So where are we all supposed to go now? | Hacker News Reader

So where are we all supposed to go now?

theverge.com

65 pointsrntn100 comments

The article is supposed to be about the "downfall of social networks" but somehow manages to ignore the fact that Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok are all still thriving with no end in sight. It's basically trying to say that because Reddit is struggling with profitability and Twitter is struggling with being bought by a petty jackass, social networks are in precipitous decline? But I barely think of Reddit or Twitter as social networks. I use the former as a resource for niche topics and I avoid the latter at all costs because it's full of bots and repetitive political crybabies. Yet me and everyone I know engages with some combo of FB/Insta/TikTok several times every day, just like we have for years and years.

Facebook instagram and tiktok, as you say, do not have the same searchable level of useful information in super niche subjects, which turns out to be the crucial difference afaic, the rest is noise.

While you are right, I believe searchability is not a criterion for earning to be be called a "social network".

In my view it is a criterion for "useful", but you're right, it's not as relevant to the idea of socializing itself.

I don't see Facebook (the core, original product) thriving. At least when it comes to actual engagement, I haven't seen any in years. None of my hundreds of "friends" posts anything anymore and we've been there since the Stanford days.

The number of active users continues to rise year to year, currently up to around 3 BILLION.

I think FB is not thriving, and actually is suffering to attract new people.

Insta and tiktok are not searchable so they are useless as archives.

FB is still adding new active users year-to-year and is up to around 3 BILLION monthly active users. Just because it's popular to imagine FB is in decline does not make it true.

Mm. Interesting. I highly doubt Facebook has that amount of users and still growing. No genz is there so that's that. I'm millennial and I don't know anyone using Facebook. Instagram is used mainly for business and sharing photos is going down since fb ruined. TikTok is currently growing without any any sign of slowing down.

Now, how many of those fb accounts are truly active? My parents have FB but they don't use it since all our photos, etc... Are being shared through chat. Are they part of the 3B mau?

> I use [Reddit] as a resource for niche topics

This is honestly the best way to use Reddit. I feel a lot of the hate is from people that haven't found subreddits useful/relevant to their needs, or are just plain ignorant. And look, I understand there's not enough time in the world to try out everything, but when people like you and I tell them that they can be useful tools, it'd behoove people to take a look before speaking from ignorance a second time.

I agree fully. This is how I used Reddit, but with the caveat that it was fairly well exclusively with third party apps. There’s a functional argument to this conversation in my view.

My workflow was essentially one of the following:

1. Read through my topic-specific subs; 2. Append “site:reddit.com” to Google searches to make Google return results that weren’t a waste of my time. Reddit links opened in my client(s).

Unfortunately for me, the official app and the new site are both absolute garbage. Wasted space, poor user experience, more ads than content, harassment to use the app, and they’re both just so _slow_ to perform basic operations. None of that has to be that way. Good design isn’t antithetical to ad revenue. I’d argue it’s the opposite.

I don’t really have an enjoyable way to engage with Reddit anymore, and that’s my biggest “pedestrian” gripe. Though I do take exception to Steve Huffman and Tim Rathschmidt’s absolutely asinine handling of the API changes outwardly. But since I have no enjoyable way to enjoy Reddit, my ideological disagreements are effectively immaterial.

From what I understand TikTok is not currently financially sustainable and is supported by money infusions. I can't remember the numbers exactly but they price user time at something like 20% of what Facebook, YouTube and other financially stable social media do. When TikTok is forced to become economically viable, the cycle will repeat where some new company gets a license to burn cash and undercuts them at the same time TikTok's forced to make the site less pleasing to users. It's pretty easy to view TikTok as an economic weapon aimed at FAANG (similar to steel dumping).

I agree, i also think Tiktok is used by China in a way as to vacuum ap any available information and maybe even to weaken the big US social networks. And for doing that they have to massively subsidise it.

