Hacker News Reader

I think a big part (if not the most critical one) of this deterioration is the addition of algorithmic feeds. As soon as a company starts prioritizing content, it breaks the natural flow of a conversation we have in real life. This leads to group mixing, polarization, emotionally-charged content prevalence, etc.

I have never really used Twitter until very recently. It was shocking to me how much the algorithmic content insertion drives the conversation. E.g. I click on a link to read an individual thread: right in the middle of it, with almost no visual indication Twitter is inserting completely unrelated but "high engagement" content. It's brutal.

Edit: imagine group chats sorted by engagement... a pile of responses in a disconnected sequence. Someone said something funny that got 10 likes? Push it to the top for the next 2 hours! (I am tempted to build this as an experiment just to see how awful—or effective?—this would be like.)

This is it. It’s algorithms to drive “engagement”. Anger is easy to generate and match the algorithm to.

And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the heads of Twitter cynically tuned the algorithm to reward anger. If it's human nature to love a good fight, then unguided ML would generate a black-box model that promoted angry posts.

I never really got those conspiracy theories. The big secret is they're tuning it to make money. Money in the ad-tech age of the internet means eyes on content and engagement. Anger and clickbait and such are all incredibly easy to tune for. Plus it's not just the algorithms that are tuned for it, people, including the "creators" on any platform, change their behavior to do "better" on the platform.

It's just a feedback loop optimized for "engagement" which is the metric these companies are using to make more money from the companies buying ad-space. Occam's razor and all that. It's just about money.

I think I remember Facebook was pretty toxic even before it had an algorithmic newsfeed. Maybe not as wild as now, but people being mean to each other and saying awful things was very much a thing. Same with oldschool forums, too.

People kind of go through a contrarian phase. I read something the other day, probably on Twitter, that to get the answer you want, you deliberately put out the wrong answer. And leach out the bile to get results.

I think there are still lots of people that are on-boarding. And over time they simmer down. Much is poor etiquette unwittingly forced, as we have finger fumbling interfaces.

The insane thing are the second order effects, people are actively tuning their content for maximum toxicity because they know the algorithm will reward them with likes, followers and perhaps real life clout, votes, money etc.

So the service social networks offer to their power users is a way for them to profit from the public discord they instigate.

It's everyone personal tabloid they can publish with zero barrier of entry or friction and an already hooked global audience.

I struggle reading threads on Twitter, just as I do on HN. If I could watch the thread grow organically perhaps possibly via a visual map, I'd stand a chance. Fork a thread on Twitter and content can end up totally buried. It's useless.

HN is far more simple in approach, but you only really stand a chance if you monitor your own thread. Kind of. So you just end up glancing this and that. Or trying to read something and then give up. Threads only get traction for about a day and people fall off reading them precisely because engagement requires a silly cognitive leap.

Natural conversations are a bit all over the place, but the brain is quite good at forming some kind of narrative. Despite participants sometimes have wildly differing interpretations. These aren't even apparent in the moment. Ruminating delays, and going back to conversations from yesterday doesn't much happen, unless you have quite an intimate relationship with someone, or you are very topic focused.

Throw many disjointed feeds into the mix, and how on earth do you navigate them, let alone participate in them.

About the only thing that kind of works for me when thinking back is something like newsnet, with basic topic threading. With well considered posts.

Apologies for adding to the noise.

Very much agreed. Group chats and instant messaging are the prime social media platforms.

You won’t troll in group chats because you’ll be removed and it’s difficult or impossible to get back. Unlike public platforms where you can sign up for 300 new accounts behind vpns. The groups are small and everyone knows everyone so you’ll have a reputation beyond just being banned.

There’s also no global admins / thought police. Each group gets to decide on their own what kind of discourse is allowed (illegal content excepted). In a group chat your friends can discuss things which would have you banned from Facebook/etc. The platform won't push your content on others so independent group chats don't ruin the experience for other users.

Yeah 100%. Small chat rooms have been existing and thriving for years now. It didn't suddenly take the Twitter debacle to make them viable options. I mean, look at the drama spilling out of Twitter right now. There are HN posters posting 10-20 comments per day on every Twitter thread. Mastodon wasn't the beginning of private or small spaces on the net. I'm in dozens of them right now.

This makes me think that maybe Google Plus (God, what a shitty name), could have succeeded. The focus on sharing into circles of users who wanted your content would have made it a system where you pick who should view a given post. This circle-oriented sharing may have led to less self-promotion than the other platforms.

In practice the issue was few people understood and properly used circles. I mostly just used them to sort kinda a primary and secondary feed. One to keep up with, and one for casual browsing.

