With all social media fucking up severely, what's next?

[squabbled]

reddit's completely fucked up in the name of money, instagram's all advertisements and no content whatsoever, youtube has no rating system, twitter's being fucked by elon, facebook's facebook, tiktok is just mindless scrolling, quora's all BS answers, twitch is completely unusable, discord's a complete walled garden... what now? there's no one place i can go to that i trust on the web anymore besides... wikipedia maybe. it's so hard to find reliable information whatsoever these days and the internet's getting more mindless and useless by every passing day, and the centralization of the web crumbling really showed me how delicate information is, and how we're literally writing the library of alexandria and burning it in real time.

[mikewarot]

Enshittification is caused by the lack of secure general purpose computing, and will continue until we get it back.

We had it back in the 1980s, when we booted from write protectable floppy disks, and could easily verify backups. What nobody realized at the time was that was a capability based security system. Very coarsely grained, but you couldn't accidentally fubar everything. It was easy to know what was being risked at any given time.

We used "shareware" disks, typed in things from magazines, and generally could run ANYTHING, in almost perfect safety. We always had our known good boot disks, and their backups, and our multiple copies of our data.

Until we can run any old random executable, we're going to avoid "untrusted" sites, and stick to the walled gardens our friends hang out at. Capabilities based systems like Genode might be able to get us there.

VMs and Containers were a make-do / very crude version of capabilities... you specified what disks a virtual machine could access, thus it was better than nothing.

WASM is the latest attempt down this road, and I only hope they don't "improve" it by destroying the capabilities model it provides.

What's really sad is that this was all solved back in the 1970s, and it's only the accident of history that we don't have capabilities based systems available that a normal person could use. In response to the need for a single computer to handle multiple levels of classification due to the needs of the Air Force in the Viet Nam conflict, research was done, and solutions were found.

---

Think of the difference between handing someone $5, or your credit card.... which is safer? You can only lose $5 in the first case. That is capability based security.

PS: Sorry, I write defensively because of the way replies tend to work here on HN.

[rlupi]

> What nobody realized at the time was that was a capability based security system.

that's a very interesting idea.

[candiodari]

But this ignores that these solutions need centralized capacity. Games or apps that work this way still work, it's not a problem and they can be isolated. It's web browsers.

The problem is that "communities" need a way to store the messages on them. You can try decentralized, but then people need to provide (and support) a centralized database (or at least disk capacity)

How could you provide that in a centralized way, given that always-on machines mostly don't exist anymore.

[AstralStorm]

A decentralized database is feasible but initial sync to find nodes will take many minutes. Typically those get accelerated by keeping a short centralized list of known potent nodes.

The problem really is not that, Freenet nodes store much more data than socials have in total, the problem is that multitude of services means multitude of filtering and means of discoverability without overloading users. That is an extremely hard problem, not everyone wants to be a moderator, distributed reputation systems are hard to set up and defend against attacks while still keeping any degree of privacy. You cannot depend on user supplied tags without reputation, you cannot know if it's posted to the right space, you cannot get reputation without someone sitting around and giving it out. (confirming it)

Nasty people will give negative or positive reputation for wrong reason, a single number is insufficient to express why you believe something is good or bad, a multitude of numbers dilutes it.

You see it on twitter and reddit with people liking something only because of the poster. Or posting controversial garbage just to get eyes on their other things. And politics gets everywhere.

Plus you really cannot monetize it, so greedy people and companies will skip it besides spamming. (Spam is a solved problem in a decentralized way, we do have three nines bayesian spam filters.)

I recommend reading the history of the original federated newsgroups. They even still are around and slightly active. There have been board splits over moderation, issues with spam and terrible content etc.

[mikewarot]

>But this ignores that these solutions need centralized capacity.

No, I know there has to be a server somewhere, but you have to have your own secure computing system, in order to be able to just try out new things freely.... we used to have this back in the 1980s.... we need to get it back, otherwise we're not free to experiment with new stuff, and as a result, end up stuck to "safe" web sites, etc.

Which is how we got here in the first place.

[BillyTheMage]

Personally I'm enjoying the return to the "older" kinds of social media. I quite like the ones that are just a text forum with threads focused around a broad topic that everyone in that community is passionate about.

I'm struggling with it, but I'm also trying out IRC. From what I can tell there are still a lot of active IRC users on Libera.

[SllX]

Speaking of IRC, I just reinstalled Colloquy the other night, only to find out that Colloquy seems to be halfway to being abandonware. I almost couldn't find it because the old website still burned into my memory, colloquy.info just turns up an SSL certificate error and I had thought I got the wrong URL at first, but no, Internet Archive confirmed that's what it was.

