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I wonder if this is regression to the mean. The technical limits of the early internet-- server resources being fairly costly, commercialization tools being li

by hakfoo 2y ago

I wonder if this is regression to the mean. The technical limits of the early internet-- server resources being fairly costly, commercialization tools being limited-- meant silos were the only practical offering. Someone puts up a hobbyist forum on a Pentium in their basement, and gets the electric bill covered by asking for donations or pointing a single polite link in the footer to a friendly vendor. What gets forgotten is that siloing serves some useful purposes. I don't want to read about anime in the same place I'm discussing vintage audio gear-- they draw different audiences and have different cultural norms, and I might want to show a different persona to each. Individual silos are also easier to curate and search. The switch to giant "platforms for everyone" was less of an organic shift and more of a "solution in search of a problem." Improved scalability and rock-bottom costs make a 500-million-DAU site feasible, and maturing ad/tracking businesses that crave scale make it lucrative. These "improvements" never said anything about "this makes things better for users." For a while, they could sell the "open sea" sites on the promise of "everyone's here" -- you went on Twitter to follow your favourite celebrities, or you joined Facebook to see how fat your classmates got, but eventually you realize there's no there there: the community isn't joined by any meaningful thread, and whatever tools that exist to create one are being undermined by algorithms that figured it's better NOT to give you what you actually came there for so you keep scrolling. Your aunt may as well not be on Facebook if her polite messages to friends are hidden behind 45 minutes of scrolling clickbait, distasteful politics and AI slop. Smaller sites and the Fediverse/Threadiverse bring back the reason to join a specific community. I can get tightly focused content, pick instances that match my preferences and interests, and the signal-to-noise ratio is higher. For a while, Reddit looked like it had what it takes to remain relevant-- if you thought of it as a network of forums with SSO and unified search, it had most of the appeal of classic siloed sites... except they decided to systematically burn goodwill with their community and chase everything that briefly made them the "un-Facebook".

Earw0rm 2y ago
The switch to "platforms for everyone" was basically the triumph of platforms over protocols. And that mostly happened because, as software got more capable/powerful, and the median user less-so, there was a shift in the relative importance of user experience vs underlying power/capability. Having users essentially cobble together their own custom experience out of interoperable parts is certainly more powerful, but it can't keep up UX-wise. Standard protocols are, by their nature, slow to evolve; they can't quickly bolt on a new feature if one is needed to make things easier for users. Before forums there were Usenet and NNTP clients; before Discord, Slack and WhatsApp there was the IRC protocol and its various clients. Around the turn of the millennium there was a brief trend of trying to make protocols feature-rich and faster moving, basically semi-public and operating outside of standards bodies. Stuff like ICQ and filesharing protocols. And they're mostly a buggy, insecure mess. Interoperability is hard if you're trying to be feature-rich, secure and user-friendly.. see the struggles the fediverse is having on the third one. 95% of what Facebook is used for could be cobbled together out of NNTP, RSS and SMTP, but it does it in a way that's idiot-proof for users and, perhaps equally importantly, controllable and ownable for investors. Oh, and as to " algorithms that figured it's better NOT to give you what you actually came there for so you keep scrolling"... think about the financial interest for dating sites, where they're trying to maximise subscriber retention.

by hakfoo 2y ago

Earw0rm 2y ago

The switch to "platforms for everyone" was basically the triumph of platforms over protocols. And that mostly happened because, as software got more capable/powerful, and the median user less-so, there was a shift in the relative importance of user experience vs underlying power/capability. Having users essentially cobble together their own custom experience out of interoperable parts is certainly more powerful, but it can't keep up UX-wise. Standard protocols are, by their nature, slow to evolve; they can't quickly bolt on a new feature if one is needed to make things easier for users. Before forums there were Usenet and NNTP clients; before Discord, Slack and WhatsApp there was the IRC protocol and its various clients. Around the turn of the millennium there was a brief trend of trying to make protocols feature-rich and faster moving, basically semi-public and operating outside of standards bodies. Stuff like ICQ and filesharing protocols. And they're mostly a buggy, insecure mess. Interoperability is hard if you're trying to be feature-rich, secure and user-friendly.. see the struggles the fediverse is having on the third one. 95% of what Facebook is used for could be cobbled together out of NNTP, RSS and SMTP, but it does it in a way that's idiot-proof for users and, perhaps equally importantly, controllable and ownable for investors. Oh, and as to " algorithms that figured it's better NOT to give you what you actually came there for so you keep scrolling"... think about the financial interest for dating sites, where they're trying to maximise subscriber retention.