He’s right. The problem is the incentive for “popularity” running amok.
If Linus’s angry emails are on a distribution list, the exposure is minimal and the damage is contained.
His same excess in social media is reproduced and exploited for various reasons, positive and negative and overflows into unrelated circles where unrelated people have input into something containment would prevent them from being exposed.
This state of total diffusion without commensurate dilution is the problem. Everyone is a perpetrator and everyone is a victim.
An analogue in biology might be tumors. The individual cells might not be bad but them running unstopped can have negative consequences.
Social media needs to attenuate virality. But that’s at odds with their current economic model. So in the meantime they implement useless ineffectual bandaids they know don’t address the problem head on but gives them a plausible “we’re trying” or “shikata ga nai” 仕方がない
>If Linus’s angry emails are on a distribution list, the exposure is minimal and the damage is contained.
Perhaps. Another way to say the same thing however is something along the lines of the following. If you behave... poorly within a relatively narrow community, given sufficient authority you can just get away with it. Maybe you drive people away but it's all pretty invisible to the broader world and those that remain just put up with it because that's the way things are.
Perhaps that's deemed acceptable.Perhaps not. But just because things happen behind relatively closed doors doesn't make them right.
I get your point. He acted badly and I think social media has dulled his appetite for that, however, his peccadilloes are not the main point. It’s the greater idiocy that current social media fosters which is a multiple orders of magnitude a bigger problem than these provincial disputes ever were.
Let’s take people who are against childhood vaccinations. Their unfounded beliefs would remain contained and would not proliferate beyond their circles vs everyone gets exposed and people who’d never think of this anti scientific position become convinced this position kinda somehow makes sense.
And I don't disagree with that. There's a whole outrage culture that social media certainly contributes to (as does click-driven "journalism"). Every intemperate or ill-advised--or seen as inappropriate by some segment of the internet--remark gets endlessly repeated and amplified.
Coincidentally this came up in a conversation with a friend recently, where we drew parallels between the way hallucinogens cause normally disconnected parts of the brain to interact and how the internet has done the same for global society.
From a certain perspective, the noospehere is currently tripping balls on social media.
>Colonel: You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result.
All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt.
The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate
in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.
>Rose: Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum.
They stay inside their little ponds,
leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.
>Colonel: The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh.
No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.
>Rose: Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."
The article quotes: "If you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible", which I think G+ tried to do.
On mailing-lists, worst case there is "that guy", and you can filter them out. Maybe you'll meet at a conf eventually and work things out in person. On Twitter/Facebook, you have to spend a lot of time blocking people and trolls have full control of the platform.
Tied to real identity - given the current state of the net one could make a case that the S Korean system of requiring gov ID # for all online signups would be an improvement, of course that opens the door to serious abuse but at this point would it be the lesser of two evils?
This is the exact opposite of correct. Old school forums were pseudonymous, but managed to do OK on the moderation front because they were often controlled by the community. Tying real world identity to sign-ins just paints a big fat target on those that have the most to lose already, such as minorities.
Everyone here is mixing up identification with reputation. Identification isn't necessary; in fact it's a bad thing. But reputation within a community is good and necessary.
Social media ruined the internet forever, even less than a decade ago there were websites, forums of all sorts and for all kinds of interests, now the internet for most people is just these social websites/apps which intentionally lock users inside their services as long as possible to make more money from advertising and promoted posts. Unfortunately unless something big happens to fix this issue, the internet is lost forever.
I also wanted to point this out, but I guess Reddit does pose a risk that they make some system-wide decision and in the process all those subreddits either vanish or die a slow death.
As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...
The same problem applies to forums. Everyone here is gushing about how great they were and yes i had fun too but so many forums were just one person running phpbb and if they got bored or whatnot the whole forum was shot, just like that. Or a mod or admin would power trip. It's not like the early internet was some freewheeling utopia, it was mostly shit. Just like now. Don't believe me? Go look at those old forums and usenet posts you remember so well
> As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...
This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.
So, getting back to OP's message. Do you think that there are currently forums like Reddit but with more substance?
Let's take some of the DIY forums. Reddit can get pretty useful, but how does this relate to 1999? Back then, getting DIY videos was difficult. Now the trick is getting to the right kind of quality videos. But perhaps in 1999 if you read something and engaged online the experience was maybe more personal/fulfilling/substancial?
Reddit is very far from a forum. It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive, it serves ads, has a terrible free speech record, and a slight amount of popularity means people will wander into your community and, generally, fill it with low content garbage. Reddit is a horrible place to host a community, and, in my eyes, is the actual cause of the death of forums more so than Facebook.
Do you have any recommendations for a better general-discussion site?
Personally, I have found myself resorting to discussion sites focused on a single topic, like Hacker News instead of /r/programming, or DharmaWheel.net instead of /r/Buddhism.
I don't, unfortunately. I'm in the same boat as you. I frequent a few narrowly focused sites, and spend some time in a couple IRC channels for more general discussion, but that's not quite the same. I wish I had a good recommendation, and would love to hear one from others.
> It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive
The only thing that the administrators outside your community do is the shitty redesigns of the UI (big thanks to them for the "old.reddit.com" option though).
Everything else is done by the community of a subreddit.
Reddit admins shut down communities without warning due to their own political whims, have edited the content of a users post with no indication of doing so, and, as said already, inject ads. Reddit's model is paternalistic at best.
I would say that political whims have nothing to do with shutting down subs like fatpeoplehate, jailbait and incels. Places that routinely advocate, or have been directly tied to violence tend to get shut down. See the pizzagate debacle. Same with all the qanon stuff.
