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I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is a

I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is an intermediary between the user and information/community they want to participate in. This leads to most problems we see in legacy, ad-based, social media. Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?

decasia 2y ago
I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it. I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.
- hyggetrold 2y ago
  I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on. Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
    Maybe SDF? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_Syste... https://sdf.org/ https://sdf.org/
  - evah 2y ago
    Tilde.club nearly meets your definition.[1] It's at least 1 decade and 15 days old, but it appears it's open to join for anyone.[2] [1] https://tilde.club/ https://tilde.club/ [2] https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
    - hyggetrold 2y ago
      The first link you put gives me a security warning so I didn't click through. But the medium article would suggest that this is the one!
- pram 2y ago
  This is called a forum.
- insin 2y ago
  That can just be a forum - a forum I've been a member of for more than 20 years has been run by the members since 2010 [1], is registered as a co-operative/community benefit society in the UK and funded by voluntary memberships or donations, with members voting annually to elect people to positions required to run it. A good chunk of those have been part of the same community on a newsgroup, then on a company-owned forum which got shuttered, then on a forum instance set up by a user who didn't want to run it any more after 6 years. The tech and platforms are ephemeral, always have been. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RLLMUK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RLLMUK
- flancian 2y ago
  This is precisely https://social.coop https://social.coop, of which I am part of, except for the "not being Mastodon" bit :) Governance happens on Loomio, which is a forum tailored for community decision making, but the main platform that coop members get access to is a Mastodon instance for now. We are experimenting with Bonfire, which is more flexible and might end up providing a solid base for federated apps in general. Let me know if you have any questions!
seqizz 2y ago
We also do not let people into the friend circle just because they have money (I hope). IMHO healthiest "social media" I could think is interest groups. They eventually need some kind of donation from one or more people, but with no or minimal barriers.
- SamDc73 2y ago
  For me no of course, but if you think about unintentionally your friends are from the same income group really (for the most part), if you are rich and go to private school, your friends are most likely rich, and usually hang around "fancy" places.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    I was briefly a member of a church-related singles group. Their activities revolved around visiting a different church every Sunday. And also doing activities on weekends that involved a lot of car travel and significant admission fees, if only viewing a film at the mall cinema. I had a real commitment to my home parish at the time. I was involved in ministries weekly, where I could not simply flit about anywhere I wanted. Sure, as a group we could meet many strangers on this itinerary, but I risked severing all ties with my spiritual home! The activities were sometimes active and sometimes passive, such as hiking, dancing, or going to a festival or something. And I quickly gave up on everything, because it seemed like the group was not really oriented to pairing people off, but more of a self-sustaining club where people gained "volunteer responsibilities" and were thus pressured into staying in the "singles group" no matter what their relationship status. Also, having no vehicle of my own, I'd either opt out of traveling, or I'd hit someone up to carpool, and that wasn't always copacetic. I also found, on dating websites, this mentality that single Catholics would be jet-setters, traveling all over the world on pilgrimage. That they would generate a steady stream of photographs and social media posts from their adventures. That they would have marvelous, expensive hobbies and be so active in volunteerism. For crying out loud! I wondered how these people would ever have space in their lives for a significant other! All I wanted to do was hang around home, go for walks, prepare a nice meal at home once in a while. But the dating sites seemed geared exclusively for high-maintenance and upper-middle-class go-getters. Again, I felt like it was a clique of "professional singles" who didn't really expect to pair off and get married.
ErikAugust 2y ago
It’s not a coincidence that Facebook started out as a college-only social network. That was the real barrier to entry.
ryandv 2y ago
I would rephrase it further to "quit ad-based media." The problems and conflicts of interest introduced by an ad-based revenue model were discussed long before the advent of the modern Web and social media; the relationship between the advertisement industry and mass media (television, radio) was already discussed in depth in the late 20th century [0]: The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and survival. The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals. Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases - the dissemination of a selling message. [0] https://archive.org/details/manfacturingconsentnahomchomsky/page/n73/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/manfacturingconsentnahomchomsky/...
- synergy20 2y ago
  in the old days even you paid to subscribe,the newspaper and journal and cable TV etc still carried commercials, they're always there,just getting much worse nowadays
  - rchaud 2y ago
    everybody saw the exact same ads though, and due to regulation, it was impossible for newspapers to do things like broadcast outright misinformation as advertisements. Deepfake Musk and Bezos praising some shitcoin on a YouTube ad is par for the course, but would be logistically impossible on a traditional cable news channel or newspaper.
