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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

If a metaverse is hosted by FB, it'll come with all the drama, nonsense and toxicity we see on there today. The product (ie, today's users of FB) is what stinks to high heavens.

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It isn't the users, it's the platform and underlying philosophy of the business. They are factory-farming humans' attention; it's no wonder the result is dystopian.

I see this sentiment posted often on HN but I've seen no social media that didn't eventually become toxic or that didn't feed on human attention, this website included. What good is a platform if nobody pays attention to it? And if people are paying attention to it, how do you plan to prevent them from fighting, competing with each other over every little thing, and spreading misinformation?

HN has its own brand of toxicity and cynicism for sure, but the existence of HN doesn't depend on that. It doesn't need you to be angry to survive, it doesn't need to know about you as a person. If you like the content that surfaces on HN and you get on well in the community then you're good. HN doesn't give a shit if create an account to comment on one or two interesting posts and then never return.

HN can live without you.

FB, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc. etc. cannot survive without trying to actively engage you. They are working tirelessly to find ways to rope you back in.

They cannot live without you.

It’s true that HN probably could continue to exist with much less overall usage and engagement than it currently has, but that’s because it presumably costs very little to run (including development and moderation) and (even more importantly) isn’t a core product for a public company attempting to constantly grow at all costs.

You provide enough value without over reaching to gobble up the planet's engaged time. You know massive ad engines which make the social media concept profit driven will not stop existing as a driver for the metaverse. We would need to pay to play in this space or accept a terrible freemium model which is likely to cause unintended consequences. The worst outcome would be a combination of both.

I’ve seen it said (somewhere, sorry) that humans simply aren’t designed to interact on these mass social scales. And (without evidence, I admit) that feels kind of right to me. The ideal social network is a small one. But the incentives of advertising and/or just growth in general mean that it would difficult to compete in the market against the likes of Facebook.

This is completely backwards.

The large scale social interaction is courtesy of the internet not from Facebook.

For example websites like Reddit, HN, Twitter, TikTok etc are the ones that facilite interaction with large, broad groups of people whereas the majority of Facebook users are just interacting with their small social circle.

I’ve always presumed that the vast majority of Facebook engagement now is not with personal content created by Facebook friends, but with the mass media content from large Facebook communities. Most of what I see when I look at my feed are posts from groups or “pages” which I have never heard of. Most of those posts aren’t even there because one of my Facebook friends directly shared or interacted with the post.

Hm, not sure.

I’m as you say, but my FB friends list have the following friend counts: 432, 139, hidden, 176, 1213, 103, hidden, 510, 179, 277, 217, 262, 233, it’s a cat, 320, 296, 317, hidden, 985, 398, hidden, hidden, 489, 995, hidden, hidden, 434, 167, hidden, 1080, 1297, hidden.

And several of those friends are in FB groups which have leaked onto my feed as a result of my friends interacting with those groups.

Those numbers are completely normal for the list of friends and acquittances you've met over your lifetime. And of that list you would only be interacting with a fraction on a regular basis.

But that's completely different from say Reddit where you would be exposed to hundreds of thousands of different people over the lifetime of using the site.

The post I was replying to didn’t mention Facebook once. Just social networks, which Reddit and the like would fall under. So you’re drawing a line that doesn’t exist in the original context.

> the majority of Facebook users are just interacting with their small social circle

That describes me and my Facebook experience is comparatively pleasant. But I don’t know how typical it actually is, most of the angst on there seems to come from people sharing meme page posts, being members of groups that spread misinformation… certainly that describes how a number of my relatives experience Facebook. I don’t think the social circle is that small for many users.

Google tells me researches at York University research indicates that humans can remember "10,000 faces over the course of a lifetime. The average person can recall around 5000" - and that's on lifetime scale - so it's not surprising that systems that are pushing past that would be uncomfortable/anxiety inducing. Brains are not wired to deal with huge numbers of humans (although I'm sure evolution will eventually have a thing or two to say about that).

> I’ve seen it said (somewhere, sorry) that humans simply aren’t designed to interact on these mass social scales.

This is something I’ve said, though I doubt I’m the only one. One particular problem is the availability heuristic goes very wildly off-course when there’s an internet bandwagon.

HN (and other discussion sites like lwn.net) are way different in this regard. Also, it's not a social medium but a forum. Before social media we had many fora. The success of each of them depended on their specialization and moderation. The more specialized the forum was, the easier it was to keep order because there were fewer trolls. Also the users knew they should not feed the trolls. We hat heated discussions, dramas, long-time users leaving the fora. But practically speaking everything was transparent. Nobody manipulated your "news feed" like they do with FB (an Instagram) to maximize revenue. Nobody suggested to me I should join some fringe groups, repeatedly. Nobody showed to me the stupidities some of my friends wrote on some groups (some of them not even knowing all their friends see it).

Is it? The HN front page absolutely does have some level of algorithmic manipulation going on. There was just a thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024032

Oh of course HN has a ton of problems and problematic solutions (greying out people outside of group think - shouldn't it be the opposite?) but it's way better than FB. Paradoxically, I don't remember when I used HN main page, I'm using alternative interfaces displaying censored posts etc. - one of the many things you can't do with FB.

Of course HN is better than Facebook. It's moderated, limited in discussion topics and the user base skews heavily towards higher educated, older professional types.

It's like being at a professional work event and truly shocked that everyone is well behaved.

> I've seen no social media that didn't eventually become toxic or that didn't feed on human attention

What about email?

It's basically The Matrix but without the cool martial arts moves.

I suppose the ultimate goal is compulsory participation, for more or less overt values of "compulsory."

> If a metaverse is hosted by FB, it'll come with all the drama, nonsense and toxicity we see on there today

It is ridiculous to imply that it's somehow unique or exclusive to Facebook.

It exists on all of the social media platforms, across the web and in the real world. It is more a byproduct of anonymous interaction than something Facebook is specifically doing.

Don't blame the users. Blame the choices that Facebook has made. They WANT the toxicity, it keeps people's eyes on their phone.

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