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Comment by cr4nberry | Hacker News Reader

With facebook dying, twitter getting bought out, reddit's eutrophication, and tiktok on the rise, it seems like things have unsettled quite a bit

The next couple years are going to be very interesting. Facebook will probably get bought out or something. For twitter, I can't really say. Reddit is probably going to become even more repulsive (and hopefully gets replaced). Hopefully tiktok goes away also :/

Also interesting to see the phrase "diversity of viewpoint" catching on so quickly

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“Eutrophication is the process by which an entire body of water, or parts of it, becomes progressively enriched with minerals and nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus. It has also been defined as "nutrient-induced increase in phytoplankton productivity"

What is happening to Reddit?

Toxic algal blooms like crimson tide can tend to choke off and kill all other life in a body of water that experiences eutrophication. It's actually such a regular thing in the Salton Sea from nearby fertilizer runoff that you could drive by and see rotting fish carcasses littering the shoreline. Probably means something analogous to that.

One missing part of the definition is that the increased nutrients cause algae to overgrow and reduce oxygen supply in the water, killing the fish

The process is similar to what's happened to reddit: new users come in like agricultural runoff, which leads to overgrowth of more suffocating aspects of the site culture

It seems like if these general purpose social networks aren’t resilient to the population growing and diversifying…. I mean, I’m not saying there isn’t plenty of evidence to suggest this is hard if not impossible (ahem twitter) but it also seems like a real crisis to wha the internet should be.

On the one hand a social network that appeals to everyone will appeal to no one, on the other hand an internet built on the idea of exclusivity just seems. Incompatible? I’m not sure what the word is but there’s a paradox here somewhere.

Is HN next?

An easy place to see this is reddit.com/r/ar_mr_xr it used to be a lot of people in the field with great info in the comment sections, but now it's a bunch of vrchat kids who fanboy zuck like some kind of messiah.

It's been around for a while. "Viewpoint diversity" has been on the rise since the early 2010s at least, especially among thinktank Republicans and the intellectual/philosophical fringe of the liberal elite.

I recall hearing the phrase a lot in the context of overbearing DEI initiatives (now commonplace) that were criticized for being too superficial in their concern with diversity of "race" rather than diversity of opinion.

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