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When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platfor

When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.

mantas 1y ago
And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends. There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
  - m_fayer 1y ago
    Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
    - closewith 1y ago
      HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
      - m_fayer 1y ago
        HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
        diggan 1y ago
        > to me the difference is plain to see. Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall. It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
        closewith 1y ago
        > HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead. That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble. > If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see. It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.
        esafak 1y ago
        Please describe what it would be like if it were not a bubble. If everything is a bubble, the concept is worthless.
        closewith 1y ago
        Old-school fora and mailing lists could avoid being bubbles when moderation allowed dissenting views to surface instead of burying them. Of course, biased moderation could still create bubbles by pruning dissent. Social platforms built on voting, like HN, will almost always drift into bubbles of like-minded posts and comments. The only variation is in which views get upranked. That isn’t necessarily bad. YC clearly prefers HN to filter for a certain entrepreneurial mindset. Bubbles can serve a purpose, but it’s worth recognising that this is a manipulated environment - in many ways hollow - and not a reflection of the broader world.
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media. That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now) There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
    - RossBencina 1y ago
      I never heard of the Meow Wars, but I do remember antiorp, a net-art mailing list disruption organisation: https://everything2.com/title/antiorp https://everything2.com/title/antiorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author) EDIT: clarity
    - diggan 1y ago
      > I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter. We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.
      - awesome_dude 1y ago
        > is often called "brigading" instead Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.
  - 3form 1y ago
    It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.
    - anal_reactor 1y ago
      Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
      - mantas 1y ago
        So… FB with like and no dislike button?
      - esafak 1y ago
        Youtube does not expose the number of down votes any more. LinkedIn has no dislike button and I find it positively toxic.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
    It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > It seems like paid communities Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account. It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential. Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
      - latexr 1y ago
        > Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws). https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/ https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-account/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a... And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations. In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification. > It just sucks I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.
- neiman 1y ago
  I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great. It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.
  - coffeebeqn 1y ago
    There’s a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.
atoav 1y ago
When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me. This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul. The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music. The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet. Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team. Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did. I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
- deleted 1y ago
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- diggan 1y ago
  I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely. Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others. Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.
dr_dshiv 1y ago
Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought. We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
- dmichulke 1y ago
  Please continue
  - dr_dshiv 1y ago
    We built scape in 9 months and ran it for 9 months, if I recall. We were all young and naive — it just felt like we failed to make something that “clicked.” Facebook had very few features (pokes and the wall), but they weren’t competing on features. We struggled to get more than a thousand people to sign up across a few NE colleges. We had this whole social blogging and communication system — it was really very cool in concept. But we had too much of a “if you build it, they will come” marketing plan. We gave up after a year and a half. We ended up selling a version of it to Teach for America. I’d consider it a failure — we gave up. I rather wish we’d have tried to raise money, though.. I can’t believe we got as far as we did — different times
- diggan 1y ago
  Ironically, searching "scape web app" today shows "Scape | AI-native CRM that captures all your conversations" which felt very on the nose.
- AstralStorm 1y ago
  Interesting. Did it get eaten by general baseline interests and lost the focus, ultimately moving to cater to lowest common denominator? Failed or sold?
UmGuys 1y ago
Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.
- willtemperley 1y ago
  I do wonder if this is just a symptom of monetization. Free advertising with viral posts was possible for talented marketers until the early 2010s. Now you have to pay. OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger. Meeting this person in person sometime later, it turned out this message was never delivered. They'd thought I was working for the company that sued them.
  - UmGuys 1y ago
    The shift was the news feed IMO. You have to consider the profit model. Users are the product.
jjav 1y ago
> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations! But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free. What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.
- Braxton1980 1y ago
  I loved using chat rooms on AOL in the late 90s, later I moved to IRC (dalnet, efnet) and made some close friends. The interactions saved me from horrible depression as in my suburban area I had trouble making friends. The reason I believe things are different is that the Internet was tech people. People more likely to be logical and rational. Once "regular" people came on they brought their stupidity with them.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group. Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback). The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?
    - AstralStorm 1y ago
      Neither does not have the same shared consistent group of participants. A forum ultimately ends up a group of more or less known individuals with a focus. Reddit and HN don't have that feel, chatrooms and such as Discord usually do, unless they get huge and overwhelm Dunbar's number. The friend feeds like Facebook's are less anonymous, but they do not form topical discussions nor feel like hangouts with the person.
corimaith 1y ago
Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.
- skydhash 1y ago
  People existed as username and their signature, but you already know that’s not the real person behind (it could be a dog or a cat for all you know). Now it’s the cult of the persona and the brand.
enaaem 1y ago
Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community. Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.
- sunaookami 1y ago
  Building "reputation" and building yourself a "brand" are the worst things from the forum-era. I will not miss power-tripping mods and users with 20,000 posts writing the dumbest replies possible into every thread asking "why would you do this?", "have you used the search function?", etc. Just because you have many posts doesn't mean the posts are good. Many users ignored high-quality posts from new accounts for example.
  - layer8 1y ago
    Forums aren’t all like that, as the HN comment section demonstrates. While not a full-featured forum, it would be prone to the same effects.
    - sunaookami 1y ago
      Of course not all forums are like that, "only" the vast majority of it is. Even niche-forums suffered from this (or especially they suffered from it). I would not count Hacker News as a forum though. There is no reputation here, no visible karma unless you explicitly click on a profile, no avatar, no signature, etc.
  - diggan 1y ago
    Just because the forums you hanged around were like that, doesn't mean every forum was like that. Probably the web forum I hanged around the most on (which is where my HN username originally comes from) has strict rules about each individual post's quality (although enforced bit unevenly), and their contribution to the discussions, in one way or another. Make enough off-topic/shit posts and eventually you'll get banned because of it. The users with a lot of posts usually made well-argued posts. Each started thread also needed a "basis for discussion" to remain open, and necrobumping was encouraged. The forum still has decade old threads actively being discussed in. AFAIK, it's still the largest forum in the Nordics, although the moderation team (and voluntary) seem to unfortunately be shrinking rather than increasing, and the forum isn't without its controversies.
weregiraffe 1y ago
>connect like-minded people around the world Traditional forums still exist.
- diggan 1y ago
  Which ones are the best for the anglophone world currently? I'm struggling to find traditional forums that are still "alive", general enough to cover a broad spectrum and well-moderated to remove all noise.
  - weregiraffe 1y ago
    You are missing the point by looking for a broad spectrum forum. Look for specific, niche forums, where people are interested in the topics discussed, snd not in "being a forum". Broad spectrum anything converges towards looking like social media. Naturally, avoid like a plague any "off-topic" or "politics" subforums. Unless you are in a politics forum, in which case, godspeed.
Telemakhos 1y ago
Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem? Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views. Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal. Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.
- seec 1y ago
  Yes that's true. Everyone gets to interact with people that are closer to their ideals but it makes society less homogeneous and disconnected locally because there is no geographical grouping. At the same time people are more mobile than ever because of technological, opportunity and work reasons as well. So, there is a lack of real grounding. Why bother being friends with your neighbors or local people when you can just travel for not very long and visit people you prefer? It leads to tensions because people live close together but have a very different way of life and sometimes radically different values, even in close quater communities. They end up hating each other secretly because without communication you cannot even begin to empathise. The social media groups reflect that; they are an echo chamber to cry about people and behaviors you don't like and reinforce your own opinions, behaviors and their superior validity. There is also the part where large government of the providence state are to be blamed for favoring rampant individualism. Instead of having to deal with friends and family you deal with soulless corporation and obtuse bureaucracy to get your needs met. When 50 years ago you could drop by to see your doctor, now you call a number, a robot answers and gives you an appointment in one month. It's not just social media that is to blame it's just technology in general that has allowed and basically created a massive bureaucracy for everything, pretending to focus on making things efficient when it basically only consumes value and is just a means of control/surveillance.
HPsquared 1y ago
An AI chatbot is just the next stage on "like-minded people" continuum. It's a machine that bends over backwards to match what the user wants from it. (Maybe unhealthy but it's just the next step after interacting with anon posters over a shared niche interest)
artursapek 1y ago
Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.
cyanydeez 1y ago
Social-mediated capitalism is what they built. Puting AI in there just makes it easier.

