Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

18 pointssebpra46 comments

Discord and Reddit are great for finding interest-based communities, and for getting away from all the noise traditional social media has. Which leads me to my question, do you think the future of social media looks like that?

Discord and Reddit are great, but they have this "gamer/nerd" brand attached to them which I think prevents the general population from joining.

What do you think?

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Reddit and Discord are very different. Reddit is a holdover from the '00s phpBB /somethingawful /slashdot /digg messageboard era. Like messageboards, it was always public, which is how people discovered it, and went on to join specific communities.

Discord is a instant messaging product that reflects modern social media priorities of walling everything off behind a user login; anathema to the public-facing nature of Reddit and Digg. If there's anything that prevents regular people from joining Discord, it's that you actually have to be told to join a specific discord, for something you're interested in. You can't click a link from someplace and see something interesting happening there.

> If there's anything that prevents regular people from joining Discord, it's that you actually have to be told to join a specific discord, for something you're interested in.

This is why I've not used Discord. I don't know anyone or anything there.

Honestly, any time I hear "join our Discord", for information that could easily be posted on the website, or on their Twitter, I think that Discord is the modern version of "subscribe to my newsletter", aka creating a captive audience that you can market a future product to.

Thanks for mentioning, hadn’t really pinpointed it but this has been my impression as well. “Like and subscribe”

I think the future of the Internet will contain a lot of "Join <expired Discord invite link> to download!" so I hope the Reddit model prevails.

Discord communities are regressive in that they're not indexed by search engines so a lot of the activity and information there may as well be nonexistent.

The reddit model is not without serious issues. Over the short term, reddit communities become echo chambers through the upvote/downvote mechanic. You only get group think, no outside viewpoints or discussion. The model promotes insular communities of single viewpoints. You also get thought-police moderators who will ban your account if you offer an opposing viewpoint.

Discord has these exact same problems, arguably worse because the echo chamber develops behind closed, un-indexable doors and crawlers can't archive any content before the moderators censor it.

If clearnet can't see it, it's inherently of less utility to me.

Subreddits can make themselves more like Discord via private subs or approval-only posting but the majority of subs aren't this way. Reddit has a nice wiki feature. Downvoting doesn't remove posts. This is all great.

The only thing better than reddit would be a standard MediaWiki instance or regular old web forum. Something less centralized.

And yes, your web forum run by a cabal of mods could devolve into a censured echo chamber just like any niche subreddit, but this will never not be a problem. As long as my censured echo chambers are visible to web crawlers, the collective Internet can retain SOME level of agency.

Even 4chan boards are archived in several places. Despite inconsistent moderation, bad-faith dialog and the fact that it's ostensibly an echo chamber - we at least KNOW exactly what it is because there's a paper trail. On the flip side, HN has its own paper trail of good-faith dialog here: https://hn.algolia.com/

Discord is a black hole. And worse - it's tens of thousands of niche black holes, each one representing a community that otherwise would have found its home on the clearnet.

Honestly neither are that great. There are active demoralization and harassment campaigns, and the platform by design is a one to many communication platform. The people that run it decide what gets seen, and places like reddit that do not prevent multiple accounts proactively have a real bot problem.

If you believe all those people talking are real people you'd be very wrong. Most are bots designed to harass contributors, threaten credibility, and waste time resources without providing anything back.

If the future of social media looks like Reddit, we should just cancel the internet and go outside instead.

95% of Reddit is a cesspool...never the subs you frequent, though...

All of the subs with more than 1M subscribers are basically Facebook 2.0.

You say that on a website that shares 99.99999999% of its DNA with Reddit. Maybe we should all be destitute and go touch grass?

I didn't make that connection though, you did.

I heard people around here don't like that...

I think the future is going to be fake social media websites that tailor make all the content to your preferences. Aka LLM generated content.

You know how in Minecraft (and other games) how they have infinite maps? You just keep on exploring and the game generates new lands for you to explore? That is what the future of social networks will be.

Except that's not a social network. If it was open about what it was, its nature would undermine the main reason for using a social network.

Probably the only people who'd bother to engage are some geeks who've confused themselves into thinking a social network is just about generating messages for consumption.

Also, such a fake social network might be able to replicate BS political slapfights, but I'd think it would fall on its face when touching on anything that's not repetitive or baroquely self-referential. It'd get old fast.

