[paxys]

I remember a time when social media was like they describe. It was when I was in college and we used it to share photos of each other drunk at parties. It turned into a disaster the moment people decided it was also a good place to discuss news and politics.

If you want to recreate "fun social media", focus on the things that made it fun in the first place and remove everything else. And you'll be too late, because plenty of apps (TikTok the most notable one, and others like BeReal, Gas, Snapchat) are doing that very well today.

If the goal is to create a "fun" political discussion forum, well then best of luck with that. They are going to need a lot more than just goals and prayers.

[INTPenis]

>It turned into a disaster the moment people decided it was also a good place to discuss news and politics.

Nail on head right here.

I was never big on social media, got into StatusNet (later ActivityPub) back in 2017 because it seemed cool technically.

So for years it was a very nice place where people mostly discussed very niche topics like computers and art.

Then Elon decided to stir the pot by trying to buy twitter and two huge waves of twitter users came over in 2022.

Now it's toxic, and I honestly believe it's because of the political and news discussions. Well they go hand in hand because people link to the news about what's going on in politics, and this is the catalyst.

[JakeAl]

I disagree. People use social media for different purposes. One is to post about yourself, my least favorite, another is to post links to information and knowledge of interest to those with similar interests. People posting about themselves do nothing to up the IQ and awareness of the population and lead to mental health issues as well as feed narcissism. News and information can lead to learning and debate and all those great things that came out of classroom discussions in college. It only goes bad where there's a culture clash or people are unsophisticated, ideologues, or lack critical thinking skills. For rational and curious minded people, it's great though.

[safety1st]

You aren't responding to your parent's actual point, you've reworded it slightly and proceeded to disagree with the strawman version you created.

Their point was that news and politics were introduced to forums which were not about those things, and proceeded to turn those forums into shitfests, which is completely accurate.

For some reason you avoided the word politics in your reply and carefully recast the subject as "news and information and learning and debate." But politics is really what the argument hinges on. People didn't sign up for Facebook to fight over divisive political issues, but Facebook promoted those conversations for the sake of short-term profit.

It's completely 100% fine for us to say fuck that, get your politics out of here and it should have happened a long time ago. One reason HN is good is because it holds its nose when it comes to politics - sometimes it gets through, yes, but the worst stuff is usually downranked one way or another (flagging, algorithmic sorting, manual modding, etc. etc.).

There are plenty of places on the Internet for debating politics. We don't need to search out forums that aren't about politics, and then convert them into political debates.