Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with.
Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of the virtual world would actually hurt their business model. People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching ads.
So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.
Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be good. It's a postmodern toilet that flushes into its own tank.
I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
> I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB
I'll one-up this: I miss USENET.
I never understood how anyone could like phpBB, compared to USENET news readers, it was a chaotic mess. But USENET, that was great for discussing things.
I remember using some forums, and there'd be pages and pages of idiots just replying "Wow, this is great, thanks OP!", or "Thanks from me too!". How the fuck do you think you're contributing rather than polluting?
And nowadays they can even create Github accounts and do this...
I first got on the Internet in 1991. The older students told me to lurk on Usenet and not post anything for a month or 2 to avoid getting flamed. I did and then I loved it. Once all the @aol.com people started showing up it went downhill. By 2000 it was so full of spam and garbage that I stopped going. I connected to a Usenet server last year for the first time in over 20 years and it was just full of junk.
Funny thing is, if we were to revive it now, it might end up as a pretty nice place, given that all the dumb crowds now have their 4chans, reddits, phpBBs, facebooks, instagrams, etc.
Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem.
As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person.
The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't trying to gain something by participating and organizing. But they're so few.
Given how many subreddits there, I have to ask if you have statistics to back up this claim.
My intuition is that people have problems with a bunch of popular subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits are just fine. I have no statistics to back up this intuition.
There’s a whole vibrant industry of people you can pay to market whatever you want on Reddit. They can’t all be competing for the same few popular subreddits. They must be differentiated by targeting niche subreddits.
There are two different "ads" we're discussing here. One is the ads reddit the platform allows you to pay for, and it shows up in the client(s) as ads. Another is the type of ad where a company reaches out to community members and ask them to post about their project/product in exchange for a static sum, which looks like "normal posts" but are actually sponsored content.
The first one sucks for a multitude of reasons, the second one you basically don't notice are ads, yet they're all over reddit.
Can't say I know how it looks everywhere on reddit, as I'm not everywhere on reddit, but the AI subreddits I referenced earlier are filled with it, and I've even received offers myself to get paid to pay about stuff and I'm a nobody, so surely I only know of the surface.
They are targetting whatever has eyeballs. If people are looking for purchasing advice they have probably come from Google. So if Google is indexing the subreddit it is fair game. That means every subreddit that is not 18+, and Reddit also forbids marking a subreddit as 18+ when the contents isn't really 18+ (as this was a form of mod protest a few years ago).
You can advertise on Reddit. If the return/cost ratio of industrialized astroturfing is better than ads then people will use it to promote their products.
There are two problems in computer science, accepting payments and naming things.
Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable. If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-unique display name, that problem would be solved.
Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many users who have $1 can't easily get that $1 to Reddit, so that's not really an option either.
Admins actively choose moderators, removing ones they don't like and inserting their favorites. Recently, a mod was removed from r/LivestreamFails and made a public crashout video. In exactly the way you'd expect a Reddit mod to.
I don't necessarily agree, the Rust subreddit is fine (except for all the AI slop posts this year, which the moderators have a hard time keeping up with) and some of the more niche 3D printing subreddits are doing fine, basically it feels like the past few years haven't happened there. The Arch Linux subreddit is a bit chaotic, but the moderation is not really the problem I think.
Maybe all of these fall into your last paragraph and I simply don't frequent the type of subreddit you describe. The thing is, it is hard to tell if it is you or me who have a representative sample here, or if we are both off. Two samples is not statistically significant.
There are over 100,000 subreddits and the vast majority of them (and all of the ones I follow) fall into their last paragraph ... it's not at all "so few". And even if it were, "representative sample" isn't really relevant when you can select and mute subs ... it's really not much different from usenet, which I was very active on in the 80's and 90's.
Yeah the reddit mod system is just ripe for abuse. They have little to no accountability, the people acting as police were the same people you appealed to and who acted as judge, there was a clear reddit mod political class with certain users or groups of users controlling significant swaths of subreddits, and with it judgements in 1 sub might get you banned from other subs. And if someone got enough mod shills in a sub they could oust original or well liked mods. And there is clear financial gains and benefits to doing all of that. Meanwhile regular users that built the site and made it a place people wanted to visit had basically zero say or influence on any of it.
I remember your story differently. You were consistently trolling /r/programming from multiple accounts for years (shevegen, shevy-ruby, shevy-java). You relied on the fact that /r/programming pretty much wasn't moderated at all.
I heartily recommend people volunteer for moderation. There’s tons of subs that need help, and the more diversity of voices in conversations like this, the better.
Modding is a shit show, and being on the other side can be quite the experience.
The more people who can chime in, the better as a society we can figure out what needs to be done.
Right now it’s rough for users, and insane for mods.
$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit. Even just your average basement dwelling troll might consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock puppet account.
Requiring a valid payment method before posting will take out 99.9% of spammers and trolls. Newspapers discovered this when they went behind paywalls. SomethingAwful discovered this 20 years ago when they required $10 to create an account.
Lol, I guess I'm glad I checked-out from reddit before the whole "AI" thing took off. My life is honestly way better without reddit. HN isn't far behind though, honestly. The less time I spend here, the better for everything else going on in my life. HN has at least been somewhat useful for my day-job and employment future.
