In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.

But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days.

It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.

I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.

Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."

Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.

She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.

To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.

I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"

No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/

I think some of this is caused by the non-obvious mechanisms of how interactions on these platforms work.

When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you reply to this HN thread), your reply „lived” in that thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm wouldn’t show that reply to your dad.

I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and being horrified when some of my friends and family got a „John liked this comment, join the discussion!” notification served straight onto their timelines, completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to whomever, without my knowledge.

Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much different experience when your youtube account wasn’t linked to all your personal information.

If you comment on a social media post, what’s going to happen? How sure are you that that comment, however innocuous it may seem now, won’t be dredged up 8 years by a prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment it’s still a valuable data point that you’re giving to Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the world.

The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ, they all change depending on the room I’m in and on the people I’m speaking to - but on modern social media, you can never be sure who your audience is. It’s safer to stay quiet and passive.

This is very well said! Probably also why social media has become so "fake" - back in the early days of Facebook, friends would talk to each other like friends. But after my religious aunt started seeing the comments I was leaving on a friend's pics, let's just say that stopped pretty quick.

Now the only thing I would ever consider posting on Facebook is "What a beautiful day! Went for a great hike with my family and enjoyed nature."

Very true! As I remember, Google+ was a step towards figuring out this issue - instead of a general Facebook-style „Friends” that includes all sorts of different people you know (or once knew), the idea was that you’d have multiple „circles” of acquaintances that you could post to separately: family, college friends, coworkers, etc.

Of course that didn’t really pan out, and the social network itself collapsed under its own weight within a couple years without ever reaching widespread adoption. It’s interesting though, because I think it really was ahead of its time - these days I just have multiple different groupchats that I text, and that’s basically the same thing.

Yeah I liked Google+, at the time Google had a much better reputation though, if they hadn't shut it down then they did Google+ would probably be fully enshittified by now!

Most of her friends are probably women. Try making an account with an obvious female name and you will see a marked difference on most social platforms I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.

funny story: I got the wife of a friend to install tinder, a couple of years back when I was dating. I was having a hard time getting matches, so I figured I'd see how the other side lives. She created an empty profile, with a blurry hippopotamus as a profile picture, and a single letter as name. Just "H". For hippopotamus. No bio. Within five minutes she was matching with every other guy she swiped right on. Which wasn't all of them, mind you. Within another five minutes, half of the guys she had matched with had messaged her. Regular looking guys. A lot of them had same opening line. "Did you know hippos are the most dangerous animal in the world?" After that, I got why I wasn't getting any replies >.<

You can try creating a profile as a woman. I did, five years ago, on a site that advertised itself as being dedicated to "affairs" between married people.

All I said was I was 20, was red haired, and open minded. Nothing more, and no photo.

Indeed, within a couple of minutes there were guys asking me if I liked to be whipped while handcuffed to a radiator, and offered to send me dick picks if I sent naked photos first. One of them added later "maybe I'm too direct for you, is that why you're silent?"

I didn't respond to any message, but the offers kept coming. It's insane.

I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)

Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.

I like her take-away from this experiment:

Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."

I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is having a better time than B, or that one needs more support and focus than the other. We’re all in the same, but different, shit.

I agree with that, although a giant amount of support and attention is one way, the sexes are going through different stuff into terms of the meta-problem of "how our problems are viewed".

> We’re all in the same, but different, shit.

We are not. This is the law of averages and is absolute poison. Sexism is not symmetrical. Men do not suffer from women like women suffer from men.

Norah Vincent killed herself.

She died by assisted suicide, for private reasons. No need to exaggerate to make a point. There’s Twitter if you want to engage in that type of culture war.

> We’re all in the same, but different, shit.

Can you elaborate on other cases where the words “different” and “same” are interchangeable?

It means that if you zoom out, things look more similar. Similar patterns, similar problems and solutions, but different components.

All the various shades of red are all red. All news is engagement bate (if it bleeds, it leads), but every piece of news is different. You are in a forest in region X and I am in a desert in region Y, both could be dealing with the same problem of keeping warm at night. It's all different, and yet still the same.

I didn’t ask for an interpretation of the post, I asked for other times where anyone would use “same” and “different” interchangeably as words (in a sentence, presumably)

It kind of seems like the sentence I quoted was gibberish that’s short enough to seem vaguely profound. Unless somebody could give other examples of when those words are interchangeable (then obviously dogs is eggs), but as it stands it’s a duck pregnancy is optional type situation

Lay off the brew.

This seems unnecessarily rude. If you have examples of when somebody would use the words “same” and “different” interchangeably in a sentence that are so obvious that it justifies being rude, the bigger dunk would be to post them

It's the stupid law of averages.

You may be the victim right now, and I may be the perpetrator, but over time you'll sometimes be the perpetrator (what, do you think you're perfect?) and I'll sometimes be the victim (you don't think I suffer?), and over time it all averages out.

But just because you're the victim this time, you're getting all the sympathy. Is that fair?

I want a sandwich to eat. You want sushi. We are both hungry.

This is a good point. The words same and different are interchangeable if you do not use either word

"Same difference" /s

Same same, only different, but still same, but still different.

> They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better.

How can I agree with this? Material conditions matter: whatever problem you have, being poorer will make it worse. Women have been earning less than men for decades, and most highly paid execs are men, not women. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-end...

Social creditscore based cloning and ai crèche raising?

It's really telling how most replies to your message are about "sexual market" or online dating. That's all some men can think of when talking about women online.