- tropdrop 2y ago
  Interestingly this changed somewhat with the clickbait-based model – now, I would disagree that advertisers "want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies." I think this does describe legacy advertisers (and TikTok, for different reasons) – we might remember Tumblr's hyper-specific LGBTQ-friendly (often NSFW) communities being completely liquidated in the transfer of Tumblr to Verizon, arguably killing Tumblr on that date. Verizon's handling of Tumblr validates Chomsky. But ad-fueled journalism seems to operate from exactly the opposite principle, so long as the controversies that drive engagement do not threaten the sensibility of specific large funders. I've seen a few times in recent memory where an article from the New York Times aired something quite sensational, only to quietly update later that what was initially reported didn't quite occur as depicted. But by that point it is too late, and profit was made. The overall point still stands – that ad-based always results in a conflict of interest.
JumpinJack_Cash 2y ago
> > Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry This depends on the definition of success, the most successful as in impressive achievements goal reaching are the ones that are open to anybody who can get noticed and brought in. ANd in the social sense even open to the ones who are most capable of monopolizing the discourse and creating a buzz in the public square. For example Trump did just that in 2016 and many tried to resist him, but in the end the GOP wants to be successful and opened itself to the guy who made the most noise in the public discourse and public square and made him the tip of the spear of the election effort. Of course it feels pretty miserable knowing that you can be replaced at any time but I don't think there is an alternative or a solution thanks to a barrier to entry (or exit). Social groups that have a barrier to entry (and exit) such as marriage , when it deteriorates the barrier to entry (and exit) doesn't prevent the 2 people to just starting ignoring each other.
- watwut 2y ago
  I would not call GOP and pro-Trump people to be "open" at all. The whole point is authoritarianism, exclusion and pure aggression toward others.
tayo42 2y ago
> In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle Thought that ended in high school. You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff...
- usea 2y ago
  > You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff... The "real pos" is just as often those doing the excluding, as it is those being excluded. Pettiness doesn't disappear at 18 years old. It's hurtful to assume anyone being excluded from something deserved it.
  - strken 2y ago
    It's more that there are maybe a thousand or so people in your highschool, but 7 billion on planet earth. If a thousand people (more like a couple of hundred the same age) exclude you then there are probably unfair network effects or someone poisoning the well against you, but at bigger scales everyone is a stranger and you get to start fresh. In those cases I think it's more likely mental illness that stops you from making friends, but if no social group has accepted you after tens or hundreds of attempts then it's possible that there's something you might be able to change.
lubujackson 2y ago
Metafilter comes to mind. Pay $5 one time for lifetime access. After about 20 years it has dwindled to a white star, but there is still a nuhhet of community left there. Amazing what a token cost does to weed out spam accounts, twinks, etc.
llm_trw 2y ago
>I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help. For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails. There is no safe dose.
safety1st 2y ago
Amend according to your preferences, run it whenever something annoys you, throw it in a cron job, etc. .bash_aliases: alias blocksocials='(echo ""; echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com"; echo "127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com") | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts > /dev/null' alias unblocksocials='sudo sed -i "/reddit.com/d" /etc/hosts'
- esperent 2y ago
  Doesn't do much for phone usage, which is where I actually want to block things. The best solution I've found for that is NextDNS.
  - abdusco 2y ago
    I use Kiwi Browser on Android, which is a Chrome-based browser with extension support. I have a userscript that gradually fades out and desaturates social media pages in 8 minutes. After 4-5 minutes, pages fade out so much that you are forced to stop scrolling and it's not enjoyable anymore. The same can be done on Firefox, which supports installing Tampermonkey for managing userscripts.
watwut 2y ago
We do not filter real world friends based on them paying for arbitrary product.
- BigGreenJorts 2y ago
  But do we not? We meet friends in life through school, work, hobbies. There's at least a time commitment to some common space if not a financial one. Friendship grow and die based on whether you can easily continue to see them - a common scenario for the dynamic changing being they no longer participate in the common space.
  - watwut 2y ago
    Friends through work, school and most hobbies are transient - they come and go, temporary only. With friends as in people in your life who you want to really be friends with, you both make changes to be able to keep the relationships. Otherwise it dies. And you certainly do not go "either you buy this app or I am not friend with you anymore".
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      I mean, you can go cold turkey when changing jobs/work/hobbies but you don't have to. Sometimes people only want to do that hobby so you don't have a choice but if you hung out with them outside of the origin activity then likely you can hang out with them without that origin activity.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  Not being a part of the scene I can't say first hand but I believe we literally do and they're called cover charges at clubs. Then there are the insufferably vain 'green bubble bad' people.
andrepd 2y ago
Not sure about "paid", but there are plenty of examples of communities with barriers to entry which are successful and long-lived, e.g. private trackers (the forums in whatcd were excellent), very niche/technical interest communities, etc.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