As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence before: I remember when they screwed all existing "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again with v4.
On spacebattles you get infracted for chan-like (or instagram-like) behaviour. It's all about how strict moderation is. They do allow likes (but there's no algo)
phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about.
People's habits changed.
I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
What really killed phpBB and that generation of boards was mostly the sketchy codebases they ran off.
The code was rife with vulnerabilities, so the boards needed constant patching (which was a non-trivial that sometimes killed the database). If you didn't patch on time, a script inevitably dropped by, exploited the software, dumped all credentials, and nuked the database.
Those old forums were not built with the adversarial nature of the 2010s internet in mind. Boards were dropping like flies a few years there. Most simply never recovered.
Absolutely avoid all the extensions. Supposedly that got tightened up in v3.x but I saw some boards get pwned in 2.x from the extensions. Another issue is that most people were too lazy to harden php.ini yup this is a thing and their servers allowed outbound connections so exploiting some of the core code was much easier. Maybe I am just lucky but I never had a security issue with phpBB. One of my earliest forums using phpBB had over 50k people on it. That may not sound like much but it was a niche community and very early in the Internets existence.
The legal landscape has also changed. 20 years ago I helped run a web forum, but with today's legal landscape - DMCA in the US, various different laws in the EU and other countries - I would never do so. The amount of liability on the host for user-created content is far too high.
It did change a lot but the biggest changes were the ToS/AuP of server/VM providers. What was not even taboo in the early 00's was becoming a problem keeping an account active on clear-web sites. Across the board many providers starting using the vague word "lewd" a word I had never heard of even after running porn sites for a long time.
Many of us moved to .onion despite being incredibly slow at the time. We would keep an unpublished clear-web sub-domain active for the old time users so they had a fast connection. Eventually that was even problematic so many forum operators stopped accepting new users and made their forums private or semi-private. Some still exist and some got married, had kids and real life took too much time and energy to also run such sites.
Europe is more bureaucratic. You have to register with the government to say you host user content and respond to abuse reports, and then respond to abuse reports, and you're shielded.
There's one or two still kicking around that I visit myself, but I'll admit I don't miss not having threaded conversations. Trying to follow a conversation with other people butting in with low effort shit posting is way harder with everything being linear.
I still use it for private and semi-private forums. The access controls make it much easier to stop drive-by spammers or at very least prevent anyone seeing their crap posts.
For phpBB site behavior, access control lists, ranks unless discourse has added that, per board policies, per rank policies. I have not used Discourse in a long time so I have no idea what they have added but that was the difference long ago.
I’ve just set up a forum for up and coming bagpipe makers (not the loud Scottish kind).
It’s been a real breath of fresh air seeing a community coalesce without the feeling of predators on the horizon (eg a hosting provider with misaligned incentives or astroturfers).
I don’t do social media (beyond HN) much at all these days but I’m enjoying seeing it slowly take off.
Using hosted Discourse. I’m glad there’s still a market for it.
Yeah, we all had such forums set up. I personally used Vanilla Forums and phpBB. I remember I did set up Invision once and I felt great about myself. (I was a kid) :D
The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.
It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.
Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.
I'm not a good marketer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the only thing I've found that works is replying to relevant comments in popular threads with neutral looking promotional material (e.g. github links). A well placed reply in a hot thread will easily drive 10x the value of a blog post.
I think it's possible to do it ethically, but anything that works is going to get gamed.
It's a pretty dark dystopian future where the only way for anyone to hear about anything is advertising or paid promotion by influencers because we're so aggressive about policing individuals marketing themselves.
Well you wouldn't want independent creators and small start-up businesses getting exposure over large corporate ventures with full marketing departments would you? Think about the pour investor class that has sunk so much money into marketing, and then some chick in a basement hand weaving some silver wire pendant gets a sale and only earns 15% markup instead of the mass produced cheap zinc pendant with a 300% markup.
I think it sounds more like "why is the town square covered in ads now , who installed actual mantraps in the town square , why is everything we do in the town square used against us , town squares were fine less than two decades ago and we let the rich parasitize them for profit"
Except you're doing nothing about that besides going "let's keep the town square terrible" and ensuring kids are 100% unprepared for the way the modern world communicates in the 21st century lol
Zealous parents are using this as an opportunity to take phones, computers and means of digital communication away. Hell, by law, you can't even use Discord without verifying your age lol
Imagine if they banned video games and texting 20 years ago because parents were convinced their kids were addicted to Halo and T9Word. They could always roll hoops in the street and send letters to each other with a little planning, too.
Which just begs the question, how much can you really change social media? How much are you really in control of your feed? This is where the "pubic square" analogy breaks down. Besides, there are a lot of communication mediums/messaging apps that are not social media.
Even back in the early 2010s I've been trying to consume social media mindfully. I made sure to follow pages with meaningful content (e.g., The Dalai Lama, The Long Now Foundation, Aeon Magazine, tech-related pages, SpaceX, Elon Musk, indie creators). I don't just add or follow blindly.
