I Am Leaving | Hacker News Reader

I Am Leaving

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478 pointstagawa709 comments

First, there was LiveJournal. Then there was MySpace. Then there was FaceBook. I was on FaceBook until .edu stopped being a requirement. Shortly after that change, my wall became a mix of soft porn and hightimes. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t what I want to see so I deleted my FaceBook account. I went over to Twitter. Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well. I deleted my Twitter account half a decade ago. All of it is actually useless, and it does nothing but eat time.

LinkedIn at least managed to retain its only useful function, a self-updating Rolodex. It would be nice to be able to disable the virtue signalling feed though.

The joy of LinkedIn is you don't need to spend your life scrolling through it. Go in, spend 5 seconds seeing what's new or if you have any non-spam messages, then close the tab.

Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required.

Yeah I unironically really like LinkedIn. I use it to see who works at companies and who else people I know might know, and what all those people have been up to. This is all super useful information to me as I plan out what to work on and with whom.

But the feed could just not be there and it would make no difference. Not sure what you'd put in that real estate on the home page instead though.

I think LinkedIn doesn’t know either, so they just did … that

Absolutely. I imagine the product meeting being "What are we going to put on the homepage? It's would be weird for your home page to just be your own profile... I guess a feed? Those seem popular and take up plenty of space...".

I must not know how to use it.

My experience is an empty shell of people that only use it when they are looking for a job. The active ones post things that they think will make them look smart, cheap blog posts about “5 management tips”, “is your manager micromanaging you?”, “9 must have resume tools”, stuff like that.

The people that I’m actually interested in have a profile, but never actually use it. Or already got a job and don’t need to open it often, if at all.

The recruiters that reach out are always scammy or offer ridiculous things hoping that if I’m there, I’m desperate. 12/h do it all position, contract, for maybe 2 weeks, maybe 6 months, (doesn’t matter, I’m on the verge of homelessness anyway right?) for a “very important and growing company” that’s not even in the area I’m in.

It always gives me that fake useless vibe. I don’t really know how to turn it into something I actually want to be part of.

Pretty much how LI works unfortunately.

The people you'd hope were active are out there busy doing useful things not writing "5 lifehacks to do useful things".

> Pretty much how LI works fortunately.

Fixed that for you! :)

Seriously, discoverable linkable profiles with tracking of connections and links to businesses and schools is incredibly useful, and we're fortunate it exists.

the trick is to not try to be a part of it, but only use it when looking for a job.

Sometimes the recruiters leads are worth it to me, but this must be very variable between users depending on profile, location,…

And do what in that scenario? Do you cold-chat (like cold call I guess) people?

Yes. It's professional, not personal, it is in no way weird or creepy to just say "hey interesting background, any interest in getting coffee with me?" just like you would with a new colleague at work. But it's pretty much everyone you can meet that way, not just people at your own company.

Have you come across a playbook for doing it the right way?

Here's a playbook:

- Find someone you're interested in connecting with. (Maybe you want to work where they work or where they used to work, maybe they live in your town and work on similar stuff, maybe they just seem to know a lot about something you're curious about.)

- Maybe get an intro from a person you both know. (This definitely increases the odds they'll respond to you.)

- Much lower friction than getting an intro and a nice feature of LinkedIn: You can both see people you both know. Reaching out to those "2nd" order connections increases the odds that they'll respond.

- Then I think the playbook for what to write is just "be yourself and sound like an actual person rather than a spam bot".

- Then don't be upset if you don't get a response, especially from people who probably get tons of messages.

There is also a step 0 that is an ongoing effort, which is to have a background and expertise yourself that is interesting to the person you're reaching out to. I love it when I get messages from people I might have messaged myself if I had come across them first.

Just don't pay attention to the "content"... that's the worthless drivel you describe (though you forgot some of the business promotion angle).

I maybe go there once a month because someone I use to work with came in conversation or I had some random thought about someone. I'll also go there to learn about business partners and people I'm about to have to deal with professionally... background kinda stuff. Sometimes that doesn't pay off, but usually it's just enough to not go into a meeting or project blind.

I am not going there to read articles, posts, and other "business self-help" stuff and I'm not going there often.

Yep, "I loved working XYZ, I wonder what they're up to now" is like a million times more useful to me than anything Facebook or Twitter has ever made.

seconded. it's mostly useless, and for the things I do the profiles are meaningless. security doesn't put a lot of info, deliberately, so as to avoid malicious scans and intel gathering

Profiles are meaningless in the sense that people don't say who they have worked for?