> the incentives are perverse The thing called Social Media is an unconstrained grift-circus peddling pure Barnumium. [1] It attracts movers/actors who enjoy the incentives, as well as followers/gawkers who have trouble seeing that their time and reality have been stolen. From The Fine Article: "Finally [...] he quit, explaining: 'I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.'” --- [1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
thisismyswamp 2y ago
https://wip.co/ https://wip.co/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
animal_spirits 2y ago
Hackernews is such a social circle. Besides the incredible moderation done by @dang I think the artificial barriers to interacting with the community are what make this a successful forum. I seem to recall needing at least 5 submission karma before you can comment - and that means 5 votes from _other_ people.
- alecco 2y ago
  Good luck with a contrarian post or comment here. They get flagged or downvoted to oblivion.
  - dang 2y ago
    That's partly true, but there's also a confounding factor that contrarian posts are more likely to break HN's guidelines [1]. For example, they're more likely to be snarky or ranty. These qualities are rightly downvoted and flagged on HN, not contrariness per se. This comes from fundamentals, unfortunately, so it's hard to change. The trouble is that someone posting a contrary view usually feels under pressure going in. They know that their post will land in hostile territory, anticipating that the majority won't receive their opinion (or them) well, and they're not wrong. They'll probably be met not just with disagreement, but with lazy truisms and putdowns that majorities always feel are obvious. The more contrarian a view is, the more common the majority response is not to engage with it, but to question why anyone would ever say such a thing. Often the majority invents sinister or preposterous explanations for this. (On that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851.) Because the contrarian commenter expects to be treated this way, they typically defend themselves pre-emptively with armor like snark, name-calling, and so on, presumably to lessen the pain of being rejected. It's as if there's an implicit (or sometimes even explicit) sentence, "I know you're all going to pile on me anyway so fuck you in advance." Downvotes and flags do end up piling on such comments, no doubt partly because majorities consider them "obviously" wrong and bad, but more because of this pre-emptive guidelines breakage. This rejection only confirms the contrarian poster's feeling that the community is against them, so we end up in a tight and vicious bind. The flip side to that bind is that when contrarian views are expressed in this defensive-aggressive way, it gives the majority a perfect excuse to keep on feeling that its views are obviously right while others are mean and bad. The contrarian ends up discrediting their own view. When they happen to have some truth on their side (as they often do), this is bad for everyone [2]. I spend a lot of time on this from a moderation point of view because it's such a tough tradeoff. It's terrible for HN when contrarian and minority views are reflexively rejected. It's also bad when guidelines breakage doesn't get downvoted or flagged. We can't carve out an exception that says it's ok to break the rules when you feel surrounded by people who disagree with you. This dilemma is not the contrarian/minority's fault. They're genuinely under greater pressure. It's easy to stay within the rails when all you have to say is conventional and the smug majority (aren't all majorities smug?) will upvote you. It's hard not to protect yourself with barbs when you're in a vulnerable position to begin with. Worst is when the contrarian is coming from a minority—any kind of minority, not just the obvious kinds—who have a different background from most of the community, and so naturally have different views. The majority response in such cases can get ugly quickly. I've seen mobs hound such commenters off HN, which is one of the worst things that can happen and one of the most important to protect against. It happens by itself; no one is thinking "let's form a mob and hound that deviant". It comes from the fundamentals, as I said, of how groups (and forums) work. From a moderation point of view we have two tools, I guess, for this. The first is to try to explain to contrarian commenters the unfortunate situation that there's a greater burden on them than there is on others, and that if they don't want their posts to be self-defeating, they need to bear that pressure while writing their comments neutrally [3]. It's not fair; it sucks; but it's how group dynamics work—we can't change it. If the majority/minority demographics were reversed, people would be doing the same in the opposite direction. I don't like to tell people that they have to do more than others through no fault of their own, so I try to make it clear that I'm on their side—not necessarily in agreeing with their view, but in feeling the position they're in. The other moderation response is to try to recognize these dynamics when they're occurring and find ways to tilt the ship a bit back towards even. It's not ok to break the rules when expressing a minority opinion, but there are ways of explaining the rules that hopefully communicate a sense of welcome along with the explanation. Conversely, when majority commenters are breaking the rules, there are ways of responding to that which add an additional layer of reproof that is appropriate to the worseness of the phenomenon. Unfortunately these "tools" are quite insufficient—partly because they're so costly in moderator time, energy, and feeling, and partly because the phenomenon is so large and intense. I do think, or faintly hope at least, it's possible for some of this knowledge to find its way into the culture, and that the community as a whole can shift—only a little, and slowly, but for real. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20contrarian%20-dynamic%20view&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