It's still just not as good as group chats. It has no community vibe as each person is posting to a different group of people. If I join a programming group chat, I'll get to know everyone there and the content will almost all be around the topic of the group. If I open something like Google Plus, it's going to be some content probably related to what I might like to see, but it's still just a public forum with no community.

Gchat is an absurd story of not realizing what was in front of it.

I believe social media apps are much like markets, in that the structure of the app determines the incentives and the interactions that happen there. I think most would agree that the 140 character limit had a profound impact on Twitter, for better and for worse. This is why HN remains stripped down, without Reddit features like message alerts and visible karma for posts, and why the lists were stashed away; these features don't work towards curious conversation. The things you're citing about group chats are structural, as well.

We aren't doomed to terrible social media. But tech companies, with their particular incentives to drive engagement writ large rather than healthy engagement, may be structurally unable to deliver a good social media app.

They give it away for free, want growth year over year and are answerable to their investors. That’s not a recipe for creating user centric applications.

I think the fact that there is a public conversation about what is healthy vs. what is not is a huge step in the right direction, even if human nature means we’ll always be fighting.

I strongly believe that in a few decades (probably sooner), the traditional social media platforms will be seen as cigarettes. Some people will still partake, but no one has any misconception about the harm they cause.

Healthier alternatives will be important in the long run, even if there is no perfect technical solution.

I do like your theories about why certain networks have fared as they have, and hopefully Mozilla comes away with some insights that might lead to something that highlights the good parts.

Cigarettes have never been a prerequisite to staying in touch in an increasingly disconnected world, though.

And neither are the most toxic elements of the current big social media platforms.

Even just a return to the basics would go a long way: Show me my friends' stuff, in order, and don't show me anything else. Let me stay up to date without getting roped into bullshit promoted on my feed.

Highly manipulative algorithmic content promotion is not necessary to stay in touch.

At worst, a less toxic iteration of a social media platform is the equivalent of e-cigarettes. Still addictive and not super healthy, still unknown how this mode of consumption will impact humans long term, but less likely to kill you from the obvious kinds of cancer.

Sure, but the corporations have incentives to run things the way they're running them now, and users will aggregate to platforms others use, which will in turn be driven by addictiveness. And you're not going to quit a platform if it means losing touch with your friends and access to your data on it.

You think school bullying is human nature? It might transcend culture, but I think it's a direct consequence of school as an institution. I mean, a school's proposition to students is basically this:

"You as a student have to spend most of your time with these strangers that we chose arbitrarily. If a conflict arises, you gotta figure it out on your own. Your parents won't be there to help you. Your friends may or may not be there to help you depending on how we choose (arbitrarily) to split you all up. If someone attacks you and you defend yourself, you'll be punished the same as them. If you refuse to participate in this arrangement, you're a criminal"

If I had to design an environment that was optimized to encourage and allow bullying to happen, it would look a lot like a school. Writing the phenomenon off as human nature seems super naive to me.

Bullying isn't exclusive to schools though.

That's true. I think the other places where it happens often have similar dynamics to schools. For example, in a workplace you might not get to choose who you work with, or be able to leave easily. That's less true of other cases like bullying in teams or clubs though.

I just know that, personally, most of the times I experienced bullying in school happened when I was separated from my friends. I think that the natural tendency people have to look out for each other is stronger than any tendency towards bullying, but that schools disrupt the balance.

People seem to pile in once someone starts, that is how bullying works. If nobody starts then nobody piles in, but at scale with social media lots of people will start, so then the masses pile in a lot.

Did you ever have "friends" as a child? Bullying was brutal in and outside school, and I was part of both ends (trying to show strength by bullying others to try to stop being bullied).

Of relevance to the topic, the people who study bullying see it as a group dynamic. Apparently this is true across cultures but some cultures prefer to think of it as an individual "bully", rather than a social process that everyone participates in by allowing it to happen.

My only experience of school bullying is purely anecdotal, from parents of kids suffering from it. The problem seems to be that a kid gets bullied, tells parent/teachers and the school then does everything it can to pretend it isn't happening.

The reputation of a school trumps anything else, it would seem?

Part of the purpose is to prepare you for the real world, which is far more brutal. Though bullying tends to be more subtle. Grownups have their lunch money taken all the time.

Your comment makes me wonder if bullying isn't like the alpha wolf thing in nature- seen only in captivity and a consequence of the need for a sense of control in an environment you can't otherwise control.

School bullying is nowhere near universally consistent. It’s twice as common in the US as it is in the Netherlands for example and the difference between schools can be far more extreme.

Citation? I found:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092217/bullying-in-euro...

https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp

Which suggests the rates are comparable between the US and Denmark.

I’ve seen slightly different numbers (11 v 21) for percentage of kids bullied each year, but I can just use your links:

Netherlands is 12% far to the right on the top link you just used, and it shows a huge range between countries.