When other men post about that, all I hear is a desperate cry for help.

I understand their struggles because I lived through them. However, after I got better at OLD, I understand how it gets tiring hearing about it after a while, specially from people who are clearly on a bad path. For example, treating like a market (which I don't consider a good approach) but not accepting their current value is not enough for creating any demand. And nowadays, with the gym culture being mainstream, it's getting even harder if you don't even try to be more "valuable".

If I summarized men online as watching pornography and following hot women on social media, people would (correctly) point out that it does not encapsulate what men do online as a whole. A lot of people do these things, but that is only part of their online experience. However, these replies are talking about OLD apps and sexual market as if women only do that online, which relates to the point of the original comment.

Parent was saying that most men don't understand the amount of casual sexual harassment women are subjected to in unmoderated online spaces -- much more so than men receive.

Which makes me sad.

Apparently Y chromosome + enculturation = prerogative to send unsolicited photos of ones genitalia to random internet strangers.

No, rather both are on opposite sides of an equation, and being buried in competition from folks trying to solve their part of it in isolation.

Women == get too much attention, often of the wrong type. How to get the right kind of attention?

Men == not getting any attention, of any type. How to get some attention?

So women either get ‘the wrong kind’ of attention, but plenty of it - or somehow figure out the magic of getting the right kind of attention? Not easy.

And men work hard to get any attention, often overdoing it on the only way they can figure out - which usually has poor (but not zero!) results. Folks good at playing the game get excellent results, however.

Meanwhile, everyone is getting played by the folks in the middle.

Notably, there are plenty of women taking advantage of the attention they get on Tinder. They just have no problem solving for what it works for, which is getting laid with near zero effort.

The way this previously got figured out was a ‘managed market’ - arranged marriages. Religious/social rules, etc.

I think we might come from different cultural expectations?

In my book, it's reductive to sweep unsolicited sexual harassment under "attention", unwanted or otherwise.

It's not rocket science: everyone deserves to be treated in a way that makes them feel comfortable and safe.

Sexual harassment (having been a target of it), is pretty much the definition of ‘unwanted attention’. Targets typically just want to be left alone.

It’s also a crime in some places, not (!!!) in others, or called different things in other places depending on the details.

For example, is sending an unsolicited dick pic on a dating app sexual harassment? Is getting felt up at work, with the implication ‘or else’? Is being stalked by members of the opposite gender? Or having career advancements blocked by a lack of ‘playing the game’?

I can give you concrete examples from a number of cultures that each culture will write off as ‘he/she/they were asking for it’, or ‘she/they/he deserved it’, or ‘it’s just boys/girls being girls/boys.’.

I’ve seen it up close and personal, and have lived it.

The underlying ‘attention economy’ dynamic is still the same.

Edit: meant to add - plenty of 80/20 also applies here of course (though more extreme). Top 1-2% men (esp. from earning or traditional looks perspective) deal with the same issues that top 50%-80% of women deal with, bottom 20% of women (from traditional looks perspective) deal with issues that 80-90% of men deal with, etc.

Sure, there are misogynistic cultures out there, but that doesn't justify it from a categorical imperative perspective.

If it's okay, then it's okay for all sexes. And I'm hard-pressed to name a world culture that's equally accepting and promoting of men-sexually-harassing-women and women-sexually-harassing-men.

Can you?

It feels like you're trying to make this an argument about statistics, when it's an argument about ethics and morality.

I never said it’s okay at all. Where are you getting that from?

Reality doesn’t particularly care about one persons idea of right or wrong. And if you look at the planet, good luck coming up with a consistent definition either.

I’m also 100% sure some random persons idea on the internet or what is moral or right has zero to do with the dynamics of dating or social interactions either.

What sort of discussion do you want this to be about?

I know. Parent, along with the reply, also said that women as a result are much less active online, but that's a belief caused by a lack of grass touching.

> "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."

> Most of her friends are probably women

-> "Women don't comment on the internet (especially compared to men) because it's a hostile place".

I think the implied difference from upthread was that women are less active online in public, unmoderated spaces for the aforementioned reasons.

It's no surprise they often use private and/or moderated spaces instead.

Thats just what the internet of the mid to late 90s was like. People rarely used their real name, there were hundreds of forums, some private. You could have different nicks on them.

Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an online identity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

The idea that everyone has only one identity, one whole, is harmful.

People change over time. People change even a little based on who's around them. Even memories change as people see things in new lights.

The Internet of the late 90s and early 2000s was spectacular in that everyone could be as authentic and deep as they wanted to be, and as shallow and invisible as they wanted to be depending on context.

Firefox? Want to know how to really sell yourself. Be 'For the User', like TRON (but avoid that for copyright reasons and because normal people don't understand). The user should be able to TRUST that Firefox isn't selling them out, spying on them, or doing anything strange. That when Firefox creates identity sandboxes they're firewalled from each other to the maximum extent; including resisting device fingerprinting (just look generic and boring).

You could argue (it certainly has been argued) that the ability for technology to dissolve the usually more coherent identities that we take on daily by granting unlimited role play, trolling, and exploration is simply too much for a lot of people, and makes it hard to maintain a coherent sense of self. This is especially true of people who are “internet addicts” - not that the designation means a whole lot as I’m here at the gym talking to you on the phone.

Don’t get me wrong, I mostly agree with your comment. I think even more dastardly is the tendency for the internet to market new personalities to you, based on what’s profitable

There's also the inconvenient truth that a very specific part of the world was online in the 1990s.

