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> how close humanity was to having pretty nice stuff right before Facebook came along. [...] RSS/atom [...] IRC for real time message Those protocols are "n

by jasode 2y ago

> how close humanity was to having pretty nice stuff right before Facebook came along. [...] RSS/atom [...] IRC for real time message Those protocols are "nice" to you but they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies. The decentralists who evangelize RSS & IRC have to step outside of their heads to understand why normal people don't find them compelling and easy-to-use. The web couldn't have "stayed as RSS & IRC" unless it also stayed a small niche community for geeks. I tried to explain why those technologies are not useful to a lot of internet users: Why a lot of normies don't use RSS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35861928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35861928 Why many chat groups don't use IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42964882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42964882 If you still insist, "I don't see why regular people couldn't just adopt RSS and IRC like me" -- it means you still haven't truly stepped outside your mind to internalize why users have different preferences and priorities on how to interact with the web.

wslh 2y ago
While you're right that social media has well-designed UX/UI, it's optimized for engagement and addiction rather than well-being, much like smoking in the past, but targeting different organs.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Yea, this is the real reason. Facebook and Social Media won because they invested $billions into it, shoved it down everyone's throat, and then got them addicted to the content. It has nothing to do with how easy or hard the technology is to use. In an alternate universe, if some other company poured $billions into evolving IRC, people would just be using that.
renegat0x0 2y ago
I think that majority prefer "algorithms" to serve them information, and that is a killer of any other solutions for media consumption, and for RSS. People do not want to 'hunt' for information, they prefer to be served. This opens doors to tiktoks, facebooks, and other. This opens door to feed manipulation, where big tech can decide what you see, and what not. That is why I have little regard for "what majority" is using, as commonly it is lowest possible denominator. Often such "algorithms" are abusive, and the take advantage of you, of your lizard brain, and your attention. I am sure there is no golden solution, no ideal. That said I use mostly RSS, but sometimes I also check the "algorithm" of reddit to check what is happening outside of my bubble. This gives me opportunity to taste both worlds, and have some sanity and middle ground. I also like small blogs, than let's say Facebook posts, as the latter easily turn into quarrel, shouting, and small blogs offers insight without much social media distractions.
- jesuslop 2y ago
  I concur. "Broken Code" book by Jeff Horwitz at the Wall Street Journal amply elaborates how business metric driven algorithms stir user attention at their convenience, that may or not agree with the user's. For one data point, I prefer to be gourmet than to be fed.
- wwweston 2y ago
  > I think that majority prefer "algorithms" to serve them information This possibility was the theme of the (most?) recent video essay on the YouTube Technology Connections channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA There's definitely something to the appeal of algorithmic feeds, I suspect there's a fundamental neurological mechanism* in play which encourages us to scan somewhere for novel appearances / developments, same as seeing what's in the garden or on the market or who is present at the oasis etc etc. But there's probably more to be said for consciously directing attention. (*There's a certain d-word that probably has a genuine neurochemical meaning when not laden by a lot of popular baggage as it's entered colloquial use that I am intentionally not using because at this point I'd suspect it encourages misunderstanding more than helps, but I'm willing to believe it's related.)
  - LPisGood 2y ago
    Is the word “degenerate”?
    - jcgl 2y ago
      Dopamine.
  - Centigonal 2y ago
    relevant post: https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi... > Simply put, companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users that derive very little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize low value users by selling them ads. Often, it’s because your business relies on network effects and even low value users can help you build a moat. So the north star metric for designers and engineers is typically something like Daily Active Users, or DAUs for short: the number of users who log into your app in a 24 hour period. > What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted. > So in practice, the design of popular apps caters almost entirely to the marginal user.
sceptic123 2y ago
How do you fit podcasts into that philosophy? RSS/atom based and still going strong.
- preciousoo 2y ago
  The amount of people that use RSS for podcasts is incredibly tiny
rchaud 2y ago
> Those protocols are "nice" to you but they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies. I used to think this, and then remembered that there are hundreds of millions of people on FB liking AI slop and typing their search term into their "Update my Status" box. The Facebook interface is absolutely unusable now, and I'm saying this as someone who signed up for it ~20 years ago. They've intentionally made it a disorienting content firehose now that they've captured however many users. Not every technology will permeate 100% of all possible users. Even if it could, it wouldn't be desirable make that permanent. FB's design decisions suggest technology can be 'made easy', as long as its in the interest of the maker to do so. That can be rescinded at any time. That's why I'll always support interoperable protocols over proprietary.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dartos 2y ago
Right, but those technologies are like 20 years old now. Imagine if Facebook didn’t come along and we had 20 years of development and improvements over those base protocols instead of today’s social platforms.
m_mueller 2y ago
I don't agree with this assertion. Back in those days, most people in my friend group were using MSN Messenger. The steps to get onto that were probably easier than signing up for Facebook/Insta nowadays. The same was true for yahoo, AOL or a whole bunch of other messenger services. But these all had open protocols that clients could implement, and they did - Adium for Mac was a great example, and it worked brilliantly. The only thing missing there was an open protocol for group video calls, which is why Skype came along. If we had continued on that path of open protocols (not even standards) vs. proprietary & locked down services, we'd be in a much different place now.
prophesi 2y ago
Small nitpick; RSS is still alive and well, but it's in the podcast space and slowly getting phased out by Apple and Spotify (in fact, most podcast SaaS's make it really hard to find the bare RSS feed). I think t would have fared well for blogs and news sites, but economic forces found it oppositional to their subscription model.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies. They were "polite", to put it in another frame. for RSS and IRC: You controlled the platform and essentially you decided to connect to services to extend your own platform. But corporations decided that you must use their platform or leave. > The web couldn't have "stayed as RSS & IRC" unless it also stayed a small niche community for geeks. I don't think it needed to be. People complain so much these days about finding another streaming service or games store or... well not music these days. The model they want is the one they abandoned. Imagined you have a "netflix" as a UI and you simply browse for services to subscribe or unsubscribe to. Then your UI controls all the sorting, filters, libraries, etc. That was essentially RSS for articles. Of course, people with Plex or Emby don't need to imagine this. But an ethical framework would have been nice. I wouldn't call Plex's UI any less intuitive than any private platform. The only argument that may hold weight here is that "you're not gonna get a good UX scheme without someone in the private sector being paid 200k/yr to figure it out". But if that's the requirement for progress, I question how my country did anything the first 200 years. >it means you still haven't truly stepped outside your mind to internalize why users have different preferences and priorities on how to interact with the web. Sure, people don't care about ads and I vehemently hate them in my media. I understand, I just highly disagree. I don't want an easier experience at the cost of all my personal data extracted to Morgan who calls me 5 times an hour about my extended warranty. I don't want a company being the sole factor in deciding on what I want to watch, or especially search for. Yadda yadda. But apathy reigns supreme. EDIT: I'll also address one argument in the RSS article: I think it's a bit biased to say "people don't follow cooking recipe websites"... on a forums focused on mostly technical topics. Most people don't follow literally everything. I'm sure you can definitely find a community of cooks and find their versions of Cory Doctorow or John Carmack or Sam Altman if you engage in such cooking discourse. But if you don't engage, then some relatively slop of "how to bake a chicken" suffices just fine, similar to any slop article in tech on "how to fix blue screen" that is just telling you to reset your computer You don't make a community out of lurkers. But modern platforms sure do profit off them.

