Hacker News Reader

Comment by EasyTiger_ | Hacker News Reader

Firmly believe what’s ruined social media is special interest groups and the rest parading as people like you and me. My evidence for this is the overnight take-over of r/politics in 2016 and the subsequent introduction of extremely divisive talking points which eventually transformed it into the glorified hate-site it is today. YES I’m bitter, Reddit before then got me through some tough times.

View on HN

Well, judging by the extremely racist and most often dumb as hell /r/Europe, the racist and self-hating r/ukpolitics and the racist, smug and self-important r/germany, it's people who ruined social media. And the Internet, for that matter. Let in too many idiots and everything turns into Idiocracy.

While it is not conducive to monetizing a platform, maybe we should have forums which are arbitrarily limited to a manageable number of people. r/politics claims to have 7.7M subscribers. That defies common sense. And 30K people online right now. Even if these numbers are inflated, they're completely nuts. It seems inevitable that when you put that many people in a room, the crazy ones take over.

I actually entertain a similar idea often. A service with a limited number of customers/clients/subscribers.

Enough for the developer(s) to make a living and provide quality.

It very much goes against common business sense, though.

Right along with my idea to make a Facebook-alike that has no tracking, no ads, etc, but costs $20/year. Another dead end business idea.

How odd, I find r/Europe mostly pretty wholesome and somehow generally with a unifying spirit which I don't find elsewhere, specially when a specific topic arises and many posts start showing up, dealing with that topic from the perspective of each country. And r/Germany often has very nice pictures making me wish to go on weekend trips, also sometimes interesting topics and topics helpful to foreigners. I don't really see any other racism than then normal one which you find in the non-internet media, like Greece/Italy hating on Germans and stuff like that, but in r/Europe somehow this is understood and dealt with as something which is a given and nobody sees a reason to expand on it, to turn it into a topic. It's somehow accepted like a cliche where fun of the stereotypization is made, sometimes with a bit of humor. I wonder how this is on Facebook.

I just scrolled down 24 hours of /r/Europe, and I didn't see anything "racist", and certainly not "extremely racist". Nor did I see anything "dumb as hell".

So when you say that "it's people who ruined social media", maybe it's divisive people like yourself – calling others "too many idiots"?

Mobile-posting, and general acceptance of the internet into mainstream culture; ruined the internet. Eternal September. Maybe recency bias (?) bc my reddit acc is 10 years old, my original hn account is little more than half that

The eternal September continues.

I also noticed this. I recommend /r/geopolitics its heavily modded to prevent this kind of stuff

Reply on news.ycombinator.com