Primarily more educated, more liberal, more wealthy.

Turns out, when you hook the rest of the planet online, you get mass persuasion campaigns, fake genocide "reporting", and enough of an increase in ambient noise that coherent anonymous discourse becomes impossible.

I mean, look at the comments on Fox News or political YouTube videos. That's the real average level of discussion.

It's still possible in smaller, constructive communities, not in large general-purpose social networks.

As a hn poster, I agree with this

The 1990s internet was definitely not more liberal! 4chan style forums were probably the rule. I can’t believe someone would say that, clearly you didn’t use the same internet that I did.

He didn't say the internet was more liberal, he said the people on it were.

Before you start forming your reply, think about the actual culture back then. If you take slashdot as somewhat representative of the 90s internet culture, it was basically anti-corporate, meritocratic, non-judgmental, irreligious, educated, non-discriminatory, and once 2000 came around tended to be highly critical of the Bush agenda.

4chan at that time and places like it represented more of an edgelord culture, where showing vulnerability or sensitivity was shunned, everything revered by the larger populace was ruthlessly mocked, and distrust of society and government in general was taken as natural. Calling them conservative would have been non-sensical.

Exactly. If I had to characterize the general internet (read: what would and wouldn't raise an eyebrow in an average forum) in terms of political alignment, it'd probably be:

   - anarchist 60s/70s
   - libertarian-meritocracy 80s/90s
   - capitalist-meritocracy-liberal 00s
   - polarized liberal-globalist vs conservative-reactionary 10s
   - polarized liberal-individualist vs conservative-statist 20s

That SA / 4chan (both of which were really post-90s) existed were in no way proof of an anti-liberal bent. Their very edgelordness was an implicit reveling in absolute freedom of expression (even if their later liberal-pro-censoring and alt-right splinter movements subsequently forgot that).

4chan was very much left-wing to liberal until Stormfront invaded them back. After Caturday came Soviet Sunday.

But your friend is wrong. She does know at least one person who comments on online forums. I bet she knows more too.

Completely agree. Look at some videos on YouTube. 20,000 comments on brand new videos sometimes. A lot of good people are commenting on the internet. The problem is that the trust in public institutions is at an all time low, and that is leading to much more doom and gloom and those of us who are from the 2000s can feel the difference in the comment sections.

Don't ask don't tell.

People use analogies constantly. That was an analogy - it wasn’t meant to be taken literally.

exactly!

Most of the internet users are passive content consumers, and it’s been the case since a long time ago. There's a post about it from 2019:

https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-read-o...

> how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots

I am sure there are some dead giveaways, but how can you be sure about that?

What I have experienced is both going into forums/discussions someone said was bots talking to bots, with no real clear indication by any of the many markers I am aware of that it was in fact bots; and also comments calling responses bots seemingly as a manipulative dismissal in response to something that was not the consensus or commonly approved position.

I say that because my impression is that what is happening is a full on breakdown of civic discussion and conversation as a whole. The internet destroyed IRL public forums (pubs/bars, clubs, etc) and the draconian COVID policies took the death knell to many more, and now bots and the seemingly bigger issue of immediate distrust of everything, seems to also be destroying online conversations of all sorts.

Yes, you’ll be able to have small group meetings and maybe even voice/video only conversations, but that brings a whole host of other systems changes with it, especially as mass surveillance long surpassed anything the worst tyrants of history could have ever even dreamed of implementing. It all seems a shift into unhealthy territory as a civilization in general, including since essentially all western governments cannot be trusted by their own people anymore.

I never tell people I comment online. No one I know knows my Reddit username (as far as I know…). Few of my friends even know what HN is.

Keybase wants to be that hub. Well, it can't be, sir.

What a weird comment.

> No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/

Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.

Perhaps time for a revival - text mode only, please, to keep out those that I don't want on there (the platform appearing too unattractive might be the way forward to avoid the TikTokers).

To be fair, back in those "good old phpbb days", people trolled just as hard as anyone does now, and maybe worse, since the consequences of it were not as visible, and getting in trouble for things you said online was virtually nonexistent. Everyone used a fake name, and while it might be possible to dox someone, it wasn't an operational concern for anyone who just wanted to be a jerk...

> people trolled just as hard as anyone does now,

Trolling had (has) a different character in smaller, more private forums: it tends towards more effort. A low-effort troll just gets banned and loses their platform, so the troll needs to at least ride the line of legitimacy. Drawing the line back to Usenet, the sheer effort that went into some trolling garnered respect if not necessarily acceptance.

Drive-by interactions reward volume since the 'game' isn't repeated. Curated social media feeds like Twitter are even worse; the troll has their own audience predisposed towards acceptance and the victim is just set-dressing.

I analogize this to in-person interactions: ostracization is mutually costly. A small group loses a member who was at least making a 'warm body' contribution, but the ostracized person loses a whole set of social benefits.

So true. I was one of those trolls, so I know it well; playing the role of a heel. People would know and remember you by avatar and custom forum titles and a huge garish signature... it cemented you as a person, gave you a face in a way that Hacker News or Reddit threads do not.

The trolling that happened on IRC would put modern day trolling to shame. Imagine posting a link to an exe claiming to be one thing but would actually contain Back Orifice (a Trojan that gave you remote access to the victim's pc). People would blindly download exes and run them on completely unprotected Windows 98.

To be fair I do miss the "old Internet". Less corporate, money grabbing, more freedom.

