Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days.
HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline.
Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your user experience will be so horrible that you won't use it.
X simply doesn't allow you to use it, atleast it doesn't pretend.
I think we need more simple websites again, but I am not sure about the incentive structure.
Channel operator drama was a major thing with IRC back when it was popular (sometimes ending to like channel splits or even whole netsplits if the people involved were related to the server operators, bot/flood wars, etc), so yeah, there isn't anything specific to Reddit about it. I wasn't part of it but i am pretty sure you'd see the same patterns in Usenet back when that was popular (and despite the romantization, i somehow doubt that Usenet was all roses before the "Eternal September").
Usenet was the best discussion platform I've ever used. People who posted questions to comp.lang.c without first reading K&R were commonly killfiled. People who posted questions to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring newsgroups without first reading relevant W3C specs were commonly killfiled. It was awesome. Can anyone direct me to a discussion platform created during the past 25 years where people are blocked or banned for failing to RTFM? I'm not aware of any.
Also the cycle/churn of software is so quick nowadays that manuals are often written as a second or third thought for majority of the projects. So I can not really blame folks for just directly probing for tribal knowledge.
The result was that newsgroups were very different for insiders vs outsiders: insiders saw nice clean message feed, outsiders saw tons of low-content messages with no replies and rare nugget of interesting info.
This was one of the big reasons why Usenet died for me: too much spam and useless messages, as there is no group-wide authority (and no, cancel bots never seemed to work)
Today, if you want heavily moderated group, there is plenty - they are simply scattered on the web. Many of them are phpbb-style forums, some discords and slacks (ugh...).
TBH this doesn't sound awesome, it sounds exactly the hotbed that spawns community drama, passive aggressive behavior and other human stuff you still see to this day :-P.
Most of my issues, especially before LLMs have been regarding misunderstanding documentation, knowing I'm somehow misunderstanding it and just needing someone to rephrase it since I'm burnt out going in circles yet have to finish X before the end of the day so I can't let it marinate in my head.
My impression is that communities trying hard to enforce doing your research prior to asking often end up skill issueing plebians. In that line of thinking it might be cool to see a "question difficulty" option on sites like SO. I've never really had a question where I couldn't roughly gauge how complicated it is and if trying to answer questions it'd be cool to be able to roughly filter like you'd do in leetcode.
This would destroy the eusocial for-free moderation by people who simply want to create an environment they value and others benefit from in the process.
human population. Most people are stupid and the only way to have something nice is to gatekeep. Every single time any community grows too large it becomes shit.
That site wouldn’t have any spam, true. Though not because of the cost, but because it wouldn’t have any users to make it worth spamming. No one wants to pay per message. Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?” Once in a blue moon someone would post, get no reply, and be even more unlikely to post next.
And yes, yes, not literally everyone, but enough that it becomes a rounding error.
I think that's well below the threshold people would care.
The problem is that $0.01 is too low, it'd be well worth spending to advertise or propagandize. For context, USA presidential elections will spend billions, they could make ten billion posts for a fraction of their war chest.
People don’t even pay 0.99$ for apps they use all day every day, opting instead to suffer through ads and have their batteries drained. There’s no chance they’d pay 0.01$ per message.
For the vast majority, there are two price points: free and not free. The psychological difference between free and 0.01$ is magnitudes larger than the difference between 0.01$ and 1$.
Something that is free is an unlimited resource. Something which costs even $0.01 is a limited resource (even if the limit is very high).
People naturally deal with limited resources different than unlimited. If it’s unlimited, each usage requires no further consideration. If it’s limited, each usage requires evaluating whether to spend dollars/credits/capacity on it.
I use a paid search engine. I paid extra for the “unlimited” option even though I should have fallen well under a lower tier. It wasn’t because of payment friction. (I was already paying a monthly fee, the only difference was the amount.) I paid the extra because as soon as this transitioned from unlimited to limited, I needed to keep a mental accounting of every usage. I needed to consider if each usage was worth buying.
If you give me a sheet of stickers for free I will struggle to stick them on anything. They are, by their nature as a physical thing, a limited resource. Payment doesn’t matter because they were free. What matters is I can run out so I need to ensure I’m making the best use of a limited resource.
So the wealthiest people get to spread the most propaganda?
People were saying this about email 20+ years ago.
Not sure if it's the case here but there's a tendency for those in tech to think people problems can be solved with code.
Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.
Sure, clever analogy. The internet barely facilitates many best practices for congregating on a communal basis, barring a user's self-sovereign strive to cultivate, recognize and then compensate for its failings with whatever sort of information, interactions and dealings one happens to seek.
