[moskie]

We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake.

[harryf]

What gives me hope is if you ever take a break from social media you realize how worthless it all is. It really doesn’t hurt to disengage.

For similar reasons it’s possible for new networks to show up which disrupt the old, such as TikTok.

The point is as individuals we are way less dependent on social media than we imagine.

[jhanschoo]

For reddit specifically, I have to disagree. It's a sad state the Internet has become, where you used to get coherent results from decentralized blogs when you google a sufficiently niche hobbyist topic. These days you just get content marketing spam. Append reddit to your search and you get subject-matter experts. The valuable conversation and folk knowledge is all siloed on social media.

[joshvm]

Reddit successfully centralised forums and made it convenient because you didn't need 20+ logins. The other half is link sharing/doom scrolling (the addictive stuff), which replaced Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.

In the not-so-distant past if you wanted expert help and non-astroturfed suggestions (or even just memes), that's where you went. Those places still exist for a lot of fields and the experts still hang out (and often are better than Reddit), but you still have the problem of finding them and managing identities across boards. In many cases the moderation is superior. Reddit now suffers from the problem where it's so big that people can run very subtle advertising campaigns to push products. It's still much better than blogspam, but you can still only really trust the negative/critical reviews.

[winternett]

Therein lies the problem... We spent so many years crowdsourcing these curated knowledge bases on a variety of subjects for free to the point that it's empowered the controlling companies to firewall them now and then make our input a commodity that they can turn around and sell to us.

Walled garden sites and apps are the enemy. The only way social media works for certain people is if they are off the main exploited niches on platforms. They take our words and ideas and give nothing back in return. They lie to us about what they can do for us in terms of creating a brand, or company, and they exploit our input and hinder growth.

We have to remember that each of us has a different perspective and purpose for using the web and for using social media.... It's not just people pushing motivational content and drop shipping, it's promoting music, or promoting a restaurant, or even turning their pet into a personality for movie roles. This is why too many people have just the narrow view of the matter that suits them most of the time... We need to understand that one mega platform with only one script and template for success dimply doesn't work, and it actually opens the field for exploitation and gaslighting about how to succeed on social media... That's also exactly what makes social media toxic, along with scams, fake users, cheating for followers, and the manipulation of visibility to encourage users to pay to promote their posts.

It's long overdue for everyone to wake up and take back their individual power in creating personal web sites and not looking back at social media. The ideal that large for profit companies care about individuals is bogus, and by the time people realized they've spent years building communities of profit for others, it's far too late. Time is money. Work is money. Social media does not pay for what you invest into it.

[joshvm]

The funny thing is that a lot of the stuff people on Reddit are clamouring for was easily supported by forums, and has been done forever. Admins were free to run their own ads or premium posts, they got sponsorship from companies, organised swaps and real-life meetups. I remember getting perks like free shipping from some places in return for being an active user. The communities were also more intimate. You'd interact with the same people frequently and the water-cooler areas were also interesting to talk about related interests, whereas outside the novelty/karma farming accounts I don't really recognise anyone I interact with on Reddit (though probably in smaller subs that's more common).

I wonder if it would work if there was a good aggregation tool that could talk to old platforms like phpBB or vBulletin (which I think is still a big chunk of the communities that are running). I can't imagine it would be that difficult and probably existed.

[auxym]

Tapatalk is/was an attempt at such an aggregation tool for old-school forums. In addition to aggregation, it offered better UX for mobile. I haven't used it in many years though, I'm not sure what it looks like these days.

[cpeterso]

Who is the WordPress of forum hosting on your own domain and customizability? Someone that can make turnkey forums for nontechnical people to create their own communities.

[0xEF]

This may sound strange (and was equally strange to admit to myself) but I'm looking forward to "mamaging identities acrosz multiple boards" again. My brain seems to be wired to associate each of my hobbies with very different aspects of my personality, and visiting a little "walled" community for whatevet activity suits that current version of myself is a nice way to compartmentalize and stay focused on what I set out to accomplish in that moment. I loved Reddit for a time, but goodness, what a disjointed experience it was for me and my easily distractable attention span.

[paulmd]

"compartmentalizing your life" used to just be called "having a little fucking privacy".

[gonehome]

In addition to the login bit, reddit/hn style threaded comments for conversation is way better UI (imo) than pages of slow loading quoting forum posts.

[unsupp0rted]

Threaded conversations is the killer feature of Reddit/HN for me. Second is that I don't need to shift between 20 different forum interfaces/color schemes. Old Reddit always looks the same, so long as you disable the ability of subreddits to mess with styling.

[havnagiggle]

> you still have the problem of finding them

That's basically the major paint point for me at the moment. Reddit made finding subcultures related to my hobbies and interests very easy. I don't know where to find communities about things that interest me now. I thought maybe Mastodon but finding hashtags has also been difficult.

[mymythisisthis]

Social media is great for groups to form, but there is a ceiling to the success.

You need a dedicated website/forum with people that understand the subject, to get though the ceiling. You get very specific advertisers, organize your own in person meetings.

[germinalphrase]

I do frequent a handful of forums, and it appears many of them are powered by Xenforo.

Maybe we need to hard sell Xenforo on a shared login model…

[joshvm]

There are some platforms like Discourse which allow you to use OAuth. That's a reasonable setup I think, if you don't care about linking your real identity (or you just make a dummy account).

[tmcdos]

In my personal opinion, Xenforo has a much worse UI than the old phpBB, SMF and similar kind of forum software.

[mjan22640]

> Reddit now suffers from the problem where it's so big that people can run very subtle advertising campaigns to push products.

Filter these out with an LLM based adblock.

[kbos87]

Makes you wonder how google search is still so profitable when the quality of information it returns has gotten progressively poorer.

[beezlewax]

SMEs or often peopling claiming to be SMEs. They'll outright lie often too - chatgpt eat your heart out

[RheingoldRiver]

I disagree. If you find the right communities, you really make close friendships with people - even if you don't know their real names, how old they are, where they work, or where they live. None of that matters, because you share and connect over a common interest. And you could never find so many people IRL with similar interests as you.