Yeah, you aren't wrong, but how do you know that you are talking to an actual human right now and not a GPT powered hackernews bot? Like you are assuming I'm a real person, but you don't know it. You can't ever really know it.

> Yeah, you aren't wrong, but how do you know that you are talking to an actual human right now and not a GPT powered hackernews bot?

Because it's 2023, and GPT, while impressive in its way, still sucks. Even if you generated the text with GPT, you're still operating it and I'm interacting with you.

> Like you are assuming I'm a real person, but you don't know it. You can't ever really know it.

That's a little sophomoric. No one needs to know with perfect clarity. If bots ever get good enough and prevalent enough most social media users are fake, there will be a little lag as people figure it out. Then people who keep using social media will get mocked for wasting their time, and it will die.

I'm just hoping that the robots dont hand wave away my arguments by making fun of them as "sophomoric".

> I'm just hoping that the robots dont hand wave away my arguments by making fun of them as "sophomoric".

I didn't hand-wave it away, I just labeled it correctly and addressed it.

A mind-blowing trump card of an "argument" it wasn't.

Dude, your argument against it was 1) that a technology that has been public for six months isn't perfect 2) that smart people would just know that comments were not being made by humans.

I truly don't understand how you are interpreting this conversation.

> I truly don't understand how you are interpreting this conversation.

That makes sense, because you're pretty badly misunderstanding me (which your summary makes perfectly clear).

I mean, 1 was part of a direct answer to your own question "how do you know that you are talking to an actual human right now and not a GPT powered hackernews bot." Emphasis mine. Your 2 is just a total misunderstanding. Hint: I was talking about social knowledge, not "smart people just knowing" in any particular case.

You should worry about everything you interact with, not just text on some small Internet forum. After all, you could be the star of your own reality-tv Truman Show, and everything you see is made up for the benefit of a TV show that you're the star of, but aren't privity to? How do you know your mom and dad aren't just hired actors along with all the people you interact with? Maybe I'm secretly being paid by producers of a TV show to write this comment to provoke you into discovering the truth of your existence for the season finale?

I think the difference is that the cost of faking my family is extremely high, but the cost of spewing comments on the internet went to basically 0.

I think it is pretty widely accepted that corporations and governments already conduct astroturfing, but those operations were limited in that you had to open an office somewhere and pay people hourly to write propaganda. Now you only need an API key.

I'd be really surprised if there are not conversations happening right now at Facebook and its competitors about injecting generated comments into people's feeds to increase engagement.

> I think the future is going to be fake social media websites that tailor make all the content to your preferences. Aka LLM generated content.

What would be the point of that? I thought the purpose of social media was to interact with people.

I think the point of social media is to sell ads. I'm not trying to say all forms of social media will go away, but I think we are headed toward a dystopian future

I think Reddit outgrew the "gamer/nerd" thing you mention, some years ago. It's a mainstream site.

Smaller communities are great but you still need ways for people to find each other, or they just die. For example, if you write a blog, how does anyone find it who isn’t already subscribed?

Reddit has subject-based discussions, good SEO, and subreddits are distinct enough to have a sense of place. One downside is that outsiders can just drop in and post, often without reading the rules, so you will often get a constant influx of newbie questions - the eternal September problem.

Discord has no SEO, so you’d need some other way of helping people find it. It seems better for people who don’t want to be found?

I run a Discord with a bunch of open source developers. We use it to collaborate and get work done, similar to the way most developers use meatspace at their office. Then when we've made something that's worth sharing with a broader audience, we post it on places like Twitter and Hacker News. So it's not like social networks are political parties where you only choose one. Not all of us are anonymous. I'm a public figure and my activities are heavily monitored. It's nice to be able to talk to and collaborate with other people openly without having every breath and whisper permanently indexed to places like Google and hn.algolia.com.

Facebook is the brand that's not gamer nerd culture. You have groups there, lots of normies you may not regularly interact with use that platform quite a bit.

I think it's too difficult to speculate what the next big social platform is/will be though. It goes through cycles from what I've observed. Generally the platform changes in a direction that the community at large doesn't like which causes a fragmentation to occur and other sites pick up the loss to start the process again.

> getting away from all the noise traditional social media has.

Why do you presume the general population actually want to get away from "the noise", or that they even consider it noise? They're the ones making the stories and posts and aren't so happy that you called their feed "noise".

