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I'm probably in the minority of people who appreciate that trend. Valuable information being hidden means that community comes before information. If you want t

I'm probably in the minority of people who appreciate that trend. Valuable information being hidden means that community comes before information. If you want to gain access to other people's knowledge you have to opt-in and interact with and understand the people who made it, and that creates an incentive to contribute back and use knowledge in an appropriate way. The open internet seems increasingly predatory and a place where some gigantic ML company just vacuums up your stuff or resells your content for ad revenue, parasitic. I don't mind the fact and think it's honestly a natural reaction to this that people guard their information. It's sort of like a medieval monastery version of the internet where people recognize that information is cultivated rather than just some commodity you scrape off the web.

disqard 2y ago
That's a really human-centered view of what we have in forums. I think many of us (wrongly) have a tech-centered view of online communities -- witness the multitude of "Show HN" posts that are "look! I made an online place for humans to congregate and discuss X". The tech stack matters little (if at all), but bootstrapping the community's trust and culture (and maintaining both) are most of the heavy lifting, and the differentiator for success. I recently (re)discovered an HN post by one of the core community moderators of deviantArt, and its success was made possible by its culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719127
ndiddy 2y ago
The reason why platforms such as Discord, Facebook, etc don't give open access to your content isn't because they don't want a predatory ML company to vacuum up your content, rather it's because they want to sell access to your content to the predatory ML companies. Meta already trains its own AI on Facebook and Instagram user content. Discord's business model (host an unlimited amount of data for free in perpetuity) is inherently unsustainable, so it's likely they'll start selling user data to ML companies within a few years (assuming the AI boom lasts that long).

disqard 2y ago

That's a really human-centered view of what we have in forums. I think many of us (wrongly) have a tech-centered view of online communities -- witness the multitude of "Show HN" posts that are "look! I made an online place for humans to congregate and discuss X". The tech stack matters little (if at all), but bootstrapping the community's trust and culture (and maintaining both) are most of the heavy lifting, and the differentiator for success. I recently (re)discovered an HN post by one of the core community moderators of deviantArt, and its success was made possible by its culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719127

ndiddy 2y ago

The reason why platforms such as Discord, Facebook, etc don't give open access to your content isn't because they don't want a predatory ML company to vacuum up your content, rather it's because they want to sell access to your content to the predatory ML companies. Meta already trains its own AI on Facebook and Instagram user content. Discord's business model (host an unlimited amount of data for free in perpetuity) is inherently unsustainable, so it's likely they'll start selling user data to ML companies within a few years (assuming the AI boom lasts that long).