Back then I could justify why my selection was "good" but even then, they were drowned out by the tedium of vacations, new restaurants, felt-cute-might-delete-later selfies. Slop/engagement bait is quicker to produce than meaningful thought-provoking content.
I am also pretty sure Facebook's negative signals (unfollow, don't show me this type of content) did not work back then, at least not deterministically. If something I did not like had enough traction, it will still pop up in my feed.
And of course, goes without saying that a lot of my choices aged like milk. Elon Musk turned out to be, well, Elon Musk. Some of the tech pages started shilling out crypto (and nowadays doubtless AI). The indie creators either stopped posting or fell out of favor with the algorithm which meant exodus from the platform. All that goes on top of my pre-existing grievances against my feed recommendations.
I still visit regularly (and have since about 2000 or so), but I agree that it is not the same as in those days. I remember feeling like I was gaining actual insight into the topics from the comments, today... much less so. Maybe being older also plays a role, but I think /. has certainly changed as well.
However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.
I use old.reddit.com but I feel like I have complete control over what I see. It's new posts, I check them and then I leave.
That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.
As I found out a while ago on HN when I complained an extension I used stopped working, ?sk=h_chr still works to get a sane FB view. No sponsored shit, no algorithmic suggestions, no posts people have reacted to, just chronological posts of people & pages you follow.
Lately the algorithm for the front page sorted by hot or best has been changed. You'd see mostly threads from subreddit you recently visited. So you no longer have control over what you don't get to see.
I use old.reddit on my desktop, new.reddit on my phone and new.reddit is constantly mashing in posts from a more niche "my-country" sub (eg: not the "main" /r/country) that's often got very baity posts (eg: guised "does anyone else hate immigrants??" posts).
Same account, same behaviour, but the new site is really pushing "gross" stuff at me.
The feeling have is that we don't browse the internet in the same way.
RSS for HN and other specific sites I want updates about. old.reddit/r/.../new pages. A third party app for YouTube to just view new things from people I subscribe to.
I definitely have fight harder and harder to, browse like it's 2006, avoid the Algoslop Train, but it is possible more places than you'd think.
What I find particularly bad about Reddit is the platform is specifically designed to amplify group think and silence competing opinions. All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. It can turn subreddits into little bubbles where like-minded people upvote each other and almost never have to see dissenting opinions. That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit, but it can be a big problem or even dangerous elsewhere.
> That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit,
I had to abandon my last few hobby subreddits because there were a few chronically online people who had to control the conversation in every single post with their opinions. If anyone didn't agree, their comments would mysteriously go to -3 or below within 30 minutes of posting.
It's all little fiefdoms for chronically online people now.
What are your thoughts on lemmy, maybe the hobby can be extremely niche but you can even be the moderator yourself on a lemmy instance and I think that a federated reddit alternative would be nice too!
If I may ask, what are the hobbies that you are talking about?
I was big on it during the reddit excursion. Eventually I figured out that because it’s so small, that many/most people read the equivalent of /r/all, where many, many posts would end up. So even your small niche community would get "genpop" users. That’s what made me return to reddit instead and delete my instance (that, and the politics of the creators infesting some major instances).
The only halfway sane community I found was beehaw.org, which defederated aggressively, but that came with being very small, and I always cared most about the discussion over the links themselves. So eventually I left that as well.
ETA: I would probably summarize it that Lemmy is (or was, been a while now) better than big subreddits, but worse for small niche communities which imo are by far the best part of reddit, and the only part I care about.
The trouble I think, going forward, is that no matter how good the technology of a new forum might be, everyone is primed and ready to flock to it. How could anything be good if the same 500,000 redditors that turned it into shit show up the first week? Worse, even if they don't, there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big (Lemmy and the commies).
I completely understand your comment and found the reference to eternal september fascinating and how it happened 35 years ago and people were talking about internet being too crowded. thanks for reference, learnt something new.
> there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big
I do wonder if software can be used to prevent this tho. I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community doesn't have crackpots (well ahem, maybe sometimes but definitely fewer than reddit maybe)
I do think about hackernews from time to time and think about how the ethos around it is Curiosity >> everything. I mean sometimes small comments/low value comments can be rewarded but usually its the well thought out comments which get value. (Well, this explains why my comments don't get +1 haha, self roasts are fun!)
I do think that in HN this intentional change plus the fact that pg spearheaded the project personally as a personal project for the first few years set the mood around it here to be like this (which is usually civil, even in disagreements)
I think that even in HN guidelines or in some important place, there is this thing called HN is not reddit and such comparison. I find it funny right now but I think that they wrote this to specifically prevent some aspects of what you are talking about right now.
I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho. It would be interesting to hear what dang comments about it maybe if dang's here about such moderation.
Also out of curiosity but when you mention shit show, do you mean the discussing turning into something (un-civil?) or lacking etiquettes as in say, the community turning into gifs posting as such or similar with low quality comments?
Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
> I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community
HN is a weird thing. I think it just managed the perfect storm of improbabilities. It managed to find just enough audience for it to be interesting, but didn't reach a critical mass that sees it going exponential (possibly its subject matter repels popular interest and especially youth interest). It has a one-man (or at least tiny moderation) team that (somehow) resists the urge to do anything but put the smackdown on bad actors (possibly the hard rule against political stories helps). And as the last refuge of people who hate Facebookization, it's also possible there is zero demand for it to be swipe-able and phone-centric.
