I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp, http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other humans.
The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social. I distinctly recall when my group of friends had stopped calling around each week to figure out what we were going to do on the weekend. I was calling people to find out what they were up to... and I got that condescending call to action, just get on Facebook.
So I did. I tried it for about a year or two. And it didn't make the web any better or more social for me. It would recommend events to attend and I'd go... but people would just be in their cliques not talking to anyone outside of their groups. Even learning about upcoming concerts and events required a Facebook account. People stopped calling and hanging out. It was all very passive: like, like, comment, meme, har, har.
So I closed down my Facebook account and haven't used it since 2009 or so. The "social web" has only become more anti-social.
Most of these web services made quite a lot of interesting innovations and such but I can't help but wonder what the web would've been like if we'd stayed true to its roots and improved the protocols and infrastructure instead of centralizing everything behind walled gardens.
It's a bit disingenuous to pretend (The) Facebook didn't do anything to connect people. Maybe it's because I graduated High School in 2003, but in early 2005 it was amazing to be able to connect to people you either went to high school with or went to your own university, people who were often living parallel lives but you just didn't know because your high school friends went out-of-state or college was large enough that you would never interact with them. At that point, you could click on anything in anybody's profile and you'd be able to find people who self-identified with that tag, be it music, movies, or anything else. Most of these people were average computer users, they weren't denizens of LiveJournal/Xanga/internet forums, but they were possibly acquainted with Myspace, which was already a ghetto by 2004.
I had friends who were disappointed by the fact that you couldn't style your Facebook page (or track who was visiting your profile). Facebook cleaned up the mess that was Myspace and made it palatable and connecting easy.
Over time, Facebook preferred connecting you to people already in your IRL social network instead of new people, and that's when it started getting boring.
I'm not pretending that it didn't do anything to connect people. It did. In my anecdote the friends who stopped calling around started using Facebook to organize our activities together. But therein was the problem for me: nobody had to actively maintain relationships that way. Socializing became a spectator sport. Passive. It became anti-social.
But prior to its existence I still had plenty of friends and we socialized quite a lot using existing technology. It just seems like the Facebook hype-train carried us along and abandoned protocols for services. And the centralization brought along everything with it: the need for users and stickiness sucked up a lot of effort that could've been spent elsewhere but wasn't.
So I wonder what the Internet would be like today if instead we had developed the protocols to work around their short-comings rather than went on the path we did, that's all.
In my experience, the "calling around" thing was something that started when everyone got a cellphone. Prior to about 1999, folks would actually just drop by your house unannounced sometimes.
That's a good point. I also didn't get a cell phone until very late in 2004, and most people I know got them in 2003-2005. I prefaced my comment with my graduation year (2003) because I think the thing that maybe matters a lot is when you came of age between ~1999-2007. Technology was changing so fast on almost a yearly basis in that time frame it's probable people with a 2 year age difference has a widely different experience of being teenagers and young adults. I don't think the same can be said of 2009-2017.
"calling around" started in 1999? I assure you that's how it was for decades prior to 1999 ;-)
We just had to sit by the single rotary phone in the kitchen with a 8ft curly cord that was so tangled, it was really only 4ft. Had to deal with lots of busy signals because even once call-waiting was invented, it cost $3 per month and no parent raised during the Great Depression could imagine committing to that expense!
This last year I made the connection that Facebook only provided the illusion that I was socializing with past friends.
Sure, I know what is going on in the lives of my buddies from high school and college. I know when they have a kid, bought a house, that they switched jobs, that they moved out to Denver, etc. But I realized that I had learned all of this through passive consumption.
With the exception of three close friends, the vast majority of my "friends" list are people who I haven't directly messaged, spoken to, or even written on their "wall" in ten years. At this junction, I'm more of a voyeur into their lives then an actual participant.
I haven't deleted my FB account, but I have stopped browsing it. I've started to pick out people who I would really like to re-connect with and then using the platform to start real conversation with people and perhaps drop in for lunch when I pass through their cities. And then perhaps, un-friend everyone not important enough to my life to value maintaining that kind of a connection.
> Most of these web services made quite a lot of interesting innovations and such but I can't help but wonder what the web would've been like if we'd stayed true to its roots and improved the protocols and infrastructure instead of centralizing everything behind walled gardens.
