pay for. Usenet days, in which you paid a single amount to a single provider and all the boards were populated by technical people, are over. There is absolutely no single place on the web where you can interact with knowledgeable people in every field all clumped together (except sci-hub + email heh)
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Gotta make a Pied Piper type thing that uses the indexedDB and some light blockchain to store data on all devices, maybe while tricking Cloudflare to do the bulk of the caching and serving lol.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Perhaps you could host on twitter while stenographically hiding from twitter. Let them collect ad revenue for rendering ads in a headless browser to nonexistent users.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    So I take that as a "No" for the "Ask HN" I did just yesterday? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674034
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    > most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat Maybe this is more a problem with how we've structured the web and less a problem with the type of app or our expectation of it. 99% of what I view on the web doesn't have to be absolutely up to date. I can tolerate some latency. If we dropped the whole request-response thing in favor of pub-sub, and just had the servers wake up for one minute every hour to propagate state changes, we'd only need to pay for 1/60th of the uptime that we currently are--the cicada approach. I realize that this would be very inconvenient for advertisers who are trying to create a controlled experience re: which material I see when. They would absolutely hate it if the default mode of consumption happened in an offline-friendly way. But given that I don't give a damn about what they want, I think it would be ok.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  Also, for the sake of humor, the offenses that the companies did should escalate. This started with the first platform declaring that it owned its users' pancreases and everything else seemed pretty minor compared to that.
- imiric 3y ago
  The discussion around this topic is severely limited by the tech echo chamber we're in. Ask random people on the street whether they care about their data or privacy, and if they care enough about it to boycott a popular web service, and you'll likely get blank stares or be laughed at for making such a proposition. Most people don't care. Which is why this cycle of service hopping will never[1] be broken, and only privacy and tech enthusiasts will keep using privacy-respecting services. All this technobabble about privacy falls on deaf ears. [1] Service hopping will still exist, but the only way privacy-respecting services will catch on in the mainstream is if they also offer a clear user experience advantage, and if they gain enough momentum for everyone else to want to use them. This is unlikely to happen with the modern indieweb movement, which is focused on the wrong things.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    This is not just about privacy. It's about ad-funded internet that can makes content creators prioritize quantity over quality. It's about the destruction of healthy civic debate by having media channels that increasingly polarize public opinion, because it's easier to sell sensationalism than good reporting. It's about how unsustainable the current model is.
amelius 3y ago
Regulations would be welcome. They also worked back in the starting days of telephony (imagine everybody being forced on the same telephone network because telephone numbers were unrelated between networks, that would be pretty shitty, so ... we did something about it! [1]) [1] http://som.csudh.edu/cis/471/hout/telecomhistory/ http://som.csudh.edu/cis/471/hout/telecomhistory/
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Oh they will, but not in a way that anyone will like. With LLMs getting cheaper to run in the coming years it'll be passport based verification and login for everything or drown in completely human looking spam.
  - amelius 3y ago
    > but not in a way that anyone will like If that is the case then it is because we just let it happen.
onion2k 3y ago
Repetition as a form of comedy is a classic. Monty Python used it a lot (eg 'The Larch'). I found this really amusing. Maybe you need to be British though.
VerminOctopus1 3y ago
You say “we get it” but seems like you don’t actually get it
Applejinx 3y ago
I forgot it was a literal video and thought it was a CSS trick, where it randomly selected among text options and constructed the cycle forever, never stopping. That would be amazing, by the way. Make it look like a video, and then the progress bar just slows and stops, and you're still there looking at new silly names and dumb stunts, hours later…
buggyipadmettoo 3y ago
It’s British humor. They think just being sarcastic is funny.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

Really? I thought the best part was about the autonomous armored car that learned to be anti-Semitic on terabytes of unmoderated Nazi posts. Repetitive is the point, because we repeat ourselves, but in time periods long enough that we forget and don't notice. This is our stupidity, compressed.

rob74 3y ago
Yeah, I guess that's one of the points that the video tries to make: the repetitiveness is so numbing that you stop noticing that the behavior of the platforms is getting more and more egregious...

rglullis 3y ago

Or maybe: Stop. Get some help. Stop chasing "VC funded social networks". Let's look at the indieweb for a sustainable model. Let's patronize separate, small, independent service providers to keep the servers running. That's all that it takes to fix this mess.