Interesting, /r/the_donald, which has, and continues to this day, explicitly called for perpetrating violence on minorities, people with opposing political views, democratic politicians, etc. etc ad nauseum, remains up and running to this day.
It is far and away worse than fph and incels in terms of content, but for some mystical reason that's totally not /u/spez vetoing any attempt to reign it in due to his conservative ideology, it has missed the banhammer.
Reddit also has its issues though. Recently they have increased policing of the subs and removed many in guise of breaching rules. Not to mention their terrible UX for the "new reddit" which has prompted me to change all my bookmarks to "old.reddit.com/r/<sub>".
Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement. This ruins any of the forum-like qualities reddit had. It’s gross.
Every subreddit is constantly in the process of eternal September, which kills the dynamics of getting to know one another that were common on forums.
Social media that is good cannot have advertising and cannot be an algorithmic Skinner box that maximizes engagement.
I am starting to think of competing with Facebook as creating online tribes that are costly, perhaps even financially very costly, but full of rich directed action. Sometimes like the dynamics of a church, where users are collated into tribes of limited size.
The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums. Many niche subreddits have seen an entire change in culture and content quality simply because a single posts hit the front page, bringing with it a flood of new subscribers who simply post variations of that top-ranking post in order to gain upvotes, or "Reddit gold", a useless e-token that is somehow considered extremely valuable to some Redditors.
> The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums
Well, that's the double-edged sword of reddit: it helps niche forums stay alive by constantly bringing in new users that originally visited reddit for other reasons. But that visibility can also kill them.
Still, aren't there lots of private subreddits or subreddits where only subscribers can post? If mods are active and ban regularly, you can preserve a culture if you want.
Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites.
A few of the communities I am interested in such as outdoors, adventure motorcycling have moved to google groups. It's frustrating as the content isn't publicly searchable so you can not discover it, it's also frustrating posts are displayed algorithmically so it may pop up in your feed, you navigate away to another page then are unable to find the post again.
Facebook has been great in it's trivial to create communities but it's terrible in the sense content is only surfaced based on some algorithmic value biased around display adds.
> that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites
i find myself having to explicitly add "forum" or "forums" to my google search to find things that might be in a forum, despite them being the most relevant to certain searches.
Googling has gotten really hard. I used to be able to really nail exactly what I wanted, craft queries that'd "drag" obscure pages up to the first couple results by picking words likely to be used in links to those pages but rarely elsewhere, that kind of thing. No longer works at all. Attempts to narrow with quotes and phrases end in "no pages found" (bull. shit.) It's like they downranked everything not on the top 500 most trafficked sites so hard that they dropped right off their index entirely. Except blogspam. God they love blogspam.
This is one of the most obvious things that really were lost in the advent of the big social media sites. Those weird little forums that have their own communities, with the sites having their own little eccentricities.
With how everything is just in one platform, it becomes impersonal as well. I heard about mastodon which feels like it sort of is taking this 'little communities' concept again, but I really wish forums would have a comeback.
> I heard about mastodon which feels like it sort of is taking this 'little communities' concept again, but I really wish forums would have a comeback.
Mastodon is different, it's more like twitter and almost as impersonal
Yeah, man! Nothing will ever come close to modded phpBB forums with the light on dark themes. A well-moderated forum encouraged so much discussion and productivity.
And I have to say, the modern versions of forums -- like Facebook Groups -- just don't replicate that same feeling to me.
I am a member of a facebook group for my city's ward. We had an election on Tuesday regarding some rather complicated funding mechanism for managing stormwater. Something which would have greatly benefited from some rational discussion. Instead people just spammed the group with conspiracy theories about how the city wants to steal our money and build arenas and other eccentricities. It was worse than useless. I found myself longing for the forums of old where there would have been one topic and lots of useful discussion instead of 100 posts with name calling and conspiracy.
How much of that is due to the newer systems bring more accessible to the 'unwashed' masses?
I recall forums back in the day requiring a certain technical aptitude to find and post on them. That created a filter, keeping out those who weren't as deeply interested or as technically educated.
There were always plenty of forums full of people with only a passing or casual interest. Even outright enormous lunatics - it's just that it always seemed a bit more reasonable overall: Everyone cooperated to not let the place go to shit immediately and the need for huge and unilateral moderator intervention was limited.
I think the large social networks have mostly poisoned a lot of people with harmful memes (the need to shout, weird conspiracy theories, etc) and now that the damage is done it's too late even for the old format. As a society we've moved past being adults online and degenerated straight into childlike behaviour.
My '90s video gaming group had our own little forum for years and years and years. In the mid-2000s, most of the members of the group jumped over to Facebook, our forum died, and our group collapsed.
Using other social media is definitely not like using those old forums.
I used to be quite active in a guitar forum. It was almost like a family - complete with crazy fights and arguments too! I bought and sold several guitars, amps, pedals, etc too. Not cheap stuff either, I would send £500+ to a random stranger and trust them to send me the guitar. That was how well the community integrated. People built up real respect, and you could rely on the fact they didn't want to lose it. That forum (probably the biggest in the UK) doesn't exist anymore.
I wouldn't even dream of having a Facebook account, nevermind participating in a community on there to that degree. I wouldn't even send £1 to a random person on Facebook!
Frankly... forums are dying because of Discord. Maybe Google-docs (which is emerging as a highly-curated, invite-only chat-platform for the younger generation).
Kids these days go to Discord and/or Google Docs for serious conversation. If you have an adult community, they may still use forums, but its more or less seen as a dated and ancient Web 1.0 sort of thing.