In my view, we should let academia develop the protocols, and let companies deliver the basic tools (such as hardware). This makes sure that innovation happens in a way that people find useful (not serving advertisement/shareholder goals), and also keeps data out of the hands of companies (because universities will develop federated protocols to keep data safe, and companies actually have no business looking into our data).
This would be a quite bit like how the internet worked in the old days (with universities and government agencies running the internet, and companies providing the hardware).
> In my view, we should let academia develop the protocols, and let companies deliver the basic tools (such as hardware). This makes sure that innovation happens in a way that people find useful (not serving advertisement/shareholder goals), and also keeps data out of the hands of companies (because universities will develop federated protocols to keep data safe, and companies actually have no business looking into our data).
And what would you do if companies wanted to develop protocols, and people wanted to use them?
The verb "let" sounds very innocuous here, but this is poorly thought-out at best, and extremely sinister at worst.
Facebook did two things: make everyone part of the network (from your grandma to your 9 year old nephew), and made it not nerdy to use. the raw web, irc, newsgroups, were all for nerds.
> Most of these web services made quite a lot of interesting innovations and such but I can't help but wonder what the web would've been like if we'd stayed true to its roots and improved the protocols and infrastructure instead of centralizing everything behind walled gardens.
These walled gardens were built on top of the open web and they are winning (at least at the moment).
How would you stop them from taking over? Regulation?
I share your sentiments, I remember those "social networks" i.e. forums, irc, etc being a place that actually were centered around social activities. In the late 90s and early 2000s there were numerous communities with their own flare and "internet culture" (in a positive way), they facilitated local meet-ups and were genuinely friendly to new members. Even though users were pseudonymous there wasn't as much hostility as it is now behind the real names on fb, probably because those communities were small and you users actually knew each other. I'm not sure what happened, maybe bullies and jocks found their way to the web, maybe everyone just suddenly became superficial, maybe it's generational changes, who knows...
It's sad in a way, there are glimpses of hope emerging, like matrix and mastodon. Fb has eaten the social networks as I knew it and it came out of the other end to the point that I sometimes call it faecesbook, that summaries it well for me.
It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and self-determination that Western society has been building up since the Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted advertising.
Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation.
You really can't see the difference between the kind of advertising this guy is complaining about and a link to a personal website / manifesto complaining about advertising? Really?
Yes, we did! Self-promotion in a relevant context (in a discussion of a worsening problem which affects many) is a very different undertaking than paid, off-topic advertising.
The period since Enlightenment in West contains two world wars, genocide, nationalists movements, monarchy keeping in power through censorship, revolutionary attempts, KKK ... All of them totally full of critical thinking and self-determination for sure.
These aren't developments that should be encouraged. The political influence of targeted advertising on social media has encouraged and enabled several nationalist movements. We believe that the lack of an open communication platform makes accessing and discussing complex ideas, whether ethical or political, much harder.
Till today, I don't see any value in real name social networks like Facebook. They should present content I want but they don't, they show upvoted content from my connections which is wrong from a consumer and entertainment perspective.
My friends like or share mostly content of people because those people are kind of high-profile in their circles. Not because they post good content. The typical example, we all know, is some boring dude working at a VC that just raised a new fund who hourly posts really crappy content on FB and gets hundreds of likes every single time. Now, guess why. This happens all the time, everyday, every minute, just go to your FB feed right now and check how many of those high-status animals post again and again some random content which is liked and shared by too many likers.
So, the status of my connections determine which (lousy) content I have to see? No thanks and this is why I prefer interest-driven platforms such as HN.
Unfortunately, you missed out on the brief time in history when they did exactly what you were asking for.
MySpace had no likes and no algorithm to filter your activity. Neither did Facebook for several years, nor did LiveJournal (and all the other social blogging platforms), or even Instagram at first.
No, MySpace and Facebook didn't what I was asking for because they didn't have any feed then.
With MySpace and Facebook in its early days, I could just stalk profiles and both didn't serve me any content based on my interest. On MySpace I could browse through some music genres but this is not my understanding of an interest-driven site.
Twitter has had a feed from the beginning and served you content you wanted, as long as you subscribed to the right people. It still does, as long as you only follow a few people.
The grandparent post was about FB and MySpace, not Twitter.
However, Twitter is a different beast. They got better over time because Twitter evolved from a friends network to kind of a interest-driven network. At the beginning people were following friends and then you had the same dissatisfying outcome like with FB (nobody wants to unfollow a crap-posting friend and muting wasn't available then). But nowadays you rather follow people on Twitter based on interest or because you share the same industry, etc.
