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by godot 299 days ago
> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small.

I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.

When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.

18 comments

I remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.
> I don’t think she even noticed honestly.

From her perspective, the post disappeared, and then you never posted anything like that again! Everyone wins

I had a relative threaten his daughter, because her daughter-in-law posted some political stuff he disagreed with.

Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.

This goes both ways (old to young and reverse), but family goes before politics. You don't cut out, or disown, or stop visiting, or badmouth family because you disagree with their politics...

If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.

AFAIK, you cut off shitty relatives…

…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.

Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.

>Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.

It's rarely, if ever, important to any concerned party's day to day life. It's bullshit partisanship instilled into idiotic brains by the media and social media.

Just because they say it's important, doesn't make it so.

Eh. While that might be true in the course of say, governance - where IMO it’s important and worthwhile to use scientific methodology (statistics, etc) to establish “importance” -

…your family around the notional holiday dinner table? The personal is what’s important, kinda by definition. The point is the subjective and emotional.

It depends, if the political take is sufficiently shitty it’s a betrayal of your morals, friends etc to continue to associate with your family spouting it.

Typically that has to be some extreme form of bigotry people won’t let go of after repeated coaching. Extreme bigotry or conspiracy thinking is arguably a form of abuse directed at other family members and it’s 100% ok to cut people off for being abusive.

Where does it stop? What if your relatives support, eg, racist policies? What if they support genocide? How personal does it have to be?

What if you’re dating a person of another race, and your relatives support keeps making racist comments to you, even after you try to explain why that’s not okay?

>Where does it stop? What if your relatives support, eg, racist policies? What if they support genocide? How personal does it have to be?

Unless they act on them, they can support anything they like, it means less than them supporting some team or MCU fandom

What? Your relative Being a racist is less important to you than them supporting the opposing team?
No, sorry. Nazi family members come last. Family members with no respect for the rights and freedoms of others and who encourage and support inhumane treatment of others don’t get a free pass.
Unless your family members are card carrying members of the Nazi party, "Nazi" is just a codeword for "disagree with them" just as "no respect for the rights and freedoms of others" is the same.
That is either a very naive take, or a dishonest one. You don't need an actual nazi party issuing member cards to recognize someone strongly aligned with the values, opinion and realities of the WW2 (and previous decade) nazi party as such.

By all means keep trolling or worse if it makes your day, hide behind pedantry if it's any help, but you're fooling very, very few people.

Sorry, but absolutely the fuck not.

If someone votes for and cheers on the sending of specific ethnic groups to concentration camps, the removal of rights and freedoms for political opponents, and the advancement of authoritarianism, they are Nazis.

We are way beyond Godwin’s Law at this point and it’s time to recognize and acknowledge that fact.

I've never cut off a relative for their politics, but I've cut off relatives because they wouldn't shut up about their politics.

Talk to me about all the gardening you're doing after retirement, about your new motorcycle, about the fishing this year, hell talk to me about your favorite sports team. I'll listen and interact, even if I'm not particularly interested in those things. Tell me for the 500th time about how Biden was a commie and I'll just eat Thanksgiving with my in-laws.

What a stupid reason to cut off your child - so late in life too.
That’s how bad things have gotten, and a lot of it is because it’s profitable to fan the flames of rancor.

I don’t see it improving. I think there was a post, a couple of days ago, where some folks concluded that social media is unfixable.

“Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

https://youtu.be/aCbfMkh940Q

TIL Kendrick Lamar has a HN (/s)
There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..
It never went anywhere because it's an engineer's solution to a social problem.
IG and others have similar functionality nowadays at least.
Excellent point. Plus and Wave were ahead of their time.
Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. In hindsight, any SNS begins as a megaphone and if it can't make statements in culture, it doesn't exist. It's not actually about the individuals. Sure, people want to post things, but they want to be feeding into something that does stuff. I don't think Google ever made that case. It was pure chicken and egg with no ice breakers.
> Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it.

Then it wasn't a good feature.