"When TikTok is forced to become economically viable"

Tik Tok is China's greatest soft power accomplishment. It's not going anywhere unless the CCP wills it so. Profitability is entirely irrelevant.

And wishing Twitter dead is just the wishful thinking of the people who write for newspapers and outlets like the Verge, because they spent 24 hours a day on it and it catered to them.

For people who aren't angry about politics, Twitter is just as appealing as it ever was (other than the transition pains.) Among people who are angry about politics, it became less appealing to people who think certain ideas should disqualify you from speaking, and more appealing to those who either don't think that, or who think that an entirely different set of ideas than the recent status quo should be the ones that disqualify you from speaking.

Twitter is losing users fast. Even Facebook, which everyone wants to pretend is dying, is still gaining users every single year. And Twitter should be losing users - it's virtually indistinguishable from any other whiny, hate-filled internet comment section, only less anonymous.

I guess we’ll see now with the 600 tweets limit unless you pay.

Reddit is a content network. TikTok is similar but the mechanism for discovery and selection is vastly catered towards casual users.

Instagram, Facebook and Twitter all remain social. For business it’s a content network, but for most users it’s still social.

This article was a culture shock. Did people actually used to believe places like Reddit or Twitter were "healthy good places" to spend your time? I thought we were all on the same page for once, in recognizing that while social networks have some benefits for the most part they are deeply unhealthy places due to how every one of them is built around ad views or subscriptions.

This is partially why I don't really care about the downfall of any of these platforms, they were always replaceable and never all that beneficial. Rather than tightly weave my identity to a platform, I'll just do what I've been doing which is browsing different platforms and posting what I want to them. More should adopt this viewpoint, so the next time a platform collapses on itself as they usually do they don't feel so... lost.

> Did people actually used to believe places like Reddit or Twitter were "healthy good places" to spend your time?

If you never curated your reddit experience, I could see how you might have this attitude.

I won't deny that /r/popular and /r/all are rage inducing dumpster fires. But if you create an account and join subreddits, just going to https://www.reddit.com/ takes you to a selection just from those subreddits. And there are a large number of wholesome, nurturing, even useful subreddits.

In some respects, it is like Usenet used to be.

> never all that beneficial.

Google would disagree, after the recent blackouts. There's a lot of useful information going on in various subreddits - to the point that some posts on specific topics compete for stack answers in search rankings! Hell, I've found more useful Common Lisp resources in the Lisp subreddits than I ever found on HN, and better solutions to (some) problems than on stack.

I have curated my experience. Including tiny subs dedicated to niches. I still don't see it as a healthy good place to spend my time. What's worse, is the platform encourages these subs to spread, become unmaintainable to the core moderation group, and eventually becomes yet another dumpster fire. Everyone always loves to believe their sub won't change.

Why are we bothering wasting resources on reddit, when what we actually want is a maintained wiki page?

>Google would disagree

Only because Google has ignored their search engine problem for years before Reddit existed, and sees absolutely no problem in promoting the most random of sites as long as the content technically exists on the page. At this point, I'm not sure they want to solve the problem, due to the revenue gained by encouraging prioritized ad placements.

Don't even get me started on the absurd levels of misinformation. Not even related to politics, it's everything. The posturing as experts when they're 15 year olds. The encouraging of buying this over that, without letting others know they work for that company. So much of the "useful information" on reddit is misjudged that way because of the pseudo-anonymous structure that encourages people to turn off their brain and believe everything they read. By the way this isn't an argument in support of non-anonymous platforms, only that the way people interact with Reddit is quite harmful and not sure many recognize that.

> Why are we bothering wasting resources on reddit, when what we actually want is a maintained wiki page?

People don't want a dry wiki page. People want to discuss and share their experiences, hence the popularity of Reddit and Discord.

Sometimes I think about Gravatar. Like it was such a simple concept but made sense and saw huge adoption.

It seems like the main bottleneck all new platforms face is getting people to sign up. That’s why OAuth is so popular.