> The people that I’m actually interested in have a profile, but never actually use it.

Does it have their work and education history on it? If so, that is "using" LinkedIn. You click on the companies in their profile. You follow the link to that company's website, see what they do. Or you find their connections from their profile page and see if any of those people are interesting or have interesting histories. Then you can (often) send people messages.

These are (in my view) by far the most useful capabilities for grown up working professionals that have been invented in the social media era. Everything else (including everything else on LinkedIn, posts and the feed, etc.) is almost entirely just noise with limited utility beyond entertainment.

IMO the best way to use it is for professional networking. Add the people you work with at your current job. If one of them (or you) leaves, you have a reasonable avenue to get in contact with them again, either for jobs or just catching up.

I just gather phone numbers and email addresses and add these people to my own records. There's no need to bring a third party into this.

Ok so I worked with you a decade ago, you have my phone number or email address, but you aren't on linkedin.

I remember you and I'm interested in what you've been up with for the last decade, so I go look for you on linkedin, but I can't find you. I shrug and forget about it.

Or maybe I also wrote down your phone number or email address along with your name. I remember you and get curious what you're up to. Can't find you on linkedin so I have no idea. But I have nothing to talk to you about, I just wondered what you were up to. So I don't email you. I shrug and move on.

Oh well. This is fine. But it's better if I can just go see what you've been up to like I can with everyone else I've worked with.

That's fair too!

Aside from the occasional lunatic post the feed's been pretty decent for me. A lot of it can be noise but I think the fact that it's kind of basic and doesn't manipulate you into constant engagement is what makes it better - I see a lot of stuff that I might not have come across otherwise rather than being fed content the algorithm thinks I enjoy, and the stuff I post gets decent visibility.

I suppose it's kind of old-skool in a way while also just being there to fill the space with... something. Meanwhile you couldn't pay me to sign up to FB, Twitter, Insta or TikTok.

Overall though - LinkedIn definitely grows in value as your career moves from 'what you know' to 'who you know'.

Yeah I agree. I find the feed useless but harmless.

So do I. Besides the fact that I got my current position directly through LinkedIn (cold contact from a recruiter), I use it to learn about people I'm going to meet.

I work with our Bizdev team a lot, discussing proposals for new business and it's great to be able to look up the management/development team of a company that we're going to have a meeting with to get a better picture of where they're coming from and what their company does.

The objections in this thread strike me as typical developer negativity: it's not directly tech-related so it must be useless.

Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required

Oh my god, don't say that out loud! That'll send them into a full redesign!

That’s nothing, I generally ignore it for months at a time

A week or two? More like a year or two.

You log into LinkedIn every week or two to check messages there? I'd call that pretty solid engagement. If I were a product person there, I'd be happy to have a user like you. I log in every few years when I really have to for some reason and it's always a pain because I'm going to have to reset my password, figure out my login, blah, blech.

I log into it strictly to job search, and for that it has been fantastic. What I love is that I don’t need to engage with the site regularly in order to utilize it for that function. I’m on every year or two for a few weeks (minutes a day tops) to update resumes, clean up my “professional storefront” essentially, and do a few job searches - which then leads to me getting regular emails with job opportunities that match my parameters. And unlike other hiring sites, LinkedIn has actually produced results for me.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkedin-feed...

You can with a quick ublock filter. I find the following works a treat:

www.linkedin.com###ember69 > div

www.linkedin.com##.pb3.pt2.learning-top-courses

www.linkedin.com##.clear-both.text-align-center.t-normal.t-12.global-footer-compact__content

www.linkedin.com###ember131 > div

www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed

www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-bubble-header

www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content--scrollable.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content

www.linkedin.com###msg-overlay

www.linkedin.com###messaging-nav-item

Every time I fall into the trap of scrolling through the LinkedIn news feed, I end up losing faith in humanity. What LinkedIn has decided that I want to see is a mix of conspiracy theories and narcistic self promotions; and under every post a chorus of congratulations and compliments.

Every time I log in, I unfollow everyone on my feed. LinkedIn is great if you don't follow anyone. I've done the same thing with other social media.

