Acknowledging that it is a difficult problem and you don't know how to solve it might be better than thinking you know how to solve it and doing something worse.

People are also quick to blame platforms without acknowledging that a lot of people are awful, the venue in which they practice their awfulness isn't necessarily at fault but it's easier to blame a thing which could be destroyed (religion, organization, social network, etc) than to acknowledge that this is a feature of humanity.

Um… *gestures vaguely towards all of human history*

but those people had no such platform before, maybe not thinking about the consequences because "growth" wasn't a great idea after all.

They absolutely did. Twitter et al. just change the shape of who you socialize with, humans weren't in solitary confinement before the Internet. The platform was more local more community based for example there were often awful people at church.

A surly neighbor, a dreaded personage at church, has limits on their influence based on simple geography. They experience pushback against their behavior via ostracism (exclusion from events and groups) and non-verbal cues (facial expressions, body language).

The same type of character on a massive online platform has the opportunity to reach a much broader audience, aided by engagement-focused algorithms that can suggest similarly cantankerous personalities to commiserate with. There is less opportunity for negative feedback against their opinions and actions, because there are seldom any "unlike" buttons, and bans and mutes are usually invisible to the originator of the speech: they can opt to interpret silence as acceptance.

Twitter and similar platforms aren't just bigger versions of a soap box in a town square, or gossip circles in a small community. They're categorically different things, with categorically different effects on society.

I think Dang’s moderation is usually pretty decent, but I really don’t think this is a place where free speech is championed. In any thread on the topic, calls for increased speech regulation seem to be very popular.

I don't really agree with the idea that this place is an echo chamber, but I do sort of see it as similar to an IT meetup. You generally don't go to an IT focused meetup and start talking about abortion, religion, etc. and nobody would be surprised if you were kindly asked to leave the venue if you insisted on soap-boxing. If someone came and carted you off in a black van for speaking in a public place about your feelings on abortion I'd expect there to be a lot of push back from the public.

I don’t think I’d go as far as saying it’s a full blown echo chamber either. But theres a pretty clear orthodoxy on certain topics here.

You can also try searching for "please by:dang"

I can argue flutter is easier than react native without getting personal. I don't argue about my relationships, or anyone else's relationships. I have extremely strict criteria for anyone I let into my life, whether that be a friend or a partner. This has worked very well for me.

You're not going to find what you want in every single city, life can become drastically better just by moving.

But that's it. I don't need to argue about why I live where I do.

I don't need the validation of random people when it comes to my life decisions. However if you want to argue with me that I can get better server-side performance via a Rust backend rather than firebase, I might listen.

To be a social medium/network, I think you need to follow/"friend" specific people. That's what makes it social.

I'd say HN is a "forum".

I realize these are my personal definitions, and there are no correct answers.

HN is a forum because everyone sees the same discussion.

When you can make a feed that "feeds" you own preconceived ideas as reality, you get told the world is just as you imagined, you're always right, and those who disagree are obviously evil and/or stupid.

At one end, you have the default Reddit front page. You get a torrent of posts completely unrelated to your specific interests or people you care about. It's as close to "the front page of the Internet" as you can get. Like staring into the collective psyche of the web.

At the other end, you have Google search. You only see pages you specifically request for by an explicit search query at that point in time. If you don't search, nothing is given to you. You have almost complete control over your attention.

Social media sites/apps are generally points between those. Critically, most give you more flexibility in how you use them than users get credit for. If you use Reddit by just browsing the front page and not even logging in, yes, it's the worst of all possible worlds. But if you create an account, unsubscribe from all the default subreddits, and only follow subreddits that are interesting to you and well moderated, then you have a lot more control. My Reddit experience is uniformly positive and enriching.

Twitter can also be a nourishing experience, but you have to be careful about who you follow, and turn off retweets for most of the people you follow.

Facebook is harder but if you disable all posts from sites that users often reshare, that removes a ton of clutter. Unfollowing people also helps.

I don't think a continuum along a single axis can reveal what's truly pathological about social media. If you break it up into multiple axes, I think problematic tech will cluster into quadrants where algorithms are targeting you personally in various ways.

I have blocked hundreds of subreddits just to make my reddit experience tolerable.

I guess it's a social medium but it feels different.