It makes me wonder if Gravatar had not been acquired and had expanded into being a service where the whole point is that you have an account that you can expand and withdrawal from various services, it would have been so much better positioned than more recent attempts or what became OAuth.

That’s what I hoped the fediverse was promising to users: one account, cross-instance.

And this is why IMO Lemmy is overcomplicating things. People are conflating single sign on (easy, relatively) with server-to-server federation (hard and resource intensive. Jumping straight into fairly deep waters of distributed systems)

Federation makes sense for Mastodon, since you boost (retweet) other people and reply to them, but Reddit communities are not linked like that. The only way they're connected is by hyperlinking, an aggregated front page, consistent UX or API, and shared user accounts. All of which can be done with entirely independent servers and OpenID/OAuth

I'm building a new protocol that adds a centralized DAO server for essentially auth, and name reservations for different taxonomies or purposes like subreddits, usernames, tags, anything really you'd be able to create unique taxonomies that could be tied to your apps. I want essentially to allow federation but with a single archival source of truth. Just in beginning stages though.

Since Apollo shut down ive been checking out lemmy.world (via wefwef.app[1], a web client app thats almost a carbon copy clone of Apollo) and I guess im slowly getting how the whole thing works, and into this whole fediverse thing.

Whilst there it not much content right now, you can experience first hand how the old communities you had on Reddit are being recreated there. It’s kind of fascinating to watch and you also slowly realze that maybe it might be actually a great thing if the content is not going owned by any single company and that what happened with reddit could never happen here. But who knows?

[1] http://wefwef.app

wefwef.app are going to realise they have a real naming issue if it ever make into some relevant user base.

Having been a vigorous Discord user for years:

Discord sucks.

Its so time inefficient (yet engaging) that I had to delete the apps from my phone and desktop for my own sake. And don't even get me started on the difficulty of actually finding niche information.

The Discord UX alone keeps me off it. Slack has the superior interface but with the Salesforce acquisition, I doubt it'll last for long. They've already snuffed out several communities' utility with their pricing plans.

Actually I think the UI is pretty good compared to, say, modern Reddit.

The usage patterns are the problem.

Hah, while I find Discord UI quite awful, Reddit is worse. People keep telling me Reddit is this fantastic resource, but every time I look I find things with just a few trivial or wrong answers. Maybe I'm holding it wrong.

Yeah I feel the same way about Reddit. Most of the comments are not helpful, many are straight up incorrect, and I don't get the "Google is a Reddit search engine" meme at all.

There are some niches that consolidate useful info there, like fandoms or weird topics/frameworks that are discussed nowhere else, but sadly that is largely moving to Discord.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I find Discord to be utterly confusing. I use it reluctantly when there's a community that uses it, but I don't enjoy using it.

Outside. There's even a nice blue ceiling (or, for British users, a nice grey ceiling)

Outside has a killer graphics card and zero lag.

Yeah, but the settings are almost non-existent, and the NPCs constantly ignore them anyway.

Also, no respawn. Lame.

> zero lag.

Obviously you aren't drinking enough.

Nobody will listen to ones unhinged rants outside though. Instead of being upvoted people just look at them funny.

I thought that was a plus?

Where do you even get a soapbox sturdy enough to stand on these days?

maybe i'll even buy a newspaper while I'm out there!

they still make those right?

sometimes the gray ceiling falls on you and it feels nice

The decline of social network monopolies will also see a decline in mass political influence in the form of international content farms pumping out propaganda, and grassroots organisations trying to save us from burning down the planet. It feels like the balance of political discourse and its capacity for abuse wobbles and wavers over time, but ultimately they cancel each other out.

I'm looking forward to a world beyond parallel societies operating on the internet for the profit of one or two companies.

The decline of individual social networks leads to social network monopolies, it doesn't damage them.

I wouldn't hold out too much hope. The most egregious propaganda has long since shifted to non-clearweb channels like Telegram and Whatsapp groups.

