[haburka]

I think that social media has been a massive experiment where we asked, what if we let capital interests subvert our desire for community to get us to watch ads? And we have learned that it’s just not a good idea. I think perhaps Digg was one of the better ones but I solemnly wish social media was mostly illegal, especially advertising based, for profit sites.

I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.

[phailhaus]

This doesn't make sense, since it's advertisers who are the ones putting pressure on sites like Twitter to stop spreading extremist content.

The problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers where they are told they are right all the time. That's what they will do by default. So if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly. If you figure out how to power a social network without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.

[ecocentrik]

Wrong take. The social or political positions that advertisers take are all strategically calculated to maximize sales and they take those position regardless of the advertising platform.

Correct take: Monetization pressure creates engagement pressure which is unnatural for human social communities outside of temporary fads and social upheaval events. In social terms Facebook, X, Truth Social... are thirsty and can only continue to grow if they convince you to be thirsty too.

[phailhaus]

Like I said: any system that optimizes for engagement has this problem. Advertising revenue scales with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Advertisers are not picking and choosing particular policy positions to place ads on. They're targeting certain demographics, and want to make sure their ads are not next to trash content. So ironically, ads both cause companies to optimize for engagement but they also force moderation.

If you fixate on dropping ads but still optimize for engagement, you get the worst of both worlds.

[bognition]

People forget that there a billionaires at the helm of these companies putting their feet on the scale of what is shown.

They are not impartial nor are the benevolent. They have a vested interest in influencing the content people are exposed to. They can hide behind the “social” components and say “we’re innocent here we just show the content people engage with” meanwhile they directly influence what content gets a chance to be interacted with.

[dingnuts]

it doesn't even matter. I've run a small community at a loss, for "fun", for the better part of a decade and people just go elsewhere when the winds change and they find themselves no longer in an echo chamber they agree with. everyone just wants to shout into the void and be validated and it doesn't even matter who the audience is

it's extremely disheartening actually

[scoofy]

I am trying to build a Wikipedia for golf course architecture. Free shared info, genuinely about showing pride in your home club, printable yardage books if people make them…

The biggest response I get is “yea but the info on my course is blank, this sucks.”

I suspect there are only like 10% of folks who are remotely altruistic, and maybe 0.1% that would bother to even quickly edit Wikipedia if they found an error.

The vast majority of social media is carried by a few folks who genuinely want to connect and share things they love. After that the follow along is people critiquing, which is fine (I’m doing it now) but it doesn’t actually build anything.

[SirFatty]

"People forget that there a billionaires at the helm of these companies putting their feet on the scale of what is shown."

Yes, people do realize that.

[amy_petrik]

problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers

and the walls of the echo chambers are built of addicting infinite feed algorithms, that's the core of it, outrage exchanging outrage amongst people who agree on one thing - THIS OUTRAGES ME

[tempfile]

Case in point, 4chan

[whywhywhywhy]

Funnily enough it still has ads.

[ecocentrik]

For sex toys, Ozempic and ED medication.

[xp84]

> if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly.

Agree completely

> without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.

Disagree: without ads, moving the needle from “quite enjoyable” to “utterly addicting” doesn’t make your site twice as profitable. With ads it does. So the need that all social media has today, to promote ragebait and drive them to obsession is far, far less if you weren’t on an ad-based monetization.

> pressure to moderate content

We didn’t have censors in every living room in America before FB making sure you don’t say anything doubleplus ungood and yet political discourse is horrifying now compared to before. I question the need for “moderators” to combat wrongthink by deleting it.

[phailhaus]

That has nothing to do with ads, that has to do with monetization. Every site needs to be monetized somehow. Ads scale with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Any monetization scheme that scales with engagement will have this issue.

[xp84]

So, a flat-rate subscription would not have that issue.

[LexiMax]

Something Awful was ahead of the curve by charging $10 for access.

[phailhaus]

Yes. Nobody has figured out how to get people to pay for social networks though, at scale. The free ones destroy the competition.

[jaggs]

The problem is not ads per se, it's that in order to be effective, ads need to be intrusive. And as a site becomes more successful, it attracts more advertiser competition, which in turn forces ads to become more intrusive to cut through the noise. And that's the start of the enshitification we all know and love. :)

[netcan]

Im not sure that advertising specifically is the issue.

I think a lot of the ills of social media are ills of the medium itself... once it reaches "everyone scale," game theory maturity and whatnot.

Anyway the way past it is probably to go past it... and onto the next medium. Back is rarely an available option.

On that note... its curious that Digg now describes itself as a "community platform," not a social network. Ironic, considering they bought the name "digg."

Speaks to the "late stage social media" meme.

[bee_rider]

Hackernews remains mostly ok by focusing on a niche that’s always been easy on the Internet for obvious reasons: tech. Once it strays even one step away, like the intersection of tech and policy, or the intersections of science and humanities, guaranteed you will get some totally ridiculous takes.