by jasode 2y ago

wslh 2y ago

While you're right that social media has well-designed UX/UI, it's optimized for engagement and addiction rather than well-being, much like smoking in the past, but targeting different organs.

ryandrake 2y ago
Yea, this is the real reason. Facebook and Social Media won because they invested $billions into it, shoved it down everyone's throat, and then got them addicted to the content. It has nothing to do with how easy or hard the technology is to use. In an alternate universe, if some other company poured $billions into evolving IRC, people would just be using that.

renegat0x0 2y ago

I think that majority prefer "algorithms" to serve them information, and that is a killer of any other solutions for media consumption, and for RSS. People do not want to 'hunt' for information, they prefer to be served. This opens doors to tiktoks, facebooks, and other. This opens door to feed manipulation, where big tech can decide what you see, and what not. That is why I have little regard for "what majority" is using, as commonly it is lowest possible denominator. Often such "algorithms" are abusive, and the take advantage of you, of your lizard brain, and your attention. I am sure there is no golden solution, no ideal. That said I use mostly RSS, but sometimes I also check the "algorithm" of reddit to check what is happening outside of my bubble. This gives me opportunity to taste both worlds, and have some sanity and middle ground. I also like small blogs, than let's say Facebook posts, as the latter easily turn into quarrel, shouting, and small blogs offers insight without much social media distractions.