Some kind of wikipedia(for dummies) centric forum + news would be great. Nowadays I just browse wikipedia but it’s a bit verbose for my taste.

Rushkoff would say well social media is like the missionaries, when they leave, next comes AI, the conquistadors for the kill.

https://youtu.be/RCVXaqSEqmI?t=676

How about websites try cultivating their own audiences in the comments section and messageboards, which was the default until these sites decided that getting traffic from social was all that mattered?

10 years ago The Verge had a thriving comments section, with an audience that migrated from Engadget and Gizmodo. There was even a messageboard to discuss topics in more detail. It ended up getting closed. These days the comments sections on Verge stories are largely dead.

A lot of sites have big comments sections with high quality answers, like the FT. But of course you are always posting at the behest of their mods and on some stories you cant post at all.

That's better than nothing. Hopefully it's better than the WSJ's, which appears to be restricted to subscribers yet is still pretty toxic.

In the 5th paragraph and in the title subtext, the author bemoans the fact that all of the other for-profit social media websites are for entertainment. This reeks of echo chamber nonsense to me. ALL social media is essentially entertainment for ~98% of users if they are honest with themselves. There are absolutely cases where Facebook is used to keep in touch and keep track of family and friends, certain Reddit communities can be a resource for hobbyists and professionals, Twitter contains breaking news. But the majority of page views on all of these platforms are for entertainment and always have been. If you consider these platforms to be important professional and/or technical tools, you probably aren't a frequent user and only go there via Google search or you are a writer for the Verge or some other publication that takes itself too seriously.

Someone maintains a list on Gist,

https://gist.github.com/zpangwin/8be46c8314d3288504f13863d9f...

It's quite a bit of federated stuff in there, but some "decent" links too.

The problem is that I can spin up a phpBB instance and create an IRC channel, but are you going to come? It's a rhetorical question.

For it to even work there needs to be a cause, otherwise you're sitting like ducks waiting for some cool shit to happen. And the new generation has no idea what those two social platforms even are... good luck onboarding a zoomer on a phpBB forum to "socialize".

But I'd love to see where else people are hanging out outside of HN, maybe there are some hidden gems out there that I could consider joining. Fediverse/Discord/Slack are a no go for me, don't enjoy them at all.

To be honest, the ability to effortlessly repel Zoomers strikes me as a feature, not a bug.

I don't see what this has to do with Zoomers, to be honest.

If we're going to bring up generations, I'm a millennial who basically grew up on IRC and vBulletin forums.

In fact, I'm still a fairly active participant in IRC, and I am definitely one in a vBulletin based board for a certain car.

But I vastly prefer the experience of having a central place of communities like Reddit for all its problems.

Moderation system tends to be consistent, you don't get random changes by negligent administrators adding full screen ads that can get past ad blockers, knowledge/discussion isn't ephemeral like it is on IRC (sure you can log but not everyone likes or wants to for various reasons).

We are already doing it. We are becoming the old dudes making fun of the next generation. Right on time.

Better to say things like: Young people are too idealistic or have a different sense of humor.

They learn from us, not the other way around.

I don't want to make fun of them, I just have no desire to socialize with them. I frankly think it's weirder to be a man in his 40's who wants to spend their digital day with 17 year olds.

If you consider yourself a teacher, its no big deal.

Socrates might have been talking to adults, but students were watching.

I try not to compare myself to Socrates, or delude myself into thinking that most social media is about teaching.

As someone who spent some time on IRC as a teen surrounded by people in their 20s and 30s. It actually is.

getoffmy.net seems to be available

Or why not create communities on GitHub itself?

Gigantic listicles that we bookmark and never revisit.

The better way to do this, is have a recommendation that is solid to make further recommendations more interesting.....

So to test this, I clicked on the first link where there was a poll and found

https://squabbles.io/

Then I checked out subreddits that I'd visit, and they actually had a community. And I didn't need an email to sign up.

