10 ms·

So Long, Twitter and Reddit

254 points by earthboundkid 3y ago

mtillman 3y ago
> start hunting for high quality blogs I like this site for that: https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/
guywithahat 3y ago
[flagged]
puffyblogger 3y ago
[flagged]
- D13Fd 3y ago
  I saw nothing about either of those people in that post. He also trashed Mastadon for the same reasons as X. I think maybe you’re reading something into the post that’s not there.
  - reactordev 3y ago
    There's a link dead center of the page, when you first visit, that clearly says "... Twitter by Elon Musk".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
kromem 3y ago
Lemmy has been surprisingly good as a Reddit replacement given the relative user counts. With 3rd party apps like Sync already migrated, you'd almost not even know you weren't just on Reddit.
- callroomlamp 3y ago
  Lemmy experience is quite satisfying. Took a moment to get used to the fediverse especially with multiple duplicate communities. Yet find myself doomscrolling much less and being more satisfied than Reddit. Still a small community though…
  - bytefactory 3y ago
    > Still a small community though Lack of content has been my biggest issue with lemmy by far. There's just not enough content right now (once the many topics I have blocked because of zero interest are removed) to sustain my mindless scrolling habit. I frequently find myself at the bottom of the barrel. I keep hoping that this results in me just wasting less time on the phone/computer, but my addiction is overpowering.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > Yet find myself doomscrolling much less and being more satisfied than Reddit. Still a small community though… I think these two things are tightly related. When a platform gets too big, the content trends towards the lowest common denominator, which tends to be content that appeals to our primal fears, anger, and hatred. Lemmy is small enough that the community is still drawn together by something healthier.
  - deprecative 3y ago
    I cannot understand why anyone would want to deal with fediverse anything. I don't want thirty places with five to twenty people that post the same few things. I want one with hundreds or thousands or more. If I want a cozy social area I'd just as soon start a group text chat. It's just the worst of every experience.
    - mdaniel 3y ago
      OT1H, I hear you and agree it is frustrating and very bad UX. OTOH, there is no rug-pull outcome because the board of anything decided to rug-pull API access to AcitvityPub endpoints That said, I think ActivityPub has only solved the distributed posting identity problem, and has not yet solved the "lemmy.ml shuts down" problem, in that such a thing will not take my ActivityPub identity with it, but will take a lot of the high subscriber communities with it, forcing them to relocate yet again
ThorsBane 3y ago
I hate reddit's up/down voting.
- timbit42 3y ago
  Then sort by New or Old instead of by Best or Top.
nadermx 3y ago
"You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you." This hits
kemayo 3y ago
> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon, so we should be on the lookout for an alternative over the next five years. Discord's fine for what it is, but it's also a fundamentally different thing than social media or forums or a support-site. Projects that try to funnel everything onto Discord are (a) losing anyone who thinks joining an 800 person chatroom doesn't sound fun, and (b) always seem to wind up being very irritable at people who join and immediately ask all 800 people their common question, despite Discord being extremely poorly searchable.
- reactordev 3y ago
  Discord is not a social platform. It's a chatroom for gamers, to share memes and voice chat while they play <game-of-the-month>. It's not a base for documentation. It's not a platform for your next product (other than a bot..) launch. It's poorly designed for searching, for knowledge, for connecting. It's 2020s version of ICQ.
  - nocoiner 3y ago
    I never understood how so many people - seemingly everyone - all came to the conclusion that Discord is all these things that it clearly isn’t.
    - bsder 3y ago
      Simple--because user authentication and management sucks ass. So, everyone is willing to put up with a wildly incorrect feature set simply to have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc.
      - gabereiser 3y ago
        Okta, Keycloak, Auth0, Kinde, FusionAuth, Firebase, Cognito, Clerk - User auth does suck ass and it’s been solved time and time and time again. Don’t be lazy.
bsder 3y ago
The more problematic thing is that Reddit took a read-only group, assigned a random, completely unknown new moderator, and re-opened it. The maw must be fed.
SubGenius 3y ago
> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon, so we should be on the lookout for an alternative over the next five years. For folks who want to move their communities to a publicly accessible Matrix server, I'm building Shpong [0]. Heavy WIP obviously. The trend of moving to closed-off spaces is bad for the open web. I'm hoping we're able to reverse it, despite everyone wanting to close things down due to AI panic. [0] https://shpong.com/shpong https://shpong.com/shpong
- bytefactory 3y ago
  This looks amazing! I'm somebody who quite enjoyed the Discord interface, although I don't use it much. I'm glad you're building something like this, it'll definitely scratch the need for an open alternative to Discord. I completely agree about the trend of closed-off spaces being terrible. I'm heartened by the number of open-source and open platforms that have picked up the mantle.
- wise_young_man 3y ago
  This looks like a really cool project. Is it open source?
  - SubGenius 3y ago
    Yes it is. https://github.com/commune-os/commune-server/ https://github.com/commune-os/commune-server/
tristan_ph 3y ago
Use twitter and reddit to promote your blog.
- hryx 3y ago
  As Andrew mentions in the post, even having a Twitter account was a source of stress. It's about more than just promoting his content. It's a feeling I can sympathize with. In 2009 I deleted my Facebook account (or "deactivated" it, the only option at the time), and even though I wasn't using it much by then, it felt like a needless weight was suddenly lifted.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Haha, you think reddit values OC? They love to say they do, but then you get caught in spam filters, reported for "self promotion" (because how dare you use a proper blogging site over reddit's markdown self post), and overall called a shill because you don't revolve your life around reddit before daring to share something you thought the community would resonate in. It can be done, but it just shows another hypocritical angle of that community.
jshchnz 3y ago
time is a flat circle - RSS feeds come back bb, I missed you
- marban 3y ago
  They never went away. (I'm pretty qualified to say)
jsemrau 3y ago
I'm on Twitter off/on for 10 years. I still don't get it' value proposition.
grodes 3y ago
rss is back
- gaws 3y ago
  It never went anywhere.
RaisingSpear 3y ago
> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon Discord was enshittified years ago. It's just that nothing really changed recently, unlike Twitter/Reddit, so it's not making the news. You've got a platform that's completely inaccessible without an account. Acquiring an account often requires handing over a mobile number. And Discord can then ban you arbitrarily, despite never posting a single message (the one saving grace is that you can email them about it, and they'll often restore the brand new account, if you don't mind the weeks worth of waiting). And that doesn't cover the five minute rigamarole of logging in (enter user/pass, fill in captcha, get told that this is an unrecognised IP/device, wait for email to arrive, open Discord email, click on link*, click Authorize, fill in user/pass again, solve captcha) - why do I have to do this just to view content? * Bonus: the link has like a ~5 minute expiry, so you can't just go and do something else during the process, or you'll have to start over from the beginning
- seanhunter 3y ago
  Goodness knows you can validly critise discord for any number of reasons but the time taken to log in on an untrusted device isn't really one that resonates with me. I have done this recently and the process took all of 5 seconds. Here's the process if you have a phone and want to do it fast: 1. Click login on discord on the untrusted device. It shows a qr code next to the credentials box. 2. Log in on phone (which for me is just a faceid check). 3. Scan qr code. Now you're logged in on the untrusted device. No captcha, no username/password typing on the untrusted device, no second factor even (because your phone is logged in using 2FA so you're using that trust) and definitely no email verification.
  - RaisingSpear 3y ago
    Good to know. I refuse to let a bunch of things touch my phone (Discord doesn't exactly have a stellar privacy record), so have never tried, but for those that don't care so much about privacy, it sounds reasonable. But hopefully you can at least understand how unnecessarily convoluted Discord makes the process if you don't have or want to use a phone.
4dahalibut 3y ago
You can just unfollow people that engage in extreme language on Twitter, you won’t run out of people
- threeseed 3y ago
  The problem is that Musk changed the Following algorithm to reward engagement. So you will inevitably get people who are more extreme and controversial. And since they will soon disable blocking you won't be able to avoid them.
  - FeteCommuniste 3y ago
    “Mute” works for me to avoid annoying users, including Musk hinself.
- numpad0 3y ago
  and funnily it seems it's them that run out of people rather than you.
TheBlight 3y ago
Doomscrolling hits some sort of dopamine receptor for some sort of evolutionary reason. But I know now, in 2023, that whatever components in my brain that are being manipulated, the reason has nothing to do with my survival. And for me really it's that feeling of manipulation I resent most. Often the manipulation is indirect which is arguably the more insidious aspect. The people we follow may not be trying to consciously manipulate us but some content they saw was -- and probably for a reason completely misaligned with whatever we like to think our values are.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
Really happy to see this. We all moved to these centralized platforms because they were convenient and benign. But we could all go back to smaller independent forums if we really wanted to. And if you run a project that people want to find, there is virtually no downside to self hosting a forum for the community.
raincole 3y ago
I don't know why people just can't use plain old forums. I've got a lot help from KVR (a forum for music making) since I started learning DAW. It works fine. If authentication is a problem then just let users login with their discord/twitter/reddit accounts? Is it the lacking of "one-click setup" forum services?
- hardwaresofton 3y ago
  They did, Discourse is basically just a plain old forum -- with a somewhat newer coat of paint. > Is it the lacking of "one-click setup" forum services? I'm a bit biased (since I run a tiny managed service provider) -- would you create a forum if it had one click setup? Services like Discourse and NodeBB do offer this kind of service, so it seems like the option is there.
  - raincole 3y ago
    > would you create a forum if it had one click setup? The only reason I'd be hesitate to create a forum is that I think people (not me) might actually prefer Discord and I'm doing a disservice for them. So it's like Catch 22.
    - hardwaresofton 3y ago
      Ah I could see that -- I personally think that forums and Discord are actually different mediums, for different purposes. Slack/Discord/Mattermost/Matrix is great for frenetic conversation and water cooler chat, but it just feels like history and long term knowledge doesn't get built easily there. It's like the difference between old school forums and IRC -- people generally didn't expect much from ephemeral conversation on IRC. The one exception might be Zulip -- their threaded chat model is actually a blend and is very effective at creating enough mass around a single conversation (i.e. a thread) and making it trackable. That said, I still think forums are a different beast.
  - FullMetalBitch 3y ago
    I have been in forums my whole life and discord is far from them, discord is just a chat akin to irc. Forums and IRC worked together very well, when I was moderating a huge gaming community we had several IRC channels for those who wanted live participation. It's impossible to follow a discussion in discord because when you arrive it may be over and they are talking about something else, that doesn't happen in a forum you can just post and add your take. And managing knowledge is easier in a forum, I can still find my 15 year old replies, or access all the news I created back when I was a mod.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
It's not really possible to use Twitter without at least a little bit of doomscrolling, and that activity took a toll on me emotionally. Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of negative news online. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling I don't think I do this -- at least not anymore. Tweets are short. If you don't want to click into the horrifying article linked or whatever, you don't have to. You may not be able to use the platform formerly known as Twitter without scrolling through a fair number of Tweets with negative framing, but it's a bit like seeing a bunch of negative titles and you can just go "Well, not my cup of tea. Not going down that rabbit hole." It's maybe something I did when I didn't feel well and couldn't focus or whatever. It's low-hanging fruit when I have no energy nor attention span. But even with that, I've gotten better over time at recognizing when I feel awful and I'm inclined to do stupid stuff online and instead of wallowing in the mire, I try to play games that are "my speed" for such times, "productively piddle," or watch music videos. I try really hard to not just wallow in my bad mood and let it grow into something more in my mind than "Well, Doreen is sick and tired today and everything sounds bad because of it."
rglullis 3y ago
If anyone here happens to be interested in a Zig community on Lemmy, let me know. My instance [0] still has plenty of room to grow, and it's slowly becoming the alternative place for emacs and lisp. [0]: https://communick.news https://communick.news
browningstreet 3y ago