Thankfully, RSS lives on. I follow 40-50 feeds using a native app, and pay a few bucks a month to host an ad-free blog that offers its own feed. My blog software even automatically posts links to Facebook for the weirdos who try to follow it there. I'm not sure how well that works, though, since I refuse to pay to "boost" those links.
Also ot, Facebook news feed is pretty terrible and filled with garbage. LinkedIn news feed is just a garbage truck off pointlessnes. I was trying to update my contact list and got so frustrated with the experience, I had a moment: do I need LinkedIn? Nope. Delete account.
I like seeing pictures and videos of my friends having fun! I love all the travel/holiday memorabilia and baby pics - it reminds me that life is short, it's a big world out there, and that you should be good to your loved ones.
You can also hide posts from your bitcoin friends and your boring VC friends ;)
call me nostalgic, but i refuse to let go of that internet. There are plenty of alternatives that dont get a multi billion dollar TV ad blitz, and theyre worth checking out
I maintain to this day a personal IRC network. Many of us have been “together” for over a decade. In fact I just tried to advocate self-hosted communities at CCC. So I’m also stuck in the past and refuse to let the internet go. But I have two points I’d like to mention.
1) Forums are dead for almost all but the biggest communities that surround a product of some kind. Social forums are simply dead.
2) As an IRC-user mentioned at the CCC. Facebook is the new telephone number. It’s significantly easier to ask for a Facebook friend request than a phone number and that edge will keep Facebook relevant even if we saw a rise in self-hosted or segmented interest driven communities.
Spam is the reason Facebook is currently the easiest way to get in touch with someone. Otherwise you could just put your email address in a publicly searchable database. It seems like we need a service that provides the verification and permission based communication model of Facebook but without the public feeds, virtue signaling, and political garbage.
Spam drove people to Facebook even in the early days. When Facebook first came out, spam filtering was far less effective than it is today. Also, for whatever reason, people trusted Facebook and would post private things there that they wouldn't post on pseudonymous forums.
The phone is best way to get a hold of someone. Other than that, linkedin is more formal, but more easily searchable. Facebook is composed of spam, resposted memes from 4chan, and a ton of inactive accounts, IMHO.
> 1) Forums are dead for almost all but the biggest communities that surround a product of some kind. Social forums are simply dead.
The Something Awful forums are still pretty lively. The community may not 'click' for everyone, but some of the smaller subforums especially are very welcoming and fun places (like Automotive Insanity, the subforum where people post about their car projects and project cars)
Hear, hear! My friend group in high school had its own Proboards forum and we spent so much of our free time on there. (And we weren't the only ones, either.) I'd say the split was 60-40 male/female. We talked about everything—political topics, gaming, arts and crafts, literature—and I owe much of my development as a kid to those conversations. It makes me sad that those kinds of half-online, half-offline communities don't seem to be around much anymore. It felt like we owned our own little plot of online land, tended to it, inhabited it. It was nothing like renting some page space on Facebook or standing on a Twitter soapbox.
After reading the delightful chapter on Community Memory in "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", I've been thinking of ways to get back to this local, more intimate style of online conversation. It seems that with the centralized nature of the web, an abundance of resources leads to the formation of a limited few communication hubs to which everyone gravitates. How easy would it be to create some sort of mesh network hub or beacon that would only let people in a local area connect to each other and create their own decentralized forums or databases? Thinking back on my high school forum experiences, the success of things like Nextdoor, local community events such as UC Bekeley's Anoncon, and even things like Geocaching, I think this could be an incredible paradigm shift for those who are tired of the overwhelming numbers and impersonality of today's "social" web.
It's only the spark of an idea, but few things excite me more than the social possibilities of a publicly-accessible network firmly and intrinsically rooted in a particular physical area!
I think a more fair view of the term social media should be as a marketing term? When these tech giants were growing they needed a name to refer to them as a whole, but that name reflected what they wanted those services to be viewed as, not the effects they came to have. We see this everywhere in how labelling of things appeal to some of our inner desires -- in this case the need of social interactions -- and not necessarily accurately describing their effects.