So it's colloquy.app now, right? You go to that website, and there's two links: the App Store link takes you to an iPad version not verified for Mac OS X and with tons of bad reviews, and the GitHub link is where you can find Mac builds, the latest is 2.5-prerelease-7097 from July 2021 which isn't exactly inspiring confidence that it still has legs.

So I mean, if anybody knows what the gold standard on Macs is nowadays I'm open to suggestions, otherwise I might just fire up Irssi and be done with it.

[tga]

The experience isn’t amazing, but Mozilla Thunderbird also does IRC and you may have it around already.

irccloud.com also used to be nice.

[deafpolygon]

The gold standard for IRC anywhere is either; mIRC on windows, or irssi/weechat anywhere else.

[mfnex]

Q: what now?

A: RSS of course. Seriously. See https://stop.zona-m.net/2019/09/rss-is-still-great.-and-need...

Pick your sources, COMPLAIN if they do not publish an RSS feeds, and read "news" including posts from personal blogs, through an aggregator. At YOUR pace, without tracking and pushing.

While we are at this, wy/how is Twitch "completely unusable" ?h Just curious, really.

[rektide]

Sites should have rss but it's not social. There's no way for me to comment on your protocol. It's a syndication protocol: that's only part of a social system.

[mylasttour]

Not OP, and not points that make Twitch "unusable", but some changes that make it unpleasant:

- Really pushing softcore porn by putting their icons in the sidebar and over home page by default (they disappear once your stream viewing history is something other, but default behavior is to recommend it to all)

- Adding more noise to chat: Obnoxious particle effects once "enough people pay money to Amazon", highlighted flashy banners

- Overlays over the video that you can't turn off, makes the player very heavy, popups over the player that you have to click to close

- Autoplaying media on home page

- Strange inconsistent regulations of streamers (who/when they get banned and how long)

- Strange attempts at noisy virtue signalling - such as overlaying sombreros and maracas on emote images for "Hispanic celebration month", which is so unnecessary and comically unthoughtful

[squabbled]

gonna have to switch back to RSS, you're right. know of any good basic RSS readers on Windows 10/iPhone that you'd suggest? twitch is completely unusable btw because of the insane policy changes that make no sense, the unusable copyright rules (literally some streamers have had cars go by that played music slightly too loud for 2 seconds and had their accounts terminated over that), and the ads, oh my god the ads. even with uBlock Origin and pi-hole on Firefox, they still get through and there's upwards of 5-10 (and sometimes even on bigger streams 15!!!) 30 second adverts about every 15-30 minutes and everytime you switch streams. only way to block them is to use a VPN/proxy into a smaller country which doesn't yet have ads, and even then, you'll get the infamous "purple screen of death" where it'll close out the stream and tell you to disable your adblocker and proxy

[fourmajor]

I've been using Feedly every since Google Reader shut down and I generally love it.

[disparate_dan]

I switched to Reeder after Feedly started showing me ads. So far, so good.

[0_____0]

Group chats. Email. Good ol' hanging out at the pub.

The lesson of the last decade is that any tech or platform that relies on advertising to exist will eventually become perverted to ends that oppose those of its users.

[rektide]

> there's no one place i can go to that i trust on the web anymore

Trusting one place is what got us into this mess. Maybe we can have new great times some other place. But on a long enough timeline most sites turn to shit. Enshittification is a probabilistic function, and every year is another dice roll.

Protocols on the other hand can endure and grow. Ones that can create lasting value are not far out, but society has rarely valued these kinds of principles or thoughts so far; we haven't had to. We've been able to take for granted. And there's been a chorus of folks insisting anything new was going to be unadoptable, for any of various myriad reasons.

It's still not certain either way, but at least a much wider scope folks are being adequately radicalized, are seeing the horror of leaving mankind's legacy in the hands of these.

[mieses]

You can trust 1+1=2 and that's about it.

[Quinzel]

> there's no one place i can go to that i trust on the web anymore besides… wikipedia maybe.

There is Google scholar - where if you’re being pedantic, you can check impact factors of journals, the credentials of the author’s etc.

I wouldn’t have ever thought of any social media (Facebook, twitter, reddit, Quora etc) as ever being a one place you could trust for reliable information. Social media, and acquiring actual knowledge are quite fundamentally different. The internet makes knowledge more accessible sure, but that has never meant it was trustworthy. I don’t think the Internet has ever replaced the need to educate oneself properly. Even the news throughout history has been plagued with propaganda and therefore hasn’t always been necessarily reliable, it was just communicated differently back then.

[ggm]

What you seem to be saying is "nothing's changed" because this "problem with myspace" has been happening since before USENET was a thing. A bunch of CeeFax and Minitel users want this internet rubbish dealt with. Gopher is ballistically angry with CERN over the web. don't get me started on WAIS.