decasia 2y ago

I would love to pay for social software on a coop model (like a food coop, etc) — we would be "members" and, theoretically, we pay a small monthly fee that covers the costs of hosting and platform development. I've tried to think about what I would want that to look like — spoiler, something different than the model of "posting + reactions" that is so familiar from twitter+fb — but then when I think about the barriers to entry for a project like that, even though the technological part might not be that difficult (assuming it was Less Than Web Scale), I just give up hoping for it. I've been following a lot of the bluesky + mastodon stuff but I don't like that their basic model of social interaction is just a clone of Twitter.

hyggetrold 2y ago
I can't remember the name of it, but over a decade ago I saw something like this - it was a single Linux server shared by (I think) hundreds of people. Really trying to do the multi-user paradigm. They advertised it as a private kind of social network, it was invite-only and I think you had to pay to help keep the server lights on. Hopefully by posting something incorrect, A Person On The Internet Who Knows Better will come along and provide the correct details. :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
  Maybe SDF? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_Syste... https://sdf.org/ https://sdf.org/
- evah 2y ago
  Tilde.club nearly meets your definition.[1] It's at least 1 decade and 15 days old, but it appears it's open to join for anyone.[2] [1] https://tilde.club/ https://tilde.club/ [2] https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
  - hyggetrold 2y ago
    The first link you put gives me a security warning so I didn't click through. But the medium article would suggest that this is the one!
pram 2y ago
This is called a forum.
insin 2y ago
That can just be a forum - a forum I've been a member of for more than 20 years has been run by the members since 2010 [1], is registered as a co-operative/community benefit society in the UK and funded by voluntary memberships or donations, with members voting annually to elect people to positions required to run it. A good chunk of those have been part of the same community on a newsgroup, then on a company-owned forum which got shuttered, then on a forum instance set up by a user who didn't want to run it any more after 6 years. The tech and platforms are ephemeral, always have been. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RLLMUK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RLLMUK
flancian 2y ago
This is precisely https://social.coop https://social.coop, of which I am part of, except for the "not being Mastodon" bit :) Governance happens on Loomio, which is a forum tailored for community decision making, but the main platform that coop members get access to is a Mastodon instance for now. We are experimenting with Bonfire, which is more flexible and might end up providing a solid base for federated apps in general. Let me know if you have any questions!

seqizz 2y ago

We also do not let people into the friend circle just because they have money (I hope). IMHO healthiest "social media" I could think is interest groups. They eventually need some kind of donation from one or more people, but with no or minimal barriers.