I often think about social media like this: I’m a quiet cafe and empty restaurant kind of guy. I hike trails and go to the gym at early hours because the vibe is right. Social media is like the mall, or a stadium. Some people like going there, and do so often. They’re excited to see Taylor Swift with 80K other people. They go to the mall early on a weekday for a sneaker drop. I don’t get it but c’est la vie. That’s their life. I don’t rant about the 80K people in the stadium for the big show. I’m sad there aren’t more quiet cafes. I spend time in countries where quiet cafes are more the norm. Maybe I’ll move there some day. I’m also reminded by my parents who talk about the old country, or how grand it was to buy a house in LA in the 60s for $14K. Things change, eras end, we miss what was or what could have been. Tech stacks change, platforms and social spaces petrify, and our kids won’t care about any of these tomorrow. I don’t have Twitter or Reddit accounts. And so it is.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Guess we have opposite problems. Most places around me are quiet and I want something inbetwee a library and a night club. Just a semi-social place to make friends. Sadly the internet polarizes that as well. Sometimes Discord is the only place for smaller kinds of media. otherwise you have ghost towns of forums where maybe you get one response back when talking about a certain work. Usually none
rvz 3y ago
The only alternative is to delete your social media accounts rather than replacing one social network with another. Migrating to another social network does not solve the problem that Andrew is talking about. It just prolongs the outrage and the addiction present in all social networks no matter their algorithm or users. Its exactly like suggesting to quit alcohol addiction by drinking a different brand of alcohol. So the solution is to delete all your social media accounts and never look back.
- arp242 3y ago
  You're posting on a social network right now.
dottjt 3y ago
Personally, I love the value of Reddit. How I see it is that it's a single account which allows me access to an infinite number of communities for me to ask questions about. Interested in fishing? Ask about it in the fishing subreddit. Interested in Chinese Medicine? Ask about it in the Chinese Medicine subreddit. I absolutely love it. It's like interactive Google.
- nunez 3y ago
  That was the case before many of the moderators of those communities left in protest of Reddit's API changes. Whether that will stay the case remains to be seen.
  - dottjt 3y ago
    I'm not sure how the moderators are relevant. The communities still exist. The moderator isn't the community itself.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Moderators shape the community. Whether or not that shape sticks after they leave depends a lot on the community and what rules they keep/enforce. for example, r/fishing bans memes. What if mod A leaves and mod B allows memes? Experience says that memes proceed to take over r/fishing anf the community tone changes. Sure, r/fishing "exists", but does it exist for the reasons you subscribed? You can even use HN as a whole here. How much do you think the tone of HN would change if Dang dissapeared tomorrow? That's the issue that was understated during these protests. Moderation is thankless work and even without drama it can burn one out.
    - nunez 3y ago
      Moderators enforce quality thresholds and keep trolls out that makes those communities possible. They used lots of custom bots to do this. Many, such as bots that detected abuse from users, used Pushshift, an API and front-end for crawling through archived Reddit posts. (Reddit's API limits you to 1000 posts/thread and has rate limits on the number of posts you can search through.) Apollo and other apps aside, a large chunk of the protests from moderators were because of how the API would render their moderation bots completely useless and Reddit's inability to provide better alternatives. Most vocal amongst them was the moderation team of /r/AskHistorians, an extremely well-curated sub that heavily used bots to enforce their very high submission and participation standards.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
thrwjud 3y ago
>Nuance and subtlety is impossible to distinguish from dog whistling. Most users don't understand that by "dunking" on someone, they are actually promoting the content. In summary, it gave me a darker feeling about the world in general, and in exchange, did not offer much to enrich my life. [...] And finally, I have more nuanced conversations with my wife and friends about politics and other hot topics, without worrying that I'm going to come off as dog whistling or naysaying. It sounds like the problem with social media for OP is between the ears rather than on the screen.
adamcblodgett 3y ago
"Those Large Language Models are hungry!" XD
jakecopp 3y ago
> I have a Mastodon account, but I don't love it, for the same reasons I didn't like Twitter. In addition, I think that way of consuming content is generally like watching mainstream TV or listening to radio with ads. You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you. Isn't that the opposite of Mastodon? The _default_ Mastodon home feed is only people you explicitly follow and posts they re-share (and it's easy to hide re-posts if desired). There is no suggested content. It's basically as close as social media can get to an RSS feed.
- xigoi 3y ago
  The people you follow are the mentioned content curators.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    Except you choose them yourself.
    - xigoi 3y ago
      Yes, but choosing people makes your feed more cluttered than choosing topics.
      - fsflover 3y ago
        Hashtags are also there.
      - timbit42 3y ago
        Don't follow people. Follow hashtags.
- progfix 3y ago
  You can also follow hashtags which for me is much more interesting than following people.
vGPU 3y ago
I agree with the writer. When Apollo got shut down, my usage of Reddit died with it. The occasional skim on BuildaPCsales aside, it’s utility has rapidly approached zero for me, and the old subs that I used to browse have taken a noticeable dive in quality to the point where it’s not worth my time to read them. The same with twitter. I tried twitter for 2-3 months. I found the quality of almost the entire user base to approach quality reminiscent of Markov chains. I amassed a handful of followers. 95% of whom were bots. With the change to X, I think it’s about time to wrap it up. Funnily enough, the en-shitification of both has brought me back to my original love: reading. I’ve finally started working my way through the backlog that’s been building for several years now, and my life has been immensely improved over the results that would have been gained over spending that time browsing Reddit.
- RamenJunkie_ 3y ago
  Same here. some 600k+ Karma and like 13 years on the platform and I completely quit when Baconreader broke. I added /r/gamedeals and /r/gamebundles and the Fortnite ststus bot to my RSS reader and that's all I follow at all now.
  - vGPU 3y ago
    My first account was probably 10 years ago. This was back when r/bodybuilding and WSB were still good. I had pretty much stopped using Reddit a few months before the news broke just because the overall quality was so low outside of a few niche fintech subs. When the announcement popped up on Apollo I sent the dev a nice tip as a thank you for his work on top of the Apollo premium (?) I had already purchased a few years back, then I uninstalled it and never looked back. Doesn’t help that trying to use Reddit in mobile safari is such a painful experience. I still haven’t figured out how to do a subreddit search, and at this point I don’t really care to.