Google-docs fits all the requirements. No major school bans google-docs. It allows real-time communication, collaboration, and holds a repository of data. Its semi-private, scales to large numbers of users, and moderation is decentralized (controlled by the owner of the Google Doc).
I'm not really disagreeing with you about discord and google docs being popular but something strikes me about it.
(1) because they're both centrally controlled, which leads to some of the same problems
(2) google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some level, but points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting something where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various group chats?)
(3) I don't think google docs or discord are quite the same as twitter etc. in the sense that they serve a different function (group chat)... maybe discord has some similarities but it seems to serve a different function.
which leads me to:
How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?
I've always felt that centralization (as opposed to federation or decentralization) is a bad thing (or at least, less desirable, network math be damned), and think that some old-school things are underrated (e.g., IRC). At the same time, there's been a common thread for years of people wanting to communicate over the internet without the technical hassle. webpage without learning networking and programming -> MySpace/Facebook... rss without learning networking and programming -> twitter... forums without learning forum software and dealing with name registries etc. -> reddit ...
I've toyed around with mastodon and have been struck by how much it has the feel of a lot of the old web, but it seems like it needs more critical mass to take off like something like email.
> google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some level, but points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting something where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various group chats?)
Google Docs for chat is no different than Wikipedia for discussion. The "Talk:" pages are group owned and visible to everyone. Google Docs has a realtime element, but otherwise works as a realtime wiki.
Plenty of internet discussion took place on the Wikis of old, not just Wikipedia but the original c2 WikiWikiWeb.
> How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?
This is tangential. People don't visit "vBulletin", they visit SomethingAwful. If you have a decentralized protocol (like vBulletin, PhpBB, Masteodon, or whatever), the laypeople generally don't care about that technological detail.
The typical web-user will be visiting "SomethingAwful", or "Digg". The webpage itself is associated with a community: a set of moderators.
Wikipedia and Wikia use similar software, but their communities are completely different. Federalized vs Centralized is a blip in the radar, its about policy, contributors and community.
While discord can do some of what forums do. I don't think it's any where close to the same. People would post much larger posts on a forum when creating a topic.
I am also into adventure motorcycle riding. All I have come across is a reddit group r/Dualsport for a forum. There is also thumpertalk. Though I feel that is more geared towards MX riding and not adventure riding. Have you been able to find any other groups that are worth anything? Maybe the adv crowd isn't as big into forums, they might be too busy out riding!
Every forum I was a member of in the last 25 years decayed into a deafening echo chamber of like-minded idiots and trolls who couldn't discuss a topic without personal slander and political or religious influences.
I gotta say I found forums really hard to browse, the UX was terrible.
People has huge signatures, they'd often quote another page long post, there was no upvotes or downvotes so you had to go through 87 pages of junk, the search functionality was terrible...
It's why I like Reddit, even though it's not perfect.
Reddit's like the forum of forums
Edit: although. One thing I do miss with forums is people knew eachother by name. Reddit's too big for that.
The Internet was ruined when the masses moved in. Let them have social media as their own little sandbox to play in and leave the rest of us alone. I don't use twitter, facebook, instagram, slack, discord, whatever-else-kids-use-these-days. I still use IRC and read newsgroups.
The internet of the past was not useful for family/friend communications. I don't want the world to see pictures of my kids (even though nobody cares it still isn't a good idea), but I do want my parents to see them. Social media solves this problem. The interesting things you list were too public and so didn't.
Don't get me wrong, I do miss the forums of the past, but there is also some good in what we have today.
No, Facebook and other social media websites do not provide value, they suck up value for the shareholders. Facebook and others like them are a disease, and they have effectively killed the internet. Your point about being able to show your grandparents pictures totally ignores email and other technologies that “solved” this problem more than a decade before Facebook. Hell, you could create a personal website with password protected pages if you were worried about the public finding certain photos. That’s how the world worked prefacebook, it was wonderful! But instead you are sending those private photos to Facebook, for free! They now own your private photos and will use them against you. Maybe you should have just used email. Of course you can’t monitize free/open, so the money people have convinced you that you need something better than a personal website, or email, or ftp or irc or Usenet or any of the superior technology that existed before the money people killed the internet.
I completely comprehend the bad things the platforms introduce, but pre-social media it was just really inconvenient to stay in touch with people way out of your area. Blogs were alright for it, but not great for 2 way communication in my memories.
I stayed in Peru for a couple years pre-facebook. I told friends and my host family I'd stay in touch and we all shared email addresses. I wrote less than 3 emails.
Next couple years go by and they start shooting friend requests and suddenly I am interacting with long lost friends, talking about their kids, jobs, and reminiscing about the dumb things we did together.
There are definitely other ways to communicate, but there's something about social media that reduces the effort required to connect with someone. It's irrelevant that you might change your address, phone number, or even email address. You have a fixed place that I can contact you and reach out. Oh, and it's the same website where I can find my favorite college roommate too...
> You have a fixed place that I can contact you and reach out. Oh, and it's the same website where I can find my favorite college roommate too...
I thought that too, until I discovered that some of those old friends actually were impersonated and who knows how many identity thefts there are out there.
when bluGill writes: "I don't want the world to see pictures of my kids (even though nobody cares it still isn't a good idea), but I do want my parents to see them."
- it makes me wonder if this means that kids gave their approval to this and were even able understand the impact on their life when their parents gave away their biometric data to sell for the highest bidder.
It seems slightly ironic that most HNers are agreeing social media ruined the internet while doing so on a Reddit like social media platform. I'm an oddball that quite likes social media though I'll give you it has flaws.