mantas 1y ago

And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends. There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
- m_fayer 1y ago
  Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
  - closewith 1y ago
    HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
    - m_fayer 1y ago
      HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
      - diggan 1y ago
        > to me the difference is plain to see. Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall. It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
      - closewith 1y ago
        > HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead. That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble. > If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see. It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.
        esafak 1y ago
        Please describe what it would be like if it were not a bubble. If everything is a bubble, the concept is worthless.
        closewith 1y ago
        Old-school fora and mailing lists could avoid being bubbles when moderation allowed dissenting views to surface instead of burying them. Of course, biased moderation could still create bubbles by pruning dissent. Social platforms built on voting, like HN, will almost always drift into bubbles of like-minded posts and comments. The only variation is in which views get upranked. That isn’t necessarily bad. YC clearly prefers HN to filter for a certain entrepreneurial mindset. Bubbles can serve a purpose, but it’s worth recognising that this is a manipulated environment - in many ways hollow - and not a reflection of the broader world.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media. That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now) There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
  - RossBencina 1y ago
    I never heard of the Meow Wars, but I do remember antiorp, a net-art mailing list disruption organisation: https://everything2.com/title/antiorp https://everything2.com/title/antiorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author) EDIT: clarity
  - diggan 1y ago
    > I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter. We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.
    - awesome_dude 1y ago
      > is often called "brigading" instead Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.
- 3form 1y ago
  It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.
  - anal_reactor 1y ago
    Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
    - mantas 1y ago
      So… FB with like and no dislike button?
    - esafak 1y ago
      Youtube does not expose the number of down votes any more. LinkedIn has no dislike button and I find it positively toxic.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
  It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > It seems like paid communities Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account. It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential. Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
    - latexr 1y ago
      > Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws). https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/ https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-account/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a... And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations. In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification. > It just sucks I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.
neiman 1y ago
I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great. It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.
- coffeebeqn 1y ago
  There’s a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.

atoav 1y ago

When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me. This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul. The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music. The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet. Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team. Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did. I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.

deleted 1y ago
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diggan 1y ago
I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely. Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others. Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.

dr_dshiv 1y ago

Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought. We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.

dmichulke 1y ago
Please continue
- dr_dshiv 1y ago
  We built scape in 9 months and ran it for 9 months, if I recall. We were all young and naive — it just felt like we failed to make something that “clicked.” Facebook had very few features (pokes and the wall), but they weren’t competing on features. We struggled to get more than a thousand people to sign up across a few NE colleges. We had this whole social blogging and communication system — it was really very cool in concept. But we had too much of a “if you build it, they will come” marketing plan. We gave up after a year and a half. We ended up selling a version of it to Teach for America. I’d consider it a failure — we gave up. I rather wish we’d have tried to raise money, though.. I can’t believe we got as far as we did — different times
diggan 1y ago
Ironically, searching "scape web app" today shows "Scape | AI-native CRM that captures all your conversations" which felt very on the nose.
AstralStorm 1y ago
Interesting. Did it get eaten by general baseline interests and lost the focus, ultimately moving to cater to lowest common denominator? Failed or sold?

UmGuys 1y ago

Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.

willtemperley 1y ago
I do wonder if this is just a symptom of monetization. Free advertising with viral posts was possible for talented marketers until the early 2010s. Now you have to pay. OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger. Meeting this person in person sometime later, it turned out this message was never delivered. They'd thought I was working for the company that sued them.
- UmGuys 1y ago
  The shift was the news feed IMO. You have to consider the profit model. Users are the product.

jjav 1y ago

> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations! But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free. What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.