I have no doubt Socrates was royally pissed off with the drop in the levels of discourse in the symposium once people decided hookers and blow (booze and sex) was just as interesting as talk.

Charles Dickens shut down as many monthly journals as he opened, rolling each one's publisher as hard as he could. You think there were no subscribers rolling their eyes when their year-long membership in that series died?

[gonehome]

I work on urbit which gives you actual control over your cloud computer and has a discord like chat as its current main application.

https://tlon.io/

It’s a lot more than just a discord alternative since it’s an entire computing environment with built in networking and p2p IDs, but the chat is a good current use case.

The goal is to escape the kind of problem you’re describing by fixing the upstream problems that cause them.

https://urbit.org/getting-started

[pengo]

Divorce proceedings are over for me.

I've never used Amazon. I stopped using Microsoft products eight years ago. I left Facebook five years ago. I exited Google's ecosystem shortly afterwards. I closed my Twitter account the day Elon walked into the executive suite. I do have a small exposure to Apple which I mull over daily like probing a suspect tooth with my tongue. But I'm centred on Linux, with a SailfishOS phone.

I found my tribe in decentralised social media. I have two Mastodon accounts, a personal one and one for the music duo I'm in, and a Lemmy account. I'm considering Bookwyrm right now too. All of these took a lot of effort to get to the point where they're worthwhile. The first months were not rewarding but, gradually, I hooked up with people I wanted to chat with, found the hashtags and forums that were a good fit for me.

If you're prepared to invest some time in your social network, I recommend checking out the Fediverse. But it won't hand you anything on a plate.

[taylodl]

IDK.

I tried to use ChatGPT for the first time over the weekend but I failed to convince it that I was human (a train orientation quiz). I said eff it and figured I'd try Bard. Got right in, no problems (BTW I was logging in with my Google sign-in for both ChatGPT and Bard, go figure)

Anyway, I asked some extremely detailed technical questions over several knowledge domains and was surprised with the comprehensiveness of the responses. I can see this is going to be my go-to for asking questions.

Sometimes though you just want to hang out online with a group of people having the same interests and hobbies as you. Reddit and FB Groups work well enough for that. Neither are perfect but they get the job done.

What's next? You're dealing with people. You should have known it was always going to be messy. Maybe you should reassess how amazing it is we can hang out with people from all over the world having the same passions and interests? I don't call that "fucking up severely" as you say.

[BoboDupla]

Discord is a walled garden, but on the other hand it is quite enjoyable. If you find smaller servers. I am only on a handful of servers (none of them is gaming related) and the experience has been stellar so far.

[AstralStorm]

The discoverability is chiefly achieved by external means, and it's only decent because everyone (owner of every space) has their own moderation.

Spaces with lax or insufficient moderation tend to become cesspools. It also has a tendency to lose information over time as pins are insufficient and search quite sucks.

[neovialogistics]

I'm not aware of any comprehensive social media/UGC platform/forum toplists but there's probably one somewhere as the format seems like a very easy way to make some ad revenue.

I also reckon that having a reliable read-only platform toplist available (with an RSS for site updates, of course) would let users better adapt to a changing internet landscape. But if there's no such thing, I guess there's always Dreamwidth to fall back on. The owners have no intention of selling or enshittifying that place.

[Gys]

The problem is us. 'We' do not want 'information'.

In general people tend to push their opinion (mainly based on gut-feeling) on others and are only interested in receiving confirmation of that opinion.

The internet and social media in particular are just another way of companies making money of serving our needs. Like supermarkets, cars, fashion, etc.

Personally I was never much into social media. I prefer to meet people real life.

[Berniek]

Is this a concerted effort to kill browsers in favor of proprietary apps? With proprietary apps the owners have all the power over privacy, advertising search results...basically everything. Where have we heard "we have to do better" only for the big players to become infinitely worse? We badly need the federated universe to mature and close out these greedy behemoths controlling social media.

[beej71]

I like the movement toward federated. People say it won't scale, etc., but I like it just the way it is. Feels more like the old days.

[midoridensha]

In defense of Quora, I find many really interesting and well-thought-out answers on there.

However, that's all it is: a place for some people to write up small dissertations to various questions (frequently what-if questions). It's not really a social media site: it's not a place for people to hang out and have discussions.

[growingentropy]

At the end of the day, it's unfortunate that the average user won't be able to wrap their head around Mastodon.

Because that's a beautiful UI, honestly.

[fuzzfactor]

For social activity, the return to non-media comes to mind . . .

[biziclop]

Wikipedia? Kinda sick too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

[hindsightbias]

Everybody stops looking at their phone and goes back to work.