It's not the internet that changed, it's the people.

I'm an old timer, and I've been there since the beginning. I remember the beginning of the eternal summer, and the gradual decline that came after.

One of my first jobs was actually 3rd shift help desk for a regional dial-up ISP. The people that called were mostly drunk southerner's who, at the time, seemed hopelessly non-technical.

Looking back I now see that any one of them knew much, much more about how the internet actually worked than a the average modern user, and were probably more worldly in general than todays average user.... and there are billions more of them now.

We thought that global access to information would democratize everything and expose people to a higher level of rhetoric and thinking. We just KNEW that the best ideas would rise to the top of discourse naturally and the world would magically become a better place. We were so very wrong. It's turns out that more than cream floats.

Well, of course it's the people. I started online in '94 and it was exclusively the territory of nerds for a long while, even as everyday folks started to use the web and email for basic things. Truly, we should appreciate having places like Hacker News for still giving us a place to post like we always used to...

Plenty of forums still do exist, but I wonder about their future as we age out. Car forums in particular were absolute godsends for amateur mechanics - not just to look up info but to ask a self-selected group of interested folks who were happy to help for free out of a sense of community for fellow fans of their brand.

I think the cDc made some effort to brand Back Orifice 2000 as a remote administration tool and in reality it really was pretty good for that; wonder what happened to those guys

They don't write on forums but they like or share a story. It's just more passive/consumer-minded.

I had a comment auto-removed from a subreddit and when I mailed its mods to inquire what might have triggered it, I was informed that commenting on a post from a month ago (yes really) is now considered a red flag for spam/bot activity.

I miss phpBB/IPB/etc. forums having a pair of resident "trolls" who were by far the most prolific posters on the entire forum, because they would gravitate to each other and "debate" at length, ostensibly but questionably as bitter rivals

> Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.

Tumblr is still doing pretty well on that front. I'm there for a fandom, and it's a super positive atmosphere where everyone just wants to make and talk about cool art.

I don’t see any obvious evidence of bot activity on that thread (and all of my spot checks strongly leaned human). Were some comments removed or something?

I noticed a few people on HN have started complaining that anyone arguing with them is a bot. I think it's a coping mechanism at finding people who challenge them, but maybe they've been on too many bot-infested forums lately, or are just young (that might overlap with both users of bot-infested forums and those who haven't had their ideas challenged much).

All my real HN friends are on https://news.ysimulator.run/news

The forum where Skynet becomes self-conscious :)

I think the idea that nobody would talk to strangers online is a bit too general. We are all mostly doing it here. I do it on reddit all the time in the same recurring subreddits that I've grown to trust. IRC was also pretty hostile back in the 90s. But again it depended on the communities. Just think you can't generalize the internet this way.

True I would also add that this an exception to most social media platforms. I feel as there is a roundtable Everytime somone posts a something. I'm some how invited and listening, whether I comment or say something is entirely up to what I have to share. Argument or debate isnt so aggressiveas it's factual based for the most part.

I know I self-censor a LOT.

> she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums.

Yet she knows you and you and me are strangers talking to each other on this forum. I think we don't know even close friends what online communities people hang out - the reason she didn't know about you being on HN.

Niche forums still exist with real humans like for example, LTT or openZFS forums. But main stream ones like XDA, reddit or YouTube etc are totally ruined by AI.

For what its worth. I recently joined "Carpokes" which is a free members only Porsche forum being run by a man hell bent on keeping it a friendly, bot-free, community. Its been great engaging in a forum again where I look at it maybe once a week.

And yet, here you are, posting ...

BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...

Given the word count of your original post, I can tell you that daily psyllium husk is a miracle.

Actually, thanks for the reminder.

most people just don't tell other people about what they do online. it's very private.

like, it's a running on joke on most social media websites that "i hope no one i know irl finds this account..."

i think your friend is just overestimating her knowledge of her friends' lives

Which Reddit thread was that, out of curiosity? And how do you know which commenters were bots?

I’m a man who had to do this because of stalkers. Literally serious, life damaging stalkers.

This thread is working pretty decently. No bots so far

Reputation management is what it will take to bring trust back to all forms of media. It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.

Unfortunately, for common people whose aim is not celebrity, this means handing over your privacy in order to have a voice.

We can do this in our IRL circles of trust, people know you because they have met or interacted with you personally.

Online, this means someone like Zuck creating a digital identity for us after we entrust them with our privacy, or some kind of open source complicated technology identifier like a cryptographically verified signature that is techno bro-free that will only be adopted or understood by tech literate.

It's a dark day for genuine human interaction and trust.

> Reputation management is what it will take to bring trust back to all forms of media.

Does that really work, though? I think it doesn't -- think all the anti-vaccine type influencers -- their identities are known and they're ok with it.

> It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.

Surely this won't be used for nefarious reasons or to silence individuals like it's done in the UK or in the cancel culture actions. /s

Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years.

I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.

I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?

Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page.

Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.

Yeah LiveJournal (my username there is lightfixer) really came close to replicating how we actually social. Deciding who is able to see what I posted on an individual level was great. Could create groups etc.

In retrospect LiveJournal was pretty great as a social network of its time. It's too bad it got turned into some kind of Russian spam site.

it was russian twitter

and twitter is a spam site, so you're somewhat right

I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing!

Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.

People will make frequent mistakes if you put the privacy decision at a per post level. (And not just average users: see stevey's Google Platforms rant)

Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to emerge and some will succeed.