The second link you used had 20.2% for the US.

PS: Did you think Netherlands and Denmark was the same country or something?

Probably mistaking Denmark for "Holland".

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The prevalence of bullying really does vary massively from country to country, school to school and even cohort to cohort.

Given how many people were very deeply and very personally affected by it, it's amazing that nobody's discovered how and why it spreads.

I've also read it's non existent (at least violent bullying) in Thailand. But I didn't look for proper research on this.

> vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars

If there was a social media network that could exclude these things, then smaller would be fine.

I remember Google Reader as a brief, well-balanced example of healthy social media platform. It was mostly text, the selection bias was in favor of users who were savvy enough to understand RSS, generally interested in an array of different things, no engagement algorithms. The blogosphere that drove much of the content at the time was wonkish, (more) independent, often irreverent but also sincere about what a better future for human civilization and politics could be like. Haven't seen another thing like it since.

Reader wasn't really a social platform for many of those reasons. It was its integration with Buzz that gave it the ability to share socially with friends

I don't think this was the case as I wasn't a Buzz user. And yes, it wasn't _really_ a social platform, but you could share items from your own feed to other mutuals and converse under the thread that you (or they) shared. A couple other readers like Inoreader and TheOldReader later implemented stuff like this, but without the large user base that Gmail had it was pointless.

Its limitations were part of what made it thrive.

The more “focused” a group is, the more civil it is, or if it is too broad it needs extremely strict moderation. A good example is reddit, where the large subs like r/politics and r/worldnews are just cesspools like twitter comments and the more smaller and finely grained ones have serious and useful discussion.

It’d be interesting to see what would happen if Twitter copped the Reddit model. Separate forums dedicated to specific topics; moderated and isolated from the hellscape of the public space.

> Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic

This is a person who has never seen what WhatsApp groups look like in Brazil or India.

I don't think it's even country specific. There are just groups and groups. One has hundreds of users, most of which you don't know and the other is 5 of your friends that you talk to every week in person. One will be more likely problematic... (but also much easier to leave)

>there will always be demand for the unhealthy

Seems a bit like saying "there will always be demand for cigarettes". Social norms and "nudges" like no-smoking areas can go a long way.

People don't set out to have toxic experiences on social media -- they get sucked in and succumb to bad incentives.

Hacker News seems pretty good. Youtube comments have gotten better.

We're in the early stages here. Only a narrow range of platforms have been tried, and they've mostly been optimized for engagement rather than human wellbeing.

I think its just having a comments section. Which basically what twitter replies are or like linked in replies.

If books had a comment section they would be toxic.

Even this site gets toxic in the comments, there isn't any brand building, no real reason to collect likes.

Github can get toxic in pr comments.

Toxic behavior gets encouraged by likes and stuff. Ime the worst message boards were the ones with reputation that could be awarded or taken away.

Group chats have a social repercussions for being an ass. The internet doesn't for the most part.

Yeah there’s always instances of toxicity on anything large, even group chats like slack for instance. I am talking about overall trends on a large scale, which is hard to measure and subjective – but think of healthy as “producing more oxygen than it consumes” and vice versa for unhealthy. It’s just the least wrong but still general model I’ve been able to come up with. YMMV.

I think the more likely truth is that people crave utility and compelling novelty. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. all either had/have usefulness that their predecessors lacked or packaged themselves in a novel way that was enjoyable. No one cares social media is unhealthy because most people realize that 'unhealthy' in this scenario is more akin to the impact of fashion magazines on young women than the way in which smoking is bad for you.

Meanwhile Facebook groups and Facebook market are actually useful, Snapchat is handy for naughty convos, Instagram provided a more streamlined experience for people who actually cared about their wall on Facebook, and TikTok provided a less aggressively progressive video streaming service that offered tools to make content creation easy for Creators while providing Consumers with a wildly better recommendation algorithm than YouTube, mobile first design, and formatting requirements that ensured content is suited to the attention span of people on mobile.

Don't discount the damage done by everyone looking for a way to get rich quick. I think something that has driven social online media (in the broadest sense) to become the cesspool it is now, is that people are building their "brand" to profit in some way or the other. This is not to say that previous online communities were not toxic, far from it (lots of epic usenet flamewars to proof the point), however largely people were not trying to "break the system" to somehow make money from it (similar to how spam has almost broken email).

Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic

I've found several group chats to be deeply problematic (though of course I accept the possibility I could be the problem).

By definition they encourage group-think, and that, coupled with the lack of requirements for being a moderator (and the attraction of the role to narcissists and control-types) can be a pretty toxic mix.

What's funny is your solution would end up in something approximating the original version of Facebook