If this isn't how you're using reddit, discord, etc, and it's easy to disconnect from them, then yeah just leave them. But they foster meaningful interactions too.

[haswell]

I don’t think the argument is that one can’t find connection on Reddit.

But I think the recent happenings are a good reason to ask how good it is to invest so much in communities that can disappear overnight.

I’ve enjoyed my time on Reddit over the (many) years and I’ve made real friends who I now know in real life. But many of the communities I once valued have crumbled or no longer provide the same positive experience. What remains are those real friendships.

Social media in general is a gigantic experiment and we’re still just beginning to learn about the psychological and sociological impacts.

Shifting focus to local in-person interactions and creating solid and sustainable relationships that don’t depend on the whims of the latest social media platform seems increasingly important.

And I still think there can be value found there, but not as a primary form of social connection.

[adriand]

> Shifting focus to local in-person interactions and creating solid and sustainable relationships that don’t depend on the whims of the latest social media platform seems increasingly important.

I agree with this completely. I have formed many online relationships particularly in the music community starting during the COVID lockdowns and it has really struck me how ephemeral they are compared to IRL friendships. It’s so much harder to connect in a deep way. It’s also so much easier to walk away. You can just kind of slow down your online engagement and the relationship dries up.

I’ve also noticed how I tend to develop a certain impression of someone just based on their online artifacts (avatar, style of writing, emoji, etc) that often turns out to be gravely inaccurate when I finally encounter them in a “realer” format such as a video call. Sometimes I end up realizing that I’d likely not hang out with that person IRL. It’s disconcerting.

Lastly, I find I often feel uncertain about the connection I have in ways that I never feel with people IRL. For instance, wondering if my tone is off, wondering if the person isn’t perhaps as interested in whatever endeavour we are working on anymore, etc.

I am fortunate in that I have not been much of a feed-based social media user for many years, but my belief that community-based social media (eg Discord) might be better has been tested by these observations. As per your comment, I think RL is where it’s at.

[PlunderBunny]

Online, we make the people we interact with into the people we want them to be, not who they actually are.

[adriand]

This is a fantastic insight!

[kirso]

Problem is an average consumer uses reddit for memes and buying recommendations.

The magic however is indeed as you pointed out discussing various topics: - Gear in baldurs gate - How to create a hardware clone of R2D2 - Books that you couldn't put down - What is the best present I can give to my friend - Summary of Hubermans protocols - Etc.

thats the beauty of it and I would miss it.

[dcsommer]

I'm glad you found a consistent source of enjoyable and enriching interactions online.

That said, do not dismiss the need for long-term, in-person friendship. IRL forces you to confront the uncomfortable/mismatched parts of others. In other words, the whole person. It enables you to comfort and support in a way that is impossible online. This is all both uncomfortable and necessary to form the most meaningful and worthwhile relationships, not to mention vital social skills.

The Internet is an incredible tool to connect like-minded people, but it will not bring happiness in the same way the flesh and blood presence of consistently physically present people can.

[PhilipRoman]

I'm sure you can make friendships in any environment like, say, a prison. I personally find IRC servers and in-game chats to be some of the best places for discussion.

[mikrl]

I love that feeling of deep, basically throwaway connection. I met a guy in a hostel once and we never exchanged names or anything, but hit up some tourist spots together, shared life stories and smokes.

In undergrad I once befriended and flirted with a classmate for a few weeks and only realized, when I was putting her number in my phone, that I had no idea what her name was. It’s like connection so intoxicating that you just enjoy it for itself.

[8note]

That's a community that can move quite easily

[rtpg]

I mean I get that for absent-minded browsing but even just...having a hobby and talking about it with people feels pretty much like Normal Person Behavior(TM) and Reddit's subreddits worked well for that in the same way that forums in the past did.

Not the end of the world but as a kid who only could find other people to talk about certain hobbies with online up until college sounds like a lot of pepole will be more bored.

[jimbokun]

Or maybe they’ll spend more time doing their hobbies than typing about them.

[starttoaster]

The caveat to that is that the more time I spent typing about my hobbies, the more I collaborated with differing ideas within my discipline, and the more I ultimately learned about the hobby. Doing the hobby is one thing, but the social aspect is certainly more valuable than you seem to be giving it credit.

[rtpg]

Definitely a thing, yes

[gretch]

We’ve only had this communication capability for the last .01% of human existence. Even 150 years ago, if you wanted to communicate with anyone outside your town, you had to pay a horse based courier what was most likely a very expensive fee. Not to mention the millions of years before that.

Did all these previous generations find less satisfaction in life? Well who knows but I argue not.

We don’t have to structure our lives so that we are dependent on the internet for entertainment.

But also, if you have to pay a small $ fee, okay that seems like a good trade too, if the value is what you are ascribing to it.

[dTal]

>Even 150 years ago, if you wanted to communicate with anyone outside your town, you had to pay a horse based courier what was most likely a very expensive fee.

Last month was the 150th anniversary of the introduction of the first government "postal card", in New York City. They cost a penny each and sold 200,000 in two and a half hours.

https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/america%E2%80%99s-mai...

[gretch]

Was this meant as a retort?

If so can we just pretend I said 200 instead of 150? I feel like that’s pretty much the same thing given that both are but a drop in the ocean of total human existence.

[rerdavies]

> Did all these previous generations find less satisfaction in life?

Heck yes. I lived half my life in a non-Internet era. And I can say with absolute certainty, that it was horrible. Finding community, especially for specialized interests, was virtually impossible. Finding specialized information -- completely impossible, unless you had access to a University library. There weren't even efficient ways to find out what specialized information you could have but don't.

Encyclopedia Britannica is not remotely a substitute for Wikipedia. And the same holds for pretty much every other form of information, every other form of communication, and every other form of community except family.

If you want to go back 100 years... all my ancestors worked 18 hours a day in the mines, starting at the age of 6, and died young from Black Lung Disease. Which is considerably less satisfying.

[gretch]

You’re comparing their existence to your modern standards. But in the moment all those people found their lives to be just fine.

By that logic you live in absolute hell compared to the future humans of the year 3000. Doesn’t feel like it though does it?

