Having run one, I have to say that towards the end people were moving to social media BECAUSE posts had a like counter. I regret not adding one to my forum.

Oh, for sure. They created a drug that suffocated all non-externally-rewarded social interaction and drew users in. But they created that drug in service to advertisements.

Tangentially related but I think upvote/downvote culture is one of the biggest social changes that we unleashed on the world and should’ve walked back long ago. The intent of the idea is good but I think in implementation it’s too ripe for abuse.

In those old forums, you couldn’t (easily) bury things the way you can today. We basically handed an incredibly powerful weapon to anyone interested in controlling a narrative - especially so with the centralization of everything.

(I want to be clear that I’m aware old forums could be gamed still, and I’m mostly trying to underscore how messed up I consider upvote/downvote/ratio culture).

I ran one too, I don't think it's so simple as that mechanism! Our forums had reputation counts and posts were the attribution point.

We had 'likes' but with actual accounting! For better or worse 'status' could be built with this. Likes, on the other hand, are fleeting

Both systems have perverse incentives, I think the audience - size/shape - matters, and how it all reflects/bounces.

Conspiracy moment: it's harder to fake 'grass roots' things with a smaller/tight knit community, we've been corralled. Once something is as big as Reddit, everything you're seeing is manufactured.

Personally, I think there's truth to the "Dead Internet theory;" less bot focus. Humans maintain responsibility with our choices.

The core problem, as I see it, is copyright.

Content must be hosted, and hosting costs money. So how is money going to interact with this system?

Copyright answered that question in the worst possible way. Copyright says that the content itself is the object with monetary value. To support that claim, copyright wraps every piece of content in a box, and says, "Whoever made this shall monopolize its value." In reality, only the box itself can actually behave as a discrete commodity, and no one truly creates content alone: all art is derivative, especially written media. Regardless of reality, copyright demands that we all participate in this delusional game.

So now everyone who hosts content is holding commodities. It's naturally advantageous to exploit the value of your commodities (you can reinvest your profit into actual value), so any business that does that will be more successful than the rest. Anyone who refuses to play the game will simply lose (or be prosecuted). So how do you sell forum posts and memes?

You don't. That doesn't make any sense, remember? You don't actually sell the content: you sell the box. You sell the warehouse. You sell the marketplace. This entire game is predicated on monopoly, so what's the most natural implementation? Vertical integration! Facebook and Twitter don't sell social networks: they sell social walls. What are those walls made of? Incompatibility. The best part is: if anyone tries to build a door into your wall, you get to sue them out of existence! It doesn't matter how broken or exploitative your business model is: if it is based on copyright, then it is guaranteed by law to succeed!

So now you own everyone and everything. How do you make money? By selling them to each other. In other words: advertising.

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But wait, there's more! Copyright answered even more questions: How do you stop people from misrepresenting someone else's work as their own? How do you stop people from sharing your secrets? How do you censor abusive material? The answer is to prosecute fraud and abuse, because those are already illegal. Right? Right? No. That would make too much sense. The real answer is copyright.

You could argue that greed is the driver. The social networks aren't displaying ads to fund maintaining their operations, they are operating in a for profit capacity and thus are incentivized to find ways to make you want to consume their product.

When someone operated a forum in the days of yore, they had the opportunity to put up ads and many did. The difference I think is that they were doing so to fund or offset the costs of operating the forum, not as a profit engine above and beyond the cost of keeping the lights on.

That's fair. I think all advertising is naturally bad for the world, but you're right that it's the combination of advertising and greed that created the extremely deleterious environment we have now.

That said, greed fed by other monetization models would not have produced the attention economy, and I don't think the evils of other models (dark patterns for subscriptions, planned obselescence, etc) could have come close to the society-wide damage that the attention economy has caused.

Despite railing against social media for years, I've recently become a mastodon convert. It seems to bring back a lot of the self-hosted phpBB vibe that I also miss. The instance I'm on is run by one guy and the costs are covered by user donations.

There was somewhat of a golden era of independent forums (be them phpBB, vBulletin, etc.), but they were for the most part isolated communities. The rise of social media platforms brought some useful centralisation (lowering the barrier to engage - though arguably OpenID, etc. could have achieved the same), but realistically it has turned many platforms into a hellscape of “idiots”.

I disagree that the centralization was useful. The isolated communities were healthier and funner as a result of being smaller and disconnected from other communities—the isolation worked towards their benefit not their detriment. No one could go trawling through your posts in other communities and decide they don't like you after all because you had an identity there that could be completely different from your identity in other communities.

I think the centralization is actually a huge contributing factor to the decline in overall health of the internet. We didn't evolve in a way that's compatible with seeing everything that our friends say to any of their other friend groups—we're wired for compartmentalized interactions, not global state.