Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralised Social Media Service? | Hacker News Reader

Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralised Social Media Service?

techdirt.com

19 pointsCM309 comments

The irony of us discussing this on HN, a centralized service

It would be cool if HN rolled out an activitypub instance

HN is still my favorite social media site. All the best online communities I've kept up with since the 90's have been community-driven BBS derivatives attached to a centralized entity where the community discussion is only tangenially related to the hosting organization. A lot of them attracted people who didn't even engage with the host's content much at all. The hosting organization just acted more like a host at a good party, attracting the right kinds of people to connect with each other.

I think there's some kind of a Goldilocks zone that happens when the organization that hosts the social media site engages in good content moderation but doesn't try to heavy-handedly control the conversation according to its own goals, allowing the community to direct itself in a balanced way. This type of attitude could help the fediverse grow too.

Because I don't care?

Maybe I'm too old but social media is nothing more than an ephemeral distraction to me.

Chuckling at hot takes on the latest current event is not important enough for me to care about the architecture.

The value some people place on social media is almost incomprehensible to me, like the value of beanie babies in the 1990s.

The UX of decentralized protocols kinda suck. IRC, Usenet, email, heck the Web too, all because standards slowed down progress as different engines adopted new features only slowly.

Not to mention the network effects of not having a clear way to find any given channel or individual.

Well the full title is technically "Why would anyone use another centralised social media service after this?", but I don't think that'll fit in the title box here.

I just can't see us use returning to protocol over platform either happening or being a good thing.

Protocol was phased out specifically because of 3 things:

* propertiary protocol started to emerge

* standard was not keeping up with the latest tech

* making things interconnect was either asking for bloatware or painstakingly writing your own which just made maintenance harder

You make it sound like some deliberate technical/societal decision. Rather, platforms gained popularity because most investment dollars want to create media companies powered by software rather than plain software companies, most people operate at the level of typing things into the box near the top of their screen and then clicking around on what comes up, and people's inability to think abstractly about how incentives are created by a system's design. Network effects do the rest, and create strong lock in so even people who know better or who have gotten burnt are still stuck in the orbit of popular centralized services.

Will the current events be enough activation energy to oust microblogging from its proprietary hell hole? It's hard to tell, but it's one of the best opportunities we've gotten.

But why does that stop technical folks from creating protocol-based software and services?

That is how the Internet was in the 90s, right? It was no mainstream and nobody cared much. The tech folks created their protocols, server tools, client tools and created their own networks with their own subcultures. IRC, newsgroups, Gopher, BBS all came out of that.

Why should that stop now just because internet is now accessible to the whole world? Tech folks can be tech folks and they can still fool around and create these small networks with subcultures. Gemini is a recent development but such things are fewer today than in the 90s. Wonder why!

If you're able to resist the siren song of the greater web and other pop culture distractions a few keystrokes away (eg HN), and are willing to gain popularity at the same rate things grew in the 90's, and have a stark divide between your few friends doing the same thing and the sheer majority who aren't, sure that could work.

But for most people, the overwhelming social environment and its network effects is just too strong of a pull.

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