hypnoosi 3y ago
I think the problem with online forums such as Reddit or Lemmy is still just the plain old content filteration. The first thing, when opening a Lemmy server, I see is a HC political memes about free-speech... aka. yet another dopamine well. We have pretty good a LLMs, it shouldn't be hard to categorise these posts and apply some filters. I would smash the button "filter out non-nuanced political posts" so hard...
disambiguation 3y ago
Anything less than face-to-face socializing is a degraded social experience. Arguing over healthier forms of social media is like arguing over the healthiest fast food chain. It's just not good for you.
- amon22 3y ago
  Why?
  - disambiguation 3y ago
    Think about what you get out of face to face socializing. It's not just verbal communication. You get facial expressions, body language, their style, their image, their smell, you can touch them. I can pass you snacks, a beer, give you a hug hello and goodbye. You're in the room together. You're sharing an experience. No other form of communication enhances, adds too, or improves on these things - with the possible exception of VRChat. Voice chat and message chat offer a fraction of the full experience. Not to mention dealing with unreliable and sketchy brokers and middle men. You can talk, but there are rules, sometimes subscriptions, or other strings attached. Also they get to spy on you and sell your private information at will. Social media is lesser still. A feed about your life so acquaintances and strangers alike can casually browse your life history at will. They'll know about you, but never really know you. They'll only know what you show them. You see, it's not just about the richness of information or experience for its own sake. Ask yourself why we socialize? What's the goal? It's to develop a connection. But there's a difference between good and great connections. How strong of a relationship can one develop when the "handshake" is limited, restricted, and fundamentally flawed?
    - amon22 3y ago
      It's a different kind of communication but I don't think there's a qualitative difference between them. They are just different, with their unique set of benefits and disadvantages. Online communication might be asynchronous for example (which allows more frequent communication) and better suited to share pieces of digital content like pictures/videos/links which might not be important for you but for younger people it is. They can still meet each other offline of course (it would suck to go to a digital concert or whatever, nobody does that) but there's a shared cultural context that is digital and online communication is what enables this. I think it's close-minded to dismiss that. Also developing a deep connection or whatever is rarely the "goal" of casual socializing (which is what online communication is for). But it also helps keeping your "real" friendships strong by enabling frequent and convenient communication even when life doesn't allow meeting frequently.
radar1310 3y ago
This isn’t an airport.No need to announce your departure.
radar1310 3y ago
This isn’t an airport. No need to announce your departure.
- Kerb_ 3y ago
  This isn't Reddit.
veave 3y ago
>Once Loris was the sole moderator, he decided to change the subreddit to read-only mode. However, this was thwarted today when a troll (check their comment history) performed a hostile takeover in broad daylight and reopened the sub. I would say you are the troll for closing a programming language sub for ideological reasons.
dzonga 3y ago
own your platform. use things like rss to follow feeds / blogs etc. but us humans being stupid we wanna take the easy way out and be surprised by the results. if people had stuck to blogs, rss we wouldn't be having so much polarization going on. now its so toxic that if someone has a different politically opinion to you - then they must've been not so smart in other areas as well.
specialist 3y ago
Andrew Kelly wrote: > ... the same reasons I didn't like Twitter. ... You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you. Exactly. I'll own and operate my own personal recommender algorithm, thank you very much. > I'm going to look into setting up an RSS reader for myself and start hunting for high quality blogs. The Correct Answer™ -- I've never understood Twitter. How do I follow convos? What are people talking about? Why can't I find anything? And most annoyingly, obvious links (hrefs) don't work, forcing click thrus. (Engagement FTW!) And WTF am I seeing the same frikking content over and over and over?! I'm finally using 𝕏 (neé Twitter) just this year. Because for the first time, I was super motivated to follow a handful of geeks (wrt climate crisis and electrifying everything) that don't post updates elsewhere. (For now. With Musk imploding 𝕏, THANK THE GODS, everyone's on the lookout for the next disco.) I now get how and why 𝕏 blows. It's an outrage machine, not a forum host. Those two use cases are mutually exclusive. -- Imagine a personalized HN landing page where I only saw unread updates from the people I follow. And for entries/topics that I'm "watching". Also imagine the ability to filter OC (outbound links). The stuff I never want to read. Lastly, imagine dupes (reposts) somehow get deduped. Like a forum for "continuing conversation", vs a whole new entry. People could repost (retweet) as much as they want and HN smartly aggregates them. And a great search. Now imagine the client for those forum features. Either web or app. Track my personal history. Which OC and people and topics do I most view, watch, bookmark, and like? Not just for internet karma, but also to complete my personal feedback loop. If my personal RSS reader and podcatcher simply logged my own viewing habits locally, I'd be in heaven. Render my activity on a timeline and I'd hit nirvana. (There's probably some other useful visualizations too.)
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
The funny thing about Twitter users is how in real life you can tell who is addicted to Twitter from the way they talk. Every conversation is a Mexican standoff with the Twitter addict as they try to bait you into exposing your Silo against their Silo. Its infuriating to deal with this type of addict because the rest of society is just trying to coexist while the Twitter addict is trying to root out imaginary threats to the Silo.
- pallas_athena 3y ago
  Silo? Not familiar with the term. Googling I found "Silo Mentality" (="resists sharing information and resources with other people or departments within the organisation.") but I don't see exactly how that applies here
  - robotshmobot 3y ago
    Perhaps echochamber is likely what they meant?
    - costanzaDynasty 3y ago
      I meant silo. Its not an echo chamber that they can disconnect from its a purposefully built online collection of thoughts and principles that they guard and collect to the point that its the driving force of their life.
      - quadhome 3y ago
        People do that without the help of social media.
  - quadhome 3y ago
    That comment made sense to me when I replaced “silo” with “filter bubble.” … which reveals my silo.
- comte7092 3y ago
  I see this opinion commonly espoused on HN, yet I know a number of people who are heavy Twitter users and not a single one acts like this. Most of them aren’t even engaged in politics at all. They mostly just care about sports and celebrity culture. They’re some of the most “normal” people I know.