But, in truth, it is also sort of fossilized, and will die once our generation (and -a-half) retires and has little time for it. So we've got 15 or 20 years more, and it will shrink as it goes, and then one day it'll just be gone. It won't even be here to memorialize its demise.
>I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho.
Maybe someone is more clever than I, and can figure it out. But I've spent nearly 20 years at this point, and I've come up with squat. I think the forums that people did enjoy (for awhile) were completely organic and just can't be artificially created.
>Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
It's difficult to even describe what you're missing, if you weren't there to see it for yourself. It didn't start with reddit, it didn't start with Slashdot, I'm not even sure what it did start with that's before my time. Are you even aware that many of these websites didn't even require an account to post? That was only if you wanted your name attached to some comment that was really clever. There was this sweet spot though, where it all converged. It was post-internet-boom, so some of the people who were posting had hobbies besides the internet itself... making for conversations about anything and everything. And, as a rule, people weren't jaded about it in general... people weren't expecting you to be rude or have some agenda. If they could even imagine that, then it was you were a spammer trying to sell something which was more junk than scam. There was the idea that if the software/website itself were bad, eventually it would be improved. Everything was text/typing/reading, so it was literate and not 10 second tiktok garbage. Phone-texting hadn't quite spoiled everything with text-speech. People managed to get fed up with bad design and bad behavior, there were so-called exoduses. And, from time to time, it was possible to be noticed without Russian mafia connections or Illuminati endorsements.
What we have now is quite possibly the worst possible timeline, so to speak. All of the points I've mentioned don't even quite begin to describe what's changed.
Hot take: a voting system (and generally any move toward ranking content rather than displaying it chronologically) will inevitably rot any social media platform. Just a question of time.
When I used 4chan the lack of voting made engaging with the actual substance of a post much easier. This was something observed by many other posters I talked to. This is going to sound wishy-washy, but my theory is that the brain is so attuned to socially trying to figure out the in-group or who is in the wrong that putting a number that signals social agreement on a statement will immediately stimulate the more primal social pathways in your brain before you can even think.
Of course 4chan isn’t a great system for meaningful discussions, the system skews conversations towards outrage and shock. But reddits short, quippy, in-group signaling post style that is encouraged by their voting system seems to be absolute worst way to interact with other people. HN also has this problem to an extent, but it’s properly modded and most people here seem to be not be living through their phones so it isn’t nearly as extreme as reddit (or twitter, I never use twitter but people seem miserable in a similar way to reddit users).
In the first decade of the 2000s my only "social" platforms were traditional (chronological) forums and the average level of discussion and effort to contribute was way higher than what I usually see now on social media.
Yeah I used to enjoy forum discussions. Reddit is agree or stfu. It got worse a few years ago (probably longer than that) with a new rule change and something about chibese ownership?
It depends on lot on the sub and how their moderators police the community, but yeah, I've seen lots of that.
I've been aggressively downvoted before for pointing out facts that people don't want to be true. (And these were not even political discussions!) I don't even bother with putting my opinions online at any rate, both because they don't actually matter to anyone but me, and because I don't get any joy out of defending them against internet randos.
Edit: It depends on the size of the sub as well. I'm a member of a few subs that I can stand because the moderators are good at moderating, and there are enough regular users coming through to counter a small number of very active cranks.
> All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility.
That is true here too. And Twitter is the least transparent, with people regularly reporting that posts critical of musk or trump have reduced reach compared to their other posts.
Yes, but HN still has a strong culture of considering both sides, excellent moderation, and some measures to help nudge people in the right direction. For example, right now I can only upvote your comment. I am not given an option to downvote it. That's a good thing!
Ah, no, the HN commentorship is quite highly biased toward a particular demographic and set of political beliefs, which is a thing that needs to be acknowledged. "Considering both sides" is not something I've ever seen as common practice in any organic online community I've been a part of, full stop.
HN's redeeming quality over much of the rest of the web is that low-effort hot-takes and aggressive content are actively discouraged by the mods and community. (These are things that other communities devolve towards, because they tend to drive engagement faster and easier than quality.)
> HN commentorship is quite highly biased toward a particular demographic and set of political beliefs
I don't know whether this is true, but I've seen exactly the same "complaint" from both sides of the USA political spectrum (USA politics are overrepresented for obvious reasons).
It's because you're new. Powerusers can downvote and even flag comments. A couple flags and the comment is (by default) invisible. Enough flagged comments and your comments are flagged by default. There's a reason this place is called orange reddit
I agree completely about Reddit. It's a clickbait factory with a misinformation density that makes my Facebook feed look downright informative.
I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of quality.
Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've known feel like they've had their hope about the future hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a stream of content telling them that everything is awful and will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket website now.
But this is antithetical to what Reddit is. It's not like StackExchange websites, where the whole point is to create a database of canonical questions and answers. Reddit doesn't have some basic forum functionality by design.
I've once talked to a person connected to someone at Reddit Inc, and they indirectly confirmed this (in retrospect it was very obvious).