Heh. I have a totally different perspective on that.
The biggest forums were always toxic wastelands. Life, Universe, and Everything (the LUEsers of GameFAQs) has gone through this same trajectory.
Toxic people attract OTHER toxic people, because trolls love trolling others. The forum gets more and more toxic as people prefer to mess with other people more than actually have solid conversation. Things get extreme: LUEsers start to post porn to an otherwise innocuous site known to have young people browsing (GameFAQs), and the admins are finally forced to shut LUEsers down.
LUEsers exodus to another major forum, known to be more open to "free speech", and the toxicity cycle continues. Similar cycles happen for 4chan (exodus to 8chan), Something Awful, Reddit (/r/clopclop, /r/TheFappening, /r/Jailbait, /r/BeatingWomen) and other websites.
Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have NOT had their exodus moment yet. The admins still think doing nothing is the best move. Eventually, there will be a controversy so big that the admins will be forced to do something about it. (Youtube is beginning to enter this cycle).
And "do something about it" inevitably means banning the toxic portion of the website. Its the most obvious choice.
Guess what? GameFAQs, 4Chan, Something Awful all still exist today. The Exodus moment is always scary, its always "against free speech", but guess what? The websites are fine afterwards.
---------
I see this all as part of the same cycle. The cycle seems to be slower for larger websites / social networks like Twitter / Facebook, but its the same cycle nonetheless.
Before social media came along, nobody really put much effort or invested into data mining. Yes Google existed but it was more or less serving as an information aggregator only, without the ability to connect the dots and identify individuals.
The rise of all these trends of big data was corresponding to the wave of social media, and these companies are now holding so much public information that grant them an enormous power and opportunity to shape our world.
With great power comes great responsibility. Their current capability potentially allows them to manipulate the world and our information at will, if they choose to do so. It can become extremely dangerous and open for abuse if not kept in check.
Nobody is auditing their data so everything is a just a mystery black box with no transparency. You either choose to believe in what they say, or you don't. The data is irrelevant by itself, it's their intentions that could become dangerous.
Does anyone even trust social media companies? Even their own employees don't let their kids come near it. I wonder what happens on their bring kids to work day?
I feel like he's right, but there's much more to understand here.
The broadcast of oversimplified messages through a human network that reacts strongly to those messages, and thus boosts the signal of those messages further, is something that bears careful consideration.
Some of this behavior could be mitigated. Remove likes and resharing. Ban the incentives (economic, internet points, attenuate diffusion with distance from *caster), etc. in other words, semi-anonymize the author, take away virality and remove the economics (likes, views, etc., which incentivize virality).
Agreed, beyond conditioning a generation of addictive consumers the narrative has never been more muddied and easily manipulated. Facts no longer matter and that's terrifying.
The world needs to figure out how to “put into place very strict requirements with appropriate consequences that make it unthinkable to violate them.”
“Everyone agrees we shouldn’t be doing this yet,”
These quotes are from a Bloomberg article* about the Chinese scientist who edited the twins DNA as embryos, found interesting that society is able to recognize the incredible dangers and implications of DNA modifications yet have a huge blind spot for tech, perhaps because it's so useful in our day to day lives. User-engagement, optimizing for addiction and driving individuals into echo chambers and the welcoming arms of extremists looking to recruit, worth it for free email I guess?
Same with Instagram. I don't use it but I concede that it is useful to some people as a platform for promoting businesses.
FB on the other hand, deserves to die in a fire.
I've all but dropped off Facebook but made an Instagram account earlier this year and am enjoying it. The photo-centric nature seems to eliminate 99% of the toxicity of Facebook. I've subscribed to the accounts of friends, architecture/design centers, Archillect, and accounts that post pictures of owls and otters. None of this promotes deep thinking or meaningful discussion, but it's a nice five-minute addition to my day. Plus it gives me a place to post my own photography where friends and others will see it.
That said, I'm hardly a Facebook/Zuckerberg fan and will jump ship the moment another platform becomes viable.
IG is the same IMO. You won't see the blatant bigotry and politics, but you will see a monoculture of self-promoters and brand builders which are similarly exhausting, just in a different way.
And I say this as someone who is subscribed to some niche meme pages on IG and enjoy them. It's just that if the page were to disappear tomorrow, I would have forgotten about it within a week. It wouldn't be missed. The value it gives me is very limited. I'd wager it's the same for a lot of other people. Social media's value is geared towards advertisers, not users.
Guy Debord used "images" as a metaphor but with Instagram it's not even a metaphor anymore.
> The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
> The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role.
Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered .... They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption.
> Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle [...] naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. It is the opposite of dialogue.
I can’t help but feel like history will look back at this time period and ask themselves: what the fuck were they thinking? A whole generation of smart engineers optimizing addiction.
Smart engineers are optimizing addiction, burning fossil fuels, and many other social ills. But those pursuits make a lot of money, and absent regulation, the labor market will be attracted toward them.
The future you're talking about will have to be regulated much more (at, at least, differently) than the present. I doubt it could even be capitalist -- which, to be clear, I see as a good thing.
Money. People can rationalize a lot given enough money. (see also: workers in the tobacco/casino/opoid industry). The average compensation at the Silicon Valley giants seems roughly 3 to 4 times that of the average American (and I guestimate about twice as high if you control for education level).
It's also a problem when people use words with strong, defined meanings like addiction where they aren't appropriate. Often this kind of thing is then turned into bad legislation because 'addiction' carrys such strong connotations.
The problem is actually far deeper than just social media being mindless. The Internet as such has become a Big Bank, where anyone (and anywhere!) can put in time investment and withdraw money.