254 points by earthboundkid 3y ago

mtillman 3y ago

> start hunting for high quality blogs I like this site for that: https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/

guywithahat 3y ago

[flagged]

puffyblogger 3y ago

[flagged]

D13Fd 3y ago
I saw nothing about either of those people in that post. He also trashed Mastadon for the same reasons as X. I think maybe you’re reading something into the post that’s not there.
- reactordev 3y ago
  There's a link dead center of the page, when you first visit, that clearly says "... Twitter by Elon Musk".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

kromem 3y ago

Lemmy has been surprisingly good as a Reddit replacement given the relative user counts. With 3rd party apps like Sync already migrated, you'd almost not even know you weren't just on Reddit.

callroomlamp 3y ago
Lemmy experience is quite satisfying. Took a moment to get used to the fediverse especially with multiple duplicate communities. Yet find myself doomscrolling much less and being more satisfied than Reddit. Still a small community though…
- bytefactory 3y ago
  > Still a small community though Lack of content has been my biggest issue with lemmy by far. There's just not enough content right now (once the many topics I have blocked because of zero interest are removed) to sustain my mindless scrolling habit. I frequently find myself at the bottom of the barrel. I keep hoping that this results in me just wasting less time on the phone/computer, but my addiction is overpowering.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lolinder 3y ago
  > Yet find myself doomscrolling much less and being more satisfied than Reddit. Still a small community though… I think these two things are tightly related. When a platform gets too big, the content trends towards the lowest common denominator, which tends to be content that appeals to our primal fears, anger, and hatred. Lemmy is small enough that the community is still drawn together by something healthier.
- deprecative 3y ago
  I cannot understand why anyone would want to deal with fediverse anything. I don't want thirty places with five to twenty people that post the same few things. I want one with hundreds or thousands or more. If I want a cozy social area I'd just as soon start a group text chat. It's just the worst of every experience.
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    OT1H, I hear you and agree it is frustrating and very bad UX. OTOH, there is no rug-pull outcome because the board of anything decided to rug-pull API access to AcitvityPub endpoints That said, I think ActivityPub has only solved the distributed posting identity problem, and has not yet solved the "lemmy.ml shuts down" problem, in that such a thing will not take my ActivityPub identity with it, but will take a lot of the high subscriber communities with it, forcing them to relocate yet again

ThorsBane 3y ago

I hate reddit's up/down voting.

timbit42 3y ago
Then sort by New or Old instead of by Best or Top.

nadermx 3y ago

"You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you." This hits

kemayo 3y ago

> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon, so we should be on the lookout for an alternative over the next five years. Discord's fine for what it is, but it's also a fundamentally different thing than social media or forums or a support-site. Projects that try to funnel everything onto Discord are (a) losing anyone who thinks joining an 800 person chatroom doesn't sound fun, and (b) always seem to wind up being very irritable at people who join and immediately ask all 800 people their common question, despite Discord being extremely poorly searchable.

reactordev 3y ago
Discord is not a social platform. It's a chatroom for gamers, to share memes and voice chat while they play <game-of-the-month>. It's not a base for documentation. It's not a platform for your next product (other than a bot..) launch. It's poorly designed for searching, for knowledge, for connecting. It's 2020s version of ICQ.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  I never understood how so many people - seemingly everyone - all came to the conclusion that Discord is all these things that it clearly isn’t.
  - bsder 3y ago
    Simple--because user authentication and management sucks ass. So, everyone is willing to put up with a wildly incorrect feature set simply to have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc.
    - gabereiser 3y ago
      Okta, Keycloak, Auth0, Kinde, FusionAuth, Firebase, Cognito, Clerk - User auth does suck ass and it’s been solved time and time and time again. Don’t be lazy.

bsder 3y ago

The more problematic thing is that Reddit took a read-only group, assigned a random, completely unknown new moderator, and re-opened it. The maw must be fed.

SubGenius 3y ago

> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon, so we should be on the lookout for an alternative over the next five years. For folks who want to move their communities to a publicly accessible Matrix server, I'm building Shpong [0]. Heavy WIP obviously. The trend of moving to closed-off spaces is bad for the open web. I'm hoping we're able to reverse it, despite everyone wanting to close things down due to AI panic. [0] https://shpong.com/shpong https://shpong.com/shpong

bytefactory 3y ago
This looks amazing! I'm somebody who quite enjoyed the Discord interface, although I don't use it much. I'm glad you're building something like this, it'll definitely scratch the need for an open alternative to Discord. I completely agree about the trend of closed-off spaces being terrible. I'm heartened by the number of open-source and open platforms that have picked up the mantle.
wise_young_man 3y ago
This looks like a really cool project. Is it open source?
- SubGenius 3y ago
  Yes it is. https://github.com/commune-os/commune-server/ https://github.com/commune-os/commune-server/

tristan_ph 3y ago

Use twitter and reddit to promote your blog.

hryx 3y ago
As Andrew mentions in the post, even having a Twitter account was a source of stress. It's about more than just promoting his content. It's a feeling I can sympathize with. In 2009 I deleted my Facebook account (or "deactivated" it, the only option at the time), and even though I wasn't using it much by then, it felt like a needless weight was suddenly lifted.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
Haha, you think reddit values OC? They love to say they do, but then you get caught in spam filters, reported for "self promotion" (because how dare you use a proper blogging site over reddit's markdown self post), and overall called a shill because you don't revolve your life around reddit before daring to share something you thought the community would resonate in. It can be done, but it just shows another hypocritical angle of that community.

jshchnz 3y ago

time is a flat circle - RSS feeds come back bb, I missed you

marban 3y ago
They never went away. (I'm pretty qualified to say)

jsemrau 3y ago

I'm on Twitter off/on for 10 years. I still don't get it' value proposition.

grodes 3y ago

rss is back

gaws 3y ago
It never went anywhere.

