HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is the future of social media private messaging/communities?

6 points by sebpra ↗ HN
Social media these days isn't even social anymore, it's mainly media. Current social media apps started off as a way to communicate with friends and then slowly started turning into entertainment apps. Could it be that the future of "social" media is just private messaging/communities? Whatsapp, iMessage, Signal, Telegram, etc.

9 comments

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LinuxBender
Is the future of social media private messaging?

Probably. Even that is too distracting for me. I prefer email.

crop_rotation
Unfortunately most people are extremely hesitant to use Email.
LinuxBender
Agreed, however that is a bonus to my wanting less distractions. Important things will be phone calls. Less important will be email. I would probably just host my own social web platform if I wanted anything more, thus keeping the social circle small and cozy. uMurmur, phpBB, devzat ssh chat.
crop_rotation
How do you get photos of social events? I have never been able to convince my friends to share trip photos on email. Nobody wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole. This is not something you can confront anyone on.
LinuxBender
For people in my social circle that would be a good use case for phpBB or email. The younger generations are less interested in things that don't get likes and emoji's so I completely understand what you mean. I suppose they are stuck using the mainstream corporate platforms.
eimrine
Interesting confirmation of my opinion that nothing has changed since invention of email.
EA-3167
Thank goodness we killed off all of those troublesome small forums and communities that weren't full of advertising or roaming psychopaths, in favor of the splendid experience offered by the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

Toooootally worth it. /s

I hope that people have learned a simple fact: megacommunities can't be effectively moderated, a place like HN probably represents the upper end of how many active users a site can tolerate and still be worth visiting. A place like Reddit is more or less just an open sewer by comparison, and it's hard to imagine a way to change that at scale.

Small communities share aims and tastes, individuals can stand out and be dealt with if needed, and an affordable amount of human moderation can handle spam and bad actors. Twitter, FB, Reddit and all of those giants are too big to work, and that's why they're full of such miserable people shouting at each other.

crop_rotation
Small communities are nice, yes, but how do you keep them small. A lot of subreddits start small, are very nice places, and then grow big and lose all that.

HN is an exception, not just because of extremely good moderation, small size, text only, clear rules and strong encouragement of assuming good faith. There is no clear way to translate it to other communities.

e.g Quora when it was very small was a very good website to visit. The more it grew the more it became useless to the point that I don't find anything on it worth visiting right now.

EA-3167
I think the point is that being a "site for talking about everything" doesn't work. Ever. HN is restricted by what it is, even more than who runs it; a lot of the content here has no appeal to people outside of the tech world. The sort of people here tend to prefer rigor and statistics to emotional appeals and bloviating, and that creates a "house style" like old forums used to have. It's self-limiting, because there are only so many people who are, to be blunt, this nerdy in this particular way.

To take the Reddit example a sub like r/Labrats is self-contained and self-sustaining in the same way! There are only so many people with the life experiences in labs, wet or dry, and so many people who will get the humor and struggles of those communities. By contrast a sub like r/Worldnews is so vague and broad that it attracts tens of millions of people to talk about just about anything at all.

Quora falls into that latter category, "Ask me anything" in essence. I'm essentially calling for a return to niches based on limited shared interests or circumstances, because they come with their own ability to restrict growth and filter out "clots".