I think the main reason these services exist at all is not to create social mediums but to tap into the flows of human communication for profit. And, since their version of communication is, in the true social aspect, an incredibly crippling one compared to the rich, immersive experience of more old ways of interacting -- no wonder we can be left with a deeply dissatisfying feeling when use social media services.
But be under no illusions - I ran a Star Trek site in the late 90s that had adverts on, every month or so I'd get a cheque trough the post. In dollars. My bank were somewhat confused about how to cash foreign currency cheques into a child account.
I ran a forum with a decent amount of users as a kid some 15 years ago. We had no ads but once a year when the bills came through we'd have a donation drive to cover the hosting fees and sometimes upgrade our (paid) forum software. Was always weird when people sent letters with cash from all over the DACH area to me ;)
I had a similar experience with my BBS. We did UUCP with some rather remote nodes and I had 11 incoming lines (the maximum BellSouth would install in a residence) so the bills were not trivial. Each month I’d post the prior month’s bill total and small checks and envelopes of cash would show up in my post office box soon after. It never made a wild profit, but there were only a couple of months where we couldn’t cover the bills.
One of the biggest differences in my mind between the Internet described in the article and the social networks of today (at least for me) is the forums and IRC channels I frequented were filled with people who genuinely enjoyed talking to one another and even cared for one another. I still have friends 15 years later that I’ve never met and so many great memories. I can’t say the same for FB or Twitter.
And the “heart of a sysadmin” statement hit so close to home.
In 2005, I used to be in a Battlefield 2 online community with game servers, SMF Forums, and ventrilo for VOIP. I used to play pretty regularly, but when not playing we would all talk and learn from each other. There were maybe 30 people at most from age 15 to 50 years old.
The way we sustained the servers was everyone pitching in to pay maybe $5 to $15 per month.
Moderation and Adminstratuon was volunteer based and people who donated had priority.
We eventually became some of the most popular BF2 servers and it made for interesting social interaction when the admins had to come together to make a decision if someone was cheating or just really good.
I’m sure communities like that still exist but I haven’t played many online games since then. Those were the days :)
The difference is who owns and pays for what. Running a centralized application for more than a few people on donations and goodwill is a challenge.
This is why I am a huge fan of distributed and federated networks. The idea of you and your buddies being able to split a dream host subscription, but instead of being locked into your own forum hangout, you can interact with a whole global network of fellow self posters and VPS renters. We are in the early days of high-quality federated interaction for non-nerds, but we will get there.
An open conversation service needs to be open to all, not just people with tech skills; we need to prevent large numbers of people feeling locked out of discourse, or left behind.
Also, many of the distributed/federated services we've looked at have rapidly devolved into niche communities often centred around sexual content. These two reasons lead us to think that a centralised service is more open and approachable.
With regards to mastodon, there's at least one hosting service specifically for it already (https://masto.host), and people who don't know that much about the Linux command line/etc have set up their own instances using it.
Facebook killed most of the old social communities. The big ones where very lucrative basically swimming in cash, they where only replaced by a bigger fish. The non profit forums and IRC channels are still alive. What worries me though is that so many people use smartphones instead of work-station computers. With a smartphone you are mostly a consumer/by-stander. While on a work-station you are actively taking part by both producing and consuming. There are a lot of really high quality content produced by professionals for profit. But the best content and Internet culture is still made by "ordinary" people for the love of sharing. I hope the good content is not buried by monetized content. There should be more "Hacker News" and less Google and Facebook ads.
And you've just described how Instagram and Snapchat took off. You don't need a work-station to post the content. All you need is a camera and a couple of seconds of your life and you're contributing something.
Sure, that content might be crappy photo of your breakfast or a short video of you puking rainbow, but it's a content that regular people submitted with little or no effort simply because they had a phone with a camera that they spend most of their time on the Internet on, not a laptop or a desktop.
Uploading photos is not that impressive. You've been able to do that on a PC from the 90's. While it has been interesting to see the 90's repeat itself on the phones, the smartphone's hardware have already surpassed, and there's really no excuse to have such a limited io-interface. The problem is the big players are just fine with their users being just consumers. One step in the right direction is the note (pen/stylus input) devices that give much better precision then using your thumbs, which makes it possible to take advantage of all that screen resolution. What we'll see next is an extra fold-able screen that will give more screen real estate. And general purpose hardware buttons on the sides and back, that apps can use for special functionality. And better voice processing using camera plus mic, so you can talk to the phone.