SamDc73 2y ago
For me no of course, but if you think about unintentionally your friends are from the same income group really (for the most part), if you are rich and go to private school, your friends are most likely rich, and usually hang around "fancy" places.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  I was briefly a member of a church-related singles group. Their activities revolved around visiting a different church every Sunday. And also doing activities on weekends that involved a lot of car travel and significant admission fees, if only viewing a film at the mall cinema. I had a real commitment to my home parish at the time. I was involved in ministries weekly, where I could not simply flit about anywhere I wanted. Sure, as a group we could meet many strangers on this itinerary, but I risked severing all ties with my spiritual home! The activities were sometimes active and sometimes passive, such as hiking, dancing, or going to a festival or something. And I quickly gave up on everything, because it seemed like the group was not really oriented to pairing people off, but more of a self-sustaining club where people gained "volunteer responsibilities" and were thus pressured into staying in the "singles group" no matter what their relationship status. Also, having no vehicle of my own, I'd either opt out of traveling, or I'd hit someone up to carpool, and that wasn't always copacetic. I also found, on dating websites, this mentality that single Catholics would be jet-setters, traveling all over the world on pilgrimage. That they would generate a steady stream of photographs and social media posts from their adventures. That they would have marvelous, expensive hobbies and be so active in volunteerism. For crying out loud! I wondered how these people would ever have space in their lives for a significant other! All I wanted to do was hang around home, go for walks, prepare a nice meal at home once in a while. But the dating sites seemed geared exclusively for high-maintenance and upper-middle-class go-getters. Again, I felt like it was a clique of "professional singles" who didn't really expect to pair off and get married.

ErikAugust 2y ago

It’s not a coincidence that Facebook started out as a college-only social network. That was the real barrier to entry.

ryandv 2y ago

I would rephrase it further to "quit ad-based media." The problems and conflicts of interest introduced by an ad-based revenue model were discussed long before the advent of the modern Web and social media; the relationship between the advertisement industry and mass media (television, radio) was already discussed in depth in the late 20th century [0]: The advertisers' choices influence media prosperity and survival. The ad-based media receive an advertising subsidy that gives them a price-marketing-quality edge, which allows them to encroach on and further weaken their ad-free (or ad-disadvantaged) rivals. Advertisers will want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the "buying mood." They seek programs that will lightly entertain and thus fit in with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchases - the dissemination of a selling message. [0] https://archive.org/details/manfacturingconsentnahomchomsky/page/n73/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/manfacturingconsentnahomchomsky/...

synergy20 2y ago
in the old days even you paid to subscribe,the newspaper and journal and cable TV etc still carried commercials, they're always there,just getting much worse nowadays
- rchaud 2y ago
  everybody saw the exact same ads though, and due to regulation, it was impossible for newspapers to do things like broadcast outright misinformation as advertisements. Deepfake Musk and Bezos praising some shitcoin on a YouTube ad is par for the course, but would be logistically impossible on a traditional cable news channel or newspaper.
tropdrop 2y ago
Interestingly this changed somewhat with the clickbait-based model – now, I would disagree that advertisers "want, more generally, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies." I think this does describe legacy advertisers (and TikTok, for different reasons) – we might remember Tumblr's hyper-specific LGBTQ-friendly (often NSFW) communities being completely liquidated in the transfer of Tumblr to Verizon, arguably killing Tumblr on that date. Verizon's handling of Tumblr validates Chomsky. But ad-fueled journalism seems to operate from exactly the opposite principle, so long as the controversies that drive engagement do not threaten the sensibility of specific large funders. I've seen a few times in recent memory where an article from the New York Times aired something quite sensational, only to quietly update later that what was initially reported didn't quite occur as depicted. But by that point it is too late, and profit was made. The overall point still stands – that ad-based always results in a conflict of interest.

JumpinJack_Cash 2y ago

> > Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry This depends on the definition of success, the most successful as in impressive achievements goal reaching are the ones that are open to anybody who can get noticed and brought in. ANd in the social sense even open to the ones who are most capable of monopolizing the discourse and creating a buzz in the public square. For example Trump did just that in 2016 and many tried to resist him, but in the end the GOP wants to be successful and opened itself to the guy who made the most noise in the public discourse and public square and made him the tip of the spear of the election effort. Of course it feels pretty miserable knowing that you can be replaced at any time but I don't think there is an alternative or a solution thanks to a barrier to entry (or exit). Social groups that have a barrier to entry (and exit) such as marriage , when it deteriorates the barrier to entry (and exit) doesn't prevent the 2 people to just starting ignoring each other.