jesuslop 2y ago
I concur. "Broken Code" book by Jeff Horwitz at the Wall Street Journal amply elaborates how business metric driven algorithms stir user attention at their convenience, that may or not agree with the user's. For one data point, I prefer to be gourmet than to be fed.
wwweston 2y ago
> I think that majority prefer "algorithms" to serve them information This possibility was the theme of the (most?) recent video essay on the YouTube Technology Connections channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA There's definitely something to the appeal of algorithmic feeds, I suspect there's a fundamental neurological mechanism* in play which encourages us to scan somewhere for novel appearances / developments, same as seeing what's in the garden or on the market or who is present at the oasis etc etc. But there's probably more to be said for consciously directing attention. (*There's a certain d-word that probably has a genuine neurochemical meaning when not laden by a lot of popular baggage as it's entered colloquial use that I am intentionally not using because at this point I'd suspect it encourages misunderstanding more than helps, but I'm willing to believe it's related.)
- LPisGood 2y ago
  Is the word “degenerate”?
  - jcgl 2y ago
    Dopamine.
- Centigonal 2y ago
  relevant post: https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi... > Simply put, companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users that derive very little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize low value users by selling them ads. Often, it’s because your business relies on network effects and even low value users can help you build a moat. So the north star metric for designers and engineers is typically something like Daily Active Users, or DAUs for short: the number of users who log into your app in a 24 hour period. > What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted. > So in practice, the design of popular apps caters almost entirely to the marginal user.

sceptic123 2y ago

How do you fit podcasts into that philosophy? RSS/atom based and still going strong.

preciousoo 2y ago
The amount of people that use RSS for podcasts is incredibly tiny

rchaud 2y ago

> Those protocols are "nice" to you but they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies. I used to think this, and then remembered that there are hundreds of millions of people on FB liking AI slop and typing their search term into their "Update my Status" box. The Facebook interface is absolutely unusable now, and I'm saying this as someone who signed up for it ~20 years ago. They've intentionally made it a disorienting content firehose now that they've captured however many users. Not every technology will permeate 100% of all possible users. Even if it could, it wouldn't be desirable make that permanent. FB's design decisions suggest technology can be 'made easy', as long as its in the interest of the maker to do so. That can be rescinded at any time. That's why I'll always support interoperable protocols over proprietary.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dartos 2y ago

Right, but those technologies are like 20 years old now. Imagine if Facebook didn’t come along and we had 20 years of development and improvements over those base protocols instead of today’s social platforms.

m_mueller 2y ago

I don't agree with this assertion. Back in those days, most people in my friend group were using MSN Messenger. The steps to get onto that were probably easier than signing up for Facebook/Insta nowadays. The same was true for yahoo, AOL or a whole bunch of other messenger services. But these all had open protocols that clients could implement, and they did - Adium for Mac was a great example, and it worked brilliantly. The only thing missing there was an open protocol for group video calls, which is why Skype came along. If we had continued on that path of open protocols (not even standards) vs. proprietary & locked down services, we'd be in a much different place now.

prophesi 2y ago

Small nitpick; RSS is still alive and well, but it's in the podcast space and slowly getting phased out by Apple and Spotify (in fact, most podcast SaaS's make it really hard to find the bare RSS feed). I think t would have fared well for blogs and news sites, but economic forces found it oppositional to their subscription model.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies. They were "polite", to put it in another frame. for RSS and IRC: You controlled the platform and essentially you decided to connect to services to extend your own platform. But corporations decided that you must use their platform or leave. > The web couldn't have "stayed as RSS & IRC" unless it also stayed a small niche community for geeks. I don't think it needed to be. People complain so much these days about finding another streaming service or games store or... well not music these days. The model they want is the one they abandoned. Imagined you have a "netflix" as a UI and you simply browse for services to subscribe or unsubscribe to. Then your UI controls all the sorting, filters, libraries, etc. That was essentially RSS for articles. Of course, people with Plex or Emby don't need to imagine this. But an ethical framework would have been nice. I wouldn't call Plex's UI any less intuitive than any private platform. The only argument that may hold weight here is that "you're not gonna get a good UX scheme without someone in the private sector being paid 200k/yr to figure it out". But if that's the requirement for progress, I question how my country did anything the first 200 years. >it means you still haven't truly stepped outside your mind to internalize why users have different preferences and priorities on how to interact with the web. Sure, people don't care about ads and I vehemently hate them in my media. I understand, I just highly disagree. I don't want an easier experience at the cost of all my personal data extracted to Morgan who calls me 5 times an hour about my extended warranty. I don't want a company being the sole factor in deciding on what I want to watch, or especially search for. Yadda yadda. But apathy reigns supreme. EDIT: I'll also address one argument in the RSS article: I think it's a bit biased to say "people don't follow cooking recipe websites"... on a forums focused on mostly technical topics. Most people don't follow literally everything. I'm sure you can definitely find a community of cooks and find their versions of Cory Doctorow or John Carmack or Sam Altman if you engage in such cooking discourse. But if you don't engage, then some relatively slop of "how to bake a chicken" suffices just fine, similar to any slop article in tech on "how to fix blue screen" that is just telling you to reset your computer You don't make a community out of lurkers. But modern platforms sure do profit off them.