I’m illustrating the existence of the hedonic treadmill. However much we get in life, somehow it’s always just okay or slightly not good enough.

[rtpg]

People say this but it's patently obvious that life was more miserable 150 years ago! ~everyone's life was basically toiling away every day to survive. There are obviously examples at the margin that change things up but let's be real. Life is a bit better!

I am personally for some financial incentive changes (though I think that we can somehow figure out how to build communities that don't cost as much to run), so it's not like reddit in its current form has to exist. I just think that we can acknowledge that online communities are a nice to have for many people.

And to expand on that, online communities can complement offline communities in very interesting ways (See how chess has grown thanks to things like chess.com, and all that feeding into an increase in people participating in social chess events. Or things like board games being complemented by things like BGA)

[moskie]

I think this is a fine perspective for inconsequential (-ish) social interactions, but then I start to think about the political organizing that these sites have also facilitated. "The revolution will not be televised" and all that, but... man. I was all over twitter getting real-time information as I participated in Occupy and BLM marches. But, now Elon has it.....

[kodah]

Political organization on the internet definitely has its downsides too. In fact, as the activity has proliferated it's consumed the internet at times and that's been disappointing, to the extent that astroturfing occurs. On top of that it seems that politics has gotten more homogenous in viewpoints since it proliferated; people are now repeating talking points more than nuanced ideas. There's also a lot of harassment and bullying that occurs due to politics prevalence on the internet. When you go into real life the experience is generally very different and opt out by default.

[moskie]

I definitely agree, but I would also suggest that the need for social media companies to monetize on engagement incentivises them to exacerbate the issues you mention. Removing those incentives might improve political discussion.

[kccqzy]

I don't consider Reddit in the same league as other social media sites. I consider it a centralized collection of forums. I hardly use my Reddit account, but I have obtained tremendous amount of useful information by searching for a topic and landing on a useful Reddit post or comment.

[SanjayMehta]

This was the only use I had for reddit - usually some hardware specific issue.

Now I find reddit rarely shows up in DDG results. Searching directly on reddit is futile. Posting queries is also futile as many mods have implemented features to limit infrequent posters.

It's been an old boys' club since EKP left.

[kccqzy]

Try Googling; Reddit ranks surprisingly high on Google searches. Better yet use something more specialized such as https://redditsearch.io/

[rerdavies]

Or type "reddit xyz" in the google search box -- a trick that I learned only recently. Completely eliminated my dependence on StackExchange, which has evolved into a rotting cesspit of obsolete information.

[aliasxneo]

I loaded Facebook for the first time in five years yesterday because there was a fire nearby that I was trying to track. That's about the only value it's provided to me in that time. So, not totally useless, but I certainly have no regrets being social-media free.

[npteljes]

As a social network, it might be worthless, but it's very useful for me as a searchable information trove. During the blackout I have been bitten by this many times, just searching for something and then getting a private reddit page. I think reddit's system works much better than the god-awful traditional forums, where the informational comments and the one-off replies have the same weight.

[rg111]

I quit that kind of internet years ago.

I was on Reddit to talk about Math, programming, books, etc. There are several subreddits from which I was helped. And I helped a lot of other people, too.

Quora had a refined userbase. I liked it there. Got ~30mn views on my answers.

In these places, I didn't have to dumb myself down and could be myself.

There are properly moderated FB groups in which I have made connections, and have a community.

On Discord, I am in so many valuable communities- where I can discuss things I like- be a part of something.

And I depend on YouTube for learning things about programming, deep learning, etc.

So, internet is worthless if you watch cat memes. But for me and millions others, it is a lifeline.

And it saddens me very much to see how deeply I depend on these.

[itake]

I've been on the struggle bus quitting reddit for 5+ years. Even with this new level of energy to quit, I'm still on it for ~20 min per day.

[gretch]

Have you tried replacing it with something else?

I dramatically reduced my social media time a couple years ago by getting some casual games on my phone. Current favorites are NYT crosswords and solitaire.

Some innocuous mental stimulation to pass time that doesn’t come with the toxicity that social media can.

[itake]

Unfortunately now I spend a lot of time on Fb and fb reels.

I catch myself thinking wayyy to much about whatever news article Fb shows me.

I also listen to fiction audiobooks, but none of the healthy things are also low brain energy like Reddit is.

[qaisjp]

The only reason I maintain an Instagram is to have images to show on dating apps, and the only reason I use Twitter is to stay up to date with the tech community (and scream into the void).

[outcoldman]

My google search is - "search something" site:reddit.com

Otherwise is just a lot of AI generated results with close to 0 information.

So I disagree.

[paulcole]

I’m assuming you’ve talked yourself into believing HN isn’t social media?

[moskie]

hm? Of course it is?

[allthecybers]

> What gives me hope is if you ever take a break from social media you realize how worthless it all is.

I agree with this sentiment. I left Facebook and don't miss it in the slightest. Left Twitter long before it was fashionable and don't miss it. It's just a bummer that Reddit is going that direction as well. I've tried to leave Reddit a number of times and then remember it's the only place to get direct, responsive support from my ISP and most of my Google searches include Reddit to see what other people think about a product, service or idea. But would I miss Reddit a year from now? Nope, probably not.

We could do away with all the surveillance capitalism using us as a product and life would probably be fine.

[NoboruWataya]

This is why I think federated alternatives like Lemmy are important and I would like to see communities migrate there instead of some other corporate walled garden. Otherwise we'll just be having the exact same discussion about some other website in five years. It pains me to see even a lot of FOSS-focused communities move their discussions to Discord, for example.

Most of the criticisms of the federated platforms centre around how they are difficult to use for the average user and could never achieve the scale that Reddit has. The difficulty point is a valid one and work should probably be done on that. But at a certain point I just don't really care, particularly about the scale point. The communities that are valuable to me aren't the huge ones full of "average users", they are (mostly) smaller communities full of people interested in tech and FOSS in particular. I can figure out federation and so can most of the people I probably want to hear from.

I don't mean any of this to sound elitist, I just feel like people who browse /r/pics and people who browse /r/selfhosted (for example) are probably different user bases with different preferences. If Reddit were to keep the former while the latter were to move to some other, slightly less seamless but more sustainable platform, maybe everyone wins.