On Twitter, I follow exactly one person. I don't even see all his comments on my feed. But I do see things like fights, light porn content (dicks, prostitutes), Musk trolling... And sometimes, I feel the urge to react to trolls or argue with people. Not a good social media in my opinion. I'm sure it could be vastly improved with a better feed algorithm, and better moderation.

This is what got me to leave Facebook definitely. I could not follow the only family member I cared about. Facebook just wouldn't show me their posts.

Twitter forced "recommended content" onto me recently. Now I just visit /notifications directly. I cut the feed out entirely.

There’s conspiritainment on LinkedIn now? Holy hell.

I haven’t logged into that clunker in a long time so I haven’t seen it. Our sales team is forced to use it. Poor souls.

Not only are there conspiracy theorists on the LinkedIn feed, also there is no censoring or warning like on FB. It's a conspiracy theorist's paradise ..

Worse, it’s coming from your office, your higher ups. Scary. Promotions tied to whether you agree with their “Biden caused the 2008 financial crisis” theory or if you are a “patriot” for attacking our capital. Don’t get me started with EU conspiracies about how Ukraine war beginning was an inside job.

Well, if it's "from above" the correct play is: yessir i am a $patriot please increase my $compensation to one befitting a fellow holder of correct opinions

Not always. We’ve seen a generation choose the door instead.

Not many, be honest. Most of us need an income.

I was referring to The Great Resignation (tm) but yes, you are correct, leave one place to roll the dice someplace else. It’s not greener, just different shades of dead and patches, with or without proper gardening tools.

Interesting, this might explain something someone started to talk to me about recently & I was just kinda like whatever - he’s not trump nor half as senile or incompetent as what conservatives make him out to be.

At this point I’d love a bill introducing max terms. Term limits. You can get re-elected but only so many times before you’re done. Do away with salaries for life “as compensation for your service”. They don’t need it if they are pulling in millions from enterprises, endorsements, book deals, merch, speaking fees in excess of $50,000.

Senate, you get 4 max terms. Reps, you get 6. SCOTUS, 4 and term limits of 6 years per term. Something to fix this professional career politicians we see like McConnell, Biden, Kennedy, Cruz, etc. The world moves too fast for one lifetime spent legislatively eliminating rights of people or bringing back “the good ol days”.

all social media trends to clickbate eventually.

like how everything evolves into crabs

LinkedIn is a horrible place because I'll see posts from the worst people I've ever met about tips and tricks on "how to be better at X". It grates on my soul.

Its because those people aren't working, so they have time to write articles at how to be better at the stuff they don't actually do.

The rest of us that are already good at X, don't have the time or energy to write articles about how to be better at it because we are too busy doing it. And when we finally get done for the day, we want to do something else with our lives except go back and write about how to be better at it.

I'm just too busy over here commenting on HN :)

Really? I only added people I actually know and it seems like a much better facebook - it only shows me relevant information and what people I know from work are doing.

Super easy to disable the feed, just unfollow all of your connections.

Is there a batch way to do that without triggering some safety check? I have several K of them.

Afraid not! The ublock origin method is probably your best bet.

"Virtue signalling?"

LinkedIn's "only useful function" is insufficient to overcome its "deal killer": it's a farce. I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality. They all claim the same B.S. (detail oriented, results driven, digital transformation, blah blah blah blah blah blah), enabling them to get hired into roles that ruin the lives of programmers like me. Better they should just be honest and say, "Switch jobs every 3 years when they find out I'm a total poser but I promise to stay out of the programmers' way".

I prefer to share my experience here:

https://eddiots.com/1038

https://eddiots.com/28

https://eddiots.com/1840

https://eddiots.com/983

> I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality.

I really wish there was a way to flag false information in someone's profile.

I had a guy last year that we fired for substantial cause. He was hired as a mid-level engineer, but honestly was borderline-junior level when we got him. That's fine, he clearly "overstated" his resume. I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.

So I shrugged it off and took him under my wing. I figured we could train him on stuff we needed. No big deal, he has at least foundational experience so its fine.

Fast forward 8 months. It has been nothing but a disaster. His personal attitude has been toxic enough that it drove me to consider leaving and we lost two other employees to his toxic attitude. Furthermore, he had already overstayed his welcome from a performance perspective. He directly caused multiple outages in our system in his short tenure and had failed to complete any significant projects by himself without it needing to be rescued by other teammates. In fact we had a junior engineer during his time that was outperforming this mid-level and used the fact that he outperformed this engineer in order to (reasonably) get a promotion.