cubefox 3y ago
Like Mastodon/Fediverse? They in turn have problems with censorship.
- rob74 3y ago
  You either have problems with censorship (or moderation, if you want to use a more moderate term), or you have problems with raving lunatics and trolls scaring everyone else off your platform...
  - cubefox 3y ago
    You can't justify censorship by across the board smearing censored people as "raving lunatics" or "trolls". The "scaring off" excuse for censorship works for forums like HN, but it doesn't work for social media sites, since on those you choose whom to follow yourself, and even in the replies to posts (of yourself or people you voluntarily follow, and whose followers are likely similar in opinion to yourself!) you can selectively mute or block people. So individuals do not actually need any additional censorship.
    - chimprich 3y ago
      > you can selectively mute or block people That's a fantasy solution. Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people. They might be a minority but even if you block them all, you've still received 10,000 hate messages and you have to spend a lot of time doing your own policing. And then everyone else still has to wade through all this crap, or see "blocked message" everywhere. Moderation is essential for most online communities. And then those 10,000 people can do the same to everyone else.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        > Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people. That's a completely fantastical example. A normal person will never have close to unmanageably many replies. This is at most a problem for celebrities, which can be granted other solutions, e.g. only people they follow can reply, which solves the problem. > Moderation is essential for most online communities. There is a big difference between forums and social media, where you choose your own filter bubble anyway.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    It's not that "moderation" is a more moderate term, it's that this is entirely a misuse of the word "censorship".
- rglullis 3y ago
  Which "they" are you specifically referring to? Yeah, it's a trick question.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    The majority of Mastodon servers. And if you are on a minority, your server is probably blocked by the majority. So it's a general problem on Mastodon, not just one of specific servers.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      This is categorically false. I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship. If each instance is a home, we should expect to follow their owner's rules when we are there. No owner is forced to give you a soapbox in their home for you to talk. If you want to have your own space, with your own rules, you are free to do so. You can invite whoever you want to your home and no one is going to come after you for the things you say in your home.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        > I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship. It has a lot to do with system wide censorship, as in the end the effect is approximately similar. > If each instance is a home That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy. You could even say that each country is "a home", and if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.
        rglullis 3y ago
        > That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy. And that would be perfectly justifiable. None of the big social media networks are forced to provide service to a customer that they don't want. It's not an utility, it should not be treated as such. > if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc. - The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself is negligible compared to the cost of moving to a different country - To "emigrate" to a different country implies having to abandon your original home country. In some cases, it even means having to renounce your original citizenship. Online, you can have different digital identities. All that is being asked of you is to respect the rules of the home you are in. If this is difficult for you to understand, it's not a problem of your social peers.
- viraptor 3y ago
  Every network has problem with censorship. You can only choose which kind of problem impacts you less.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    I'm just saying that Fediverse solutions aren't automatically better than centralized ones.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    4chan is pretty good in that regard. Not social media per se, though. I wish there were more "only as much censorship as necessary" platforms.
    - viraptor 3y ago
      Almost every platform is "only as much censorship as necessary". The threshold for necessary is just different. (4chan gets away with a lower threshold since the posts are very ephemeral)
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - Pannoniae 3y ago
        I don't really agree.... many censor things they shouldn't out of scaremongering for "safety" and "brand integrity" and "protecting the users"
        sanderjd 3y ago
        They do it because the overwhelmingly vast majority of people don't like all that crap, and they are more interested in catering to that large group of normies than to the tiny group of edgelords out there. You just aren't their audience, and as you say, there are other places you can go for that experience.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  You mean with the people who host servers choosing not to host certain content? That isn't censorship, it's just people making their own choices.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    It's server admins making their choices for/against users, by blocking entire instances whose politics they don't like. There is a big difference between users making their own choices and admins making them for them.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Ok, so what? Server admins are just private people hosting their own thing. They can do whatever they want. It's honestly none of your business what they choose to do.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        I argued that there is a lot of censorship on Mastodon. You may be okay with this (presumably because the censorship doesn't affect your own political opinions) but that's a different point.
        sanderjd 3y ago
        It isn't "censorship", it's private people choosing not to host stuff they don't want to host. That's their choice, and it's good for them to be able to choose.
        cubefox 3y ago
        Call it what you want, the effect is the same.
        sanderjd 3y ago
        No it isn't. For instance, even though you seem to be mad about having your reach there limited by the choices of mastodon server admins, here you are freely expressing your opinions on a different website. You have not been censored.
jacquesm 3y ago
No, that gets you a different shaped mess.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Actually, I'd argue that it makes different messes. Plural. However, these messes are of a much smaller scale, have less long-lasting effects and are easier to work around.
CrampusDestrus 3y ago
Indieweb is by definition not sustainable. Either you are a generous person who is paying out of his pocket to host a platform, or you require people to pay for usage (or your platform it truly p2p but good luck with people having the means to self-host nodes). Fact is, most people are freeloaders so this is not sustainable either way. Let's just say it like it is: most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat. If I had $20 to spend I'd rather buy a bunch of books instead of 4 months of whatever mastodon server would ask me to pay for. Usenet days, in which you paid a single amount to a single provider and all the boards were populated by technical people, are over. There is absolutely no single place on the web where you can interact with knowledgeable people in every field all clumped together (except sci-hub + email heh)
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Gotta make a Pied Piper type thing that uses the indexedDB and some light blockchain to store data on all devices, maybe while tricking Cloudflare to do the bulk of the caching and serving lol.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Perhaps you could host on twitter while stenographically hiding from twitter. Let them collect ad revenue for rendering ads in a headless browser to nonexistent users.
- rglullis 3y ago
  So I take that as a "No" for the "Ask HN" I did just yesterday? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674034
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  > most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat Maybe this is more a problem with how we've structured the web and less a problem with the type of app or our expectation of it. 99% of what I view on the web doesn't have to be absolutely up to date. I can tolerate some latency. If we dropped the whole request-response thing in favor of pub-sub, and just had the servers wake up for one minute every hour to propagate state changes, we'd only need to pay for 1/60th of the uptime that we currently are--the cicada approach. I realize that this would be very inconvenient for advertisers who are trying to create a controlled experience re: which material I see when. They would absolutely hate it if the default mode of consumption happened in an offline-friendly way. But given that I don't give a damn about what they want, I think it would be ok.
jhbadger 3y ago
Also, for the sake of humor, the offenses that the companies did should escalate. This started with the first platform declaring that it owned its users' pancreases and everything else seemed pretty minor compared to that.
imiric 3y ago
The discussion around this topic is severely limited by the tech echo chamber we're in. Ask random people on the street whether they care about their data or privacy, and if they care enough about it to boycott a popular web service, and you'll likely get blank stares or be laughed at for making such a proposition. Most people don't care. Which is why this cycle of service hopping will never[1] be broken, and only privacy and tech enthusiasts will keep using privacy-respecting services. All this technobabble about privacy falls on deaf ears. [1] Service hopping will still exist, but the only way privacy-respecting services will catch on in the mainstream is if they also offer a clear user experience advantage, and if they gain enough momentum for everyone else to want to use them. This is unlikely to happen with the modern indieweb movement, which is focused on the wrong things.
- rglullis 3y ago
  This is not just about privacy. It's about ad-funded internet that can makes content creators prioritize quantity over quality. It's about the destruction of healthy civic debate by having media channels that increasingly polarize public opinion, because it's easier to sell sensationalism than good reporting. It's about how unsustainable the current model is.