There are, of course, a few non-technical subreddits I like that would fall through the gaps here, in that their average user might not appreciate a federated alternative. In days of yore those communities would have inhabited forums; I wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of those.

[tensor]

I'd love to see something without federation, but using a wikipedia style model to support it. I don't think federation will ever be sufficiently simple for the majority of people to adopt, and I think the world needs a world forum that is accessible for everyone, not just tech people.

[ImaCake]

I tentatively disagree here. The only required complexity for federation is choosing a server/instance. Once you are using it the experience could be made frictionless.

I think a big problem people have had with trying to join federated socials is that they did it when everyone else tried it and thus the system failed. And so people think its really hard when its just been technical issues with onboarding people.

[troad]

> The only required complexity for federation is choosing a server/instance.

This is a bigger problem than fans of federation acknowledge, though. Human beings have multi-faceted identities, and fediverse instances tend to be quite narrowly focused.

The average person is rightly going to assume that 'A collection of Marxist communities' - to take a real instance description from near the top of the join-lemmy.org list - is probably going to be mostly about Marxism, and not really about, say, knitting, or motorcycle maintenance. And even if a given person is in fact a Marxist, they're not going to see 'a collection of Marxist communities' as a replacement for Reddit, where they can talk about Marxism, motorcycles, and knitting.

You can explain to people all about federation and the ability to interact across different instances, but you're still asking them to make a home somewhere, and that entails choosing from amongst identities in a way that Reddit doesn't require, and that most people don't want to do. You're also putting them at the whim of their home instance in a way that they aren't used to and may not like (what if the Marxist instance defederates / blocks the users from the motorcycle instance, due to their insufficient revolutionary zeal?).

[ImaCake]

I agree with the problem of federation identity but suspect this is partly an “image problem” in the sense that less specific and broader identities are a fix.

As for being subject to the whims of the instance; that is no different to reddit/twitter admin who also push ideological agendas. In fact, federation allows you to at least migrate to a different regime, something that neither commercial site permits.

[gonehome]

I don't think federated systems without something like urbit underneath will work outside of a hyper technical niche. You end up back at a handful of even crappier centralized servers with a worse experience and even more capricious mods - a worst of both worlds.

The reason centralized ad-based companies are so successful is the centralization solves serious UX problems that are unsolvable by systems that are not centralized. You need a unified platform where users share an underlying system that stuff can be built on top of that they can actually own, where the details of the system are hidden and it's possible to actually get UX/discovery/auth that is just as good as centralized systems. It has to solve for the problems that lead to centralization. [0]

This stuff will only work when to an average user they have no idea they're even on a system that isn't centralized, just looks like a normal app. You can't get there without solving bigger issues upstream from the app itself. [1]

[0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...

[1]: https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...

[neilv]

> We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media.

There was no mistake. Some pre-goldrush Internet/online people could and did point out these things, from the start. Meanwhile, tons of money rushed in, the money deployed the systems that were available and promoted to people, and the massive influx of people were not hearing from the altruistic types who could see things changing.

I think the current Internet user base overall has mostly never known an online environment in which their associations weren't owned and controlled.

Even the language was changed: "social network" was no longer something that was yours, or between you and others you knew, but "social network" is something some billionaire owns about everyone else's personal associations (power to monitor it, to mediate it, to inject into it).

And when there's upset in one commercial property of power over people, usually the upstart alternatives (even some "decentralized" ones) that rush in are like a corrupt country's revolutionary -- who made grand populist speeches, until they gained power, and it turned out they only wanted to be the next dictator.

[dotnet00]

>I think the current Internet user base overall has mostly never known an online environment in which their associations weren't owned and controlled.

I think this isn't said enough (even with how often it is said). Switching to Matrix and setting up a fediverse node were big in realizing how used to controlled "sterile" environments me and my friend circle had gotten.

Especially early on we found ourselves often saying that being on those platforms brought back the old "early internet" feeling (for us this would be the early/mid 2000s).

[pixl97]

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

>Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

[CatWChainsaw]

The anguish in that piece is visceral but the writing itself is beautiful.

[deepsun]

Yet every time I point to the root of the problem -- that most social media web properties are privately owned by their respective shareholders, who just benevolently let you store your* texts and photos at their premises for free -- I get downvoted heavily here on HN. The community doesn't want to hear that here.

[Kilgore54]

Yeah absolutely The problem here is the profit motive. What we need are sustainable communities that are not controlled by sectors of private capital and they treat their users like products or widgets.

I know some people are in America, especially above a certain age, refuse to think this way. Decades of Chicago school neoliberal propaganda has convinced them that anything good has to be driven by a profit motive.

I would have hope this community would be a little bit better than that but I'm fairly new to it

[aceazzameen]

It's more than a profit motive. Profits can be fine. The bigger issue is the need to show unlimited growth on the books. That whole system drives the gradual enshittification of everything.

[voisin]

Everything, including our climate and other basic needs as humans. Wild that it hasn’t been overthrown yet.

[aceazzameen]

I'm hoping when the day comes, it isn't too violent. But history has its own thing to say about that.

[moskie]

It is troubling that, in the US at least, one of the two major political constituencies has a lot more guns than the other....

[stefan_]

"these companies need to make money" is a very weird way of saying "Reddit could have been perfectly profitable years ago but we went and got a shit ton of venture capital instead by selling investors on the idea that we were gonna be as big as Alphabet". Surprise, their level of execution is roughly "press conference at the Four Seasons" as this little episode so well demonstrates.

[chrismcb]

No one is saying you are only allowed to maintain certain connections.. First of all, what you say is mostly true in the real world as well. I was in a bowling league for 20 years. I want friend with anyone but they were acquaintances. The bowling alley closed. I no longer see anyone. I could have taken the friendship outside the bowling alley... But you can also take your social media friendship outside that particular social media. It wasn't a terrible mistake, and it isn't a problem self contained to social media.

[moskie]

I understand your point, but I think an assumption that a lot of internet users have, and a fundamental pitch of the internet, is that the internet is the tool you use to _find_ people to bowl with in the first place.

