[mattikl]

When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.

[jjav]

> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world.

I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!

But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.

What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.

[skydhash]

Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group.

Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback).

The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.

[II2II]

The over generalization of the term social media drives me bonkers. In the olden days we had things like message boards, forums, and chat rooms. Then came social networks. All of those terms reflect some sort of connection between people.

When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting self-promoters (for the lack of a better term) to an audience, not the other way around. As you said: the focus is on the individual, may that be a person or a business.

Perhaps we should be making an effort to distinguish between the two environments, to avoid associating connecting businesses and self-promoters to customers with connecting people to each other.

[safety1st]

The self-promoters, 90% of the time, are either operating an entertainment business, advertising products, or both. So we can still just call it connecting businesses to customers, otherwise known as marketing.

It should all be called social marketing, not social media, as it really just a thin veneer over the Google and Meta ad monopolies.

Your attention was once in other places and it moved onto the Internet. The ad monopolists figured out a way to turn the Internet into a marketing platform, by purchasing their competitors and then gradually changing the features their services offered. They then converted you from a human being into a unit of advertising inventory. Doctorow's reverse centaur aptly describes the phenomenon; the simian body is slaved to the ad machine brain and now follows its command through the magic of cheap psychological tricks.

[skydhash]

> It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around.

A pet peeve of mine is when businesses reject the marketing channel they own (their websites) to adopt platforms like X or Instagram. Use them, yes, but do publish on your own site (and adopt RSS along the way).

[bdangubic]

except no one goes to their website or uses rss. it is unfortunately a waste of time for small niche group that finds it useful

[II2II]

The way I look at it: social media makes you aware of their presence. Actually conducting business usually happens elsewhere. That elsewhere may be physical or virtual.

Another way to look at it is that depending upon social media for anything beyond promotion leaves you at the whim of those companies. Facebook only let's viewers see a limited slice of information unless they log in. Places that used Twitter as a newsfeed ended up showing chaotic junk when Twitter became X, unless the user was logged in. I was doing a web search yesterday that turned up a lot of Yelp results. I didn't realize that Yelp was still a thing. Judging from the content, it probably isn't. The list goes on. As a potential customer, it leaves me with a very dim view of the companies that rely upon social media instead of supplementing their presence with social media.

[skydhash]

What do you want as a business? The void of platforms like X? Or the actual people that took the time to goes to your website to learn more about your offering.

[westurner]

> The old social media was more like going out

>> [Social media] is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around

Originally there were no business accounts, ads, or news feeds on Facebook, for example.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35877603 :

> for the record, e.g. Facebook did originally require a .edu email address at an approving institution

What were the other pivots from that original - textual personal profile and you can only write on other peoples' walls - product to profitability?

[yannyu]

> When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships

I agree entirely with this. I think that it's helpful to remember that "social media" arose to differentiate itself from "traditional media", the social piece is a descriptor not a function. Traditional media has been one-way, and the goal of corporations has been to make social media largely one-way as well but to make it feel like it's not. Social media exists mostly to serve influencers, brands, and celebrities and all of us are eyeballs to monetize.

[Gormo]

Agreed. I consider traditional "virtual communities" (lie Usenet, IRC, BBSes, web message boards, etc.) to be something quite different from modern "social media", and I find the former to be far preferable to the latter.

[FiatLuxDave]

For modern types of "social media", I prefer to use the more accurate term: Gossip Engine.

It tells you exactly what it does in a way that "social media" obscures. Nothing drives engagement like a Gossip Engine!

[camgunz]

There's two distinguishing characteristics:

One: algorithmic feeds (etc) are engineered to addict you

Two: virality stats (views and likes) allow senders to hone message effectiveness based on structure (funny GIF, misspelling, "this you", etc), completely separate from content (white supremacy, authoritarian communism, etc)

This is why Reddit is maybe barely social media, and HN, other forums, IRC, etc, aren't.

[garrickvanburen]

"social media" is forums, IRC, blogs, etc, but through the lens of advertisers.

[deadbabe]

Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?

[diggan]

> Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?

Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page.

Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted before you, and before messages posted after. Everyone's view and message was equal, so pile-ons or hive-mind "this is the right way of thinking" seemed less common.

[scelerat]

I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.

In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.

[swed420]

> I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.

> In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.

The following was built and deployed in Taiwan and proved to be very capable at sidestepping policy gridlock.

I've often wondered if some of the concepts that power it could be applied to help facilitate more generalized discussion and debate (which could also optionally tie into instances of the original political purpose it was built for).

https://www.plurality.net

https://github.com/pluralitybook

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...

[yannyu]

You're right, but we also underestimated how easy it would be to game these systems and how the owners of these platforms would be incentivized to allow or even assist in gaming these systems. Voting solved a problem that existed, but created another one that is arguably worse.

[AstralStorm]

Neither does not have the same shared consistent group of participants.

A forum ultimately ends up a group of more or less known individuals with a focus.

Reddit and HN don't have that feel, chatrooms and such as Discord usually do, unless they get huge and overwhelm Dunbar's number.