I believe the point is that with workstations you get more of a verbal culture, not visual. You have to put more effort into a quality textual post than into a crappy photo of your breakfast. Accessing Internet via phones contributes to the vicious cycle: it's not very convenient to write and read text, you'd better post a photo or watch a video.
You don't have to use corporate sites like Facebook and Pinterest. Check out scuttlebutt.nz for a serverless alternative, or Mastodon for one where anybody can host a server. Or just stick to forums and IRC.
No, you don't have to. But if everyone you know does, then you have to make a choice. I've had the same "just get on Facebook" experience as the article's author, and it isn't just about "what are we doing this weekend?" It's about human social behavior changing to fit the model implemented by Facebook, because Facebook tries so hard, and so successfully, to be sticky, that eventually everyone is on Facebook. If you're not, then once that's happened, you're no longer part of "everyone", because Facebook's design very successfully seeks to maximize the degree to which people prefer it as an exclusive medium of social interaction, because that's the same as maximizing its revenue stream. The people who run Facebook, and who build it, have by now gotten very, very good at doing exactly that. And their userbase is such that, whatever adverse effects their model of revenue maximization by social behavior monopolization may have, it is by now having them on about one-third of the entire human species. If we include all the other behemoths which use similar models, the fraction of humanity affected grows markedly - half? More?
Yeah, I know, it sounds absurd and dystopian and like something you'd hear from an ideologue of the RMS stripe. Well, I have my differences with RMS, and we've had them out in public before now. And I'd have regarded the things I'm saying as dismissively as anyone might, if I'd heard someone saying them a few years ago. But that would've been a few years ago. Times change.
It was around the time I missed the second wedding, followed by the second chance encounter with one of the parties thereto, and the second heartfelt apology, and the second "but you should really get on Facebook", that I started to really think something was up other than that everyone had just quietly and comprehensively dropped me, over the space of a few months, because I was just that unpleasant a person to have around. Sure, that was my default assumption. But it would seem unlikely in that case for the apologies to be so heartfelt, or indeed to occur at all; they needn't have, no more than the entire conversations in which they occurred, if those who made them hadn't chosen to engage when they saw me out and about. They could've quietly walked the other way. Instead they hailed me and started conversations, in order to apologize for having unintentionally snubbed me, and to warn me I'd better get on Facebook if I didn't want more of the same.
So I had to think something else was up, something outside my own constant suspicion that I exist in the world purely on sufferance and should not be too surprised when that sufferance ceases - and I started looking around for what it might be. What I found was other people who'd had the same kinds of experiences that led me to start looking in the first place. People like the author of this article, who'd also watched their social circles disintegrate around them, and be reconstituted in a form which did no longer include them, in order to make a lot of money for a dozen or so thousand people mostly in California.
Now I've got no problem with people making a lot of money. This is America, after all. And I don't think anyone who works for Facebook is evil, at least not in any higher proportion than the population at large; you get a few bastards in every hundred, sure, but there's no reason to imagine Facebook uniquely concentrates them somehow. But none of that changes the fact that, in the cause of building something that makes those people a lot of money, they have produced a machine for the deliberate mass modification of human social behavior, the like of which history has never yet seen.
I don't know. I feel like there's nothing unreasonable in thinking such a situation has implications a bit beyond "well you don't have to use it". Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I really am the problem here, and Facebook is just a bugaboo. Maybe that's true for everyone else with a story like mine, too. But what if it isn't? Wouldn't that seem a little dystopian to you, there being a website in a position to mediate your friendships? It seems a little dystopian to me.
I understand where you're coming from, but ultimately it is your decision to stay on Facebook. If you ever want to try something different then try Scuttlebutt. All of your data there is stored in your own blockchain, and then you exchange these blockchains with others. There is no central server or identification authority.
The UI is very much in an alpha state but the SSB protocol is solid, so the blockchain itself will outlive any particular UI version. It might actually be able to scale without having a central authority run it, which gives a glimpse of a future without Facebook.
Every time I talk about this, people assume I'm on Facebook. Why is it that, every time I talk about this, people assume I'm on Facebook? I talked about this and you assumed I'm on Facebook, so you should be able to explain at least one reason why, every time I talk about this, people assume I'm on Facebook.
