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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructive, complex discussion. This is one reason I like podcasts and why, for example, Joe Rogan has become popular. The demand for long form, complex discussion is higher than the supply the internet currently provides.

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A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's crap, it shouldn't be shown to me anywhere. Meanwhile, content from my actual friends or people who I have demonstrated interest in is pushed way down or all the way out. All because of popularity and some very misguided notions of engagement. Bad feeds ruined the internet.

I actually do think likes, stars, upvotes, whatever you want to call them are valuable forms of feedback. I like specific reactions - love, laughter, anger - even better. But I do wonder what it would be like if those only went to the poster. If they weren't shown to anyone else, and didn't affect what was shown to anyone else. I suspect that it would make "the feed" a usable model again, instead of the abomination it has become.

On your last point, that's more or less how HN works for comments. You can't tell if a comment has been upvoted 20 times or -5 times (until it reaches the negative threshold for fading out). But I agree, that would help.

Agreed. It's not the feed that broke the internet – it's the forced filter.

The notion that forced filtration, reprioritization, and chronological rearrangement of content is implicit the idea of information feeds (search, social media, etc) shows how deep the brokenness is baked in.

Sometimes the filter is a feature, but sometimes it's not. In the name of convenience, it feels like we've given up our right to choose to see everything and decide for ourselves how to filter.

Its the capitalism of it.

Or even youtube. The site gives you zero ability to manage your subscriptions in a reasonable fashion so you're best off just watching whatever it thinks you should watch. I've resorted to bookmarks over subscriptions because it's a better user interface than what the site gives me.

You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. Algorithmic "timelines" (which aren't timelines at all) are one of the biggest mass scams ever perpetrated. It allows giant companies to sit and mediate personal friendships, and extract rent for anyone who wants more reach (even within their existing, opt-in audience).

I think daily about ways to get people to stop donating content to these censorship and surveillance platforms. Most people don't run businesses, so they never realize the rent-seeking nature of these jerks.

You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship.

This would imply HN "censors" the front page. Of course that's nonsense. Sometimes sorting by an algorithm is just sorting.

In the case of HN it's up votes, and in the case of Google it's a basket of hundreds of criteria (including up votes if you think of clicks on results as voting). Google probably does have some "censorship" rules like filtering out illegal content, but I'd be surprised if they're not impartial about everything else.

HN's front page is heavily moderated/curated; it is far from being purely vote-based.

> This would imply HN "censors" the front page.

That’s precisely what they do. Everyone’s allowed to censor what they wish on their own webpage. I, for example, censor from my own webpage (which otherwise contains a lot of information about me) anything someone could use to physically harm me.

The issue comes up when the censorship is used, for example, in DMs or timeline posts between friends (as it is on Facebook and Instagram and Discord), versus one’s own content on a webpage.

There’s a difference between moderation and rent-seeking.

> I'd be surprised if they're not impartial about everything else.

Assuming impartiality seems awfully optimistic, given both human nature and the fact that Google admits that it is committed to maximizing profit.

The feed competes against all the learning resources on the internet. Perhaps people in general are just tired and looking for banter, because the non-banter, however a minority, is completely discoverable.

I think Podcasts are mainly popular because you can consume them in the car on the way to work.

Sounds if self-driving vehicles ever take off, we'll be back to video.

omg same here...

with the current confinement situation in the world, my podcast episodes list has been growing. i caught up with some of it over last weekend but i feel like i don't have a dedicated time for podcast anymore.

twitter & the web have replaced that time.

the herd mentality

Ever since the first time I heard that word, I've always imagined animals on a farm feeding happily at a trough, unaware of their impending doom. It turns out, that's closer to reality than I thought.

Edit: I mean the word "feed".

it's also when predators go after prey and the heard of whatevers blindly follow the direction of a peer, sometimes into peril.

The book Trust Me, I'm Lying expands on this point greatly.

It is well worth a read.

What I would like to see is a way to build charters and algorithmicly enforced governments, and then fork communities when divide exceeds concensus. What I mean by this is a subreddit where you can choose how votes are tallied, and instead of a fiefdom, becomes an open source template for other communities who can inherit the historical record.

When you create the community, it gives you a mad libs style page, where you can choose if you are a democracy, republic, autocracy, a mix of them. Vote weighting, whos votes count for what things, vote prediction and extrapolation. Conditions and Voteing for changing the charter rules, votes for how content gets posted, votes for leadership boards and mastheads. The ability for editors to strengthen or amplify certain voices or voters in a community. If you could seed a community with "role model voters" and then use the other voters who vote like them to extrapolate how they would vote on stories they havent seen. There is this common misunderstanding in the word that votes are only used as votes, and not as a signal to indirectly form a decision.

Every AI feed I've ever used (prismatic being one that comes to mind) buckles under popular vapid content rising above. Extremely strictly moderated feeds do exist tho: https://aldaily.com https://longform.org/ https://longreads.com/ I just wish there was a way for a group of strangers, who arent math experts, could spin up a collaborative feed reader (something that autoingests rss/twitter), and through their collective upvotes posts it to a more static page. Counterparties did something like that with Percolate.com and was able to still use the product once it pivoted markets. https://www.techmeme.com, https://www.mediagazer.com and https://www.memeorandum.com/ do the same thing. But those were all close knit teams that knew each other, their underlying tools arent accessible to spin up your own. I'm sure these tools exist for newsrooms, with the abundance of modern CRMs coming to maturity, a place to chat and edit before things get published. But they arent built for strangers to create community together.

It would make sense for these communities to more resemble Wikis with more static content, instead of the endless feed first. /r/personalfinance wiki being the front page, and the feed being something on the side powering new content to add to it.

Id really like to see something that combines reddit, git, fandom/wikia, techmeme, rtings.com, slant.co, kit.co into a collaborative consumer reports, wirecutter, or metacritic, rotten tomatoes. A place for people to gather to build consensus around something in a more structured way than wikipedia, and then publish it. Places like https://letterboxd.com succeed in some ways, but only through the existence of a shared culture and keeping to a specific topic.

There could also be an element of customizability for the end user. A metacritic or rotten tomatoes where you can weight certain critics votes, or a wirecutter where you can express your preferences for certain traits and then have it output a ranking list. Not completely dissimilar to rtings.com's magic tv ranker.

Sounds good. If you build it I'll use it.

I don't know, chronological formats have been there even before the WWW, namely Usenet, IRC and even E-Mail in a way. So this stuff also rarely made its way to web searches.

But probably there is a higher percentage hosted on proprietary platforms (Reddit, FB, ...) that replaces services mentioned above but personal websites as well.

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