Then I commented on a thread, checked to see if it appeared in incognito. It did.

Well let me eat my words, that is a good list.

So... I guess I am eating my words

I'm all for everyone going private. You can bounce from black-hole to black-hole and talk to people you want to talk to. The problem has been mass, public adoption. We learned our lesson. Bring on the invite-only revolution.

Lemmy has been great. Only been on about a week, haven't missed Reddit even a litte, and I was a friggin' addict. Mastodon too, been on there for a few years but I don't use it much, I was off Twitter long before that even came around and I wasn't really looking for a replacement.

Watching all the various types of assholes fail to gain any foothold in the fediverse, while simultaneously watching them implode the current mainstream platforms, is very refreshing.

The lesson I'm taking from this is that companies are good at building a public commons, but absolutely terrible stewards of it over the long run.

It sort of makes sense, if a local government, or a university wants to build a physical commons, they hire out to companies to design, build, etc. the space, but then ownership transfers over to the organizer of interest such as the government who then manage it in perpetuity.

back in the olden days we had a thing called a forum, they were much better

Usenet.

What's that, nobody's posting? Well... post something.

Yes, spam, but it turns out to be trivial to filter.

> it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff;

In short, shifting to Doctorow's "enshittification".

[The monkey's paw curls, and another social network from Facebook appears]

(This seems to have been written shortly before Threads showed up)

I've been enjoying Metafilter again after many years, and also Tildes. There are well established forums for my interests that were always bigger than they were on reddit. I have some Tildes invites if anyone wants them.

I'm very much a lurker in online spaces (this is the first comment I've ever made in HN!) but I've found the atmosphere on tiles very appealing.

I'd love an invite if you'd be willing to share. You can contact me at <my username> at gmail.

> I have some Tildes invites if anyone wants them.

I'd love a Tildes invite if you still have one to share. My email is on my HN profile.

If you have any extras I would love one! - tildesinvite.yx13z@simplelogin.com

I'd appreciate an invite if you have any left, my email is on my HN profile.

I'd love one, please. Can be reached at mtiga at duck.icom, without both of the i's.

I would love to have an invite! I love the feel of tildes.net; feels like the old internet. Email: myalias.quickstep124@silomails.com

Also looking for Tildes invites, if anyone has one!

I have been browsing Tiles a lot and love it. Anyone got an invite?

Nerds screaming for decades: The lock-in effect of the big companies will bite you in the ass.

Normies: But it's so easy and i can't be bothered to understand what i am doing anyway. Go away

...The inevitable happens...

Normies: Where are we all supposed to go now?

Rinse and Repeat.

> Normies: But it's so easy and i can't be bothered to understand what i am doing anyway. Go away

An alternative reading:

Nerds screaming for decades: why make things easy for normies, they just need to git good. Poor UX is a feature, not a bug, and it doesn't matter anyway.

Normies: lol ok sure.

P.S. To add to the horse that is already beaten to death many times over: "just set up a cron job to rsync your files to a remote linux storage server, who needs a cloud storage solution with simple and easy to understand UX anyway, anyone can (and cares to) do it, just git good".

I read that as

> The Free shit they make for us must be trivial to use and for free and i wont give them any money to develop it to solve the problem. I'd rather get exploited by megacorps for free and complain that they treat me like cattle

hope they like to grass they get fed

How does poor UX and difficulty of use have anything to do with free vs paid? That's an entirely orthogonal problem.

I, personally, am in the camp of people willing to pay for non-shit services that let me avoid ads and other annoyances coming from something being "free". And I vote with my wallet too, which is why I pay for YT Premium and never have to think about the whole ad debacle with YT. Because yeah, "free" tends to come at a cost.

Because Good UX cost development time that has to be paid by someone. Nothing can compete with the lock-in and network effect these megacorps have. We have four choices to deal with that:

* Close your eyes, cry about bad UX and continue to be treated like literal cattle by them.