I think the future of social media looks a lot like Instagram, because that's where social media is today, and it's crazy, I know, but some people actually like Instagram.

According to this, Instagram is the fourth most popular social media thing. Facebook and YouTube are the biggest (although I disagree that YouTube counts as "social media").

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

I'd definitely say it's something closer to Discord than Reddit or the likes. Because it feels like people want to be in mostly self contained communities with those that share their own values and interests, and where outsiders looking for ammunition/dirt are left empty handed. That last part seems to be what did in Reddit for a lot of controversial communities, because it quickly saw them covered by media outlets and the site pressured to remove them. It also sees a lot of its content recycled by other outlets too, like Buzzfeed and their ilk.

So it feels like a lot of communities want a space where they can carefully vet who can participate, lock out those trying to cancel or shut them down and keep discussions among themselves without randoms jumping in and stirring up trouble.

Reddit is too centralized. I like the idea of the fediverse where people can run their own instances and run small cozy communities which are easier to moderate by virtue of being small. You don't need sophisticated machine learning algos or shadow banning to filter out bad actors. You just nuke accounts which broke the rules.

Excited for things like Lemmy[0]. If everyone had their own Lemmy instance it would vastly improve the Internet and social media.

[0] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Very excited for things like Lemmy. Having a Lemmy instance per subreddit makes a lot more sense than Mastodon, because it makes the "which instance do I choose?" onboarding issue self-explanatory.

Reddit has grown so much in the past few years. I frequently surprised at how much local content I can find on there now. Their mobile offering is now video heavy and will be competing with TikTok pretty soon.

But it has changed - Reddit used to be amazing. I agree with /u/JimtheCoder's comment: "95% of Reddit is a cesspool...never the subs you frequent, though... "

I hope the future of the internet is not reddit.

Discord yes, small communities with barriers to entry, posts broadcast only to that community not the entire planet.

Reddit, no. Reddit is 15+ years old now. It is what it is, a news aggregator site with volunteer mods to police content. I don't see how they grow either revenues or users which is why they are trying to ipo and cash out.

Think of walled off 'private communities' with HOAs. My take is people want the internet that self selected for only the certain social groups/classes of people that could afford the internet in the early 2000s without having to say that is what they want. Mainly college students and post-college professionals with enough disposable income to afford the limited practical use the internet offered back then. Maybe make a startup that only offers services to those in the RIGHT Discord channels, with the right social credit. Maybe job offers first go to those in your channels, so your same social circle that has already self selected out the 'wrong' types. It seems super gross to me but the other alternative complete sucks too. I just think this new direction is as classist and racist as private home communities with restrictive HOAs and the people hear need to be honest that that is what they want.

This is kind of already the case. There are stock/forex trading discords where "verified" trader roles already exist (e.g. you have an account with that prop firm), and helpful information (including job openings) are sent there first.

Same thing with various Discord communities that recruit from Reddit where your participation in the subreddit is used to determine if you're trustworthy.

If you don't know how to get access to those Discords, you wouldn't know that they exist.

> My take is people want the internet that self selected for only the certain social groups/classes of people [who loved computers enough to early adopt] the internet in the [20th century] without having to say that is what they want.

This is what I want. There. I said it. Go lay down with the lambs on Reddit and Facebook to cry more about it.

Did all of you forget that TikTok exists and is vastly more popular than anything mentioned in this thread? How can you talk about the future of social media and disregard gen z?

I stopped using Reddit a couple of years back because it was getting to be more of a cesspool than I was willing to put up with, so for me, anyway, it's not better than other social media.

People watching AI bots playing minecraft.

delete discord and reddit. embrace github.

being constrained to support git is a fantastic constraint.

You can't really post political rants on Github, though. Unless you manage to sneak them in via issues.

you can host political rants, you can't really force other people to read them though. Just another reason why it's awesome.

one of my most active repos right now is just ranting about alignment mostly lol

if anything searching github for politics hits a bit different, there is some heavy stuff in there like a db that tracks every swedish politician XD

Look at gunjs to see what the web will look like in 2030

I think the future of social media is an oxymoron. Concentration of capital trends toward that direction (at least in the near term), but this doesn't mean it's what people want or need.

If what we're at is called late-stage capitalism, since it is the theoretical end of the road, there's nowhere to go but backward.

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