After the sixth performance review warning in 8 months, I finally fire him for performance and creating a toxic work environment. Remember, he was a mid-level engineer that was being outperformed by our junior engineers.

Anyway, he was fired and I move on. The department significantly turned around for the better after he left. I really regretted not firing him sooner and spending so much effort trying to save him. The entire team was relieved when he left and happy.

Then one day, about a month later, I am having a 1x1 with an employee in my team who asked why that fired employee was a senior engineer and thought that it should justify a promotion for himself. I explained that he wasn't a senior, not even close and I was then pointed to his linkedin page.

On that page I read what the fired employee wrote about himself. First of all, he gave himself a promotion to "Senior / Lead Engineer". Keep in mind, this was someone who couldn't be trusted for basic junior level tasks by himself. Now he is presenting as a lead engineer.

In his accomplishments he said he lowered our AWS bill by 38.5%. Sounds great. Except that he wasn't even priviledged to our AWS expenses during that time, and furthermore our AWS bill had actually increased by over 20% during the same time period. He didn't just "inflate" his contribution (which is normal on resumes/CVs), but he was in no-way involved in managing the AWS expenses whatsoever.

Another bulletpoint said he had helped "integrate ChatGPT and AI tools into our platform to improve developer effeciency by 26%". Except that our company has (and still does) have a compliance regulation against using ChatGPT at all (we deal with sensitive government data that is restricted) and we were explicitly banned from using AI developer tools during his time here. So this is another entirely false claim.

He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released. No such product was ever released, let along him running it. The companies revenues were mostly flat during his time there.

That wasn't even it, but i've made my point. I went down the 8-10 bullet points on his LinkedIn and only 1 was even based in reality (although exaggerated). The rest were entirely false. On top of that he promoted himself as a lead engineer, of which he was closer to a Junior.

Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.

It's fine. I was happy to not have him in my life or organization anymore. I wasn't going to sue him over it or anything. But it does bother me that someone else would potentially hire him based on information that is essentially entirely fabricated. Yes they could try to get references. I assume he would cheat or lie his way through that as well, using friends that pose as past managers or something. If they called for an employment verification, the most any company would do is verify the employment dates and _maybe_ job title. But most companies in tech don't even bother with that.

Of course I don't know how much of this is a LinkedIn problem, as just hiring in general. Even if LinkedIn enforced community moderated accuracy, there's nothing to stop him from typing up stuff on his Resume that he sends around.

Then again, for anyone listening that works at LinkedIn, having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers. It would probably be more real and trusted than a reference check and make LinkedIn an indispensable tool for employers.

> I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.

Yikes. I have a great cost-cutting proposal for your company, then: don't bother with interviews. Just let HR hire directly based on resumes without ever talking to the candidate. Why would you bother with the interview if this is happening anyway?

> He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released

If you're a public company, this should be easily falsified by the next employer doing due diligence. If not, yeah, hard to know.

> Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.

This is the one he really should always get caught on. If companies say nothing else when asked about a former employees, they at least say what their tenure was.

> Having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers.

Which dating site was it that admitted that they really didn't want their users to find their soulmates, because then they stopped using the dating site? LinkedIn doesn't want you to find your perfect job and work there happily until retirement. Then why would you bother using LinkedIn anymore?

Thank you for the story, and the detailed write up.

My takeaway from this is that I'm undercutting my opportunities by telling the plain, unvarnished truth of my skill set on Linkedin.

That's a nightmare. Can I ask, candidly, how it was that HR had more say than you?

LinkedIn (and resumes / CVs) exist for you to lie to HR and fit into the automated systems to so you can get a job. They don't exist to be uniquely useful. If they were anything but lies then you wouldn't need to deal with technical interviews as you could go off of the candidates LinkedIn or resume. As you say, it's a system that when games gets you through HR. HR doesn't know shit from anything so they pass the candidate along. If you convince HR that your shit doesn't stink they'll be convinced you're the second coming of Christ. That's the game to play.

> I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process

> So I shrugged it off and took him under my wing.

You probably already know it now, but you shouldn't have done that. It never ends up well. If it feels like a no hire, it's a no hire.

Reference checks are a thing.

3 Days late but this is a funny comic! (I'm more WandaWant than say, alGorithm so some of the coding references go over my head but the jokes are funny all the same!)

Thank you, ExtraRoulette!

Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)

Hah! I appreciate that. One question if that's okay. I notice a few comics refer to COVID though they seem to be dated pre-pandemic:

https://eddiots.com/344

I'm curious; how come?

Nice catch, ExtraRoulette! You're the first to notice.

This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics.

It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs.

Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day.

So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore.

I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore.

I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.

Ah I see! The comics kinda have a "generated" vibe if that makes sense, since all the panels, characters, text is precisely in the same place.

I assume you just create a script with the dialogue and your program does the rest? That's neat!

Install uBlock Origin and wipe those virtues away. Use the element zapper mode to temporarily remove things. Refresh and it'll be back. Use element picker to permanently hide parts of a website.

I refuse to sign up for linked-in because I'm still salty about the years when 2/3 of my inbox was emails asking me to sign up.

Yes, I remember when LinkedIn was tricking people into spamming everyone in their contact list on their phone and using the information to suggest connections. A coworker was fooled and sent out invitations to everyone in his massive contact list. He was in sales for over 40 years and was mortified, then pissed off.

I refuse to install the LinkedIn apps on my devices. Microsoft didn’t help matters when they integrated it into Outlook.

I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago because it had no useful function for me. All it did was get me a constant stream of recruiter spam.

> I deleted my LinkedIn account...

Genuinely curious: Can you delete now? How?

Around 15-16 years ago I _tried_ doing the same and found out that deletion was _not_ possible. I had a personal profile as well as a company profile there. The company was a one-man startup that went down around 2007-9 sometime with the crisis. So it was closed.

As there was no option to actually delete or remove profiles I had to resort to manually tracking every bit of content in groups/threads etc and editing each one-by-one to be blank. Also profile pages were blanked and company facts removed where possible. I even wrote a note on both profile pages that "I no longer use this site: this profile is no longer active". This work took days I recall.

As many years have passed I do not recall if there was an option to hide the personal profile or not, but no such option existed for the company, and no delete option existed either way.

Last time I logged in was around five-six years ago only to find out that my profiles were still there and my former company had now gained 100+ current and former employees from multiple countries!

I had no way to inform anyone that these people were not really employees, as said company no longer existed. And, they never had been.

I would still like to be able to permanently delete these profiles, but last time I checked it was still the digital equivalent of Hotel Califonia:

     "you can check out any time  you  want,
      but you can never leave"

In all that time, and before, I had my website - along with the moves. The site is still there.

> Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well

I don't have a Twitter account; but I have found Twitter quite interesting to learn opinions of several people on the state of web development, which I used to regularly check out. Some of them have since migrated to Mastodon; others haven't; some of those who had migrated, went back, because, it seems, they were after the audience after all. When Twitter stopped anonymous readers from accessing its user feeds, that was a big disappointment.

How many of you have _never_ used any of these central-platform Social Media sites?

My purpose is not to virtue signal or brag about how I've never owned a TV etc, but I'm genuinely curious about how many people who are reading this never once signed up for or spent more than a minute on any of these garbage platforms?

Let's leave LinkedIn aside, for various reasons. I'm thinking here of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

Stay where you are. A team is on its way to extract you.

I think there are not many who never even signed up with any of these platforms. If not anything else then at least out of curiosity I too have signed up on all three you mention. If you change the question to "never ever used past the first 2 weeks" - sign me in to that list.

I mean never have even created an account.

I would be especially curious to know if anyone went to university in USA/Canada and avoided Facebook. I was never a heavy FB user prior to school, but it was the hub of everything. Even for alumni events, it remains the hub.

Depends. Does logging on facebook once a month to see what the few family members are doing counts ? That at best, I went months never visting it and just used FB as a SSO provider for any site I didn't cared enough to create any proper account on.

As for others, I only visit twitter if it is a source for update of something I care about, and that's near always coming from some other site like HN

Both could disappear tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.

I tried some FB groups related to hobbies but they're generally garbage with no way to bury useless/low effort content.

I made accounts at one point or another and will look at the thing someone links at me on twitter or whatever but I've just never been interested enough to browse these sites or post anything myself. Never felt like I was missing anything either.

> these garbage platforms

They are what you make of it. You have to take the time to understand what they are and how they can be used. Just because you don't understand something or it doesn't fit any of your uses doesn't mean it is garbage. I never would have met my wife if I hadn't been on MySpace.

