The Rise and Fall of ‘Boring Dystopia,’ an Anti-Facebook Facebook Group | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of ‘Boring Dystopia,’ an Anti-Facebook Facebook Group

motherboard.vice.com

61 pointsDanBC21 comments

> The alternative to closing it was endless policing by him and Rumi Josephs, an artist who served as Boring Dystopia’s second admin. “It didn’t work at that scale

This is my biggest beef with all popular social media platforms today. They've invested vast effort in making themselves addictive but almost zero on making them efficient for users at scale.

Take OSS for example - any moderately successful project will start attracting so much noise the project will typically end up consuming all the waking and some of the sleeping hours of the founders, largely through communication and managing a growing team.

IMO this is the stuff we need to figure out how to scale effectively on social platforms instead of investing all out efforts into ever-more-toxic clickbait

I would buy you gold if there was HN equivalent. In all seriousness, this is something I think about on a daily basis. The need for more/tiresome administration leads to promoting more people to moderate, and they a) might be moderating too many things simultaneously, or b) might bring unnecessary micromanagement or other traits to the mix. Here's hoping multiple site types get it right!

It's just showing clearly the biggest flaw of the groupthink of people in tech: That technology is what matters most and everything else is just a small problems that can be solved on the side. The reality is that social things are often way more important to success and often can't be solved with technology (alone).

I get where you're coming from. At a certain level nothing replaces meeting someone face to face and shaking hands.

But I'm talking empowering social "power users" with more tools to make them more efficient. Googles Gmail auto replies would be a prime example - http://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-is-using-ai-to-create-au...

> investing all out efforts into ever-more-toxic clickbait.

Toxic clickbait is an investment with a substantial and proven return. What is the revenue model for effectively scaling communities? Users will presumably demand it for free and be averse to advertising.

And there we have it, a Christmas miracle: The most Hacker News comment there ever was.

> Toxic clickbait is an investment with a substantial and proven return.

So is selling arms to third world countries.

> What is the revenue model for effectively scaling communities

Similar to AWS - pay for usage. There are enoug people experiencing pain of running one-to-many relationships with the Internet. Provide them productivity tools. Of course not as sexy for investors wanting a quick return

Such sites do not facilitate elaborate, modular hierarchies:

"' . . .if a society does increase significantly in size, and if at the same time it remains unified and integrated, it must elaborate its organization.' A common reaction to this scale-complexity relationship has been to account for increasing complexity of social organization through population growth."

http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/ISCOM/GAJ1-17.pdf

The future successes in social networking will come from people who leverage social science and not just computer science.

This is a common theme. I drink starbucks, but they donate to charity so it's cool. I work at a wall street firm, but I meditate and do yoga, so it's cool. I read facebook, but I an in groups that point out the banality of modern existence, so it's cool. We focus on irony, instead of putting in the real work and sacrifices to make meaningful change.

Have you ever seen a talk by Slavoj Zizek?

I have. He's a fraud.

Nah he's alright. I have my issues with him but he really is good at discussing and digging into the issues with what GP is getting at with his post.

He lies. Check out his dispute with Chomsky.

This is what David Brooks calls being a Bobo. I'm one too.

This is a good time to pause and think about how much work dang puts into HN. By default all online communities open to anyone on the Internet become cesspools. Writing software is probably the only way you could consistently fight this battle.

> Which is surprisingly hard, because there’s this mixture of Silicon Valley ideology, PR and advertising which distracts us from our own aesthetic poverty, and the reality of what we have. Which is just all these crap robots…

Best part.

Right! The artists own anti-capitalist ideological explanation for it is adorable... but the core issue he's highlighting is real, and important.

That's an awful lot of Vice-y words about a Facebook group.

Couldn't finish it because of the pretentious writing style. Maybe if the author had bothered to explain why this group was any different from the others. From the description it sounded like https://www.reddit.com/r/abandonedporn reposts.

I'm just imagine the group founder's bemused reaction upon being contacted by someone saying they're a journalist wanting to write a feature on his former Facebook group

The reasons given for Boring Dystopia are the reasons I hardly ever use social media at all; it's been built into an elaborate attention trap by the very people that use it. Essentially, it's a very boring Matrix made by humans.

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