Because everyone is. I quit Facebook for a year or two, trying to get people to email or WhatsApp or whatever. didn't work. So I lived with people closer to me reaching out to my SO through Facebook, or sending messages in another way. I eventually made an account again because there were instances where an alternative solution was too much of a pita. So I now check every other week, respond to messages when I have time, and ignore the rest. I think I've posted one thing in the past year.
Still trying to get people to contact me through WhatsApp or signal, which works really well for the NL (>95% have wa), but not so much for international friends. I mostly don't get the drive, the need to post mundane things on there. I just can't get myself to believe anyone will care that I took a picture of me eating lunch, or whatever.
> Those "social networks" were small, and never made front-page news (or any news at all), and were more concerned with keeping to themselves than recruiting new members.
And I'm supposed to be convinced that those small forums weren't anti-social in their own important ways?
Such as? It wasn't that you never brought new people in. It was that you weren't operating under a perverse incentive to bring in as many new people as you could.
Such as being subject to the whims of random administrator/moderators and whatever random set of principles they wished to apply to their users.
The most striking example I can remember was with Rick and Morty creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that is no longer alive, but it appears someone kept some of Dan's insults from that thread[1].
But that pales in comparison to more technically-oriented forums and mailing lists where insidious forms of passive-aggression flourished. These include:
* making the new user feel stupid for failing to comprehend the poor documentation or poorly considered forum guidelines
* making the new user feel stupid for asking a question and failing to read a relevant footnote from a message posted three years ago with an unrelated message topic
* endlessly blathering on about top-posting, asking-about-asking, proper quoting, on-topic vs off-topic, reading-the-stickies, formats for uploading images/attachments, instead of making the software better so that humans don't have to deal with that bs. (The same way git makes it so that humans don't have to bicker about who gets repository permissions)
* telling a user they will be ignored, then mentioning in a meta-discussion about the forum who is ignoring whom
* other users rationalizing the behavior of trolls because those trolls were veteran members
* general lack of mentors to help new users (if the purpose of the forum was to be a sort of community)
There are of course exceptions. But I still remember the feeling of just crossing my fingers in the hopes that my query about a technical topic wouldn't trigger Socratic bombs from a forum's resident jerk.
Stack Overflow proves there's a way to at least a way to discover and read relevant responses without that pain. I have no idea what the antidote to Facebook/Google is. But pining for single-point-of-failure, buggy backends serving up poor UIs with content that cannot easily bubble up to a wider audience isn't going to help.
And forget the anti-social part-- you can't even technically achieve the spirit of such forums today because sock puppets and Sybil have become so sophisticated. Unless we confine ourselves to topics so ineffectual that nobody on the internet would ever decide to hate us.
Okay first of all I've seen Rick and Morty and there is no way in the world I'd spend one millisecond I didn't have to around the people who create that show. If I ran a bar in a Western and Dan Justiharmoroiland walked in, I'd go for the shotgun. The show is occasionally funny and constantly evidence that the minds behind it are deadly toxic to everyone in their blast radius. Like Bill Hicks with a sack of crystal meth and a great big hard-on. So I'm not sure how much Dan Harmon being Dan Harmon counts as an example, is what I'm saying. That guy's going to ruin whoever he's around just by being who he is.
But this all misses the point. What we're talking about here isn't "content" bubbling up to "audiences". It's people keeping in touch with one another, and making themselves places to hang out on the Internet and arrange to hang out off it. I mean, yeah, some people are going to be assholes. That's not really a problem for technology to solve. "Don't hang out with assholes" is maybe not that hard? But this isn't, like, Buffy or X-Files forums we're talking about here. It's "hey, let's put up a thing so we can talk to each other". If anyone can just sign up to join whatever you're thinking of, then whatever you're thinking of isn't really what we're talking about here, because what we're talking about here is more than anything like long-running group chats avant la lettre, using whatever technology happens to be available. Using technology, shaping it to fit one's purpose, and not the other way around. That's the distinction toward which we're struggling here, I think.
On old forums (at least the ones I was part of) the community was usually small, and you knew most users and what they thought.
Instead on hn most of the comments I see are from people I don't think I ever read from before.
Also, here we don't officially have PMs or an official IRC channel, both of which were major parts of the communities I remember (most of the stuff actually happened on IRC, not on the forums).
Absolutely. HN isn't about meeting people, it's about discussing ideas. A very worthwhile objective in its own right, but the two shouldn't be confused.