I feel pretty confident that I have a deep understanding of what they are and how they can be used. And to me, they are pure garbage. Regarding use, they definitely fit my uses, though I would never use one. I was very active on several forums and such before these platforms appeared. I'm all about social networking - it's mostly the technology behind the platforms that I... don't like.

It's awesome that you met your wife on MySpace - that's great! It's also totally possible to meet your future SO at the local dump, but that doesn't make the location any less of a garbage pit.

Heck, even garbage itself can be useful while still being garbage. I'm sure some excellent installation artists have made impressive art with refuse, etc. But that doesn't make the medium less garbage-like; if anything, it emphasizes its garbage nature.

If you want me to be honest, the term "garbage" is far too kind when it comes to describing social networking sites, IMO. "Poison" may be a more accurate word to describe my sentiment.

I would never have met my wife if I hadn't taken a particular part-time job when I was in college. So many very banal everyday decisions can unexpectedly/in retrospect change the course of one's life.

I've never used any of them. I made a Facebook account years ago as it was required to log in to something else I needed, but I never did anything on Facebook proper. Never been on MySpace, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or anything like that.

I am close to never having used a central-platform social media site. I had a Facebook account for a few months about ten years ago because the manager of a project I was working on insisted that we use it to communicate. I closed down the account soon after the project finished. I have never had an account on MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

The one exception, perhaps surprisingly, is Instagram. About eight or nine years ago, my daughter was starting out as a freelance illustrator, and I was fascinated with how she and other illustrators shared ideas and learned from each other through Instagram. It seemed like a new form of culture propagation. For a year or two, I posted my own music and photographs to an Instagram account that I set up under a pseudonym. I never got any engagement from it, but I started following some people who posted content that was interesting to me. I continue to follow twenty or thirty accounts and enjoy checking them every day or two, but I stopped posting myself a long time ago and my account continues to be under the pseudonym, so I don’t think it really counts as social media use.

This comment is super funny. You are on a central-platform social media site making this comment.

Good point. I was aware of that, of course, but, like some others here, I like to believe that HN is different in significant ways: no images or videos, no personalized feed, no following or being followed, no targeted advertising, etc.

You are correct, of course, but to me HN is more similar to a bbPHP forum than Facebook or Twitter. (Forums are themselves central-platform social media sites, but to me they are quite different.)

No feed. No social network. Et c.

Reasonable people disagree over whether it's appropriate to label any piece of software in which two or more people interact "social media". I tend to think it renders the term uselessly broad.

Reasonable people know how to use a dictionary:

"websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking"

Right. Because some people use it that way and dictionaries have (not inappropriately!) leaned strongly descriptivist for decades. They should have such a definition in them.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure what about my post prompted you to jump to suggesting I'm an imbecile.

> Meanwhile, I'm not sure what about my post prompted you to jump to suggesting I'm an imbecile.

If that's your take I can't stop you but it's just a play on your own wording.

I’ve never used any of the ones you mention, aside from LinkedIn as you say.

There are different reasons in each case. E.g. Twitter’s short message limit seemed guaranteed to produce what it did, compared to e.g. Usenet or HN. Facebook originally seemed to me like a way to publish on the web for people who didn’t know how, like Geocities. MySpace seemed to be for teenagers. All of these were reasons not to use them initially, but over time nothing changed in a positive enough direction to change my mind.

I'm a Never Myspace, Snapchat, Instagram, Fediverse guy. I'm always threatening to delete my Facebook though and have parked it on disabled status for over half a decade. People get offended by me not these social medias.

I just learned early enough that I have to have internet life, professional life, social life and family life all isolated for on death other.

I used Facebook when it first came out. I thought it was pretty useful as an enhanced version of something like friend finder. I moved away very quickly when I first graduated high school and lost touch with a lot of people I had known. When Facebook opened up to non-university users, many of them showed up and I was able to reconnect. But to me, that was its purpose, re-finding a pre-existing social network of people I'd known from school. Once I had their real current contact info and had met back up with them, Facebook didn't serve much of a further purpose. The people I actually care about I'll see in person every few years when I go back to where I grew up to visit. I don't need to know what they or anyone else is doing or thinking on a daily basis in-between those visits.