Well, you could argue that people work on the Internet. It's not a bad argument, but the problem is much deeper than this.
Every single major social network is now being used as a storefront where you can promote and advertise your personal brand and/or product. I follow a fair amount of people in Web Design and Web Dev, and over the years, many have completely annihilated any emotional connection with their audience and instead run their pages as an established brand.
Look at what happened to Quora, a site that had an incredibly promising start and I personally enjoyed writing hundreds of answers. I enjoyed it because it felt like my answers are being heard, valued, and acted upon.
These days, Quora is a hellhole, a dreadful dump of marketing garbage where people are ready to get their pitchforks whenever someone tries to one-up their "best answer".
Instagram? Holy crap! Instagram is an absolute marketing godsend. Though, some would argue it's not exactly the most appealing type of marketing. The history books of the future will be like the pornography magazines of today. If this trend continues, then this is certain.
> and over the years, many have completely annihilated any emotional connection with their audience and instead run their pages as an established brand.
True, browsing the web for fun these days seems increasingly burdensome as I feel that a good chunk of what I read lacks personality and feels extremely scripted.
The solution to that is not "make it easier to publish online", as Big Tech will always claim. One way may be to start curating your own list of interesting voices, and consume their content deliberately, instead of having it be passively fed to you (including their likes and RTs, which I personally don't like seeing) via the Feed.
> Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'
Well, didn't someone at Microsoft call Linux "a cancer" once? I suppose turnabout is fair play... well not exactly, but close enough! More like paying it forward.
These social media are not for everyone, for some one who are introvert or not a people person or just simply don't like other people then yeah twitter, fb etc are abomination.
Social media is also a tools, good or bad, its what you make of it.
Its tool for all kind of purpose. Certainly can be used for communication too as well as selling ads. Even for selling ads it still have some good for some user.
Oh Linus, after sacrificing your reputation and life's work to appease your daughter's politics, now you go and say something that will displease her. You are not great at brown-nosing, bless you man.
I believe he's right. The whole system is game-ified to maximize time spent. You get nothing but small carefully timed dopamine hits that keep you hooked and your productivity/life balance goes out of the window.
Is it just me, or does the article kind of suck? It starts with discussing who he is, and then his opinion, and the spends the next half of the article talking about what kind of person he is and how this is 'ironic' coming from _him_ of all people.
Just seems weird that they give his opinion, and then we get someone else's opinion on HIM. That doesn't seem very unbiased. Maybe I am overthinking it.
That's funny, cause I was about to post starting with "Is it just me..."
No only the things you said, but it's written like it's targeted at a middle-schooler. I could barely make myself skim the 2nd half of it. I did, cause, you know, Linus.
It's Business Insider, it's the TMZ or Uproxx of "business news". Every once in a while they'll have original content (i.e. sourced from their editorial team), but for the most part it's a content mill of copy-pasted content with a few rushed sentences from an overworked copy writer.
I too had the same impression. It's a complete equivocation of the problem. Even if you're not fan of Torvalds, and think he's rude, his rudeness is different from the problems of social media.
I keep thinking that the simple but fatal decision to mess with the timeline is the deepest sin of social media. If the timeline is purely chronological then there is a much higher barrier to create biases. Social media business models have to respect that or it goes toxic.
The rest of social media's problems have mostly to do with it being a cacophony, which you get with any large and horizontally organized group. Loudest speaker wins, shock replicates faster, etc.
I agree with him 100%. I also feel like this cancer has spread beyond social media. The internet as a whole feels rotten.
I grew up with the internet, so it felt natural to adopt things like social media (early days of FB), cloud storage, YouTube, etc etc. They just seemed to work their way into my life, aided by the adoption of smartphones (essentially a pocket computer).
Today, I've become a Free Software and Privacy advocate. I use libreboot+Debian, have a dumbphone, no social media, and aggressively restrict usage of services like Google et al.
But I feel this isn't going far enough. The real toxic element is the 90% of the internet which is not designed to bring any positivity or enrichment to my life. I recently made the decision to make my main workstation air-gap/offline and it was the best decision ever. My laptop will be my internet connected machine and I'll probably set-up some sort of whitelist on it. I also find it easier to physically isolate a laptop (e.g. put it in a drawer) outside of work hours and thereby regulate outside intrusion into my personal life.
I'm also very sympathetic to the concerns about not triggering the mass bovine herd of professional offense-takers. I work as a Doctor so it's a constant effort to police my opinions and actions on a daily basis. The internet used to be a refuge where I could do daft things like engage in a flame war on a random forum about a random obscure hobby. Today, the risk of inadvertently triggering someone and having it cross into my real life removes any incentive to participate. Even HN feels like that. I've lost count of the number of replies I've typed out, only to delete without posting. I just think there's no point. It's not fun anymore.
I'll probably give up HN soon. It's the last of anything resembling social media that I use. I strongly dislike the inability to completely delete an account and past posts. It's not like I post controversial stuff, but I've grown uncomfortable about leaving any trace online.
Today you have to dig deep to find anything that is not vapid bullshit. The Donald has leaked into other subreddits and the site has become a disgusting cesspool. I feel like I'm the only person that thinks that the advent of memes as means to communicate seems to have degraded discourse to a level of bite sized concepts that eliminate complex analysis of any given topic. Have an opinion of LGBT rights? Post a meme! Have a political opinion? Post a meme! If you don't agree with my 6 word statement on a silly image I will be a complete asshole to you in the comments section that exposes a market of ideas that has devolved into racist diatribes and AnCap ideology.