Kinda, except HN exists and is popular largely due to YC's popularity, which is very closely tied to the new style of ad-financed, VC-linked, revenue oriented social networks.
For the record, I don't think that's a good or bad thing. Just a reality of this community.
I personally find that threaded discussion substantially worsens the social aspects. When the “best” comments float to the top, any topic turns into soapbox vs. soapbox and actual conversation rapidly breaks down. Social norms are also reinforced and very little change happens in practice.
In a linear discussion, topics don’t die when they reach the width of the page. People can go back and forth on an idea for days or weeks. I believe this property is very important for fostering bonds and maintaining a community spirit. Otherwise, everyone just becomes a collection of their pet ideas.
OP mentions Paul Ford's tilde club [1], [2]. I really must get around to putting up one of these locally soon - if only to learn about running a Web server in the wild.
BTW, thanks for mentioning the tilde club! Hadn't heard about that before... A lovely passage from the Medium article:
[Talking about the history of Unix] Fast forward 20 years: Your typical “cloud” Unix server, designed in the 1970s to be a very social place, is today a ghost town with one or two factories still clanking in the town square—factories that receive our email, or accept our Instagram photos and store them, and manage our data. But there’s no one walking around and chatting downtown. Thus when people talk about “cloud computing” they are talking about millions of tiny ghost towns. Ironic, because what do people build on these ghost towns but social networks.
If you know your way about Linux and the commandline, it's not that hard. There's plenty of good tutorials out there for (almost) anything you would want to do. Renting a small VPS is not particularly expensive either.
I did it this year and can only recommend it - I learnt a ton in the process :-)
We had ad-free online communities in 1994... you just used telnet instead of a browser. We had BBSes in 1984. She is totally correct that online gathering spaces of various kinds are not new. The labels change, the tech changes, the scale changes... and that is why the ads came in. Because at some point we jumped from individuals making small systems into businesses making money via large systems.
my faith is that there will be a revival for this internet just like vinyl. I I dream it will be very based on physical location. Kind of a mix of mastodon with localwiki.
Our team (mostly cognitive scientists and engineers) is nostalgic about the past of online communication and concerned about its future. Our platform, Lyra, provides support for effective conversations rather than social networking and advertising. You can read our history of online convesation - and more about our approach - here: www.hellolyra.com/introduction
Speaking as one notorious-for-promoting-own-stuff type to another, you don't need to reply to nearly every thread. This top-level one was probably sufficiently.
Thanks for the advice, we've been staying under the radar on HN recently but we honestly feel really strongly about this. We're a nonprofit, have been sinking lots of cash into this project, and are not in it for personal gain :)
Okay, since you're advertising your service here, I think it's only right I give you some feedback on it, as someone who registered an account to test it out just now.
Firstly, it took me a fair bit to realise that the book icon at the top was actually the menu button, and not just a logo linking to the home page. It's a neat idea (having the service logo act as the menu), but it's not at all clear to users, and should probably be replaced with a simple logo link and hamburger button instead.
Secondly, forcing users to log in to view any content is not a good design pattern, and has been seen as a bad idea in the community management world for decades. Scrap it, let people view at least some content as a guest.
Stylistically it isn't too great either. It works on a functional level, but all in all, it just feels very... dated. Like, the site was made in 1995 type dated. That's probably because the colour scheme feels drab and uninteresting, the fonts all staid and the general structure of the pages is all so academic and formal looking. It reminded me of one of those 'guestbook' features Microsoft FrontPage used to have, and not in a good way.
So again, change that up a bit, since the vast majority of the population have design tastes that are a bit more up to date than Lyra's here.
Not sure the tour is a good idea either. Facebook, Twitter and others like them don't need one, and the way it's implemented here feels a bit overbearing more than anything else.
Do like how profiles let you add new fields yourself though, that seems quite useful (especially in an era where new social networks and their respective profile links keep popping up every day).
As for conversations, those just feel a bit awkward at the moment. I mean, are there any groups here? Any tags? Hashtags? Any way of categorising content at all? Cause at the moment, it seems like it's just a list of conversations about whatever random topic that you're somehow supposed to find and wander into. Not sure how user friendly that is myself.
Overall though, it's a mixed bag. There are some neat ideas here, and I admire you for creating your own social media site, but the design aesthetics and general setup just seem so dated it isn't a viable competitor to the likes of Facebook and Twitter for me.