> It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy.

Except that they worked for a company that clearly wants all of your data. Privacy and Google are often at odds with each other… and for the folks that understood privacy at the time, it was a hard sell unless they worked at Google.

Privacy to me means that even Google doesn’t get to peek in whenever they feel like it.

Another mistake is that they had a significant presence in Brazil through Orkut, but they didn’t bother to integrate and migrate the users in.

Orkut’s user base was already degraded through Facebook but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much different from Reddit, I’m sure with some creativeness G+ could have benefited from extra users.

Orkut Büyükkökten's orkut.com might have been a semi-private project (Google, like any company, doesn't normally name its products after first names of its coders).

Also, as you say, it was populated by many Brazilians, an imbalance like that may discourage non-Brazilians from joining, so not sure if integrating them would have helped or hurt.

I was an Orkut user from the USA for a few years. The vibe was way nicer than Facebook. I think I was with them from 2007 to 2011 or so.

killedbygoogle.com says 2004 to 2014 so a decent chunk of the service's run.

The biggest boneheaded decision from my perspective was their taking over the + prefix in Google search (to filter for results that have this term verbatim). That just positioned G+ as my enemy and I had a strong desire for it to die. Unfortunately, they didn't bring back the prefix even after it died. Quotes around a term do something similar, but I am still angry.

I think that change happened well after G+ was dead

I just found this October 2011 post reporting about this change as it happened (4 months after G+'s launch in June 2011):

https://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/

According to Wikipedia, G+ usage kept growing from about 40M that October to 90M by the end of 2011 and then to hundreds of millions over the next few years, but the reporting methodology seems very inconsistent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B

"It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy."

The legendary Andy Hertzfeld played a role in shaping the design of Google Plus.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus-design-andy-he...

Beside my friend who was gifted with invitation, there was nobody else from my circles (sic) and when asked they were replying with standard "why I should make yet another account". So for me it was a ghost town right from the start.

And frankly it was actually the first place where I truly noticed how big companies are extracting data from us; back then I felt really unpleasant when I tried to fill up profile.

I've got this old screenshot [1] and profile included: about me, "I know this stuff", current occupation, employment history, education path, place of residence with map, home and work addresses, relationship status and what kind of partner you are looking for, gender, other names - maiden name, alternative spelling, nickname, visibility in search results and a section for links to other websites. This may be seen as not much today but back then even facebook wasn't that "curious" - that was about to change.

I also tried to utilize Google Wave for our university group to keep us informed etc., but people wanted just "plain old" emails with attachments.

[1] - https://ibb.co/SDDGG3PJ

G+ died because it was clown colored google product, not a communal space for people. It was technology without any aesthetic that made you want to be there.

Myspace was hilarious because it was such a mess. The people owned it, hacked the css. Every profile page was a messy real person.

The migration of YT accounts to G+ is how most of the critical mass learned there was G+. It took years to recover nicknames.

IMO, their biggest problem was that they made a product that was terminally uncool.

Google Wave worked fine for me, as I recall. I remember being really impressed on one level, but I also couldn't figure out what to actually use it for.

A couple weeks ago, I thought about diving back into demos to reacquaint myself with it. It's possible that it was ahead of its time. Or maybe it was a solution in search of a problem.

Downvoters surely work for, or are asscolytes of $GOOG, heh. More slaves they!

G+ copied some features and design work the open source federated social media, particularly Diaspora. So yeah, a lot of the features were developed in context of privacy protections.

yeah they made a lot of mistakes, the biggest one was not iterating on making it a good product. they just dumped it into the world, mostly formed and did nothing with it.

it had a lot of good ideas like you said it just needed to make it simpler to use, maybe even make the circles stuff not default though i didn't have much trouble with it

forcing everyone to use something that still had teething issues was the biggest screw up, if they wanted to integrate youtube they should have started with making G+ popular so people would actually want that, and yeah real names so dumb.

blizzard tried that as well lol. then some guy rang up blizzard hq and told one of the higher ups where his kids went to school and they suddenly realised full name is actually too much information

Discovery was bad.

I was the one to push G+ and Gwave on my friends and it did not take at all.

I remember that the (initial) invite-only aspect played out in the worst way. Some FOMO angle works, but it ended up just ... not working, and who joins a social media wastleland?

+ also got a bad rap due to what happened to Youtube - merged accounts - and yeah Google acted in some awful ways in more than one way but they were also trying to solve a problem of Zuck's shifting views on privacy (or rather the same view, that it shouldn't exist)

It probably wasn't the worst thing ever to try to leverage some of the existing social networking going on on YouTube, but combining it with a real name policy and making the actual posts/comments into first class global content for the G+ feed? Idiotic, and completely undermined the whole premise of safely walling off your content to its intended audience.

(See also: nice how reddit now makes it possible to curate the list of which subs you participate in whose comments and posts appear on your global profile page)

Reddit is fucking miserable. I don't want to claim they profited solely off the work of Swarz, because his involvement wasn't... total, I mean he left, but it feels like one of these things where mediocre people get control over something which was initially made by people who actually know what they're doing

> Reddit is fucking miserable

Reddit is the town bar, the popular one.

Some people love the town bar! :)

Some people hate the town bar! :(

Things like this can often be assessed on a macro level. When you start to get the number of users sites like Facebook have and sites like Reddit claim they have, you end up with content that's reflective of a broad sample of society. You do have that on Facebook, you do not have that on Reddit.