> "The whole 'liking' and 'sharing' model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage," he said.
This is the crux of the issue IMO. Once it was possible to gain "fame" via Twitter/FB/IG, it was game over. People become incentivized to maximize their likes and followers instead of having conversations. A big following can get you anything from a distribution deal with a fly-by-night supplements company, all the way to a book deal and appearances on Oprah or Comedy Central.
On old-school forums/message boards, you had a community based on a specific shared interest, so people weren't completely anonymous strangers and weren't posting to lobby for attention among the broader community.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadIf Linus’s angry emails are on a distribution list, the exposure is minimal and the damage is contained.
His same excess in social media is reproduced and exploited for various reasons, positive and negative and overflows into unrelated circles where unrelated people have input into something containment would prevent them from being exposed.
This state of total diffusion without commensurate dilution is the problem. Everyone is a perpetrator and everyone is a victim.
An analogue in biology might be tumors. The individual cells might not be bad but them running unstopped can have negative consequences.
Social media needs to attenuate virality. But that’s at odds with their current economic model. So in the meantime they implement useless ineffectual bandaids they know don’t address the problem head on but gives them a plausible “we’re trying” or “shikata ga nai” 仕方がない
Perhaps. Another way to say the same thing however is something along the lines of the following. If you behave... poorly within a relatively narrow community, given sufficient authority you can just get away with it. Maybe you drive people away but it's all pretty invisible to the broader world and those that remain just put up with it because that's the way things are.
Perhaps that's deemed acceptable.Perhaps not. But just because things happen behind relatively closed doors doesn't make them right.
Let’s take people who are against childhood vaccinations. Their unfounded beliefs would remain contained and would not proliferate beyond their circles vs everyone gets exposed and people who’d never think of this anti scientific position become convinced this position kinda somehow makes sense.
From a certain perspective, the noospehere is currently tripping balls on social media.
>Colonel: You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.
>Rose: Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.
>Colonel: The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.
>Rose: Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."
On mailing-lists, worst case there is "that guy", and you can filter them out. Maybe you'll meet at a conf eventually and work things out in person. On Twitter/Facebook, you have to spend a lot of time blocking people and trolls have full control of the platform.
EDIT: from his interview: 'I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere'
As an example, check out the myriad articles about Google users being outed as trans when Google started integrating Google+ into everything: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-ha...
As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...
This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.
Let's take some of the DIY forums. Reddit can get pretty useful, but how does this relate to 1999? Back then, getting DIY videos was difficult. Now the trick is getting to the right kind of quality videos. But perhaps in 1999 if you read something and engaged online the experience was maybe more personal/fulfilling/substancial?
Personally, I have found myself resorting to discussion sites focused on a single topic, like Hacker News instead of /r/programming, or DharmaWheel.net instead of /r/Buddhism.
The only thing that the administrators outside your community do is the shitty redesigns of the UI (big thanks to them for the "old.reddit.com" option though).
Everything else is done by the community of a subreddit.
It is far and away worse than fph and incels in terms of content, but for some mystical reason that's totally not /u/spez vetoing any attempt to reign it in due to his conservative ideology, it has missed the banhammer.
Complete political whims.
Every subreddit is constantly in the process of eternal September, which kills the dynamics of getting to know one another that were common on forums.
Social media that is good cannot have advertising and cannot be an algorithmic Skinner box that maximizes engagement.
I am starting to think of competing with Facebook as creating online tribes that are costly, perhaps even financially very costly, but full of rich directed action. Sometimes like the dynamics of a church, where users are collated into tribes of limited size.
Can't you just sort by new...?
Well, that's the double-edged sword of reddit: it helps niche forums stay alive by constantly bringing in new users that originally visited reddit for other reasons. But that visibility can also kill them.
Still, aren't there lots of private subreddits or subreddits where only subscribers can post? If mods are active and ban regularly, you can preserve a culture if you want.
Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites.
A few of the communities I am interested in such as outdoors, adventure motorcycling have moved to google groups. It's frustrating as the content isn't publicly searchable so you can not discover it, it's also frustrating posts are displayed algorithmically so it may pop up in your feed, you navigate away to another page then are unable to find the post again.
Facebook has been great in it's trivial to create communities but it's terrible in the sense content is only surfaced based on some algorithmic value biased around display adds.
i find myself having to explicitly add "forum" or "forums" to my google search to find things that might be in a forum, despite them being the most relevant to certain searches.
With how everything is just in one platform, it becomes impersonal as well. I heard about mastodon which feels like it sort of is taking this 'little communities' concept again, but I really wish forums would have a comeback.
Mastodon is different, it's more like twitter and almost as impersonal
And I have to say, the modern versions of forums -- like Facebook Groups -- just don't replicate that same feeling to me.
I recall forums back in the day requiring a certain technical aptitude to find and post on them. That created a filter, keeping out those who weren't as deeply interested or as technically educated.
I think the large social networks have mostly poisoned a lot of people with harmful memes (the need to shout, weird conspiracy theories, etc) and now that the damage is done it's too late even for the old format. As a society we've moved past being adults online and degenerated straight into childlike behaviour.
Using other social media is definitely not like using those old forums.
I used to be quite active in a guitar forum. It was almost like a family - complete with crazy fights and arguments too! I bought and sold several guitars, amps, pedals, etc too. Not cheap stuff either, I would send £500+ to a random stranger and trust them to send me the guitar. That was how well the community integrated. People built up real respect, and you could rely on the fact they didn't want to lose it. That forum (probably the biggest in the UK) doesn't exist anymore.
I wouldn't even dream of having a Facebook account, nevermind participating in a community on there to that degree. I wouldn't even send £1 to a random person on Facebook!