* Push for legislation that forces these services to be paid only thus making competition on the grounds of how they treat their users possible again

* Collectively decide to use and finance free, federated, semi-selfhosted open alternatives (see crying about bad UX on that front)

* Stop using them at all

And even youtube premium is just paying to be a cattle. Youtube has enormous lock-in power already and I can't even count the amount of fuckups, anti-consumer features and violations of their users and "partners" they have commited.

I am done regarding the petty complaints of the cattle users that don't want to understand, can't be bothered to consider the effects they have.

> Good UX cost development time that has to be paid by someone

There is a difference between "we would like to make UX better, but we don't have resources at the moment" and "the [obnoxious monstrosity of a] UX we already have is perfect, and if someone is confused by it, then they are an idiot and should just get good".

Just like in that infamous dropbox HN post discussion, people were railing Drew for "who would even want to use this, you can just trivially set up an rsync cron job on your linux server" (which is an argument about UX quality), not for megacorp lock-in or competitors lacking the same resources.

"So where are we all supposed to go now?"

Important to understand that the word "we" in this article means chronically online tech journalists angry at Twitter.

I've been enjoying tildes.net a lot, especially after the Reddit debacle. It's more like HN in that there are much fewer jokes and pun threads than reddit.

Yes

4chan

I still enjoy twitter, I find its death greatly exaggerated.

I could say the same about reddit except for the "enjoy" part. I imagine that in a while people will give up on finding alternatives and go back to reddit. Unless reddit keeps doing more stupid stuff it's not going away anytime soon.

This is the story of Reddit for years.

The best case trajectory for Reddit is Facebook's: a highly populated corporate cesspool of low quality leftovers.

But that really is the best case, as Reddit doesn't have the "my family and my boss are on Facebook, so I have to be there" effect that Facebook has. It really does rely on some threshold of quality posts.

Other than the rate limit issue this past Saturday I haven't really had any problems with it. I still self-curate who I follow with follow lists. I still get to be involved in baseball discussions with friends who have stuck it out there. I'm also able to continue following a large Japanese car community, especially friends I've made when visiting for that hobby.

It's still a very useful place to be. You just have to do some work sometimes (follow lists, mute/blocklist words/phrases, etc.) to keep yourself more isolated from things you don't want to see.

If you want to follow domestic US politics/rage bait, I imagine you are having a good time.

After the facebook stuff of 2016-2020, I went to twitter trying to avoid ragebait, it was there too.

Its not dead, its just not helpful. You get way better stuff from individual subreddits. You get even better stuff reading a non-fiction book. Reddit's app suggests rage-bait which is why its become so bad.

Every time I bother to check out twitter, or mindlessly follow a link there, it's just more of the same toddler-level political trolling. It's like an endless loop of bitching and whining and attacking, just with slightly different topics day to day.

There's no way that this isn't due to what you're reading. Almost everybody who does serious politics is on twitter, so if you can't find serious political conversation or though there, you can't find it in actual politics.

If Congresspeople are trolling, the problem isn't twitter.

The problem is precisely Twitter. It's not a dumb pipe, it amplifies messages of politicians, yet doesn't establish the rules of decorum they'd be bound by at work. Those rules exist for a reason.

I must be doing Twitter wrong because it seems like you get very little discussion worth reading and it's too hard to find gems in a thousand reply thread. Many times even my feed has about only two or three posts worth reading. It's about as useful as reading YouTube comments.

Try using the lists feature, one list per topic that interests you. It takes a little gardening but is the highest signal/noise way I've found to use the site.

For those replying to you about Twitter is still politics, that's like going to r/all on reddit and complaining that it's all tired memes. When you look for lowest denominator content, that's what you'll get.

The answer lies in curation. Just as one can read only high quality subs like AskHistorians or AskScience on reddit, so too must you curate your Twitter feed with what type of content you're looking for. For example I have lists for ancient art, web development, general programming, and so on. I also block the Trending pages so I almost never see any political stuff on Twitter.

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