The point is that we weren't looking for social media, so killer SNS features didn't matter. It was a better mousetrap for a market that's deep down motivated by mashed potatoes.
That's a great point. In the mid 2000s I remember thinking about this. "You don't talk to your parents the same way you talk to your friends. So it's like, you are different people to different people."
This meshes deeply with "The medium is the message" from McLuhan.
Wonderware has an automatic I/O assignment feature that - if you follow some basic rules on naming things - sets up all your data sources for you automatically. It cuts out maybe a quarter of your development time.

I don't use it because I mostly automate fuel farms, and I do that by taking a blank fuel farm config we created and customize it for a particular site. We have scripting in place to assign data sources that work with a standardized set of PLC data structures that we've written. Most Wonderware installs are one-offs that start with a blank slate, so our use case is unusual.

That doesn't make auto-assignment a bad feature. It just means it's not the best fit for me. Likewise, Google Circles was a good feature that I never used because I only ever knew one other person who used Google Plus.

I remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.
Facebook around 2008 was pretty cool. Just me hanging out with my irl friends.

And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.

I thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.
Google's Circles is a classical example of something that seems like a great idea on paper but doesn't work in practice. It had too much friction: categorizing people by circles and then also deciding which circle should receive what. Apparently nobody liked it and it's one of the reasons Plus failed so spectacularly.
No, it didn't fail.

Circles is group chats (WhatsApp, or whatever's popular in your neck of the woods), which I'd argue is how (most?) people in 2025 actually do “social networking.”

Instagram/TikTok/Xitter is… something else entirely.

Chat programs are not social networking.
They absolutely are. Maybe less so in the USA, but they have replaced Facebook for many (most?) people in the subcontinent, Africa, and south america
Another reason was asymmetric friendships. Meaning Alice could add Bob to a circle without Bob adding Alice back. Made it so much harder for the network effect to kick in.
The main reason I didn't use is because the UI sucked so much.
FWIW IG now has a similar feature. I don't use it but alas...
And yet for certain communities - like TTRPGs - it not only worked incredibly well but were still unlocking the effects of its loss.
You could run something like Facebook but in tiny shards. It would be better. And require 1/1000th of the engineering workforce.
I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome.

I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.

People hated it because Google for some reason decided to force it into YouTube by forcing you to link your YouTube account to your G+ account. Remember that stick figure tank guy that was plastered over every comment section?

I believe that’s mostly what killed Google Plus. People were introduced to it in the worst way possible, so nobody actually cared to try it out, even if it was technically a good product.

This was also introduced in the same moment as a bunch of real name initiatives from multiple companies. People were rejecting it based on what it demanded compared to what was offered. It also killed or force reworked other Google products that were working fine to end users (e.g. Google Talk).

In my eyes it was one of the key moments that put them on a downward trajectory in public opinion. So while it might have had the right features the rest of the deal sucked, and people were already tiring of social media overall.

Google Plus correctly identified a major problem.

Unfortunately the solution that works for most people is to have multiple identities on multiple social media sites. So FB with one circle, work relationships on Slack, several channels on Discord, a group of friends on Instagram, a couple of groups on What's App, some mobile game friends on Line...

That's a really good point that I haven't seen made before. Even with apps/networks that are ostensibly pretty similar, like Slack and Discord both offering channel-based text chat, real-time audio calls with screen sharing, and the ability to join multiple servers/organizations, the people I hang out with and the type of things I talk about with them on Slack versus Discord are very different. I've never worked at a place that used Discord for their work communications, and I've never had a group of people I gamed with who use Slack to coordinate and talk while playing. While there's potentially a bit of friction if I happen to want to start gaming with a friend from work or something like that, I'd honestly still want to use separate accounts for my personal life and work stuff even if the same app was used everywhere, so having everything in a single place just doesn't feel like it matters.
And that's why the real name policies helped kill Facebook. The best way to section off your friends from family from work is a separate somewhat anonymous account for each.
I understand the negative focus group part. The internet radio stations I like end up closing. I dislike advertising, but radio stations without income are unsustainable. This makes it hard for me to design products since they will likely fail! Maybe I should design them to be the opposite of what I'd like them to be...
Reminder for everyone to donate to your favorite station (eg SomaFM).
I wish Google didn’t give up up everything they try. Google plus was cool.
You can't though. The problem is, that humanity is a web. Not a set of communities (at least on the scale of 1000s of people). And since those webs overlap you will either need to solve the overlap problem at the boundaries (taking engineering effort) or you will end up with essentially one big shard again. On the other hand, you really don't need to change anything on the backend. Simply limit the number of "tier 1" friends to 50, have a "tier 2" category for your 1000 and put everything else in "acquaintances" and split engagement between those.