I don't know any more. Even the small subs I previously visited for good content have turned into their own little echo chambers, along with a lot of drive-by posts because small subs get recommended in other people's feeds now.
In some of the hobby subreddits where I had good discussions in the past it's now just one big echo chamber of people parroting the same information around, whether it's true or not. If you want to participate you either need to toe the line of the accepted brands/methods/techniques or keep your mouth shut. Most of us just get tired and give up
Yeah that's really the issue with all social media. If you restrict yourself to just checking what friends post on Facebook, or what people you subscribe to post on YouTube, those platforms are pretty healthy too. It's when you go to the infinite content feed that sites become an issue.
These days I typically resolve the domain names of these attention media platforms to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file, so that I do not inadvertently end up visiting them by following a link somewhere else. I think there are very few true social media platforms remaining today, among which I visit only HN and Mastodon.
I wouldn't be surprised if Meta turned WhatsApp into a TikTok clone just to get around the restrictions. They know that banning WhatsApp for teenagers in Europe is almost impossible. I look at my kids, all their sports clubs and other extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.
"YouTube has introduced enhanced parental controls allowing parents to manage or block YouTube Shorts for teen accounts. Parents can set daily time limits for Shorts ranging from zero to two hours, configure custom bedtimes, and set "take a break" reminders" (AI summary)
The second a ban is announced everyone would just migrate to the next thing. That's the nice part of social media and communication apps, they're easy to migrate off of.
I'm a bit glad that it's no longer Facebook groups. But WhatsApp is also disappointing. I have to keep an account on my 'throwaway' phone for junk apps just to communicate with those groups and clubs. And usually WhatsApp is the only way with them.
> extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.
If you want to block Shorts. I recommend you to try out revanced which gives you youtube without any ads and a lot of other customizations.
To be honest, I find it funny that paid youtube customers might shift to revanced which is technically piracy jsut to remove shorts.
I was this close to rooting the phones but she had just bought a new phone.
But if pricing wasn't the concern for me (which right now it is but I don't think for many HN users it might be), here's what I suggest.
Go buy a phone which can be easily rooted and also use an somewhat secure os (just short of graphene)
Patch revanced (I have even made a nix flake or some nix file [i don't use nix that much but I was curious and ended up using LLMs to generate the file] whose purpose was to take android file and patch it when I was in nix, but I don't have it with me right nwo as I may haev lost it)
Have in the options the short block option.
Newpipe is great as well but it doesn't really allow having comment support.
Also given that HN is a very techie and well hacking with software community. If anyone's interested to take an challenge within Java/Kotlin (Unfortunately, they scare me) then I have got an idea for you guys:
"But the option of turning shorts back on can still be toggled. I wish if anybody whose an expert in java/kotlin can take a look at how revanced works and maybe how to have a revanced patch which can block shorts by default (additionally with ads preferably too with the download option patch as well & the sponsorblock) while atleast in the revanced specific settings option blocking just the option/toggle switch to turn shorts back on."
Also I am a teenager. I would consider the fact that I am on this website partially because of a loop of youtubers that I started following [ Fireship the goat before he turned VC -> Primagen the legend -> Theo t3 (I do feel like he's not the best guy following but he covered so much about YC that I ended up opening news.ycombinator.com and reading it and not watching him read it and ended up making account)
oh yeah before Fireship, I used to follow Code with harry when I was around ~13 yo. I learnt python from him many years ago before it was introduced to us in school so much so that I ended up picking the finance subject out of curiosity and I enjoyed both finance and tech.
One of the funniest stories from this whole is when Code with harry loved one of my comments on youtube loooong time ago and I was around 14 or osmething and then my mum saw it and she didn't know what loving a comment in YT mean and she got suspicious about it and questioned me and then I had to describe hearting a comment to her xD.
Oh yeah. I started learning about python itself around this time because one of my cousins whom I deeply respect who works in aerospace but back when in his university started mentioning how he worked on a ~2-3k loc and he mentioned python and I was like hmm what's python.
I don't know if a parent is interested to hear this but I feel like teenagers really replicate those they admire. A lot of my traits first started just being around that cousin & he actually taught me about assets/liabilities when I was in 5th grade and taught me chess which both became very obsessive points for me later down the life (My joy when I finally ended up beating him at chess fair and square)
I don't think that I do that well academically per se though, it really just depends on my mood so :/ yeah but I really ended up butchering some prestigious college's paper real hard and still tensed about it but honestly as a teen, I don't even know why I am typing this but my point is that your kid would have a personality and just nudge him in the right manners & let him think for himself to think that he reached at a particular conclusion. I do feel like that's generally how I approached and I was the youngest of my whole entire family tree so that made me more mature but I do feel like it came at a trade off of wishing to grow up fast asap when I was a child and now wishing to go back too seeing say not being able to cope up with massive study efforts or competition but that's another matter I guess.
Though parenting is definitely really really hard, kudos to every parent out there.
When did this start? IMHO it started with instagram. I remember back then there were multiple retro photo apps, insta was one of them, I had several on my phone and kept playing around with them (at the time apps felt like Christmas presents, each update exploring a device feature in creative ways).