[mandmandam]

Yes!

And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things.

They're TEXT and LINKS ffs.

Even Snapchat, which deals in video, costs about $2.50 per user per year to run.

Honestly, we're some set of dopes to let people like Zuck and Huffman build yachts and apocalypse bunkers, with bloody advertising money, all for the genius idea of sharing text and links on the internet.

[danudey]

Text and links, but then also recommendation algorithms, spam filtering, image hosting, lightning-fast caching systems so that your main feed doesn't take hours to load fetching row by row from MySQL, geographically distributed data centres for redundancy and locality.

Then there's the ad engine, which requires user data harvesting, and all of that analytics and analysis and machine learning, and that all gets expensive, so you have to do more of it and do it better so that you can make more ad dollars so you can afford to do more of it and do it better so that.... and so on and so on.

You could just charge users, of course, but if you charge users then you hamstring your organic growth, so you have to find a way to only charge some users but charge them significantly more. Even if Twitter only costs $1/usr/mo to run, how many of those users will pay? You need to charge 1% of users $100/mo, or 0.1% of users $1000/mo, which means you need to offer them something tangible for their money, but none of these sites can really think of anything tangible to offer their users that's worth paying for so they're stuck with ad revenue and...

Yeah, it's a gigantic mess.

[hgs3]

If you're a non-profit then you don't need a recommendation engine or an ad engine. You also don't need to self host video and images, at least initially. Reddit, for the longest time, relied on Imgur and embedded video players until they built their own infrastructure. Also, thanks to advances in AI, there is an opportunity for AI moderators for content curation. As far as caching and web scale in general, you don't need a full server farm initially. Even Google started with a single server rack.

[rerdavies]

Google's 1st server was housed in a cabinet of Lego bricks. No server rack.

https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2011/googlegrewfr.jpg

Google's first server farm consisted on row after row of regular desktop machines on the floor. Also no server racks.

But sooner or later, you're going to need one of these: https://www.google.ca/about/datacenters/

The thing I would live in constant fear of if I were to host a Mastodon server is that sooner or later, one of your users' posts is going to end up being linked to in a Wired feature article, or a New York Times article, or goes viral for any of a billion reason, and your server is going to end up getting hammered with 10,000 requests a second for a week or a month, which means you're going to be facing a sudden unexpected $3,000 AWS bill. (Not sure what it would actually cost. Anyone?)

I've seen what being linked to in a Wired article does to a web server. It's ugly.

[elektor]

Do you have a source for that $2.5 figure?

[jorvi]

That number seems incredibly unlikely. I’m a relatively casual Snapchat user, and from ~45GB of cellular use, ~3.5GB is from Snapchat. That’s just egress bandwidth (from Snapchat’s point of view), they also have to ingress my snaps as well as temporarily host stories and snaps in transit.

[prattmic]

Q1 earnings (https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2023/q1...) says 383M daily active users and $1.3B in costs (including sales, administrative, etc), for ~$3.50/user/quarter or ~$14/user/year. So far above $2.50/user/year. Even just using cost of revenue is ~$4.50/user/year.

[mandmandam]

I clarified that I meant just infrastructure costs, and posted the source.

Even so - what's $4.50 per user per year - 40 minutes of minimum wage work? 45 seconds of a lawyer's time?

For sending, and processing, and receiving GBs and GBs of video?

For (not even) this cost, we give up control of political narratives? We let people like Huffman and Musk and Zuckerberg control what we get to see?

They take money from tinpot dictators and a selection box of wealthy grifters. We let our parents and grandparents get taken advantage of by every scam artist on the planet with a few dollars. Why? To save $4.50 a year?

[hotpotamus]

I think the big cloud providers have warped peoples' sense of what these things actually cost (and also the massive scale of these userbases that allows the costs to be spread widely). Egress is one places where providers make their (significant) margins.

[mandmandam]

To be clear, I'm talking about solely infrastructure costs.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/as-snapchat-use-soars-during-p...

Divide the costs cited by Snapchat themselves by their daily users and you get $~2.50/yr.

[this_user]

Social networks derive their value from their size. $2.5 per year per user may not be much, but if you have just 1000 users, that is already $2500 per year. 100000 users is a quarter of a million per year. Are you going to pay for that out of pocket?

It takes money to run a social network of meaningful size in even just a halfway professional manner. Who would do that while receiving nothing in return?

[mjan22640]

Design the network physically distributed on the users computers.

[shadowgovt]

It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is.

I can't help but observe that for all of it being "just text and links," we sure do keep converging on monolithic service providers for... Some reason.

[danudey]

> It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is.

I'm an awful programmer and I could build a reddit clone pretty trivially if I really set my mind to it.

Then I'd have to figure out how to attract users, how to handle spam and abuse, how to filter content, how to age restrict things, what tools users need, how to host media content cheaply, how to hire people to help me keep the site online and scaled, how to.... probably a thousand other things.

Building a forum is easy, building a business around a forum.... difficult.

[shadowgovt]

And not even a business, the other things you're describing are things you have to solve even if you want to provide the service for free (well, for cost at that point. Because if you're providing media content and hiring people, the whole thing costs you more than labor). And the other things you've described are table stakes... Filtering content and handling abuse in particular, if you get large enough for anybody to care you exist. No government is going to sit idly by and let a service just become the next CSAM haven.

At the end of the day, most people don't want to put the labor in. If they did, we would have seen fediverse take off ages ago.

[paulmd]

> And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things. They're TEXT and LINKS ffs.

stop doing JAVASCRIPT

documents were not meant to be turing-complete

the frontend developers have played us like fools

look at the user-focused experiences they have built for us with our attention-economy revenue:

they have played us like fools

[vxNsr]

At scale that’s relatively expensive though, $2.5x1billion is still 2.5 billion dollars. That money needs to come from somewhere…

[mandmandam]

Pedantically, that's not how cost per user works. Whether you have a billion users or 3, $2.50 / user is $2.50 per user.

And that infrastructure costs the same whether you riddle the platform with advertising and influence, or leave it pristine. In fact, leaving it pristine costs far far less to society, all things considered.