The problem with that though is: You will generate an enormous amount of social friction "why am I tier 2, but (without loss of generality) Karen is Tier 1?" and reduce monetizability. So truly nobody will feel happy about those restrictions. And since it doesn't solve any engineering problem you run into (see above) there is no one incentivised to build such a thing. (Ironically this may not be completely true, given that this is pretty much how Chinese social media apps work. So maybe states [or at least power structures] are incentivised to build such a system)

I can see many way where you can only follow (and be followed) by 1000 people would be better in many way. An audience of 1000 isn't monetizable so the network wouldn't be poisoned by ads ("sponsored content" AKA "sponcon").
15 years later, we've reinvented Path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)

> Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allowed users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family.

1,000 is way too many. Low hundreds max.
At some point, everyone on Facebook realized almost at the same time, that it was no longer a place to share, but a place to compete.

Then everyone basically stopped sharing and started curating.

The problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that.

I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.

There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.

This is pretty true, but funny because it’s maybe the simplest problem to solve at least on Facebook, with the group visibility. People just either don’t care or are too incompetent to select the correct audience when posting.
Yeah, Facebook's best days were when it still required a .edu email to sign up.

Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.

This is the reason for facebooks success the rollout. Regardless of when you joined it was always better for you then the next group.

Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.

There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.

https://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/new/index.php

comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters

This is sorta something people are discovering with Mastodon. Lots of instances are realizing it's better to cap registrations before they get too large and just have someone spin up another instance.

You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).

Google + solved this issue with 'circles' or whatever it was called.

For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.

The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)

Telegram is a platform where you can connect with people on a small scale
Yea the first few years of Facebook were magical. It felt like suddenly you could connect with your peers in a new way, discover old friends, etc. Went downhill pretty quickly though.
Once a sister of my friend messaged me asking to take down a picture of him with a beer mug. It was because they were looking for matches for him (Indian wedding). I said no and told her that it is better to lose such a match :p

At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)

SomethingAwful is still fun precisely because they don't have too many people. At any given time, there's about ~2500 active users, which is enough to keep the chats funny and interesting and avoiding "dead mall" vibes, but not so much that it's horrible like LinkedIn or Facebook.
I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks.

The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.

Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.

The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)

Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.

In real-world terms:

• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.

• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.

• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.

• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.

Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)

• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)

• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.

Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)

It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.

I think this is really insightful. I would add that modern Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok add another dimension in that they try as hard as possible to discourage interactions among friends, by focusing on algorithm-based curation (and push everyone to vertical-video-swipe-mode for all but Twitter). It seems obvious that someone did the math years ago and determined ad dollars are better when people see friend posts nearly 0% of the time, replaced by posts from random mysterious “Pages” you don’t follow, celebrities you don’t follow, and viral public posts by complete strangers. People’s posts are increasingly for nobody to see, because unless they are public and go viral, they’re invisible.

So it’s like most of these “social media” sites are no longer social. They’re more like “targeted media feeds.”

True, but – at least for the networks born in the "organic era" — I don't think the shift to algorithmic curation is a causal factor for the disappearance of organic traffic on these networks.

I think, for these older networks that had an "organic era", it's the reverse: the falloff was due to the space becoming a dark forest for organic interactions; and then a curated global engagement sphere was implemented to fill the void / decrease user churn.

