Comment by TheOtherHobbes

5 months ago

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

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

26 comments

TheOtherHobbes

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3form  5 months ago

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

  • anal_reactor  5 months ago

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

m_fayer  5 months ago

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

  • closewith  5 months ago

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

    • m_fayer  5 months ago

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

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

      5 replies →

8f2ab37a-ed6c  5 months ago

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

  • diggan  5 months ago

    > It seems like paid communities

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

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

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

    • latexr  5 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

      > It just sucks

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

      3 replies →

  • awesome_dude  5 months ago

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

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

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

    • 8f2ab37a-ed6c  5 months ago

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

  • Jordan_Pelt  5 months ago

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

awesome_dude  5 months ago

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

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

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

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