Anyway, 'at scale', $2.5 bn is a drop in the ocean. There are thousands of people who could pay that all on their own. The global economy is 100 trillion dollars (as of 2021). And there's this thing called taxation, which sorts out public goods and services (such as communication) at scale.

[rerdavies]

I'm not sure there are a thousand people on the planet who would be willing to pay $2.5B a year!

[epicureanideal]

Membership fees. If we could get customers used to buying things again, $10/yr or $100/lifetime membership fees seems more than reasonable.

[Narkov]

So easy to say, so hard to actually do. Most HN readers wouldn't care about dropping $100 but the fact is Facebook, Reddit, Google users pay $0.

[greiskul]

Youtube gives you the option. Do you want no ads? Pay for Youtube Premium. I do not need to engage in a hostile user vs platform agaisnt Youtube, with me searching for better adblocks, and youtube trying to figure out how to block the adblockers, cause they go and give me the option. I doubt that reddit would be getting the pushback they are getting if they had come out with some sensible numbers per user, that people are actually ok with paying.

[SteveNuts]

The problem there is I think people are sick of seeing 15 small recurring charges on their credit card statements every month. It's death by a thousand paper cuts.

There needs to be some sort of universal pay per view model that works across any site.

[UncleMeat]

And yet, people whine incessantly about YouTube Premium or about Netflix not letting people squat on each other's accounts.

[tenebrisalietum]

Well there are pictures and video too.

[BHSPitMonkey]

Not until later in Reddit's history, when they (just like Facebook) wanted to wrestle some power away from the likes of YouTube and Imgur. (Smartly so, since these platforms had lots of leverage to be able to turn off embedding one day and sour the Reddit UX / drive users away from the site. But this change did not make Reddit more valuable to its users.)

[hn_version_0023]

It’s almost enough to make one reconsider the use of social media entirely.

My hope is that one day the kids will just stop using it and it dies it’s natural death.

[moskie]

I've wondered for a long time if social media is just a fad.

[concinds]

There's a fork in the road. IRL socialization is selective, since someone needs to want to talk to you specifically; you decide who you talk to, instead of listening to random people.

For a minority, online socializing is mostly selective. One-on-one chats on WhatsApp, group chats, or small, selective online communities like tiny Discord servers among friends. Only venturing out to "the masses' social media" to promote a product or a brand (or out of boredom), but mostly staying away from the riff-raff and idiocy.

Then there's the people who lack IRL friends, and who can't get in these group chats or friends-only Discord servers, who have nothing but the riff-raff and idiocy for company. There's more and more of these people, as people get lonelier.

I guess the only thing you can do is make sure your kids are in the first group.

[EA-3167]

I think anonymous social media as the mainstream is a fad, the end-point is going to be more like Snow Crash, minus the artistic flair. I think text-based, possibly anonymous social media will persist, but it won't be what billions of people are doing.

Most of the problems with social media come down to the ability of people to separate themselves from the consequences of their speech and actions. I don't think that lack of anonymity should be enforced, I just think it's the natural progression of people trying to gather in groups on or offline.

[lordfrito]

100% this.

The problems of social media are largely already solved in the real world, where there are real consequences to bad behavior. Reputation is a thing in the real world.

We're still in the medieval ages of the internet. People are regularly waylaid and conned by digital highwaymen.

We need the digital equivalent of a reputation in the digital world. Will end up being similar to a SSN -- an identity that follows you around and can't be shaken. It's going to very unpopular with the libertarian minded, privacy focused, and religious mark-of-the beast types. But I see no other way forward.

[optimalsolver]

You mean like a China-style social credit system?

[lordfrito]

Yes and no.

Like China, in that users are identifiable in the real world, and held accountable for their actions.

Unlike China in that it's not about mass surveillance and mass shaping of behavior and political opinion.

Think of it like a drivers license, but for the internet. Keeps people from anonymously performing drive by shootings and hit-and-run type events, because the car/driver can be traced back to a real person.

Benefits:

- The user that seems to be acting like a troll has a "record", a reputation for being a troll on other sites. Dude is clearly an idiot, or out to cause trouble. Best if I just ignore his crapposting and strong opinions about politics or whatever.

- Person that posted private NSFW pics of me online turns out to be my troubled ex on the other side of town. I've reported the crime to the local police and prosecutors office.

- Person who posted bomb threat, well we can all see it's some 8yo kid who goes to that school. Follow up there first.

- That guy from overseas who wants to give me $1M if I first wire him $1000, well looks like he is a known criminal. Problem avoided.

- In spite of their online reputation and my better judgment, I screwed up and got scammed out of money by someone online. Well turns out he's Joe Blow from Arkansas and so I've filed a police report against him. Also I've contacted a lawyer and have filed a lawsuit.

I understand the concerns and comparisons to Chinese social credit, as I said the libertarian and privacy minded people won't be happy. They'll argue they have a right to surf/drive anonymously without a license, and that the government will use this for ill, etc.

End of the day I have faith that our system of government, with it's checks and balances, will make it harder for those in power to abuse the system compared to CCP. For example, here you'd need a warrant to look into a persons online behavior. Companies will not be able to track people without their consent, etc.

Still, the ability to track people at scale will be abused, as power is always abused. The question is "are we better off collectively as a society for what what we gain, knowing the background level of power abuse that we'll have to endure?"

Let me put it another way, would you rather that we get rid of drivers licenses and other identification like SSN used by say, your bank? Without that info, it becomes much easier for me to impersonate you and withdraw money from your bank account. As it stands, banks have to follow KYC laws, which means they have to know who their customers actually are, which makes it hard to scale digital fraud as all transactions can be traced back to real people which can get arrested and/or charged with crimes.

All I'm suggesting is that we need this level of traceability on any part of the internet that matters. Banks, commerce, retirement saving, all communications with minor children, and most public spaces communications (Facebook, Reddit, eBay, Tinder, etc).

I'm all for keeping parts of the internet anonymous. They'd end up being disused, like back alleys in shady parts of town. Only people with something to hide go there (4chan, etc). Maybe you can trust the guy you meet there, but I wouldn't give him any money. Who takes 4chan users seriously? Meanwhile the rest of us stay on the other part of the internet, where trolling and shitposting wouldn't be as much of a problem anymore.