amelius 3y ago

Regulations would be welcome. They also worked back in the starting days of telephony (imagine everybody being forced on the same telephone network because telephone numbers were unrelated between networks, that would be pretty shitty, so ... we did something about it! [1]) [1] http://som.csudh.edu/cis/471/hout/telecomhistory/ http://som.csudh.edu/cis/471/hout/telecomhistory/

moffkalast 3y ago
Oh they will, but not in a way that anyone will like. With LLMs getting cheaper to run in the coming years it'll be passport based verification and login for everything or drown in completely human looking spam.
- amelius 3y ago
  > but not in a way that anyone will like If that is the case then it is because we just let it happen.

onion2k 3y ago

Repetition as a form of comedy is a classic. Monty Python used it a lot (eg 'The Larch'). I found this really amusing. Maybe you need to be British though.

VerminOctopus1 3y ago

You say “we get it” but seems like you don’t actually get it

Applejinx 3y ago

I forgot it was a literal video and thought it was a CSS trick, where it randomly selected among text options and constructed the cycle forever, never stopping. That would be amazing, by the way. Make it look like a video, and then the progress bar just slows and stops, and you're still there looking at new silly names and dumb stunts, hours later…

buggyipadmettoo 3y ago

It’s British humor. They think just being sarcastic is funny.