I know this was true at least for Facebook. I recall a clear 5+-year gap, after a lot of the original FB core demographic had already left, but before FB adjusted its recommendation engine, where FB was just... a ghost town.

My impression of this gap time, was that back in the "organic era", FB had implemented some sort of damping, ensuring that posts by commercial posters got "promoted" to only a small fraction of that poster's subscribers, and preventing multiple posts from the same commercial poster from making it to the same user's feed at once. (Presumably to prevent something they saw as "advertising" from overwhelming the organic posts they considered the user to be "there to see.")

The gap ended once they shut off this now-vestigial damping, and opened the floodgates to commercial posts showing up in feeds, being shared to non-subscribers the same way organic posts could be, etc.

Other social networks seemed to "follow the trend" on both counts — previously having tuning parameters in their algorithm to protect users from commercial posters flooding their feeds; and then later suddenly "opening the floodgates" in response to organic engagement decline. But (IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong) they didn't all do it at once; each network changed only at the point that that network needed to change to retain metrics in the face of declining organic participation.

Networks like Tiktok, meanwhile, that were born entirely after this sea-change among networks, just let brands into users' FYPs from the start. That was half the point.

You’ve misrepresented the core of your argument. Wikipedia on dark forest hypothesis:

“The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…”

> not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions

Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

No, the argument was exactly the standard form of "Dark Forest."

> > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions

> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

It's not an "adaptation", just an elaboration / amplification / clarification.

N.B, it's written in the negative. And, AIUI, the "Dark Forest" hypothesis does indeed not say that the reason we're not hearing from any alien civilisations is that they're all absolutely uninterested in establishing contact with other alien races (like us), but just fear that some of them would be hostile. So yes, the silence is not "because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions"; only because they're afraid some of those interactions would be distinctly negative-sum.

> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.

It's just seeing it from the other side, still applies IMO. E.g. not talking about politics ("making yourself 'dark'").
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I mean, it's arbitrary, but it's not like it's a contradiction. In both instances, you can start with an assumption of mutual interest in positive-sum interactions, and still end up with a universal threat-assumption.

(And it's also kind of definitional to the meaning of "positive-sum." A positive-sum interaction is better than no interaction. Insofar as a civilization is optimizing for... basically anything, it would prefer positive-sum trade [from which it acquires resources, information, etc] to no trade. At the very least, all else being equal, the resources and information would increase the civilization's odds of survival.)

Let's assume that the vast majority of alien species would like to have positive-sum interactions with other alien civilizations, if that were possible. But they can't assume a guarantee that there isn't at least one civilization that defects into being predators, and would come to destroy them (and any other civilization they could discover through them) if they caught that predatory civilization's attention.

As such, the civilization goes silent, hiding from such predators; and, as such, the civilization immediately punishes any other civilization that may reach out to them, trying to "shut them up" before that other civilization's directed communications reveal their own location. Which means that, in effect, due to simply being aware of the existence of the possibility of such predators, every civilization becomes the very predators they're imagining.

And because every alien civilization can work this out, every civilization can conclude that even if there weren't predators at first, the equilibrium state is for everyone who wasn't a level-1 predator to have become this type of level-2 predator.

(And yes, there is a social-network equivalent of the level-2 predators — these are the "cringe reaction" accounts that get attention by punishing the violations of the performative-perfection norm.)

---

Or, to be formal about it: the dark forest hypothesis is essentially timeless decision theory applied to the game-theoretic tit-for-tat strategy. The same logic that argues that Roko's basilisk can force you to enable its existence before it exists to enforce that, argues that the structure of "the lawless cosmic void"-as-social-network can force your own civilization into choosing "defect" over "cooperate" before you ever actually meet any aliens who could enforce that. Even if your civilization really wants to choose "cooperate"!

The best social network I ever used was private one with a few thousand users. Over time you just know most active users.
Ha ha, the authors says do things that don’t scale, but he used Gemini to write that cliche prose.
"What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too."

—xkcd 1320

Digital Heaven. We may not get it, but our AI death masks will.