The friend feeds like Facebook's are less anonymous, but they do not form topical discussions nor feel like hangouts with the person.

[jfengel]

Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.)

I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about.

You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people.

[jjav]

> Email is still completely open.

Yes, fortunately. Email should always be used, at least as an available option, because it is the only truly open way to communicate electronically.

Recently I bought something and had some hiccups getting it to work and found that the vendor only provides support in one single place: discord. A proprietary platform I can't get access to.

> Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then.

I still read usenet most days ;-)

But no, it is very small compared to the good times. It would take me hours to read through my list of newsgroups in 1990, now at most 10 minutes.

[Braxton1980]

I loved using chat rooms on AOL in the late 90s, later I moved to IRC (dalnet, efnet) and made some close friends. The interactions saved me from horrible depression as in my suburban area I had trouble making friends.

The reason I believe things are different is that the Internet was tech people. People more likely to be logical and rational. Once "regular" people came on they brought their stupidity with them.

[enaaem]

Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community.

Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.

[sunaookami]

Building "reputation" and building yourself a "brand" are the worst things from the forum-era. I will not miss power-tripping mods and users with 20,000 posts writing the dumbest replies possible into every thread asking "why would you do this?", "have you used the search function?", etc. Just because you have many posts doesn't mean the posts are good. Many users ignored high-quality posts from new accounts for example.

[diggan]

Just because the forums you hanged around were like that, doesn't mean every forum was like that. Probably the web forum I hanged around the most on (which is where my HN username originally comes from) has strict rules about each individual post's quality (although enforced bit unevenly), and their contribution to the discussions, in one way or another. Make enough off-topic/shit posts and eventually you'll get banned because of it. The users with a lot of posts usually made well-argued posts.

Each started thread also needed a "basis for discussion" to remain open, and necrobumping was encouraged. The forum still has decade old threads actively being discussed in.

AFAIK, it's still the largest forum in the Nordics, although the moderation team (and voluntary) seem to unfortunately be shrinking rather than increasing, and the forum isn't without its controversies.

[layer8]

Forums aren’t all like that, as the HN comment section demonstrates. While not a full-featured forum, it would be prone to the same effects.

[sunaookami]

Of course not all forums are like that, "only" the vast majority of it is. Even niche-forums suffered from this (or especially they suffered from it). I would not count Hacker News as a forum though. There is no reputation here, no visible karma unless you explicitly click on a profile, no avatar, no signature, etc.

[Telemakhos]

Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem?

Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.

Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.

Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.

[ranger207]

This is my theory too. The internet made it easier to connect with diverse cultures... and then ignore all of them in favor of the one that agreed with you on every point so you could ignore anything that went against your thoughts

[seec]

Yes that's true. Everyone gets to interact with people that are closer to their ideals but it makes society less homogeneous and disconnected locally because there is no geographical grouping.

At the same time people are more mobile than ever because of technological, opportunity and work reasons as well. So, there is a lack of real grounding. Why bother being friends with your neighbors or local people when you can just travel for not very long and visit people you prefer?

It leads to tensions because people live close together but have a very different way of life and sometimes radically different values, even in close quater communities. They end up hating each other secretly because without communication you cannot even begin to empathise.

The social media groups reflect that; they are an echo chamber to cry about people and behaviors you don't like and reinforce your own opinions, behaviors and their superior validity.

There is also the part where large government of the providence state are to be blamed for favoring rampant individualism. Instead of having to deal with friends and family you deal with soulless corporation and obtuse bureaucracy to get your needs met.

When 50 years ago you could drop by to see your doctor, now you call a number, a robot answers and gives you an appointment in one month. It's not just social media that is to blame it's just technology in general that has allowed and basically created a massive bureaucracy for everything, pretending to focus on making things efficient when it basically only consumes value and is just a means of control/surveillance.

[artursapek]

Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.

[dr_dshiv]

Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.

We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.

[diggan]

Ironically, searching "scape web app" today shows "Scape | AI-native CRM that captures all your conversations" which felt very on the nose.

[AstralStorm]

Interesting. Did it get eaten by general baseline interests and lost the focus, ultimately moving to cater to lowest common denominator? Failed or sold?

[dmichulke]

Please continue

[dr_dshiv]

We built scape in 9 months and ran it for 9 months, if I recall. We were all young and naive — it just felt like we failed to make something that “clicked.” Facebook had very few features (pokes and the wall), but they weren’t competing on features. We struggled to get more than a thousand people to sign up across a few NE colleges.

We had this whole social blogging and communication system — it was really very cool in concept. But we had too much of a “if you build it, they will come” marketing plan.

We gave up after a year and a half. We ended up selling a version of it to Teach for America.

I’d consider it a failure — we gave up. I rather wish we’d have tried to raise money, though.. I can’t believe we got as far as we did — different times

[atoav]

When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.

This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.

The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.

The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.

Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.

Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.

I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.

[diggan]

I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely.

Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others.

Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.