RaisingSpear 3y ago

> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon Discord was enshittified years ago. It's just that nothing really changed recently, unlike Twitter/Reddit, so it's not making the news. You've got a platform that's completely inaccessible without an account. Acquiring an account often requires handing over a mobile number. And Discord can then ban you arbitrarily, despite never posting a single message (the one saving grace is that you can email them about it, and they'll often restore the brand new account, if you don't mind the weeks worth of waiting). And that doesn't cover the five minute rigamarole of logging in (enter user/pass, fill in captcha, get told that this is an unrecognised IP/device, wait for email to arrive, open Discord email, click on link*, click Authorize, fill in user/pass again, solve captcha) - why do I have to do this just to view content? * Bonus: the link has like a ~5 minute expiry, so you can't just go and do something else during the process, or you'll have to start over from the beginning

seanhunter 3y ago
Goodness knows you can validly critise discord for any number of reasons but the time taken to log in on an untrusted device isn't really one that resonates with me. I have done this recently and the process took all of 5 seconds. Here's the process if you have a phone and want to do it fast: 1. Click login on discord on the untrusted device. It shows a qr code next to the credentials box. 2. Log in on phone (which for me is just a faceid check). 3. Scan qr code. Now you're logged in on the untrusted device. No captcha, no username/password typing on the untrusted device, no second factor even (because your phone is logged in using 2FA so you're using that trust) and definitely no email verification.
- RaisingSpear 3y ago
  Good to know. I refuse to let a bunch of things touch my phone (Discord doesn't exactly have a stellar privacy record), so have never tried, but for those that don't care so much about privacy, it sounds reasonable. But hopefully you can at least understand how unnecessarily convoluted Discord makes the process if you don't have or want to use a phone.

4dahalibut 3y ago

You can just unfollow people that engage in extreme language on Twitter, you won’t run out of people

threeseed 3y ago
The problem is that Musk changed the Following algorithm to reward engagement. So you will inevitably get people who are more extreme and controversial. And since they will soon disable blocking you won't be able to avoid them.
- FeteCommuniste 3y ago
  “Mute” works for me to avoid annoying users, including Musk hinself.
numpad0 3y ago
and funnily it seems it's them that run out of people rather than you.

TheBlight 3y ago

Doomscrolling hits some sort of dopamine receptor for some sort of evolutionary reason. But I know now, in 2023, that whatever components in my brain that are being manipulated, the reason has nothing to do with my survival. And for me really it's that feeling of manipulation I resent most. Often the manipulation is indirect which is arguably the more insidious aspect. The people we follow may not be trying to consciously manipulate us but some content they saw was -- and probably for a reason completely misaligned with whatever we like to think our values are.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

Really happy to see this. We all moved to these centralized platforms because they were convenient and benign. But we could all go back to smaller independent forums if we really wanted to. And if you run a project that people want to find, there is virtually no downside to self hosting a forum for the community.

raincole 3y ago

I don't know why people just can't use plain old forums. I've got a lot help from KVR (a forum for music making) since I started learning DAW. It works fine. If authentication is a problem then just let users login with their discord/twitter/reddit accounts? Is it the lacking of "one-click setup" forum services?

hardwaresofton 3y ago
They did, Discourse is basically just a plain old forum -- with a somewhat newer coat of paint. > Is it the lacking of "one-click setup" forum services? I'm a bit biased (since I run a tiny managed service provider) -- would you create a forum if it had one click setup? Services like Discourse and NodeBB do offer this kind of service, so it seems like the option is there.
- raincole 3y ago
  > would you create a forum if it had one click setup? The only reason I'd be hesitate to create a forum is that I think people (not me) might actually prefer Discord and I'm doing a disservice for them. So it's like Catch 22.
  - hardwaresofton 3y ago
    Ah I could see that -- I personally think that forums and Discord are actually different mediums, for different purposes. Slack/Discord/Mattermost/Matrix is great for frenetic conversation and water cooler chat, but it just feels like history and long term knowledge doesn't get built easily there. It's like the difference between old school forums and IRC -- people generally didn't expect much from ephemeral conversation on IRC. The one exception might be Zulip -- their threaded chat model is actually a blend and is very effective at creating enough mass around a single conversation (i.e. a thread) and making it trackable. That said, I still think forums are a different beast.
- FullMetalBitch 3y ago
  I have been in forums my whole life and discord is far from them, discord is just a chat akin to irc. Forums and IRC worked together very well, when I was moderating a huge gaming community we had several IRC channels for those who wanted live participation. It's impossible to follow a discussion in discord because when you arrive it may be over and they are talking about something else, that doesn't happen in a forum you can just post and add your take. And managing knowledge is easier in a forum, I can still find my 15 year old replies, or access all the news I created back when I was a mod.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

It's not really possible to use Twitter without at least a little bit of doomscrolling, and that activity took a toll on me emotionally. Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of negative news online. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling I don't think I do this -- at least not anymore. Tweets are short. If you don't want to click into the horrifying article linked or whatever, you don't have to. You may not be able to use the platform formerly known as Twitter without scrolling through a fair number of Tweets with negative framing, but it's a bit like seeing a bunch of negative titles and you can just go "Well, not my cup of tea. Not going down that rabbit hole." It's maybe something I did when I didn't feel well and couldn't focus or whatever. It's low-hanging fruit when I have no energy nor attention span. But even with that, I've gotten better over time at recognizing when I feel awful and I'm inclined to do stupid stuff online and instead of wallowing in the mire, I try to play games that are "my speed" for such times, "productively piddle," or watch music videos. I try really hard to not just wallow in my bad mood and let it grow into something more in my mind than "Well, Doreen is sick and tired today and everything sounds bad because of it."