And, HN can only not-rely on advertising because it exists as a sort of funny pseudo-advertisement thing for some startup incubator.

[sapphicsnail]

I think the lack of notifications is also a big factor. It's harder to get addicted and harder to start fights.

[frantathefranta]

You are definitely right there, reddit has become more annoying because even old reddit now has chat pinging me all the time. And every single time I post a comment on my iPhone reddit I get reminded to subscribe to notifications for comment replies.

[ryandvm]

Hackernews mostly survives because it's the Y Combinator sponsored boardwalk over the incessantly sucking carp of tech bro daydreamers hoping for success by osmosis.

[gct]

Let's just start shifting the overton window: let's make all paid advertisement illegal y'all.

[Nextgrid]

Hard to get the political momentum to do that now that we've surrendered humanity's social fabric to the advertisement industry.

[giancarlostoro]

I've thought about how I'd build one and I keep landing on content based ads, give me ads that target page content. You are already interested in the content you see, so why not. Generic "show everyone you can" ads should also be fine, and slightly discounted. But I do wonder if it would even be enough to keep the lights on.

[coldpie]

The trouble is that ad-based business models incentivize maximizing engagement, because more engagement gives you more places to put ads. It turns out maximizing engagement is the primary driver of all of the bad things about social media, and honestly the modern internet as a whole. Regardless of how the ads are chosen, ad-based models will always end up at the same place: pushing extremist content in order to maximize engagement.

[nemomarx]

you'd think Reddit could handle this, since subreddits are very narrow and coupled to interests. but I guess you'd also think a PC review site would be able to do the same thing and not show car ads or etc

[giancarlostoro]

The old internet used to be like this, you'd pick the type of ads you wanted on your site, so a lot of sites had ads that looked like the content on the site.

[jtbayly]

HN has advertising too. I don’t claim it’s the same, but let’s be accurate.

[rchaud]

Not remotely the same thing. HN's ads are text-only job postings for companies in YC's portfolio. "Online ads" on the other hand are an unregulated wasteland of scams, dropship brands, misinformation, titillation, and culture war ragebait.

[southwindcg]

True, but how many sites allow users to down-vote or flag the advertisements? A lot of the blatant ad posts wind up flag-killed and only people who have "show dead" enabled ever see them.

[jtbayly]

No, you cannot vote up or down the official ads on HN.

[_DeadFred_]

Hacker news is not an app for cheap entertainment. Social media is. Hacker news is predominantly used by professionals, entrepreneurs, and/or tech interested/adjacent people. Social media isn't. Internet access and historical self selecting of people who sought out online spaces for interaction/community (it was not the norm, nor as acceptable, in fact often considered weird) acted as a gatekeeper that previously skewed early social media to have a different user base than today.

[babypuncher]

I think algorithmically curated social media feeds should be regulated the way we do tobacco. Massive education campaigns and obnoxious labeling laws so that everyone and their dog knows it's toxic. Maybe take away their safe harbor while we're at it. The algorithm is a form of editorial control after all, so it can no longer be argued that these sites simply function as a "public square".

[IgorPartola]

Digg was more of a news aggregator than “social media” which I see as user generated posts + profile interactions. As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.

I do think you are right about the rest as it applies to Twitter and Facebook.

[Shog9]

Digg rather famously did have both followers and "influencers", though not in quite the same sense that those creatures are known today. Arguably its failure to limit the impact of both are what led to the forms we see today.

There's been an awful lot written about all of this over the years, much of it overly simplistic and some of it just straight-up wrong; we all want to believe that we're just plain smarter than the ancients, even when those ancients were us.

If you're interested in (ahem) digging into this, start by searching for things like "Digg voting network".

[bee_rider]

Social Media and News aggregation are not entirely different things, right? I mean, in the sense that News (and other link) Aggregation was one of the things that grew into Social Media. I think you are right to say it is more of an aggregation site, but also it’s worth nothing that in Digg’s heyday, Social Media was barely a thing.

Social networking was a thing. Social networking, link aggregation, discussion boards—it’s like pouring milk, hot sauce, and vodka into a vat to get Social Media.

[andrewinardeer]

MrBabyMan was a pre-influencer influencer.

I'm convinced he was paid to post stories to drive traffic to sites.

Of course I don't have evidence to support this. It was over 20 years ago.

[linker3000]

> As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.

Yep, some personalities on Digg had their groupies and if they posted something, all their followers would vote it up the listing, in effect the post was influenced.

That's when I bailed because genuinely interesting stuff not posted by the 'right' people had no chance of exposure.

[AlecSchueler]

> I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.

It's also worth considering that you could just be part of the right demographic that finds it palatable. I know in certain circles the HN groupthink on women's issues for example are seen as a meme.