20+ years ago, i just settled for lurking whatever boards popped out of the ether and playing EverQuest, RuneScape and Habbo Hotel, to soak in its novelty. Such persistent asymmetricity should never be lost.
You have zero issues with spam and abuse because you have a small user base, not because of the fee.
Twitter has TONS of paid accounts for spam.
Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.
On top of that, they are effectively paying per word to post through paying for tokens. This does not stop them.
Assuming the Fediverse was as popular as Twitter/FB, they could simply run their own instances, no need to pay for access through any specific server.
Anyway, my point is that charging for access to a network where access is already open is a good enough of a filter to avoid spam originating from your node. Spammers are not going to be interested in paying $29/year to be able to send posts via Mastodon when they can just create a bunch of accounts on servers with open registrations or simply running their own botnet.
Hell, I don't even have to be a complete cynic to make the argument that basically any news piece today only gets to be written if it serves the economic interests of its publisher. That is valid from the NYT and Washington Post to an indie game developer talking about their project on Mastodon.
If everything is "spam", then there is no ham. If there is no ham, there is no way to build an classifier. If there is no way to build a classifier, then what is the problem we are trying to solve in the first place?
Bots spreading misinformation are bad and a problem on Twitter/Facebook/TikTok, sure. But the reason that an entrance fee does not solve this problem is because these networks are built on the idea of controlling what content people get to see. On the "open social web", people are in charge, there is no "algorithm" and manipulation becomes a lot harder.
No? That doesn't mean they aren't spam, though.
And then what? No one is going to navigate an instance that is just spam, and other instances will promptly block them.
There was a spam wave some months ago. The spammers were using Mastodon and Sharkey instances that had open registrations. They were not signing up to paid-only instances to become "legit".
The worst I see on Twitter when I peek in come from checkmarks. Cryptocurrency shills are some of the worst offenders and they seem to have taken over.
That looks to be retrofitted, not the origin of the term.
From a purely theoretical level, there's a very broad range of incomes worldwide, so any price point you use to keep spammers out makes it unaffordable to the average person in many nations, and varying pricing by nation just means the spammers pretend to be from the cheapest nation(s).
We also have a demonstration of payment-based messaging systems in that price range with SMS and voice calls, which still get junk. (Nation-specific: my German SIM gets none while my UK SIM gets a lot… but only when I actually visit the UK).
For subscription-based payment filtering, similar — while it's hard for me to determine which of Musks's statements I should take seriously or literally, twitter premium pricing it's still a test of this idea even if it wasn't the true intent behind Musk's assertion.
Was this the initial idea of the Brave browser? Did that succeed to some extent?
Also it tends to be made illegal for obvious reasons (even if in practice, everyone but the most careful user eventually gets identified by their IP, the logs of which Web servers are legally obligated to keep in most states).
Otherwise, if you actually meant pseudonymous payments, well, Flattr actually tried to do it. Flattr 1.0 basically died in the 2012-2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, while Flattr 2.0 never managed to get enough reach, unlike the Silicon Valley backed, new competitor, Patreon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY
> He said "if I was in charge of Facebook, mate, I'd be saying like 'fucking QUID A GO!'"
> It gave me a small sense of hometown pride when I realized the guy was serious... small sense of hometown pride that there must be very few places in the world where Mark Zuckerberg would be offered financial advice from a guy who was 15 pence short for [his bus fare]
Someone built this (a 4chan clone) on ethereum, I can't remember what it's called. It was pretty dead, but the project exists.
The psychology is already there, "all" that's required a snowball to start adoption in the online media space.
[1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works
It should cost at least 10 cents. And I think your idea is the future.
Check out this paper:
https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%...
It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless.
So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money.
I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate.
Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.
Then go make one. It’s easier now than ever. The social media mistake was trying to make one site everything to everyone but the web is still there.
I miss the old web, the old browser based games. So I'm digging out my old code from shareware I made 15 years ago and turning some of them into free games.
Likewise my blog, converted it from Wordpress into plain HTML. I have more control, at the "expense" of not having a visitor counter system that might go up to 100 if I post a link here but otherwise only goes up to 1-4 views.
This means no need for ads, which is a better user experience directly.
It also means no built-in tracking cookies that I can't remove, and by extension no need for a popup that parrots "we value your privacy" like it's a magic phrase to keep demons at bay even though they "value" the privacy in the same way that a pirate values the cargo of the ship they're taking from at cannon-point.
The internet has always had nice discussion forums that were labors of love of generous people. In the case of HN, the generous person running the forum is actually a company managing billions of dollars. In the absence of a better funding model for the internet, maybe that’s the solution: altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly.
The exponential growth required of publicly traded social media companies drives different motives in moderating and promoting the discussions.