rglullis 3y ago

If anyone here happens to be interested in a Zig community on Lemmy, let me know. My instance [0] still has plenty of room to grow, and it's slowly becoming the alternative place for emacs and lisp. [0]: https://communick.news https://communick.news

browningstreet 3y ago

I often think about social media like this: I’m a quiet cafe and empty restaurant kind of guy. I hike trails and go to the gym at early hours because the vibe is right. Social media is like the mall, or a stadium. Some people like going there, and do so often. They’re excited to see Taylor Swift with 80K other people. They go to the mall early on a weekday for a sneaker drop. I don’t get it but c’est la vie. That’s their life. I don’t rant about the 80K people in the stadium for the big show. I’m sad there aren’t more quiet cafes. I spend time in countries where quiet cafes are more the norm. Maybe I’ll move there some day. I’m also reminded by my parents who talk about the old country, or how grand it was to buy a house in LA in the 60s for $14K. Things change, eras end, we miss what was or what could have been. Tech stacks change, platforms and social spaces petrify, and our kids won’t care about any of these tomorrow. I don’t have Twitter or Reddit accounts. And so it is.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Guess we have opposite problems. Most places around me are quiet and I want something inbetwee a library and a night club. Just a semi-social place to make friends. Sadly the internet polarizes that as well. Sometimes Discord is the only place for smaller kinds of media. otherwise you have ghost towns of forums where maybe you get one response back when talking about a certain work. Usually none

rvz 3y ago

The only alternative is to delete your social media accounts rather than replacing one social network with another. Migrating to another social network does not solve the problem that Andrew is talking about. It just prolongs the outrage and the addiction present in all social networks no matter their algorithm or users. Its exactly like suggesting to quit alcohol addiction by drinking a different brand of alcohol. So the solution is to delete all your social media accounts and never look back.

arp242 3y ago
You're posting on a social network right now.

dottjt 3y ago

Personally, I love the value of Reddit. How I see it is that it's a single account which allows me access to an infinite number of communities for me to ask questions about. Interested in fishing? Ask about it in the fishing subreddit. Interested in Chinese Medicine? Ask about it in the Chinese Medicine subreddit. I absolutely love it. It's like interactive Google.

nunez 3y ago
That was the case before many of the moderators of those communities left in protest of Reddit's API changes. Whether that will stay the case remains to be seen.
- dottjt 3y ago
  I'm not sure how the moderators are relevant. The communities still exist. The moderator isn't the community itself.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Moderators shape the community. Whether or not that shape sticks after they leave depends a lot on the community and what rules they keep/enforce. for example, r/fishing bans memes. What if mod A leaves and mod B allows memes? Experience says that memes proceed to take over r/fishing anf the community tone changes. Sure, r/fishing "exists", but does it exist for the reasons you subscribed? You can even use HN as a whole here. How much do you think the tone of HN would change if Dang dissapeared tomorrow? That's the issue that was understated during these protests. Moderation is thankless work and even without drama it can burn one out.
  - nunez 3y ago
    Moderators enforce quality thresholds and keep trolls out that makes those communities possible. They used lots of custom bots to do this. Many, such as bots that detected abuse from users, used Pushshift, an API and front-end for crawling through archived Reddit posts. (Reddit's API limits you to 1000 posts/thread and has rate limits on the number of posts you can search through.) Apollo and other apps aside, a large chunk of the protests from moderators were because of how the API would render their moderation bots completely useless and Reddit's inability to provide better alternatives. Most vocal amongst them was the moderation team of /r/AskHistorians, an extremely well-curated sub that heavily used bots to enforce their very high submission and participation standards.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

thrwjud 3y ago

>Nuance and subtlety is impossible to distinguish from dog whistling. Most users don't understand that by "dunking" on someone, they are actually promoting the content. In summary, it gave me a darker feeling about the world in general, and in exchange, did not offer much to enrich my life. [...] And finally, I have more nuanced conversations with my wife and friends about politics and other hot topics, without worrying that I'm going to come off as dog whistling or naysaying. It sounds like the problem with social media for OP is between the ears rather than on the screen.

adamcblodgett 3y ago

"Those Large Language Models are hungry!" XD

jakecopp 3y ago

> I have a Mastodon account, but I don't love it, for the same reasons I didn't like Twitter. In addition, I think that way of consuming content is generally like watching mainstream TV or listening to radio with ads. You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you. Isn't that the opposite of Mastodon? The _default_ Mastodon home feed is only people you explicitly follow and posts they re-share (and it's easy to hide re-posts if desired). There is no suggested content. It's basically as close as social media can get to an RSS feed.

xigoi 3y ago
The people you follow are the mentioned content curators.
- fsflover 3y ago
  Except you choose them yourself.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    Yes, but choosing people makes your feed more cluttered than choosing topics.
    - fsflover 3y ago
      Hashtags are also there.
    - timbit42 3y ago
      Don't follow people. Follow hashtags.
progfix 3y ago
You can also follow hashtags which for me is much more interesting than following people.

vGPU 3y ago

I agree with the writer. When Apollo got shut down, my usage of Reddit died with it. The occasional skim on BuildaPCsales aside, it’s utility has rapidly approached zero for me, and the old subs that I used to browse have taken a noticeable dive in quality to the point where it’s not worth my time to read them. The same with twitter. I tried twitter for 2-3 months. I found the quality of almost the entire user base to approach quality reminiscent of Markov chains. I amassed a handful of followers. 95% of whom were bots. With the change to X, I think it’s about time to wrap it up. Funnily enough, the en-shitification of both has brought me back to my original love: reading. I’ve finally started working my way through the backlog that’s been building for several years now, and my life has been immensely improved over the results that would have been gained over spending that time browsing Reddit.