I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing things like counting multiple devices as different users, multiple accounts as different users, making minimal efforts to remove bots, counting dynamic IPs as distinct users, and so on. You could even count API callers as users, but that is stretching the limits of plausible deniability. The thing is - their content isn't reflective of the popular town bar, it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'

If you look at their "all accounts" it's over 650,000,000.

Around 250,000,000 is monthly user usage, which would be for one or more accounts.

And if course, like every site, a percentage that keep the thing going (around 35,000,000 daily logins).

It's one of the top sites on the internet and has been for a very long time.

I tried to start using Reddit. None of my friends had ever heard of it or wanted to use it, and I soon lost interest in it.

From my little experience of using it, it seems that its main audience is the mentally retarded or just children under 11 years old.

The same questions are asked all the time. It wasn't difficult for me to find a search on the site for why they don't use it?

There is a lot of nonsense in the comments/answers, which they state with full confidence.

And there was also a feeling that there are rarely disagreements in discussions, even if there are minor differences, everyone adheres to a single line, often related to the topic/name of the subreddit.

I found several people creating content that I was interested in, but some of the posts on the page were hidden and it was easier to follow them on YouTube or blogs.

In general, searching for valuable posts or comments is like digging through manure to find gold.

And even if you find a clever idea or a good technical hint, it was often easier to find it just by reading the documentation. It's the same with interesting posts. If it's something worthwhile, then it will be on twitter, blog, YouTube, social networks or in some forums.

I'm not talking about advertising every second post, or even among the comments. Disabling ad blocking was a mistake.

> it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'

A very appropriate definition. It's not even interesting to discuss something on Reddit. If your opinion or thought coincides with the ideology of the subreddit, then you will have a lot of likes. If it don't match, you get dislikes, insults, or worse, no response.

In general, I did not find any benefit for myself on Reddit and I am unlikely to return there, it is a waste of energy and effort.

Reddit is a bunch of bar districts in a large city. You can find any sort of bar you want. Some of the bars you'll love. Some of them you'll hate. Some of them will make you say "what the hell is any of this?"

It's an almost infinite variety. Fractal even with how many subreddits are the results of splits from an older subreddit.

You can find any sort of bar you want, but all of them are owned by the same shady company which waters down the drinks, are involved in secret backroom deals which sometimes results in things like selling your personal info or in bars being closed without notice. They also refuse to give the bouncers the training and resources they need which leaves many bars full of jerks who shouldn't have made it inside in the first place, while in other bars you can find yourself thrown out for no reason at all.

It's kind of like an American grocery store where you have shelf after shelf filled with different brand names and products in all kinds of colors and flavors, but they're all owned by one of three corporations so it really doesn't matter which product you buy, you're still supporting the same assholes who will gladly poison you if it'll increase their profits by a fraction of a cent, so naturally most of your choice comes down to the flavor of the poison.

No. I'm very specifically saying (contrary to your implication) that it's the management of the bar which is the problem

HN loves to do this. "Platforms are mirrors held up to society". No, not always. Sometimes there really is unnecessary executive top-down control

(btw this is trivial to bypass; actual segregated alt accounts remain the only thing you should rely on if you need compartmented identities/aspects)

One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG.

Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.

Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.

My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting how bewildered many young people are when confronted with anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a challenge. Tech savviness among young folks feels more like it was in the mid-90s. They're infinity more online-savvy, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing anything about how that works, they're cooked.

I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.

Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.

This is my impression as well. From what I've seen, many Gen Z people only loosely even think in terms of things like "files". They are used to integrations where everything just lives on some website or in a Google app and the way you locate things is by searching.

I am a professor of CS and we found, post-pandemic, that very few students had any exposure to real computers. It was all smartphones and tablets. So the things you mention—not knowing what a file is—really is the state of things. We now explicitly talk about files in our intro programming courses, first as a general idea in CS1, and then we dig into (some of) the representations in CS2.

Although there has also been a softening of math skills among the weakest students, the best students are still quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills, not analytical skills.

I'm also noticing another trend with my 16yr old daughter and her friends. They are craving old school offline experiences. They have all dragged out the parents and relatives old music collections, cruising second hand shops for old CDs etc. when they visit others houses they are checking out each other's household book and music collections.

She recently got a cheap digital camera with no screen and just a shutter button and and plain old viewfinder. The idea is that like the old days you don't know what you took a photo of until (a bit like getting the film developed) you plug the SD card into a computer and have a look.

I think she'd get a kick out of ripping CDs and ditching Spotify. I can teach her all about files and filesystems then haha.

My 19yr old son doesn't follow the same old school stuff, but he kinda shunned social media from the beginning.

That's cool to hear. I fear it's not the main trend, but it's comforting somewhat.

We still need a lot of plug and Play with home servers.

In theory, AI should be good at helping building interfaces between cloud backups and home server apps. Because AI should be good at apis.

In theory

I’d like a turnkey k3s and a 10” rack designed for consumers. Set up to host your Minecraft server, store your media, and be incrementally upgradeable.

Gamers are the ones building PCs by hand. They have the skills, it’s a matter of motivation.

Building PCs by hand nowadays is quite trivial. You don't need to set bunch of jumpers on the motherboard correctly, manually assign IRQs, etc. The peak "complexity" modern gamers deal with is correctly overclocking their gear without frying it or making the system unstable (which is mostly done in some nice GUI according to a youtube tutorial anyway).

The software and security aspects of running a server are far more consequential and complex.

