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Even if it does, it still doomed to become what Twitter became. In my opinion, the best years of "social networks" were the early 2000 till early 2010, before

Even if it does, it still doomed to become what Twitter became. In my opinion, the best years of "social networks" were the early 2000 till early 2010, before Facebook and the likes became globally popular. During these years we had forums and IRC channels. These were off-limit to "common" folks or people looking for engagement, and you could find quality material and interesting discussions over there. Then the modern social media came, and it ruined everything. Short form content and engagement motivation (like Twitter ad revenue share, where they pay you for "popular" tweets), ruined the place for everyone. You can't have a meaningful discussion with 200, or whatever the limit is, characters. Most people on these platforms try to "game" the algorithm in order to publish a viral tweet. There is zero to no moderation, and in one "scrolling" session you can see a lazy motivational quote, a selfie, an MRR screenshot, a life lesson, and far right/left propaganda, which is kinda insane. On top of all that, the entire "follow" mechanism is flawed. It creates small echo chambers around big accounts. Take a popular account, find a tweet you disagree with, and look at the comments--it will be filled with "yes men" and people looking for engagement. On forums you could read different opinions in the same discussion, thus widening your world view, rather than narrowing it. Forums also had moderation, and users had "reputation", even though they were anonymous. I joined bluesky recently, out of curiosity and hype, and it's filled with "Hello this is my first post", pictures of peoples workstations, anime, politics (US based, which I don't care about), etc. It's just too much noise to navigate with little to no value. The entire modern social media system is broken. We don't need something more popular than Twitter, we need something completely different that will bring value back into online discussions, but I guess it's unachievable. Look at HN, which I consider to be the top 1 "social" platform for myself, yet it's unknown outside the tech/science community. Everything too big is doomed to become average at best.

RGamma 2y ago
I wouldn't consider HN a social community. More like a sort-of-aligned rag-tag drive-by commenting site. In a community you know each other personally. Not that it's not valuable or interesting, otherwise I would have quit it long ago. The value of any site is in its members' (self-selected) convictions, interests and skills and its self-regulatory and adaptive abilities... as vague as that sounds. But yea, I desire back the calm net too. If not for my sake, then for everybody else's. We're making it up as we go. That said it's a metropolis now, not a village...
PaulHoule 2y ago
Personally I think algorithmic feeds can save Twitter clones. I see the chronological feed + boosting on Mastodon as basically toxic, particularly when you create an "Explore" feed by showing the most boosted posts from the past 24 hours (or the like.) It privileges hateful image memes and other kinds of echo chamber content. To stand to use Mastodon I need an extensive list of block terms such as "Trump", "Republican", "Fascist", "Trans.*", etc. With about 15-20 rules my feed is OK. I did not need to put blocks into Bluesky, there are angry and hateful people just like there are on Mastodon but Bluesky's algorithm puts a headwind to them so: (1) I see less in my feed, (2) people who might repost that kind of thing see less of it to repost, (3) those people get used to playing different games. My understanding is that Threads does it even more so but inexplicably Meta won't let me make an Instagram/Threads account. I think that kind of site is great for posting pictures of your cats, a snap of what you just ate, what anime you just watched, a good blog post you read about programming, etc. That kind of site is terrible for posting about politics because in either 140 or 1400 characters there is no room for nuance, no way to say "I agree with 95% of what you say but I take issue with 5%". No way to find common ground, no way to organize effective activism. Many supporters of the Democrats learned the hard way that you can share Kamala Harris memes 100 million times and it's not any more effective at winning the election that it is for the official campaign to run endless ads on YouTube asking for $5 or $10.

RGamma 2y ago

I wouldn't consider HN a social community. More like a sort-of-aligned rag-tag drive-by commenting site. In a community you know each other personally. Not that it's not valuable or interesting, otherwise I would have quit it long ago. The value of any site is in its members' (self-selected) convictions, interests and skills and its self-regulatory and adaptive abilities... as vague as that sounds. But yea, I desire back the calm net too. If not for my sake, then for everybody else's. We're making it up as we go. That said it's a metropolis now, not a village...

PaulHoule 2y ago

Personally I think algorithmic feeds can save Twitter clones. I see the chronological feed + boosting on Mastodon as basically toxic, particularly when you create an "Explore" feed by showing the most boosted posts from the past 24 hours (or the like.) It privileges hateful image memes and other kinds of echo chamber content. To stand to use Mastodon I need an extensive list of block terms such as "Trump", "Republican", "Fascist", "Trans.*", etc. With about 15-20 rules my feed is OK. I did not need to put blocks into Bluesky, there are angry and hateful people just like there are on Mastodon but Bluesky's algorithm puts a headwind to them so: (1) I see less in my feed, (2) people who might repost that kind of thing see less of it to repost, (3) those people get used to playing different games. My understanding is that Threads does it even more so but inexplicably Meta won't let me make an Instagram/Threads account. I think that kind of site is great for posting pictures of your cats, a snap of what you just ate, what anime you just watched, a good blog post you read about programming, etc. That kind of site is terrible for posting about politics because in either 140 or 1400 characters there is no room for nuance, no way to say "I agree with 95% of what you say but I take issue with 5%". No way to find common ground, no way to organize effective activism. Many supporters of the Democrats learned the hard way that you can share Kamala Harris memes 100 million times and it's not any more effective at winning the election that it is for the official campaign to run endless ads on YouTube asking for $5 or $10.