[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.

[Natanael_L]

There's a few self hosting forums, and there's Lemmy / Kbin for federated ones

[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.