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Comment by dgb23 | Hacker News Reader

> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate.

This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger.

In every online community that has had some amount of hype surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match their expectations.

What I didn't get when I was younger was that this doesn't need to affect me at all. Unlike the people mentioned above, my financial or reputational interests don't align with the size of the online communities I participate in. For me it comes down to "do I enjoy participating".

If you aren't an advertiser, streamer, content creator or anything of the sort, you don't really benefit from hype, growth or any of those things. So don't let these things affect your enjoyment of talking to people online or playing video games with them etc.

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Even a lot of regular people these days are caught up in the addiction of getting the maximum amount of engagement out of everything they post online. They don't want to talk to people. They want thousands of strangers to praise them. So the bigger the network the more likely they can accomplish this.

I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it.

> I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it.

“Prank” channels come to my mind at this. Like the one that got shot semi-recently for messing with people, who then said it was “worth it”.

It’s a shame how hard people can hyperfocus on fake Internet points and even let it hurt their actual relationships. I had a friend who was intensely upset over a comment suggesting a new camera angle because it “made their channel look bad” to be constructively criticized.

The human brain wasn't made for this.

Seeing the effects of social interactions with millions of people (albeit virtual) does something weird to the brain.

I agree, but I also think it's a completely unsurprising outcome. Pre-internet, there were lots of people who wanted to be famous, and idolized movie and TV stars and the like. With these sorts of internet platforms, those types of people actually do have a shot at being well-known, if not outright famous, in a way.

> They want thousands of strangers to praise them.

And the irony is that the people who think this way tend to be less likely to have anything worthwhile to offer.

Toddler learning strikes again. Doing good gets you a token acknowledgement. Creating a mess of some sort gets it instant and intense. Yet people are always surprised that people don't do good for attention despite essentially ignoring it themselves.... People by and large tend to have little self-awareness unfortunately.

I'm of two minds on certain kinds of complaints. A lot of content creators talk about getting throttled or having their reach restricted.

While I do think content creators should be treated fairly by platforms to make the game fair... This doesn't really affect me and it often feels like that's all certain content creators will fixate upon, rather than making quality content.

I think it's sometimes a strategy of deception, to make it seem like the speaker is so much more important or dangerous that they need to be suppressed by the powerful.

> A lot of

Isn't that the issue? How is "a lot", and is that number representative for everyone who publishes text, video, pictures,... on the Internet or, more limited, the Web, or, even more limited, a handful of online platforms?

> making quality content

I'd argue that quality is in the eye of the beholder. Online, both trash and treasure co-exist. Moreover, one man's trash is another's treasure as quality is, always, subjective value attribution.

The big challenge has always been discovery. The so-called "big" social networks got big because the introduction of a "wall" or a "feed" changed how we, denizens of the internet, interact with the Web: from "pull" to "push". The vast majority of internet users don't collect and curate links: they just consume a feed that pushes updates from their "network". Or "subreddits", or "channels".

Incidentally, how's consuming feeds of pushed content all that different from flipping television channels? Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent does echo eerily in this digital future.

Yeah I've gone back to traditional bulletin boards just because the conversation quality is much higher and therefore enjoyable. When people are racing to go viral or get "upvotes" you get lowest common denominator junk food, which is the life blood of these social networks which are about stealing your time and showing you ads.

Unless someone generates a social network based on a paywall and exclusivity that somehow delights the business model just doesn't work for the user.

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

>Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

...

>Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the free communication service they tossed on there just to have more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don’t Need Storefront. And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.

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