Braxton1980 1y ago
I loved using chat rooms on AOL in the late 90s, later I moved to IRC (dalnet, efnet) and made some close friends. The interactions saved me from horrible depression as in my suburban area I had trouble making friends. The reason I believe things are different is that the Internet was tech people. People more likely to be logical and rational. Once "regular" people came on they brought their stupidity with them.
skydhash 1y ago
Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group. Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback). The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?
  - AstralStorm 1y ago
    Neither does not have the same shared consistent group of participants. A forum ultimately ends up a group of more or less known individuals with a focus. Reddit and HN don't have that feel, chatrooms and such as Discord usually do, unless they get huge and overwhelm Dunbar's number. The friend feeds like Facebook's are less anonymous, but they do not form topical discussions nor feel like hangouts with the person.

corimaith 1y ago

Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.

skydhash 1y ago
People existed as username and their signature, but you already know that’s not the real person behind (it could be a dog or a cat for all you know). Now it’s the cult of the persona and the brand.

enaaem 1y ago

Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community. Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.

sunaookami 1y ago
Building "reputation" and building yourself a "brand" are the worst things from the forum-era. I will not miss power-tripping mods and users with 20,000 posts writing the dumbest replies possible into every thread asking "why would you do this?", "have you used the search function?", etc. Just because you have many posts doesn't mean the posts are good. Many users ignored high-quality posts from new accounts for example.
- layer8 1y ago
  Forums aren’t all like that, as the HN comment section demonstrates. While not a full-featured forum, it would be prone to the same effects.
  - sunaookami 1y ago
    Of course not all forums are like that, "only" the vast majority of it is. Even niche-forums suffered from this (or especially they suffered from it). I would not count Hacker News as a forum though. There is no reputation here, no visible karma unless you explicitly click on a profile, no avatar, no signature, etc.
- diggan 1y ago
  Just because the forums you hanged around were like that, doesn't mean every forum was like that. Probably the web forum I hanged around the most on (which is where my HN username originally comes from) has strict rules about each individual post's quality (although enforced bit unevenly), and their contribution to the discussions, in one way or another. Make enough off-topic/shit posts and eventually you'll get banned because of it. The users with a lot of posts usually made well-argued posts. Each started thread also needed a "basis for discussion" to remain open, and necrobumping was encouraged. The forum still has decade old threads actively being discussed in. AFAIK, it's still the largest forum in the Nordics, although the moderation team (and voluntary) seem to unfortunately be shrinking rather than increasing, and the forum isn't without its controversies.

weregiraffe 1y ago

>connect like-minded people around the world Traditional forums still exist.

diggan 1y ago
Which ones are the best for the anglophone world currently? I'm struggling to find traditional forums that are still "alive", general enough to cover a broad spectrum and well-moderated to remove all noise.
- weregiraffe 1y ago
  You are missing the point by looking for a broad spectrum forum. Look for specific, niche forums, where people are interested in the topics discussed, snd not in "being a forum". Broad spectrum anything converges towards looking like social media. Naturally, avoid like a plague any "off-topic" or "politics" subforums. Unless you are in a politics forum, in which case, godspeed.

Telemakhos 1y ago

Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem? Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views. Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal. Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.

seec 1y ago
Yes that's true. Everyone gets to interact with people that are closer to their ideals but it makes society less homogeneous and disconnected locally because there is no geographical grouping. At the same time people are more mobile than ever because of technological, opportunity and work reasons as well. So, there is a lack of real grounding. Why bother being friends with your neighbors or local people when you can just travel for not very long and visit people you prefer? It leads to tensions because people live close together but have a very different way of life and sometimes radically different values, even in close quater communities. They end up hating each other secretly because without communication you cannot even begin to empathise. The social media groups reflect that; they are an echo chamber to cry about people and behaviors you don't like and reinforce your own opinions, behaviors and their superior validity. There is also the part where large government of the providence state are to be blamed for favoring rampant individualism. Instead of having to deal with friends and family you deal with soulless corporation and obtuse bureaucracy to get your needs met. When 50 years ago you could drop by to see your doctor, now you call a number, a robot answers and gives you an appointment in one month. It's not just social media that is to blame it's just technology in general that has allowed and basically created a massive bureaucracy for everything, pretending to focus on making things efficient when it basically only consumes value and is just a means of control/surveillance.

HPsquared 1y ago

An AI chatbot is just the next stage on "like-minded people" continuum. It's a machine that bends over backwards to match what the user wants from it. (Maybe unhealthy but it's just the next step after interacting with anon posters over a shared niche interest)

artursapek 1y ago

Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.

cyanydeez 1y ago

Social-mediated capitalism is what they built. Puting AI in there just makes it easier.