"dad jeans" ?

Outdated looking jeans that are a light-ish wash with an unflattering cut more designed for comfort and price rather than style or for rugged work.

Though the term has recently been adopted by a trend in women’s jeans that don’t really resemble their namesake.

The connotation being that they’re outdated, uncool, and dorky.

Yeah, that trend came up in search, hence my confusion. Thanks.

I just set up a little cube server with a Mini-ITX board I had lying around. Overall I'm very happy with it, but right now it's basically just Unraid with the built-in containers running for Deluge, Jellyfin, and the Crafty minecraft server.

I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.

> I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.

Immich exists. It really is missing only some editing functionality and some nice-to-have features from GPhotos like automatic panoramas. Other than that, it's superior to Google.

Immich feels too heavy for my needs, so I wrote a single executable server that turns my photo directories into a photo gallery (https://github.com/yhling/go-web-image-gallery)

Photo ingestion is via regular samba uploads from my phone.

You might be shocked. Immich is amazing.

I'm working on it! I have a little NUC that I'm learning Linux (Is that the proper term?) on. I plan to self host a few services for myself and host family photos on it someday.

I'm going through a "Deep, Vast, Trough of Learning" at the moment :>

Too bad all of the RAM and NAND flash are going to be unaffordable for the next few years at least.

Once you include internet latency hard drive latency isn’t that much worse. It won’t help but it won’t stop it.

Hard disk drive prices are also soaring. Looking up a random WD drive: up 70% since July, a Seagate drive, up 50%

For $125, which is also about the price of one year of cloud storage, you can get a hard drive big enough to store half a million photos and also back up a million photos. It probably won't ever go over $200.

And the hardware to serve that hard drive is somewhere between free and another hundred.

Sure, but then you're putting all your eggs in one basket (hard drive). If you really want to divest yourself of the cloud then you need to set things up in a redundant and fault-tolerant fashion. And at that point the outlay is much more than 'just a hard drive'.

Did you skip the "back a million photos" part? That's at least 3 copies of every file, spread across your group. If you want maximum safety you can add a local backup too, which isn't much more money. You don't need to spend anything on fault tolerance. Your files should already be on multiple servers, but also if it goes down for a few days that isn't a big deal.

That was already covered in my top level comment though. Geographic redundancy not local mirroring.

Yes, you need two hard drives. If you’re really paranoid, use three.

I’ve been thinking about setting up a family domain and just hosting my family’s pictures to it as a way to share internally. But the risk exposure of running anything online is just so bad now, it feels risky and a pain in the ass to both give family access to see and post but also seal it off from spammers and scammers.

The way in which any open text box on the internet is guaranteed to turn into a malware vector is new now, and makes casual and marginally technical users trying their own thing much higher stakes and annoying.

If you setup a server at home, you can expose it via a cloudflare tunnel, meanwhile it's behind your firewall + NAT. This will obfuscate the server IP a bit. It allows allows you to use very simple cloudflare Zero Trust rules to only allow people to access your server/website from people with a user account on that domain. (Or geographical restrictions, etc, etc)

I was thinking about something similar. ( Family photo sharing) The problem is: family is so used to Instagram and co, that they won't use it.

Apple has photo sharing where you can share photos privately.

Agreed, Apple shared albums seems to be the default. It’s not amazing, but your photos and contacts are already there, no new network required.

Yeah why put anything on social media. Your content is just a means to put ads alongside, and then trained to death by their AI.

It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family.

It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.

Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but

1. Reddit communities tend to get too large

2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading

3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).

The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.

The culture on discords tend to be way better than anywhere else on the internet, but discord really sucks to use. Somehow still doesn’t have a usable search, really underpowered notifications control, they have the worst pop ups imaginable that seem to just float on top of the whole interface and make it impossible to use.

I really wish something better would come along.

I wish Discord had a betrer account switcher on mobile. I have a realname account for friends ana family, and another I use with randos.

I use discord PTB and Canary to run multiple instances with different accounts on a single device.

It also allows running multiple instances with a single account (to be on multiple vocals at once for example).

The only drawback is the release cycle is more frequent and I need to update every time I boot.

Is this a feature of PTB, or something coming soon to the stable version?

> Somehow still doesn’t have a usable search

worst part is that it used to :/

It can do per channel and per server notifications for all messages, @mentions, or none.

What else would you want?

I also want levels of notifications. Especially emergency one - Some channels are super critical and I want to be notified immediately, give me a popup, ring my phone, override if my phone is on mute, then call me. Kind of like pagerduty.

Arbitrary regex matching. Something I use in IRC often.

I lurk in a bunch of Discords for things I'm not active in, but don't want to have to find an invite to if I need to ask a question in the future.

I always have a notification badge on Discord, and I hate it. Too many servers have channels where I get pinged, even though the channel is muting. I'm presuming someone is doing something like "hey @all, play with me"

I ought to be able to register that I will never ever care about this channel. Please ignore it for me.

You can mute channels and servers completely and get no notifications.

The problem with Discord is that I have to know exactly where stuff is for me to access it.

There is absolutely zero chance I find something interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon the server link somewhere other than Discord.

And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active, forget about seeing what people were talking about before.

All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord is completely walled off and hidden away and might as well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the internet.

I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible things that has happened to the internet and the fact that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.

Everything you just said is, through another lens, the boons of Discord. Lack of discoverability and permanence are a big part of why communities are moving and forming there.