I don't quite remember, but I don't think it was a social network then, I think you posted the photos in other networks, and then they made it into a social network and something strange happened. People started posting pictures of food and just general daily life stuff and I thought this was a small group of people who were a extroverts and just wanted to show off idk, they ate beautiful food.
Then something strange happened. This behavior started getting normalized, all other insta like apps disappeared and shortly after, it became necessary to have an instagram account.
I remember at the time I thought something was off, to this day I think I have posted a total of 10 instagram images, they still have the old filters, and stayed off of it since.
But it's been interesting watching it morph into this hydra that simply cannot be put down, to the point where it's more powerful than governments.
Really good question...TL;DR: I'd put it around when Mark Z decided Instagram also had to be Snapchat. (copied Stories) It normalized a behavior of copying.
I had gotten completely out of these apps, then ended up in a situation where I needed to use Snapchat daily if not hourly for messaging, and needed to use TikTok to be culturally literate. (i.e. I got into something romantic with someone younger).
It was a stunning experience. Seeing _everyone_ had normalized this "copy our competitor" strat, hill-climbing on duration of engagement.
YouTube Shorts is a crappy copy of TikTok with mostly TikTok reposts and no sense of community.
Snapchat has a poor clone of TikTok that I doubt anyone knows exists.
TikTok is the ur-engagement king. Pure dopamine, just keep swiping until something catches your attention, and swipe as soon as it stops. No meaningful 1:1 communicating aspect (there's messages, but AFAICT from light quizzing of Gen Zers, it's not used for actualcommunication)
Instagram specifically is hard for me to speak to, because Gen Zers seem to think its roughly as cool as Facebook, but my understanding is millennials my age or younger (I'm 37) use it more regularly, whereas Gen Z uses it more as like we'd think of Facebook, a generic safe place where grandma can see your graduation photos, as opposed to spontaneous thirst traps.
It made me realize there's something weird about TikTok, it's kind of like Twitter except with an audience much more compliant with/sanguine about The Algorithm. i.e. no one's fighting for a "people I follow only" feed (there is one, but it's not worth fighting for, in a cultural sense)
They will overpromote one thing and some story you're not part of will be hyperviral for 6 hours, so there's almost no time for someone else to digest it. (example that comes to mind is Solidcore Guy, https://people.com/man-finds-empty-6-a-m-solidcore-class-fil..., took People 10 days to catch up to something you'd need to know for small talk in a 48 hour window)
HN lets users opt to automatically lock themselves out after a while (noprocrast). Fortnite and WoW do not. Sounds like one knows they have users with problems, no?
I think the term addiction is way overused in this stuff. If a company makes a product you enjoy using that doesn't mean you can just describe it as addictive and get out of jail free. If there's some chemical in it that messes with your brain, fine, otherwise people need to take ownership of their own choices.
I think the disturbing reality is these countries are wanting to control social media to control the population politically. There was even a Labour MP in the UK who admitted it on television. If it weren't the case they'd just tell concerned parents to turn on the parental controls devices already have, problem solved. Instead they pass laws to end internet anonymity, but only on the big networks, which won't do anything for kids but is an excellent way to control political discontent.
> I think the disturbing reality is these countries are wanting to control social media to control the population politically
The current alternative is that unaccountable private interests control this, so some regulation in this regard seems reasonable to me. However, swapping private control for public control is only barely better.
The best solution that I can think of is ending algorithmic feeds, and having subscription feeds, or maybe user curated feeds, only.
They do work. You may not feel they work perfectly, but government mandated ID verification on social media will work far worse and be far more coarse grained. You don't even have any control with government regulation, so being "coarse grained" isn't even worth discussing because with one-size-fits-all laws imposed by the providers there is no grain.
thread ranking is useful and doesn't increase addictiveness
I do agree that karma increases addictiveness and adds little value; I can see it being useful for certain permissions (so new accounts can't do thinks like downvoting), but it could just not be visible to the user; then there's no motivation to "increase my karma"
> thread ranking is useful and doesn't increase addictiveness
Can you please elaborate on what you find useful about thread-ranking? It's an anti-feature that only serves to increase addictiveness (by making top-level comments into a competition) and make it impossible to reload an active discussion and find your place again, in my opinion.
The difference is whether or not the platform is for-profit. If the goal of the platform is to make money, decisions will be made to keep people more addicted than would otherwise be natural. And that's the problem.
> The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.
More specifically: using "engagement" as the metric to optimize.
Users' use of content is measured: how long do they watch it? Do they leave a comment? Do they give a "like"? Based on that, the algorithm finds similar content that will elicit an even stronger response.
Every action you take on modern social media is giving information to your drug dealer so they can make the next hit even better. But not better for you; better for the social media, who make money from ads.
The continuously adaptive nature of the input stream as a basis for keeping users' eyeballs leashed to ads is what separates FB, Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube from the more benign, but still addictive alternatives (HN, Fortnite, WoW, NFL, Reddit).
> Hacker News has plenty of its own echo chamber, no different to any other social environment.
Sure, but fwiw the HN echo chamber is organic. People choose to interact with people who have similar opinions, as they have since forever.
In contrast, the echo chamber on HN, Tiktok, FB, etc is architected specifically to drive engagement. You are shown more of the content that you react to, so that you won't leave.