RamenJunkie_ 3y ago
Same here. some 600k+ Karma and like 13 years on the platform and I completely quit when Baconreader broke. I added /r/gamedeals and /r/gamebundles and the Fortnite ststus bot to my RSS reader and that's all I follow at all now.
- vGPU 3y ago
  My first account was probably 10 years ago. This was back when r/bodybuilding and WSB were still good. I had pretty much stopped using Reddit a few months before the news broke just because the overall quality was so low outside of a few niche fintech subs. When the announcement popped up on Apollo I sent the dev a nice tip as a thank you for his work on top of the Apollo premium (?) I had already purchased a few years back, then I uninstalled it and never looked back. Doesn’t help that trying to use Reddit in mobile safari is such a painful experience. I still haven’t figured out how to do a subreddit search, and at this point I don’t really care to.

hypnoosi 3y ago

I think the problem with online forums such as Reddit or Lemmy is still just the plain old content filteration. The first thing, when opening a Lemmy server, I see is a HC political memes about free-speech... aka. yet another dopamine well. We have pretty good a LLMs, it shouldn't be hard to categorise these posts and apply some filters. I would smash the button "filter out non-nuanced political posts" so hard...

disambiguation 3y ago

Anything less than face-to-face socializing is a degraded social experience. Arguing over healthier forms of social media is like arguing over the healthiest fast food chain. It's just not good for you.

amon22 3y ago
Why?
- disambiguation 3y ago
  Think about what you get out of face to face socializing. It's not just verbal communication. You get facial expressions, body language, their style, their image, their smell, you can touch them. I can pass you snacks, a beer, give you a hug hello and goodbye. You're in the room together. You're sharing an experience. No other form of communication enhances, adds too, or improves on these things - with the possible exception of VRChat. Voice chat and message chat offer a fraction of the full experience. Not to mention dealing with unreliable and sketchy brokers and middle men. You can talk, but there are rules, sometimes subscriptions, or other strings attached. Also they get to spy on you and sell your private information at will. Social media is lesser still. A feed about your life so acquaintances and strangers alike can casually browse your life history at will. They'll know about you, but never really know you. They'll only know what you show them. You see, it's not just about the richness of information or experience for its own sake. Ask yourself why we socialize? What's the goal? It's to develop a connection. But there's a difference between good and great connections. How strong of a relationship can one develop when the "handshake" is limited, restricted, and fundamentally flawed?
  - amon22 3y ago
    It's a different kind of communication but I don't think there's a qualitative difference between them. They are just different, with their unique set of benefits and disadvantages. Online communication might be asynchronous for example (which allows more frequent communication) and better suited to share pieces of digital content like pictures/videos/links which might not be important for you but for younger people it is. They can still meet each other offline of course (it would suck to go to a digital concert or whatever, nobody does that) but there's a shared cultural context that is digital and online communication is what enables this. I think it's close-minded to dismiss that. Also developing a deep connection or whatever is rarely the "goal" of casual socializing (which is what online communication is for). But it also helps keeping your "real" friendships strong by enabling frequent and convenient communication even when life doesn't allow meeting frequently.

radar1310 3y ago

This isn’t an airport.No need to announce your departure.

radar1310 3y ago

This isn’t an airport. No need to announce your departure.

Kerb_ 3y ago
This isn't Reddit.

veave 3y ago

>Once Loris was the sole moderator, he decided to change the subreddit to read-only mode. However, this was thwarted today when a troll (check their comment history) performed a hostile takeover in broad daylight and reopened the sub. I would say you are the troll for closing a programming language sub for ideological reasons.

dzonga 3y ago

own your platform. use things like rss to follow feeds / blogs etc. but us humans being stupid we wanna take the easy way out and be surprised by the results. if people had stuck to blogs, rss we wouldn't be having so much polarization going on. now its so toxic that if someone has a different politically opinion to you - then they must've been not so smart in other areas as well.

specialist 3y ago

Andrew Kelly wrote: > ... the same reasons I didn't like Twitter. ... You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you. Exactly. I'll own and operate my own personal recommender algorithm, thank you very much. > I'm going to look into setting up an RSS reader for myself and start hunting for high quality blogs. The Correct Answer™ -- I've never understood Twitter. How do I follow convos? What are people talking about? Why can't I find anything? And most annoyingly, obvious links (hrefs) don't work, forcing click thrus. (Engagement FTW!) And WTF am I seeing the same frikking content over and over and over?! I'm finally using 𝕏 (neé Twitter) just this year. Because for the first time, I was super motivated to follow a handful of geeks (wrt climate crisis and electrifying everything) that don't post updates elsewhere. (For now. With Musk imploding 𝕏, THANK THE GODS, everyone's on the lookout for the next disco.) I now get how and why 𝕏 blows. It's an outrage machine, not a forum host. Those two use cases are mutually exclusive. -- Imagine a personalized HN landing page where I only saw unread updates from the people I follow. And for entries/topics that I'm "watching". Also imagine the ability to filter OC (outbound links). The stuff I never want to read. Lastly, imagine dupes (reposts) somehow get deduped. Like a forum for "continuing conversation", vs a whole new entry. People could repost (retweet) as much as they want and HN smartly aggregates them. And a great search. Now imagine the client for those forum features. Either web or app. Track my personal history. Which OC and people and topics do I most view, watch, bookmark, and like? Not just for internet karma, but also to complete my personal feedback loop. If my personal RSS reader and podcatcher simply logged my own viewing habits locally, I'd be in heaven. Render my activity on a timeline and I'd hit nirvana. (There's probably some other useful visualizations too.)

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

The funny thing about Twitter users is how in real life you can tell who is addicted to Twitter from the way they talk. Every conversation is a Mexican standoff with the Twitter addict as they try to bait you into exposing your Silo against their Silo. Its infuriating to deal with this type of addict because the rest of society is just trying to coexist while the Twitter addict is trying to root out imaginary threats to the Silo.

pallas_athena 3y ago
Silo? Not familiar with the term. Googling I found "Silo Mentality" (="resists sharing information and resources with other people or departments within the organisation.") but I don't see exactly how that applies here
- robotshmobot 3y ago
  Perhaps echochamber is likely what they meant?
  - costanzaDynasty 3y ago
    I meant silo. Its not an echo chamber that they can disconnect from its a purposefully built online collection of thoughts and principles that they guard and collect to the point that its the driving force of their life.
    - quadhome 3y ago
      People do that without the help of social media.
- quadhome 3y ago
  That comment made sense to me when I replaced “silo” with “filter bubble.” … which reveals my silo.
comte7092 3y ago
I see this opinion commonly espoused on HN, yet I know a number of people who are heavy Twitter users and not a single one acts like this. Most of them aren’t even engaged in politics at all. They mostly just care about sports and celebrity culture. They’re some of the most “normal” people I know.