[atoav]

I think there is something to be said about the value of the amateur. About not treating everything as a entrepreneurial side project where everything is sacrificed to the financial gods and you make the same choices as everybody else, because everything else would be a risk. Amateurs do things for the heck of it. They don't need it to be polished, they just love what they are doing and want to share that love. If you ever thought about doing anything, a blog, a band, a podcast, a youtube channel, a forum, a new type of thing for which a name has to be found: Do now, think about polish later (if at all).

Places like forums are great, but I don't even think it is strictly necessary need to make one (unless there is a niché that you care for which hasn't been covered). Maybe it is already enough to pick one that exists and to actively participate in it. I remember reading threads where I went like: "Man, these people are really, really into that topic, this is great!"

[Terr_]

> Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces.

Reminds me of the succinctly-demonstrated problem of: https://webcomicname.com/post/185588404109

[vkou]

> they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that).

When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

[corimaith]

Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.

[skydhash]

People existed as username and their signature, but you already know that’s not the real person behind (it could be a dog or a cat for all you know). Now it’s the cult of the persona and the brand.

[weregiraffe]

>connect like-minded people around the world

Traditional forums still exist.

[diggan]

Which ones are the best for the anglophone world currently? I'm struggling to find traditional forums that are still "alive", general enough to cover a broad spectrum and well-moderated to remove all noise.

[weregiraffe]

You are missing the point by looking for a broad spectrum forum. Look for specific, niche forums, where people are interested in the topics discussed, snd not in "being a forum". Broad spectrum anything converges towards looking like social media. Naturally, avoid like a plague any "off-topic" or "politics" subforums. Unless you are in a politics forum, in which case, godspeed.

[mantas]

And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends.

There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.

[3form]

It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.

[anal_reactor]

Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.

[mantas]

So… FB with like and no dislike button?

[esafak]

Youtube does not expose the number of down votes any more. LinkedIn has no dislike button and I find it positively toxic.

[m_fayer]

Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.

[closewith]

HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.

[m_fayer]

HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.

Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.

[diggan]

> to me the difference is plain to see.

Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall.

It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.

[closewith]

> HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.

That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead.

That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble.

> If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.

It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.

[diggan]

> It seems like paid communities

Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account.

It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential.

Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.

[latexr]

> Would serve as an automatic "You're 18"

You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).

https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/

https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a...

And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations.

In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification.

> It just sucks

I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.

[diggan]

> You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).

Yeah, I had one of those myself when I was under 18 too, I think it was called Maestro or something similar. However, it didn't work like a normal credit card (which I think only 18+ can have), platforms were clearly able to reject it, as most things I wanted to buy online didn't work at the time with it (this was early 2000s though), only with my mom's debit card.

Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block? Then requiring credit card "donation" of $N would still basically act as a age verification. I think debit cards might in general be available to people under 18, so filtering to only allow credit cards sounds like a start at least.

Newgrounds literally employed the same strategy for automatically validating a bunch of users, from https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1548205:

> 2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.

Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.

> One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts

Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs. I feel like they get lots of stuff right, from transparent moderation to trying to keep it small but high-quality. The judge is still out on if they got it right or not :)

[awesome_dude]

And people that are not in the "cool kids" group are economically disadvantaged because, even if their contributions are valued, they get on the offside with the powers that be?

When you have people with power over someone else, power to ban, power to economically injure, you end up, almost without fail, with sycophantic groupings.

People only praise those with the power, and anyone foolish enough to disagree, no matter how accurate, are punished.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

Something Awful pulled this off with a $10 lifetime subscription, cheap enough that most can afford it, but it's expensive enough that a bot farm wouldn't bother, and the admins are quick with suspensions and bans if you act like an asshole.

[Jordan_Pelt]

I'm not so sure. Every so often I browse Metafilter (remember Metafilter?) out of morbid fascination, and it's a total trainwreck. I don't think it's a model for success.

[awesome_dude]

When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.

That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)

There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars

I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.

[diggan]

> I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.

We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.

[awesome_dude]

> is often called "brigading" instead

Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.

[RossBencina]

I never heard of the Meow Wars, but I do remember antiorp, a net-art mailing list disruption organisation:

https://everything2.com/title/antiorp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)

EDIT: clarity

[neiman]

I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great.

It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.

[coffeebeqn]

There’s a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.

[UmGuys]

Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.

[willtemperley]

I do wonder if this is just a symptom of monetization. Free advertising with viral posts was possible for talented marketers until the early 2010s. Now you have to pay.

OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger. Meeting this person in person sometime later, it turned out this message was never delivered. They'd thought I was working for the company that sued them.

[UmGuys]

The shift was the news feed IMO. You have to consider the profit model. Users are the product.

[HPsquared]

An AI chatbot is just the next stage on "like-minded people" continuum. It's a machine that bends over backwards to match what the user wants from it. (Maybe unhealthy but it's just the next step after interacting with anon posters over a shared niche interest)

[cyanydeez]

Social-mediated capitalism is what they built. Puting AI in there just makes it easier.