[EA-3167]

I feel like those "libertarian minded..." types are ultimately just another brand of utopian fantasist. It sure would be lovely if we could have nice things, but we already know why we can't: human nature.

Maybe that'll change some day, but not today.

[1270018080]

As long has humans are genetically predisposed to be addicted to it, I doubt it. Maybe in 200k years.

[rukuu001]

I've wondered about this, and what need it serves in people that they're not getting otherwise? Usenet was pretty popular from the beginning and maybe the first 'social media', and succeeded without marketing.

[DashAnimal]

If I think of every community I was a part of during the 2000s, they've all shut down. In the end money played a part in all of them closing, or people who don't want to commit any longer to something that isn't making them money. In contrast, I've been on reddit since 2011 which is really good. I've spent zero money and learned and enjoyed a lot.

[hliyan]

A few years ago, I came up with this idea: "...a social network that uses email as its communications protocol and regular mail servers as the “cloud”. There is no “platform”, but an app which is basically a re-skinned mail client with certain features disabled or abstracted. There is no advertising." https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-netwo...

[zo1]

And "channels" or "pages" are really just email groups?

There was a time a while back where that sort of thing was thriving, and I believe it was mediated by Google Groups at the time (I can't recall the specifics). I remember seeing such amazing visual content back then, shared as plain old emails.

[hackerlight]

I question the word "mistake" here, because it puts the burden on us and implies that it could have turned out differently, in that we could have just decided to opt out. When it comes to products that prey on the dopamine system and have network power behind them, it probably couldn't have turned out any differently, short of policy that adjusts the incentives of the people who create these products.

[nine_zeros]

You are not wrong but the real problem is not profitability, but constantly increasing profitability, quarter over quarter.

[stalfosknight]

Perhaps this is a more a reflection of our current state of development as a species than a mistake we consciously chose to make. As gross as Reddit's behavior has been, it doesn't change the reality that nothing at all in this scarcity-based economy is free.

[bbor]

“Is capitalism at fault? No, surely it’s the kids!”

[TechBro8615]

Communist Cuba doesn't have a social network, but they do have a "sneakernet" [0]:

> El Paquete Semanal ("The Weekly Package") or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal

[paulmd]

Join the original decentralized social network! Old men in their basement want to know your QTH!

https://botsin.space/@aregsstv/110553041714602525

[bbor]

Lol thanks for the reminder TechBro8615. I don't really want to argue about communism being inherently authoritarian on here :) I was just responding to the parent comment, who was (to some extent) dismissing the ancestor:

> We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake.

I think we can agree that there are ways we could organize social media that are neither governed by the intense profit expectations of VCs, nor the work of Communist satan magic. For example, government funded!

[stalfosknight]

I was not dismissing anyone. I was suggesting that it's not unreasonable for Reddit to want to be a profitable business even though how they're going about it is rather questionable.

There exists a reasonable middle ground somewhere between /u/spez's ridiculous terms and this idea that many seem to have that 3rd party apps and/or users deserve a free ride. You can blame capitalism if you like but I don't believe there is a superior alternative until we reach the point where we have a Star Trek-like post-scarcity economy of some kind.

[wvenable]

I disagree. 3rd spaces are often profit generating businesses.

The problem is that these companies are VC backed enterprises mean to give many multiple return on investment. It's not merely enough to be profitable.

Reddit certain could have been profitable already but they've continued to grow in headcount and stupid ideas (nft.reddit.com) basically chasing an unachieveable goal. It will eat itself to pursue that goal.

[unyttigfjelltol]

Where's the non-profit foundation to replace them? Has someone already started it?

[1ark]

Signal, Session, Berty, Jami, and Nostr are some I can think of from the top of my head.

[dotnet00]

Agreed. The nice part is that often those connections can be moved elsewhere, especially for us more tech savy people.

Having first purged my posts on reddit and recently outright deleting my account, it's been refreshing to realize that I can indeed go without reddit, even without the few subs I found particularly useful.

The few strong online friendships I've made have long since been "backed up" to Matrix and the Fediverse with self hosted instances after experiencing spurious bans on discord and realizing how fragile the centralized arrangement is.

[tmn]

You can move those connections to other channels. But yeah without a free market / progress driven system you aren’t going to have a phone, mail service, etc either. It’s a double edge sword.

[yanderekko]

>We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system.

I would absolutely take profit-driven moderation over the petty tyranny of your stereotypical reddit mod. These mods are not heroically channeling some sort of vox populi.

[brvsft]

Some are harping on the sentence before this, but this is absurd:

> How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary.

You are definitely allowed to form connections outside of the internet. That's where many of the best ones are.

[rralian]

I agree with you. And in fact I have mostly removed myself from social media. But I can’t help pointing out the irony of sharing this sentiment in what is essentially a form of social media. Doesn’t dilute your point. Just made me smile a little.

[jbrennan]

This is a great point, and I’m curious to hear what would be better alternatives. Like obviously there’s something great about having online connections with other people, but how could we do it better without surrendering to some big platform?

[williamcotton]

We could make a public platform. In the US this all but guarantees a protection from censorship. Third parties could offer moderation services. The brave could suck on the firehose!

[floren]

The funny thing is that Usenet is already a highly censorship-resistant platform, and tools like NoCeM would let you subscribe to third party moderation streams!

[Shilva]

I genuinely forget Usenet is still technically around these days. I dabble in the idea of using it here and there, but the ease and convenience of the modern www has spoiled me quite a bit. If I go to a decentralized platform, it's more likely to be something fediverse.

[moskie]

Federated social media, and maybe a public cloud infrastructure as an alternative to things like AWS?

[redbell]

> but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system

We all hope Hacker News remains the exception, otherwise, it might mark the end of “the internet as we love it”

[moskie]

I don't think it's a good idea to assume / hope that HN remains that way. Money is still an aspect of the existence of HN. It exists because pg has enough money to run it, and its existence aligns with his current desires. This community could just as easily dissappear in a way equivalent to what we're seeing with Twitter and Reddit, if pg wanted. And it could not be easily replaced, because its existence is dependent on pg's money...