It's not at all organic. There's lots of flag killing and shadow banning on HN to suppress opinions, mostly anything that hints of right wing stuff. It mostly works, too.
> The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.
At least you can now choose your bubble and even listen to your own echo. That beats having the government beam their psychosis straight into everybody's brain by TV, radio and newspapers.
That makes the whole society an "echo chamber" of whatever the rulers have on their current agenda. And not just on your devices, but all the people you meet in real life.
Content on social media nowadays isn’t organic. State level resources are being thrown to influence people. So you are being beamed some government propaganda anyway.
I grew up in the forum days and internet discussions were very different back then. Accounts like “Endwokeness” would never work. People will make fun of him for being so obsessed with trans. You can’t just post some low effort political openings and walk away. Your openings need to have substance and you are pressured to engage. Otherwise people will see through your schtick and you get banned.
I don’t have a solution for this, and I think it’s a different problem regarding social media for kids.
Billions of people are posting real organic content on places like Instagram and Facebook. Their vacations, their workouts, their barbecues with friends, their thoughts and feelings on different matters. What you're saying is the opposite of truth.
The topic at hand was state propaganda and BBQ recipes are outside the scope of state propaganda. Perhaps I should have made that more clear that this is only applied to political topics.
But you do point out something interesting. I still follow football sites and football is still outside of the scope of state propaganda. Although you definitely have tribalism and biased fans and pundits, the vibe is completely different from any political topic.
Yes, but most importantly I need to manage my children’s devices; it cannot be opt in and it mustn’t be possible to disable without me approving. Screen time is too easy for kids to work around as is. I also need in-app content type filtering (eg. no shorts, no music videos on music streaming apps) and literally no one is providing such options, not to mention it should be managed in screen time, too. Parental controls are a complete shit show in iOS and the app ecosystem.
You will always be able to come up with some unique combination of features you want from software that it doesn't have yet. Note that none of these social media bans would block Gemini, and most of them don't consider YouTube to be social media. You are still far ahead with Family Link, and Android is flexible enough that if there's actually real demand for these things you can implement solutions and sell them to other parents.
It's simple really. Do you have a recommendation algorithm that is tuned to individual preferences to increase engagement? You're a social media that falls under the ban.
You're a messaging app that is between individuals (or group messages) with no recommendation algorithm but just for communication? You're an communication (or at worst Social network) app, you're good to go.
If I would add, I'd add a clause that says "if you can make a non-algorithms version of your product and keep it separated, you can maybe circumvent the ban"
> Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.
I'm surprised Reddit gets a pass or borderline pass in social media discussions.
In my experience working with kids, Reddit was the worst of the social media platforms for mental health. By far. The kids who were into Reddit were always spouting off information they got from Reddit and had soul-crushing amounts of cynicism about the world. On top of that, they had a chip on their shoulder about it all, believing that Reddit was a superior source of truth about the world.
The whole experience caught me off guard because going into this I mostly heard about the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such. Instead the biggest problem was Redditors on a fast path to doomerism.
Agree, I consider Reddit worse than Tiktok because of the downvote. Even a mild lean in one direction immediately results in extreme viewpoints bubbling up to the top and all other opinions silenced. Few people I know spend much time there, but the one that does sticks out like a sore thumb, always finding every opportunity to get upset about whatever the outrage of the day is.
It's a shame that HN's "don't talk about HN is turning into Reddit" guideline is there. It's preemptively used to shut people down when there are real issues with threads randomly devolving into uninteresting politically charged therapy sessions.
Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic chatrooms.
I met with so many interesting people on chat in the early 2000s and have met with many offline as well. Multiple times I've travelled 6+ hours to participate in chat meetups with 20-50 others from the same chatroom.
Those were different times: Over 4 years, I've never received a d*ckpic or was target of stalking, harassment, abuse or scam.
People were genuinely interested in each other, chat was not about building a personal brand and anonymity didn't make commenters psychos.
I'm not sure if ignorance was bliss, or times changed so much, but as an adult, I feel online communication has became a battlefield where I need to protect my sanity every time I interact with it.
Rage bait, fake news, ads, bot farms, lies in a never ending flood.
I wouldn't let my children to even try to live the same, uncontrolled online life I had.
> Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic chatrooms.
They were not a downgrade, they just worked the other way. With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did that too.
With early Facebook, you would meet somebody at a party, have fun together, and decide to become friends on Facebook, not much different from exchanging phone numbers, but somehow better.
> With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did that too.
And it was usually themed around a specific hobby or activity, which would naturally turn into offline, real-world activity. almost as if it was a conduit to connecting real people with real interests, who would seek out communities based around their interests, connect, and then eventually go and do those interests.
I was heavily into a few growing up, all of which revolved around real-world activities, which the forum members all actively participated in. One, in particular that really stuck with me for years, was tennis. The forum I was on had monthly meetups for my region (NYC metro area) and dozens of people would show up, engage, and enjoy each other's presence and participation. There was also a travel section, so if I was traveling to another country or part of the US, I'd be easily able to tap into that region's meetup and get a chance to hit some balls whenever I was on the road. Lovely.