A certain person tried that, but HN has given them nothing but hate over it.
If there’s a specific idea you or others had in mind that was different, I haven’t seen any serious proposals or roadmaps posted. I’d love to see it though, I’d rather things be more decentralized without the contemporary gatekeeping that comes with it.
Also I’m not sure what you had in mind for altruistic. There’s a difference between financing people’s nostalgia fetishes and financing the repairing of society, but either could be squeezed into the definition.
What I want is more or less Mastodon. A feed ordered by date, a complete lack of algorithmic suggestion (unless maybe I explicitly ask for it), a complete lack of advertising, and stringent moderation that enforces things in my preferred direction.
If it’s to service a nostalgia kick then that’s not going to be a big enough sell. Otherwise it needs to be a business, which is obviously not an option either.
I only browse old.reddit logged out and log in if I want to to comment before logging out by deleting my cookies. I started doing this after seeing the first "year in review" thing they sent to my account, which creeped me out. Especially not being able to disable this type of data collection, on either of the two sites.
I may be having an easier time of it by using RES though.
Almost every app now degrades quickly after startup capital fades, maybe we should just all quit social apps the minute they show signs of degrading, because right now most of the content, ads, and people on these social apps are now just as uninteractive, repetitive, mundane, and unrewarding as watching TV.
Some stayed, of course, but I feel anecdotally that content on reddit now is mainly posted by casual users and bots.
When you comment to complain, you get "Star Trek has always been political", "The Simpsons has always been political".
Yeah... but Star Trek memes hasn't always been. /r/SimpsonsShitposting used to be funny, not just sarcastic eye-rolls about [current-republican-bogey-man/woman strawman].
Even if you run across a “news” subreddit and comment on something that doesn’t seem Left, you will get banned right now. It’s very toxic.
Best to stay away from Popular
You’re saying that you look explicitly for things that conform to your political views, comment things with your political views, then get banned?
Do you have a link to an example?
I was banned from r/Damnthatsinteresting, for example, because they said r/Conservative supports abortion. I have never seen that. It’s mostly just Trump leaning articles.
also any sub related to anything remotely gender specific immediately gets overrun with incel content (or female equivalent)
but I do think niche or regional community oriented subs are worth frequenting
To be clear, amidst this, reddit was still growing. So from an Excel sheet management perspective, nothing seems wrong. But most of that growth could be found in low effort content that honestly can be found on any social media platform. Where the sort of unique content that did set reddit apart slowly started to decrease in both quantity and quality over the years.
Actually the genuine content (and votes) seems to be a minority now?
Reddit and X are both very bad, where is the non-video fun these days?
disclaimer: i created it to scratch my own itch for the reason you list
Reddit is one of those great examples were management and execs all feel like they need to show their impact and justify their salary and just make the platform worse.
Bots and propaganda are literally everywhere. The platform keeps getting worse but I admit it is to some extent addictive.
I am somewhat happy that HN is one of those places where politics are generally avoided.
I am sick of people arguing about geopolitics and national politics like it was some fan battle while not even knowing their mayor candidates programs, hell many don't even know who their mayor is or what their city council is working on.
This stems imho from the dead of traditional newspapers who were often local, in favor of internet media which is in its nature global.
I swear most people in Italy know more about US politics than what's happening in their own backyard, completely backwards.
HN is avoiding it because somebody else pays to run it and there's zero images or videos.
Also re: politics, stuff the federal government does affects me a lot whereas most local governments seem pretty similar and powerless. If the pendulum can swing so broadly ever 4 years I'd better watch it, right?
Honest question: If, other than voting every 4 years, you have no ability to impact change, why spend the time watching it? Why not spend the time doing something more constructive that you have the ability to impact? (aside from prior to the election to inform voting, of course)
The last mayor of my city decided to make the entirety of the fields in front of my house (in Italy, countryside near Rome) buildable and completely ruined the view from my house and filled it with traffic.
The bigger problem is the amount of lazy comments on the site, which are invariably highly upvoted.
I'm so sick of pun threads, and office references and any other popular culture reference.
They've just about made me start to hate Monty Python, which is quite an accomplishment.
The latest is that everyone is beating Dune references absolutely to death.
If someone wants an AI project idea, then a browser extension which used an LLM to score all the comments in a Reddit thread and filter out all the lazy comments would be useful. If it works, most of the comments on front page articles should disappear.
It would probably eliminate most of the actual bot comments as well.
dont follow the very large subreddits
i mostly follow it for game specific subreddits, and my hobbies such as woodworking etc
lots of great users in there
I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs.
I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on Android. Relay survived the API changes and adopted a subscription model.
But thanks to Revanced I was able to patch an old version of Relay to use my own API key for free.