3 ms·

there are likely tens of thousands of sites who dream of having 2 million active users. other than a few VC heads, in no world is millions of dailies a bad thi

by toofy 2y ago

there are likely tens of thousands of sites who dream of having 2 million active users. other than a few VC heads, in no world is millions of dailies a bad thing. i’d be shocked if hn had 2 million daily. and thank your god it’s not full of everyone screaming at once. it’s what makes it such a rad place to be. i moved to mastodon when the infosec community migrated there and honestly, its OmgSoMuchBetter that it has less people. it’s like here on hn, the signal to noise ratio is fucking glorious. i’ve mentioned this multiple times in the past, but in reality we (people) prefer multiple different spaces, and for very very good reasons. it i want a quiet night with a fancy dinner, i’ll go to a quiet nicer restaurant. if i want a loud night out with the friends, we go to a club. if i want a goth night i go to the goth club if i want to hear blues i go to a blues bar. etc… the big sites suffer from their own ridiculousness and still, years later haven’t figured out that trying to be everything at once is hilariously stupid. it just makes you bad at everything. blue sky is incredible, at least until eternal september hits. Mastodon’s different servers hit so much better than the last years of twitter did. the minute everyone flocks to either of them, im out. we like different spaces for different moods, it’s common sense. could you imagine how awful going out would be if you’re talkin with your friends and over and over some totally random people were constantly coming to your table and screaming shit at you? “defend yourself!” … no, because that’s not normal… bar owners would be like “bro, that guy who keeps screaming at random people has to go… fuckin weirdo.” that’s the experience these same group of VC people keep trying to tell us is normal and what we should want. no thanks. thats weird af.

godelski 2y ago
So much this. I wish we could embrace this more. Not everything needs to be for everyone. If you make something for everyone you've just made something for noone[0]. I fear we are just hyper focusing on being over the top, to be monopolies. It's good business, but is it good for us? I'm sure you can find some metric to say it is, but is that what the metric actually measures? We should make sure we are building the things people want, not what we think people want. To make life better for our communities, states, countries, or everyone. I have no doubt you can get rich while doing this. But if we're chasing a score harder than we're chasing a goal we'll always rationalize the former is the later. It's a great trap we've seemed to have fallen for. [0] we even have good mathematical intuition to believe this. In high dimensional systems when things are normal distributed (really just not uniformly distributed) the mean is not representative of the whole. I think it's clear that there's lots of different people with different opinions about a lot of things (high dimensions) and that there's not a smooth even distribution of opinions (they clump)
tourmalinetaco 2y ago
This is why the death of fansites and forums was so huge. Instead of that quiet restaurant or blues bar we were all shoved into a dingy fast food joint and crammed together like sardines with robotic staff who do everything in their power to keep us in the joint as long as possible, even if we’re all hangry and throwing things. Really the only problem I had with forums is finding new ones, and that’s probably the only thing Reddit did right was ease of creating and finding communities.

by toofy 2y ago

godelski 2y ago

So much this. I wish we could embrace this more. Not everything needs to be for everyone. If you make something for everyone you've just made something for noone[0]. I fear we are just hyper focusing on being over the top, to be monopolies. It's good business, but is it good for us? I'm sure you can find some metric to say it is, but is that what the metric actually measures? We should make sure we are building the things people want, not what we think people want. To make life better for our communities, states, countries, or everyone. I have no doubt you can get rich while doing this. But if we're chasing a score harder than we're chasing a goal we'll always rationalize the former is the later. It's a great trap we've seemed to have fallen for. [0] we even have good mathematical intuition to believe this. In high dimensional systems when things are normal distributed (really just not uniformly distributed) the mean is not representative of the whole. I think it's clear that there's lots of different people with different opinions about a lot of things (high dimensions) and that there's not a smooth even distribution of opinions (they clump)

tourmalinetaco 2y ago

This is why the death of fansites and forums was so huge. Instead of that quiet restaurant or blues bar we were all shoved into a dingy fast food joint and crammed together like sardines with robotic staff who do everything in their power to keep us in the joint as long as possible, even if we’re all hangry and throwing things. Really the only problem I had with forums is finding new ones, and that’s probably the only thing Reddit did right was ease of creating and finding communities.