watwut 2y ago
I would not call GOP and pro-Trump people to be "open" at all. The whole point is authoritarianism, exclusion and pure aggression toward others.

tayo42 2y ago

> In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle Thought that ended in high school. You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff...

usea 2y ago
> You have to be a real pos to not get invites to stuff... The "real pos" is just as often those doing the excluding, as it is those being excluded. Pettiness doesn't disappear at 18 years old. It's hurtful to assume anyone being excluded from something deserved it.
- strken 2y ago
  It's more that there are maybe a thousand or so people in your highschool, but 7 billion on planet earth. If a thousand people (more like a couple of hundred the same age) exclude you then there are probably unfair network effects or someone poisoning the well against you, but at bigger scales everyone is a stranger and you get to start fresh. In those cases I think it's more likely mental illness that stops you from making friends, but if no social group has accepted you after tens or hundreds of attempts then it's possible that there's something you might be able to change.

lubujackson 2y ago

Metafilter comes to mind. Pay $5 one time for lifetime access. After about 20 years it has dwindled to a white star, but there is still a nuhhet of community left there. Amazing what a token cost does to weed out spam accounts, twinks, etc.

llm_trw 2y ago

>I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. Facebook was terrible for your well being a long time before they enshitified with adds. You may be too young to remember but likes were a hot commodity people would ruin their lives over without any outside help. For myself I find push notification based social media to be completely cancerous, and pull based one only mildly so. One need only look at the trolls from usenet to see people obsessed with nothing but text based emails. There is no safe dose.

safety1st 2y ago

Amend according to your preferences, run it whenever something annoys you, throw it in a cron job, etc. .bash_aliases: alias blocksocials='(echo ""; echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com"; echo "127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com") | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts > /dev/null' alias unblocksocials='sudo sed -i "/reddit.com/d" /etc/hosts'

esperent 2y ago
Doesn't do much for phone usage, which is where I actually want to block things. The best solution I've found for that is NextDNS.
- abdusco 2y ago
  I use Kiwi Browser on Android, which is a Chrome-based browser with extension support. I have a userscript that gradually fades out and desaturates social media pages in 8 minutes. After 4-5 minutes, pages fade out so much that you are forced to stop scrolling and it's not enjoyable anymore. The same can be done on Firefox, which supports installing Tampermonkey for managing userscripts.

watwut 2y ago

We do not filter real world friends based on them paying for arbitrary product.

BigGreenJorts 2y ago
But do we not? We meet friends in life through school, work, hobbies. There's at least a time commitment to some common space if not a financial one. Friendship grow and die based on whether you can easily continue to see them - a common scenario for the dynamic changing being they no longer participate in the common space.
- watwut 2y ago
  Friends through work, school and most hobbies are transient - they come and go, temporary only. With friends as in people in your life who you want to really be friends with, you both make changes to be able to keep the relationships. Otherwise it dies. And you certainly do not go "either you buy this app or I am not friend with you anymore".
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    I mean, you can go cold turkey when changing jobs/work/hobbies but you don't have to. Sometimes people only want to do that hobby so you don't have a choice but if you hung out with them outside of the origin activity then likely you can hang out with them without that origin activity.
Nasrudith 2y ago
Not being a part of the scene I can't say first hand but I believe we literally do and they're called cover charges at clubs. Then there are the insufferably vain 'green bubble bad' people.

andrepd 2y ago

Not sure about "paid", but there are plenty of examples of communities with barriers to entry which are successful and long-lived, e.g. private trackers (the forums in whatcd were excellent), very niche/technical interest communities, etc.

heresie-dabord 2y ago

> the incentives are perverse The thing called Social Media is an unconstrained grift-circus peddling pure Barnumium. [1] It attracts movers/actors who enjoy the incentives, as well as followers/gawkers who have trouble seeing that their time and reality have been stolen. From The Fine Article: "Finally [...] he quit, explaining: 'I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.'” --- [1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum

thisismyswamp 2y ago

https://wip.co/ https://wip.co/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

animal_spirits 2y ago

Hackernews is such a social circle. Besides the incredible moderation done by @dang I think the artificial barriers to interacting with the community are what make this a successful forum. I seem to recall needing at least 5 submission karma before you can comment - and that means 5 votes from _other_ people.