Kids these days go to Discord and/or Google Docs for serious conversation. If you have an adult community, they may still use forums, but its more or less seen as a dated and ancient Web 1.0 sort of thing.
Google-docs fits all the requirements. No major school bans google-docs. It allows real-time communication, collaboration, and holds a repository of data. Its semi-private, scales to large numbers of users, and moderation is decentralized (controlled by the owner of the Google Doc).
(1) because they're both centrally controlled, which leads to some of the same problems (2) google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some level, but points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting something where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various group chats?) (3) I don't think google docs or discord are quite the same as twitter etc. in the sense that they serve a different function (group chat)... maybe discord has some similarities but it seems to serve a different function.
which leads me to:
How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?
I've always felt that centralization (as opposed to federation or decentralization) is a bad thing (or at least, less desirable, network math be damned), and think that some old-school things are underrated (e.g., IRC). At the same time, there's been a common thread for years of people wanting to communicate over the internet without the technical hassle. webpage without learning networking and programming -> MySpace/Facebook... rss without learning networking and programming -> twitter... forums without learning forum software and dealing with name registries etc. -> reddit ...
I've toyed around with mastodon and have been struck by how much it has the feel of a lot of the old web, but it seems like it needs more critical mass to take off like something like email.
Google Docs for chat is no different than Wikipedia for discussion. The "Talk:" pages are group owned and visible to everyone. Google Docs has a realtime element, but otherwise works as a realtime wiki.
Plenty of internet discussion took place on the Wikis of old, not just Wikipedia but the original c2 WikiWikiWeb.
> How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?
This is tangential. People don't visit "vBulletin", they visit SomethingAwful. If you have a decentralized protocol (like vBulletin, PhpBB, Masteodon, or whatever), the laypeople generally don't care about that technological detail.
The typical web-user will be visiting "SomethingAwful", or "Digg". The webpage itself is associated with a community: a set of moderators.
Wikipedia and Wikia use similar software, but their communities are completely different. Federalized vs Centralized is a blip in the radar, its about policy, contributors and community.
Just like social media.
One became somewhat shilled though.
People has huge signatures, they'd often quote another page long post, there was no upvotes or downvotes so you had to go through 87 pages of junk, the search functionality was terrible...
It's why I like Reddit, even though it's not perfect.
Reddit's like the forum of forums
Edit: although. One thing I do miss with forums is people knew eachother by name. Reddit's too big for that.
Tons of junk? Use search more. Also it depends on the forum on question. Some have megathreads, some do not.
Don't get me wrong, I do miss the forums of the past, but there is also some good in what we have today.
I stayed in Peru for a couple years pre-facebook. I told friends and my host family I'd stay in touch and we all shared email addresses. I wrote less than 3 emails.
Next couple years go by and they start shooting friend requests and suddenly I am interacting with long lost friends, talking about their kids, jobs, and reminiscing about the dumb things we did together.
There are definitely other ways to communicate, but there's something about social media that reduces the effort required to connect with someone. It's irrelevant that you might change your address, phone number, or even email address. You have a fixed place that I can contact you and reach out. Oh, and it's the same website where I can find my favorite college roommate too...
I thought that too, until I discovered that some of those old friends actually were impersonated and who knows how many identity thefts there are out there.
Ever hear of text and email?
The biggest forums were always toxic wastelands. Life, Universe, and Everything (the LUEsers of GameFAQs) has gone through this same trajectory.
Toxic people attract OTHER toxic people, because trolls love trolling others. The forum gets more and more toxic as people prefer to mess with other people more than actually have solid conversation. Things get extreme: LUEsers start to post porn to an otherwise innocuous site known to have young people browsing (GameFAQs), and the admins are finally forced to shut LUEsers down.
LUEsers exodus to another major forum, known to be more open to "free speech", and the toxicity cycle continues. Similar cycles happen for 4chan (exodus to 8chan), Something Awful, Reddit (/r/clopclop, /r/TheFappening, /r/Jailbait, /r/BeatingWomen) and other websites.
Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have NOT had their exodus moment yet. The admins still think doing nothing is the best move. Eventually, there will be a controversy so big that the admins will be forced to do something about it. (Youtube is beginning to enter this cycle).
And "do something about it" inevitably means banning the toxic portion of the website. Its the most obvious choice.
Guess what? GameFAQs, 4Chan, Something Awful all still exist today. The Exodus moment is always scary, its always "against free speech", but guess what? The websites are fine afterwards.
---------
I see this all as part of the same cycle. The cycle seems to be slower for larger websites / social networks like Twitter / Facebook, but its the same cycle nonetheless.
The rise of all these trends of big data was corresponding to the wave of social media, and these companies are now holding so much public information that grant them an enormous power and opportunity to shape our world.
With great power comes great responsibility. Their current capability potentially allows them to manipulate the world and our information at will, if they choose to do so. It can become extremely dangerous and open for abuse if not kept in check.
Nobody is auditing their data so everything is a just a mystery black box with no transparency. You either choose to believe in what they say, or you don't. The data is irrelevant by itself, it's their intentions that could become dangerous.
Does anyone even trust social media companies? Even their own employees don't let their kids come near it. I wonder what happens on their bring kids to work day?
The broadcast of oversimplified messages through a human network that reacts strongly to those messages, and thus boosts the signal of those messages further, is something that bears careful consideration.
The world needs to figure out how to “put into place very strict requirements with appropriate consequences that make it unthinkable to violate them.”
