The Internet I Knew (2014)
flowerhack.dreamwidth.org
flowerhack.dreamwidth.org
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
This "everybody" clearly does not include privacy-conscious people.
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?
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.
Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and advertising should not corrode conversation.
Viva la revolucion!
www.hellolyra.com/introduction
You really followed this with a link to your website?
We humans apply double standards for others and for us.
> Viva la revolucion!
> www.hellolyra.com/introduction
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.
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.
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.
And only if you use a third party client.
Likewise with Facebook when they first introduced the newsfeed. It was literally just a feed of recent activity as far as I remember.
The value is that they're usable, least common denominator (not in a bad way) networks where you can keep in touch with your 80 year-old grandmother.
> 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
You're in a bubble. For nearly every Facebook user, this is not the typical experience.
I'd say that sentence generalizes pretty well.
You can also hide posts from your bitcoin friends and your boring VC friends ;)
Your comment indicates you understand it very well.
> No thanks and this is why I prefer interest-driven platforms such as HN.
What interest drives HN? HN is no different than FB. Except instead of "high profile" accounts, you get a mod selected drivel.
Ultimately what you are saying is that you want stuff you agree with. That's it. That kind of thinking is why we got the facebook we currently have.
https://freenode.net for a classic IRC experience, free of charge. https://mastodon.social/about for a distributed open source twitter-like experience https://diasporafoundation.org/ for an alternative to facebook that respects your privacy.
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.
Interested in electronics? EEVblog forums.
Audio? DIYaudio.com and Vegalab forums.
Mobile? XDA and 4pda forums.
Mobile audio? Head-fi and Doctorhead forums.
Mobile power? budgetlightforum and chongdiantou BBS.
Yes, a big amount of them is Russian and Chinese. Yes, there is something to think about.
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)
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 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.
And the “heart of a sysadmin” statement hit so close to home.
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 :)
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.
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.
We believe using a communication tool needs to be as easy as entering a URL and logging in - friendly, familiar, no new terminology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I'm supposed to be convinced that those small forums weren't anti-social in their own important ways?
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.
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.
Usenet, IRC, BBSes, MUDs… heck, remember The Well?
The Internet has always had ways for people to get together and socialize. Ello invented nothing.
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).
Also, for whatever reason, convention seems to favor all-lowercase names.
For the record, I don't think that's a good or bad thing. Just a reality of this community.
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.
How would one go about that now?
[1] https://medihttp://tilde.club/um.com/message/tilde-club-i-ha...
[2] http://tilde.club/ [infinite waiting list... suspect dead]
[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.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/record-sales-v...
https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/01/vinyl-sales-rose-26-i...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2017/01/12/vinyl-...
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/04/vinyl-records-sa...
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.
Sorry.
- 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!
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.
We'd love to hear some specific feedback on what you think could be improved about our UI :)
We also think we're not doing too badly compared to Reddit and Hacker News!
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.
Hope this helps!
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.
Thanks for your comments; we are very open to any more specific or detailed feedback on improving the platform.
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.
This page provides a concise summary: https://www.hellolyra.com/about?page=how-lyra-works
I wish you the best of luck.
Whatever land you're wrapped up in, I hope everything is awesome there, too.