alecco 2y ago
Good luck with a contrarian post or comment here. They get flagged or downvoted to oblivion.
- dang 2y ago
  That's partly true, but there's also a confounding factor that contrarian posts are more likely to break HN's guidelines [1]. For example, they're more likely to be snarky or ranty. These qualities are rightly downvoted and flagged on HN, not contrariness per se. This comes from fundamentals, unfortunately, so it's hard to change. The trouble is that someone posting a contrary view usually feels under pressure going in. They know that their post will land in hostile territory, anticipating that the majority won't receive their opinion (or them) well, and they're not wrong. They'll probably be met not just with disagreement, but with lazy truisms and putdowns that majorities always feel are obvious. The more contrarian a view is, the more common the majority response is not to engage with it, but to question why anyone would ever say such a thing. Often the majority invents sinister or preposterous explanations for this. (On that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851.) Because the contrarian commenter expects to be treated this way, they typically defend themselves pre-emptively with armor like snark, name-calling, and so on, presumably to lessen the pain of being rejected. It's as if there's an implicit (or sometimes even explicit) sentence, "I know you're all going to pile on me anyway so fuck you in advance." Downvotes and flags do end up piling on such comments, no doubt partly because majorities consider them "obviously" wrong and bad, but more because of this pre-emptive guidelines breakage. This rejection only confirms the contrarian poster's feeling that the community is against them, so we end up in a tight and vicious bind. The flip side to that bind is that when contrarian views are expressed in this defensive-aggressive way, it gives the majority a perfect excuse to keep on feeling that its views are obviously right while others are mean and bad. The contrarian ends up discrediting their own view. When they happen to have some truth on their side (as they often do), this is bad for everyone [2]. I spend a lot of time on this from a moderation point of view because it's such a tough tradeoff. It's terrible for HN when contrarian and minority views are reflexively rejected. It's also bad when guidelines breakage doesn't get downvoted or flagged. We can't carve out an exception that says it's ok to break the rules when you feel surrounded by people who disagree with you. This dilemma is not the contrarian/minority's fault. They're genuinely under greater pressure. It's easy to stay within the rails when all you have to say is conventional and the smug majority (aren't all majorities smug?) will upvote you. It's hard not to protect yourself with barbs when you're in a vulnerable position to begin with. Worst is when the contrarian is coming from a minority—any kind of minority, not just the obvious kinds—who have a different background from most of the community, and so naturally have different views. The majority response in such cases can get ugly quickly. I've seen mobs hound such commenters off HN, which is one of the worst things that can happen and one of the most important to protect against. It happens by itself; no one is thinking "let's form a mob and hound that deviant". It comes from the fundamentals, as I said, of how groups (and forums) work. From a moderation point of view we have two tools, I guess, for this. The first is to try to explain to contrarian commenters the unfortunate situation that there's a greater burden on them than there is on others, and that if they don't want their posts to be self-defeating, they need to bear that pressure while writing their comments neutrally [3]. It's not fair; it sucks; but it's how group dynamics work—we can't change it. If the majority/minority demographics were reversed, people would be doing the same in the opposite direction. I don't like to tell people that they have to do more than others through no fault of their own, so I try to make it clear that I'm on their side—not necessarily in agreeing with their view, but in feeling the position they're in. The other moderation response is to try to recognize these dynamics when they're occurring and find ways to tilt the ship a bit back towards even. It's not ok to break the rules when expressing a minority opinion, but there are ways of explaining the rules that hopefully communicate a sense of welcome along with the explanation. Conversely, when majority commenters are breaking the rules, there are ways of responding to that which add an additional layer of reproof that is appropriate to the worseness of the phenomenon. Unfortunately these "tools" are quite insufficient—partly because they're so costly in moderator time, energy, and feeling, and partly because the phenomenon is so large and intense. I do think, or faintly hope at least, it's possible for some of this knowledge to find its way into the culture, and that the community as a whole can shift—only a little, and slowly, but for real. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20contrarian%20-dynamic%20view&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...