Though there may be some very good information locked behind unsearchable discord servers, and that won't be publicly archived for the greater good (not that most of reddit isn't forgettable).

The good and bad, I guess.

99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does

I think the only people who don't know what discord anymore is the 50+ crowd. Atleast 50% of the randos I talk with online have discord as their preferred method for texting and voice communication and immediately want to switch to it if possible. And if older people actually cared about doxxing themselves with every conversation they would probably have a higher percentage too.

I don't know what the right way to handle intersecting identities is.

Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming.

If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints?

As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual.

And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."

He is not wrong though a bit off. Discord has 200MAU. So 97% of the global population probably have no idea what Discord is.

People massively underestimate the scale of whatsapp/facebook/tiktok (billions of MAU)

I'm (barely) under 50, but I kind of hate it. I have no idea how to handle the un-threaded flood of messages, and much prefer something like Reddit, message boards, or even FB groups. I felt the same way about IRC back in the day and never got into it.

I use Slack at work, but at least there I have a workable plan: no notifications for most channels, read or at least skim all messages in every channel by EOD, don't read it outside of business hours unless I get a DM. Also, absolutely never join the chatty #random type channels.

As someone with two teenage kids, I would wager that this is highly age-dependent, and that it is exactly reversed the younger you go. My guess is 99% of the under-25 population uses Discord daily and has never had a Facebook account.

In which country? The young adults in my UK family aren't using Discord. They don't use Facebook (except to keep up with older family/associates) either though.

US. What are they using in UK? WhatsApp? That kinda counts as Facebook, I suppose. But then again, is WhatsApp really a direct competitor with Discord?

By the numbers, Discord is definitely more popular in the US, though it is pretty popular in the UK too.

Are you sure they don't? How would you know? Every intern I've worked with uses discord

Your experience (as a single data point) doesn't mean that everyone the age of the interns you work with uses Discord.

I'm responding to his personal datapoint with my own. I agree with you though..

The majority of the population has no idea what the trendsetters are doing before it becomes mainstream.

But if you include other group msg platforms as the same thing (whatsapp, fb messenger, etc) i imagine most people know.

I think there's a much higher barrier to entry to Discord than Facebook. It won't become mainstream unless it significantly changes.

Which is likely why it's so good still. The usenet before the eternal September.

You probably mean, 99% of anyone older than 25.

I am 77.

That's amazing. Wishing you well, and thank you for all your contributions!

Very kind of you.

Discord is the 'AOL (1990s)' of the 2020s. (clearly aspects where that fails, but as a social media?)

In the US this is likely a wildly high overestimate because a huge percentage of the population plays video games at least casually and it has a very large mindshare (if not necessarily daily use for everyone) in that domain.

Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too.

I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...

Given that I recently joined a leatherworking Discord comprised of individuals pretty much the exact opposite of my demographic, I believe this is just plain wrong.

My guess would be near half, probably a 60/40 split.

> 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).

You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.

It's not really, you can just Google search and find all their posts and comments.

Sure, you can do that. It’s harder and not collated in the same way though.

You can just whack space a couple of times in the search field on a user profile on the "new" reddit (www. or sh.reddit) and hit Enter

There is also Project Arctic Shift.

I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus.

Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.

I think this is almost certainly true. People aren’t built to be acceptable to an audience the size of a football stadium, they’re built to be acceptable to a hundred or so people at a time. If you can comfortably context-switch, it’s probably a much easier lifestyle.

I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.

It's funny to see how communities shard.

In the plastic instrument games genre, there are some Discords where any wisp of using commercial music will be met with a stern reaction and potential ban. There are others that will link you to Drives full of thousands of songs from old games. The same people are in both groups.

Sort of like the people who work in big tech and the people who post on Hacker News. You'd think the intersection is an empty set, but it's probably pretty large.

The problem about this, for me, is discoverability. I have loads of hobbies that I'd love to engage with the communities of, but how do you engage with servers of that size without actively being invited to them?

Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and district it seems

Why doesn’t Signal have the same mindspace that these (imo) marginal apps have? It’s actually private. I wonder if people find it hard to use or something…

Does Signal scale?

Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord.

It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.

Won't disagree about channels and mindshare, but will note that Signal got public group links in 2020, not that recent.

https://signal.org/blog/group-links/

Signal by design doesn't have moderation and server-side conversations, it's not suitable for large groups.

Signal doesn’t have channels (text, voice) which I think is a big one.

It does in the Bay Area

If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.

Ugh. Sigh.

My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements.

It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime.

https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH

"Content Not Available Content not available in your region.

Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom"

God I hate the modern internet.

I'd actually flip that and suggest that people stop trying to use Discord for things that aren't aligned with Discord's product UI/UX priorities!

Discord is what it is, and my teenage kids love it. However I'm constantly baffled by it LOL.

I'm amazed Discord hasn't launched a corporate version of thier software yet, or that Slack hasn't seen the potential of static voice channels.

Or just not a buggy piece of crap. It’s more stable than it used to be, but I still run into random problems here and there. Much more often than with any other piece of software I use regularly, but I suppose most are becoming web apps anyways…

I keep Discord running in a Firefox tab. It typically only goes down when I have to restart the browser and I often have it up for weeks.

everytime discord ask me to claim this account i just quit the app. they operate in some bs tech realm that no other service does.

Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was really even a thing and they lived on until things like Slashdot and Digg took the reins.

Discord is IRC, just with modern features.

I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades.

Probably not.