“Everyone agrees we shouldn’t be doing this yet,”
These quotes are from a Bloomberg article* about the Chinese scientist who edited the twins DNA as embryos, found interesting that society is able to recognize the incredible dangers and implications of DNA modifications yet have a huge blind spot for tech, perhaps because it's so useful in our day to day lives. User-engagement, optimizing for addiction and driving individuals into echo chambers and the welcoming arms of extremists looking to recruit, worth it for free email I guess?
* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-13/top-genet...
That said, I'm hardly a Facebook/Zuckerberg fan and will jump ship the moment another platform becomes viable.
And I say this as someone who is subscribed to some niche meme pages on IG and enjoy them. It's just that if the page were to disappear tomorrow, I would have forgotten about it within a week. It wouldn't be missed. The value it gives me is very limited. I'd wager it's the same for a lot of other people. Social media's value is geared towards advertisers, not users.
Instagram is particularly weird to me, look at what's trending, semi naked teenagers/stars, selfies and ads, that's all, for miles of scrolling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Instagra...
Guy Debord used "images" as a metaphor but with Instagram it's not even a metaphor anymore.
> The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
> The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered .... They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption.
> Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle [...] naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. It is the opposite of dialogue.
The future you're talking about will have to be regulated much more (at, at least, differently) than the present. I doubt it could even be capitalist -- which, to be clear, I see as a good thing.
Well, you could argue that people work on the Internet. It's not a bad argument, but the problem is much deeper than this.
Every single major social network is now being used as a storefront where you can promote and advertise your personal brand and/or product. I follow a fair amount of people in Web Design and Web Dev, and over the years, many have completely annihilated any emotional connection with their audience and instead run their pages as an established brand.
Look at what happened to Quora, a site that had an incredibly promising start and I personally enjoyed writing hundreds of answers. I enjoyed it because it felt like my answers are being heard, valued, and acted upon.
These days, Quora is a hellhole, a dreadful dump of marketing garbage where people are ready to get their pitchforks whenever someone tries to one-up their "best answer".
Instagram? Holy crap! Instagram is an absolute marketing godsend. Though, some would argue it's not exactly the most appealing type of marketing. The history books of the future will be like the pornography magazines of today. If this trend continues, then this is certain.
This, so much this.
The solution to that is not "make it easier to publish online", as Big Tech will always claim. One way may be to start curating your own list of interesting voices, and consume their content deliberately, instead of having it be passively fed to you (including their likes and RTs, which I personally don't like seeing) via the Feed.
Well, didn't someone at Microsoft call Linux "a cancer" once? I suppose turnabout is fair play... well not exactly, but close enough! More like paying it forward.
Social media is also a tools, good or bad, its what you make of it.
Just seems weird that they give his opinion, and then we get someone else's opinion on HIM. That doesn't seem very unbiased. Maybe I am overthinking it.
No only the things you said, but it's written like it's targeted at a middle-schooler. I could barely make myself skim the 2nd half of it. I did, cause, you know, Linus.
The rest of social media's problems have mostly to do with it being a cacophony, which you get with any large and horizontally organized group. Loudest speaker wins, shock replicates faster, etc.
I grew up with the internet, so it felt natural to adopt things like social media (early days of FB), cloud storage, YouTube, etc etc. They just seemed to work their way into my life, aided by the adoption of smartphones (essentially a pocket computer).
Today, I've become a Free Software and Privacy advocate. I use libreboot+Debian, have a dumbphone, no social media, and aggressively restrict usage of services like Google et al.
But I feel this isn't going far enough. The real toxic element is the 90% of the internet which is not designed to bring any positivity or enrichment to my life. I recently made the decision to make my main workstation air-gap/offline and it was the best decision ever. My laptop will be my internet connected machine and I'll probably set-up some sort of whitelist on it. I also find it easier to physically isolate a laptop (e.g. put it in a drawer) outside of work hours and thereby regulate outside intrusion into my personal life.
I'm also very sympathetic to the concerns about not triggering the mass bovine herd of professional offense-takers. I work as a Doctor so it's a constant effort to police my opinions and actions on a daily basis. The internet used to be a refuge where I could do daft things like engage in a flame war on a random forum about a random obscure hobby. Today, the risk of inadvertently triggering someone and having it cross into my real life removes any incentive to participate. Even HN feels like that. I've lost count of the number of replies I've typed out, only to delete without posting. I just think there's no point. It's not fun anymore.
I'll probably give up HN soon. It's the last of anything resembling social media that I use. I strongly dislike the inability to completely delete an account and past posts. It's not like I post controversial stuff, but I've grown uncomfortable about leaving any trace online.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070206145523/http://reddit.com...
Today you have to dig deep to find anything that is not vapid bullshit. The Donald has leaked into other subreddits and the site has become a disgusting cesspool. I feel like I'm the only person that thinks that the advent of memes as means to communicate seems to have degraded discourse to a level of bite sized concepts that eliminate complex analysis of any given topic. Have an opinion of LGBT rights? Post a meme! Have a political opinion? Post a meme! If you don't agree with my 6 word statement on a silly image I will be a complete asshole to you in the comments section that exposes a market of ideas that has devolved into racist diatribes and AnCap ideology.
This is the crux of the issue IMO. Once it was possible to gain "fame" via Twitter/FB/IG, it was game over. People become incentivized to maximize their likes and followers instead of having conversations. A big following can get you anything from a distribution deal with a fly-by-night supplements company, all the way to a book deal and appearances on Oprah or Comedy Central.
On old-school forums/message boards, you had a community based on a specific shared interest, so people weren't completely anonymous strangers and weren't posting to lobby for attention among the broader community.