What was nice is that genuine communities were formed, and people actually and actively policed their own communities not as a power trip (hey Spez!) but rather in earnest to ensure their communities were welcoming and that whoever was interested in that topic/activity could participate.
Man I miss the days when forums were hopping. They all really had their own "character," too, often informed by whatever interest group they were catering to.
It feels like by including everything on one site, Reddit et al just end up as a bland "soup." But they're so useful by the sheer mass of population that they end up drowning out everything else.
The problem is not the whole of social media per se, it is the monetization mechanisms used in the social media platforms. I'd think it would be better to ban the addictive algorithms, although it would be difficult or impossible to define precisely what to ban then.
Hacker News is a sort of social media platform, but I would have no problem with my kids using it without any sort of restrictions. The same is not true for Tik Tok or even Facebook.
> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.
Agreed but you have this on many websites such as youtube. Is youtube the next to get banned here? I mean you can write comments to so it is kind of a social mediua setup as well.
> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.
I don't know. It sounds quite arbitrary to me.
Not that I have anything against chopping down the big platforms. They truly abuse many people.
Engagement is prioritized over quality on most mediums. I find user generated content on social media absolutely abhorrent.
Thank goodness for hacker news. I can read something, share my views and in some cases, my views may be based on some weak intuition and I learn from polite correctness.
Tech folks went crazy for Google+’s circles back in 2011 but the demand from normal users just wasn’t there for that level of control. FB brushed it off with friends, “close friends”, and public. That was enough — even “friends of friends” was dropped or buried after a while.
Fast forward to 2025 and circles is absolutely the winning paradigm, except it’s called “group chat” where it is the vector for cat pictures, hollandaise bragging, and vacation snaps.
That's why I started distinguishing these two concepts when I talk about them in English. The terrible thing that insists on obnoxiously getting in your way with its stupid algorithms when you're just trying to have conversations with your friends is "social media". Early Facebook and Twitter, and current open-source initiatives like the fediverse, are "social networks".
Tictoc, Instagram, Youtube shorts and in parts Linkedin are Digital Drugs. Similisr to smoking cigarettes or vaping.
Whats fascinating about thid is that we have managed to create a new class of drugs - that does not require physical substances to be added to our bodies...and works via visual stimulous only.
In the early days they were social networks. The idea was to connect people. (The Facebook movie is called the Social Network…)
Now they’re social media. The idea is to push messages to you but this time the message is coming from a person you know so you’re psychologically more inclined to believe it.
Probably the online dating platforms are the same way. Someone actually finding their mate, and no longer needing the platform is counterproductive to their business model.
100%. Go on Facebook or Instagram today and you’re more likely to see viral videos than to see anything to do with your friends. It’s just a moth to flame.
> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.
Heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting and even youth novels.
There are a lot of big feelings about social media, but little data.
If the goal is to make social media "less addictive", the article in the OP does nothing to stop that. The article claims that social media affects youth mental health, but does the data actually back that up?
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[4] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[5]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[6] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[7] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
reddit having tons of niche subreddits and the ability to sort them by best all time is one of my favorite ways to filter for higher-quality content. (i don't use the main feed much.)
>Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all.
"AI" is really no different. These social media bans should include "AI" too, for people under a certain age. I even see adults that don't understand the limits of "AI" and that it shouldn't be trusted blindly.
The keyword here is monetization, it’s what ruined social media, among many other entertainment industries. If we somehow managed to ban monetization through social media or internet, you will notice how it will reset back to ol’ fun days.
It’s not really social media at all and we should stop calling it that. I call them chum feeds or scrollers. There’s no social component. It’s just addictive short form infinite scroll brain rot.
Social media deserving of the name is almost dead. It’s not that profitable and the sites are expensive to run.
Not if there's no reputation. If you see someone liked your post and then you go check out their posts, or if people recognize commenters and remember things about them, then it's social. Think engaging with friends on Facebook or participating in a hobby forum. But there's nothing social about engaging with a popular Reddit post or some celebrity's Twitter feed.
I get where you and parent are coming from. It's social in the way that anti-social behavior is social.
The content is generated by users but the consumer of the content is served whatever user content drives engagement. People aren't really having conversations on these platforms.
The only places where you can really have a conversation are places where engagement is low enough that the odds off a set very high engagement comments can't shove everything else down the page.
I remember when they saw what a certain game app was doing and were disgusted by it. Wild to me that those same people l̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶ almost instantly chose to not only adopt the behavior but make it core functionality. It's way worse when you see the evil and STILL chose it.
The medical and financial predators targeting elderly makes me wonder how to constrain it. The law doesn’t really help, short of having a court determine there’s some level of incapacity.
In theory the law doesn’t require victim cooperation. In practice, I’ve found local prosecutors won’t touch a case with an uncooperative victim. And most victims don’t cooperate whether out of humiliation or rejection pf the very idea they can be scammed. Because to them all scams are obvious, and only morons are scammed. They consistently lack imagination for the sophistication and manipulation component of scams, thinking it’s all about obviousness.
I’m sure it’s not only a case of “save the children”. Saving grandma’s retirement accounts is also important. The internet is a cesspool.
Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of the virtual world would actually hurt their business model. People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching ads.
So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.