You're right, HN is a social medium. It suffers from many of the same issues as Twitter. Much of the negativity and positivity it creates is similar to what I can see on Twitter. Perhaps that's the human condition "at scale"?

I think somehow, for the time being, the audience and size of HN is "okay" and most of the devils haven't leapt out of their lightly corked bottles just yet within the community.

It's also aggressively moderated. I can only post ~4 times a day since my account got flagged / rate limited for participating in flame wars about China, Apple, monopolies, etc. There's probably no way out of this except to create a new account.

It doesn't even need a watchdog agency like the environment does.

Wouldn't fly in the US, so it's a non-starters since those companies are based in the US.

Free Speech is SO IMPORTANT that it can't be fettered by private companies for private gain like Facebook.

... This is in addition to the legal / philosophical criticism that the government repealing S230 protection for all but a few websites would be equivalent to the government providing libel-lawsuit protection to only a few state-sanctioned media outlets. Wholly incompatible with the first amendment.

If you feel it needs fixing by killing it then why are you participating in it, and by extension validating it rather than arguing for that fix?

You could even find content that you wanted online before Google made search pay-to-play.

Killing social media and requiring services (like email, etc) not be an ad-supported free model (where the product is the user) would completely transform the internet (and its balance of power) as we know it and for the better.

SomethingAwful charging $10 for an account was always/accidentally the right idea.

The Web loses 1% of its decent content, while the remaining 99% gets higher visibility, more funding, more interest/attention (which can improve quality, as in, say, collaborative communities like Wikipedia, or open source). The rest of the cost is the loss of a bunch of shit content that most people could/would replace with time-wasters like sudoku or Tetris or entertainment magazines, and carry on with life. Seems like a bargain to me.

Google uses Ads to unevenly compete with every other software company on the planet. Google can buy your company and outpay you for engineers with what is essentially their financial fingernail clippings. The thing that's gained in this scenario is all of the talent that could be going to other things besides optimizing ads.

I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction, and I don't mean because of its flaws. I judge that a pretty crappy state of affairs, and I think the #1 cause is that it's so lucrative to keep your users in a position where you can track & spy on them very well, while avoiding leaking anything they're doing so that competitors can see it—IOW incentives are set up to greatly reward successful closed platforms while discouraging interoperability, so we get even more of that than we otherwise might.

Sadly it's worse than you expect here. Enter ElasticSearch. The company behind the innovation you propose will piggy-back on open source projects (Lucene), add a novelty to it (clustering) and choose a permissive open-source license to encourage contributions. Once hitting a significant market penetration threshold, the project then will move to a mixed-source, enterprise license model with intentionally-crippled community versions (think Neo4j, JFrog, etc).

ElasticSearch isn't even alone here, it's just the most obvious example. I've actually been insisting for a long time that we need an Apache-licensed standard solution for clustering generic applications...something useful enough that anyone can connect part A & part B to get "clustered Lucene" instead of "ElasticSearch". Something reasonably deployable (read: is monitorable, has RBAC) without massive licensing costs (read: Neo4j). Not an easy problem, for sure.

You might also be forgetting that Google first became big because they created a search engine that actually worked. Getting Altavista or Lycos to find what you were looking for was a real skill.

I'm not out celebrating when a country like Turkey or something blocks Twitter.

No, I'm advocating the Amish approach. It's perfectly reasonable and noble for a society to get together and decide "we're not going to use X". There's nothing censorial about that. It's the same kind of logic people use to advocate against things like ICEs and eating meat. Are vegans trying to "censor" your meat-eating? No. It's the same kind of reasoning behind us having _any_ laws to begin with.

And I'm not even talking about blocking Twitter. I'm saying that legislatively we should make sure that no company with a product like it can do business in our country(-ies). The same way that we have laws in place that prevent companies from business practices like "dumping toxic waste next to your housing development" under threat of force (like we will fine you to hell and back and then throw you in prison). Is that censorship too?

Come back with a more thoroughly-reasoned argument, please.

I enjoyed his interview with Sam Harris. He was honest and direct in answering tough questions about Twitter. He explained how they try to balance free expression but also want Twitter to be a safe place for people to interact.

Compare this to Zuckerberg who is never candid or forthright in public.