[LikelyABurner]

We don’t need social media, period.

Social media is a fundamentally flawed model that you have can have human communication on a global scale with a “The Algorithm” used to cleanly order high quality capital-C “Content” into numeric categories that can be parceled out to drive capital-E “Engagement”.

If you told people about this 30 years ago, they would have laughed at you, and not because of some garbage about people expecting horses instead of cars (Christ how I’ve come to hate this quote, it needs to die a painful death) but because it is a fundamentally stupid idea that only an autist that doesn’t actually communicate with people could have come up with. This is not how people communicate, this is how computers operate, and we’ve been shoving humans pegs into computer-sized boxes using addiction to dopamine hits to keep them firmly wedged in there, and now we’re wondering why everything’s going to shit as a result.

The old ways were best. An ecosystem of small forum communities where the only ordering is time (the ordering none of us can escape) and the subject of the conversation, and the community itself evolves its rules organically through migration, not what a committee of managers in Silicon Valley thinks its CoC’s should look like this month.

[jryle70]

You are participating in a social media site, with "Show HN", "Ask HN", upvotes, downvotes, with appearance controlled by "The Algorithm", all of the hallmark of social media.

Your comment is typical social media, with language that provokes extreme emotion ("period", "hate", "stupid", "going to shit").

You fit right in with what you feel outraged about.

[TrevorJ]

Person A: "I think the ship is sinking!" Person B: "Haha, you are ON the ship, you hypocrite!"