[AwaAwa]

Try not paying your taxes and see what happens.

We have always been reduced to producers of monetary value for an intermediary. We pretend we are in control of that intermediary, and maybe once we were. Much like the beginning of every social media site.

[Kilgore54]

It's not really an apples to apples comparison. You're talking about taxation, governments can absolutely run stuff that is not profitable and do all the time.

Better example would be to not pay your rent or your mortgage... But we don't want to make the mistake of equating governments with private capital. If anything governments are controlled by private capital disproportionately when they are often the only defense we have to try to defeat centers of power on such a scale.

[AwaAwa]

I think it is an apt comparison, since social media companies don't need to extract monetary value from every single individual, unlike rent, and do run their orgs for large amounts of time in the 'red' thanks to VC money. Which let's be honest, is another game of VC's leveraging credit/debt systems via financial institutions.

Perhaps you feel this way because you still think the government is individually on our side, when every announcement sounds more and more for a vague concept of good, that seems to enrich the announcers, while doing nothing for my life, or any real person I have ever interacted with. Which puts paid to the concept of government being on the individual's side.

[EchoReflection]

That is such an elegant, concise, and accurate description of the situation. Bravo

[res0nat0r]

Unfortunately sites the size of reddit can't exist without money. People gravitate to sites like github etc because they provide features, which cost money,that people want.

[99_00]

You haven't said what the mistake is. Is it a mistake to use socially media because the connections aren't peremmant?

[moskie]

The mistake was to commit to a system where social connections are only maintained / allowed to exist if they are profitable for an intermediary.

[99_00]

As opposed to not having those social connections?

[moskie]

As opposed to recognizing these problems ahead of time, and instead creating a (public?) system for forming these social networks that doesn't need to monetize. One that wouldn't be corrupted by the needs for ever-increasing profits.

I don't mean for that system to necessarily be a full replacement for the social networks we have now, but I'd argue there's room for something like a public alternative to them.

[99_00]

Free systems always excited and and continue to do so. Commit to them. Correct the mistake. If committing to them doesn't fix the mistake, then the choice was to have the social connections you wanted or not to. And given those choices, and what you want, choosing social media isn't a mistake.

[sgregnt]

They created the connections, without their facilitation this would probably never exists in the first place.

[soup10]

well said, this is an ugly part of capitalism, anything that can be turned into a product, will be turned into a product. And greed and the profit motive and the hunger for growth will usually lead to some corporatized version becoming the dominant product in the space while more idealistic indie operations operate smaller in the fringes if at all.

[camdenlock]

There is no such thing as “the internet community”. There is just humanity.

[zaat]

Not sure what you mean, about half the people I know are not on the web at all, or just browsing mainstream news sites occasionally. Then there is the group of people who use social media to some degree and are online a lot. These are 2 distinctive groups, both are parts of humanity but only one of them is related to the internet community.

[TechBro8615]

What choice did we have? A herd of sheep can only go through an open gate.

[nailer]

> Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system.

I will point out that whenever somebody talks about a system where creators own and can profit from their own creations on HN someone responds with “crypto is a scam”.

[camhart]

Except, the lockout is self imposed. Reddit's "crime" is closing down their API... users just need to use the actual reddit app and they can keep their connection/communities going.

It does sucks for the people who've built their livelihood offering 3rd party reddit clients though. Sure it was always a risk. Big tech destroys entire businesses on a regular basis. Doesn't make it a bad choice on their part--the (american foot)ball simply bounced the wrong direction.

[btilly]

Except, the actual Reddit app sucks. And it particularly sucks for busy moderators.

So successful subreddits will be getting inexperienced moderators imposed, who don't know how the communities work, and who don't have the right tools to use.

Care to take bets on how well this will turn out?

[midoridensha]

>Care to take bets on how well this will turn out?

I'm betting many communities are going to turn very shitty, but ultimately it won't hurt Reddit's bottom line one iota. In fact, Reddit will probably be more profitable than before.

Just look at TikTok: you don't need communities with intelligent discussion to have a highly profitable company. Instead, it's better to chase vapid morons who want to watch shitty 1-minute videos.

[bbor]

It is my opinion that viewing oneself as a special light in a world of vapid morons leads to a sad, angry life. Just thought I'd weigh in, one vapid moron to another :)

[midoridensha]

The world isn't completely full of vapid morons. There's plenty of intelligent people here, plus there's plenty of intelligent people on various Reddit subs, who are interested in intelligent discourse. There's plenty of popular media that isn't vapid and moronic: just look at Star Trek: it's been a cultural phenomenon for over a half-century and it's rather intellectual for a series aimed at the general public, yet it's rather difficult to find anyone these days who's never heard of it.

There's nothing terribly special about people who are reasonably intelligent and are interested in intelligent discussions about various topics; we're not some vanishingly small minority. Civilization wouldn't have gotten this far if 99% of people were vapid morons. There are a lot of vapid morons out there, as evidenced by the rise of TikTok (and to be fair, not everything there is utter trash), but they're not the overwhelming majority of the population IMO.

[bbor]

I guess my point was less about relative population sizes and more about dismissing the humanity of others. What would einsteins life have been if he had grown up in an abusive, food-insecure household? What about yours (not to assume ofc). Life is hard, conditions are hard, people have subtle undiagnosed disabilities all the time, and I just bristle at dismissing them as more-or-less worthless

[Kilgore54]

Except the official Reddit app makes it impossible for people with disabilities, or people that want a reasonably well moderated community, or people that just want a usable app.

Enthusiast community that makes up probably 80% of the content on Reddit are going to see other options if they can't use third party apps.

I mean would you continue to use the internet if you could only use AOL?

Anytime your community is dependent on staying on one centurally controlled for-profit app with no alternatives, it's doomed.

[jcz_nz]

That is a willfully ignorant perspective.

Reddit made a choice to first misinform, then pull the rug from under bunch of people (not just devs, it’s the Reddit users as well), and THEN chose to lie about what happened to deflect blame.