- It's OK to have a small learning curve; we think users will be OK with the menu symbol.
- We've thought extensively about whether to show content to non-logged-in users. This isn't really Lyra's use case. You can see it as closer to email than social media. Our goal is not to categorise "content". The very term "content" makes us itch. We don't aim to provide searchable communities or hashtags, as these are easy avenues for harassment, abuse and targeting vulnerable communities.
- Most of Lyra's existing use cases look like this: start converstion (with existing contacts, or invite them otherwise). Have conversation, usually private, with contacts.
- The tour can be removed with a single click, it was actually a requested feature and has received positive feedback.
- The general design is constantly evolving and it will improve as we have access to more funding.
- We offer a growing number of customisable themes (left menu); the look and feel of a platform should be in the user's control. Style is very subjective; some like basic, some like glitz. If you have any suggestions for a theme you would like, we will be happy to set it up for you.
There's no need to apologise for good, constructive feedback!
Money presumably. It's a lot easier to get a good design for your site or app if you have a decent amount of money to pay professional designers. Which most open source foundations and charitable organisations don't have.
Edit: Though I guess it could also be because a lot of alternative software and services are created by people with a 'hacker' or 'programmer' mindset, where very little attention is paid to the UX and everything is focused on the features/tech stack. They're the same people who seem to think IRC, email lists and newsgroups have decent UI.
Exactly! We agree that email and newsgroups do not have the most useful or accessible UI, and aim to offer a much better design. Needless to say, our design is constantly improving.
Not the parent, but I have two specific suggestions about the on boarding process.
One, please add a directory (feed?) of public conversations that can be viewed without logging in. I want to see how the platform is used by other people and whether that fits me - but if you ask me to create an account first, I'm going to bounce.
Two, here on HN you say the team is mostly cog sci and engg people, which sounds awesome and piques my curiosity about why you made this. But the web site itself doesn't mention that, or anything about the people behind it. Please add an 'about the team' page so that I can understand more about the people who are inviting me to use their platform.
We have been thinking carefully about whether to include a public conversation feed. Public communications are not Lyra's central use case, and as most conversations are private at the moment, such a feed would be quite sparse.
As a nonprofit which is not funded by advertising, it is not our main goal to support viewers without an account. There is no charge to sign up.
If you’re trying to be a new alternative to Big Social, you should aim to be better or at the very least more interesting than the competition. There’s no way your network can be THE network for all people but you’ve gotta get them in the door. Good design goes a long way, the bare minimum is MEH.
A quest to remain "more interesting" leads to constantly changing platforms, dark patterns, and intrusive notifications. A useful and effective platform enables communication in a reliable and stable way.
Thanks for your comments; we are very open to any more specific or detailed feedback on improving the platform.
Mmm, no. I don't think it should be a "quest". That's what Facebook is doing and I've never heard an FB user say they like any change that gets made.
I don't have any specific feedback about your platform (heck, I'm building my own social network at the moment), but I will say that your site is VERY text-heavy. I've seen your other comments about the common person not wanting to create a Mastodon instance and while I agree with you, the common person also doesn't want to wade through an essay just to find out what you're promoting.
Simple and Stripe are great examples of sites that have a LOT of text but it's designed in a way to make it not look tedious to peruse.
Lyra values language and aims to be an effective tool for large conversations; we're not worried about large amounts of text. We especially don't want to patronise users by hiding or folding up messages which they have taken time to write.
Huh? What does making your site less cluttered have to do with patronizing users and/or hiding their messages? Sounds like you're so wrapped up in Lyra land that everything you do is awesome.
The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web anti-social. I distinctly recall when my group of friends had stopped calling around each week to figure out what we were going to do on the weekend. I was calling people to find out what they were up to... and I got that condescending call to action, just get on Facebook.
So I did. I tried it for about a year or two. And it didn't make the web any better or more social for me. It would recommend events to attend and I'd go... but people would just be in their cliques not talking to anyone outside of their groups. Even learning about upcoming concerts and events required a Facebook account. People stopped calling and hanging out. It was all very passive: like, like, comment, meme, har, har.
So I closed down my Facebook account and haven't used it since 2009 or so. The "social web" has only become more anti-social.
Most of these web services made quite a lot of interesting innovations and such but I can't help but wonder what the web would've been like if we'd stayed true to its roots and improved the protocols and infrastructure instead of centralizing everything behind walled gardens.