For all the people thinking "hey, you're on Hacker News" is some kind of gotcha, I think it's useful to distinguish between what all these things are. I'm on Netflix, too, which is a centrally-hosted platform that distributes algorithmically-curated media. That isn't nearly the same thing as a social network. Hacker News is a link aggregator that you can comment on, effectively serving the purpose of a newspaper, but crowdsourcing both writing and editing. You can't follow other users. You can't tag other users or receive notifications (and I don't want notifications). I don't have a profile and don't think anyone else does. We don't send each other direct messages. There is no personalization. I don't see any meaningful way in which this is similar to Facebook or Twitter. It's more like an industry conference, but ongoing, virtual, and anonymous.

I am 48 years old man in Northern Europe and been working in IT since 1995. Currently would define myself as old-skool U*nix sysadmin. I have consciuosly avoided all social networking. For a short time around 2007 I had Google account only to save longer trips on Gmaps. I am reading HN occasionally for a long time but don't consider it social networking.

Needs and perspectives change.

I technically have a Facebook account, but Facebook notified me that it was hacked about 8 years ago and I haven't bothered to go through the re-verification process because Facebook turned out to be useless to me.

I had a Twitter account and 10 years later they warned me that it was being removed because I had never used it. I have a new Twitter account that I log into daily because now I get value from it.

Never used MySpace. Have an Instagram account that I haven't used in probably 2 years. I just signed up for Threads to see what the hype was all about. Maybe it will be useful, maybe not.

Have an active LinkedIn account (got my current job through it) and I keep my network up to date to help with my next job or finding candidates for when we have opening. LinkedIn is useful to me.

I really don't get the vitriol in some of the responses here. No one is forcing you to use social media. If you don't like it, then don't use it.

I am close to that and nearing 50 years old. I blame it on two things mainly.

First, I have been around long enough to witness the many negative social behaviors of Usenet reappear in web forums. I reasoned by induction that this is what people will do in each large network that follows. I guess I prefer social sneaker-networks with limited scale.

Second, I am within three degrees of the Unabomber. (Kind of like three degrees of Kevin Bacon but with surprise amputation.) I identify too easily with victims of such targeted attacks, and I am uncomfortable with the idea of publicity in general.

I also don't consider HN to be in the same category. But if it had allowed anonymous posting, I would probably never had created an account here either.

And yet, you read and comment on Hacker News, a social media site akin to reddit. Do you have the same conclusion about this space?

The people here are nice

... for now ;)

The feature list of Hacker News is similar to Reddit, but the content and the nature of quality control are entirely different, and his issues were about the content he saw on those websites. In light of that I don't agree that his comment is hypocritical.

This site doesn't even have half the problems as most social media. Ragebait is usually handled well, the incentives to troll/virtue signal are low (karma is not visible) and the level of discussion is usually high. And there is no customised feed, everyone sees the same thing.

...people look at other people's karma on reddit ?

The karma of individual comments absolutely changes the way people interact with them

Not to mention it's a race to the bottom in terms of posting the most low-effort, low-quality content because they tend to get the most upvoted.

It doesn't do anything to encourage nuance or thoughtful interaction.

Correct, and a lot of it is posting either very short comments, which are parsed easily, or very long comments that seem like they are correct by length alone (Bardfinn and PoppinKream). Neither has much to do with being "good" comments

You must be looking at some niche topics then.

>Ragebait is usually handled well

Because there's a monoculture here, and you are part of it (so am I, for the most part).

Pay attention to topics even moderately political and see what happens to comments that fall outside the accepted norm.

Indeed - it is a monoculture that pays lip service to science, but actually is all about consensus.

If I've understood what's said about Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', even science is all about consensus.

I'm fond of Max Planck's “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”, or its pithy summary "science advances one funeral at a time."

You think science is what the consensus says it is, even if you cannot personally verify it?

If that's it, what exactly is the difference between science and religion?

Science is primarily a methodology, and secondarily a body of provisional knowledge discovered and tested via that methodology.

As non practitioners, if we trust in the methodology, then to some extent we have to take a shortcut and make decisions based on the consensus judgement of expert practitioners. And, unlike some religious people, accept we can never act in absolute certainty.

I absolutely hold to the scientific method.

But do you think you find that method in science? In science journals, academic departments?

I don't think you do, and I for one don't trust.

Science, like religion, like academia, like government - and all those individuals therein - are all in thrall to money, not truth. I don't think there is any doubt that the proclamations we receive from whichever institution are about providing us with information that is expedient for us to believe (not verify). The provided information is about control of minds. If whatever-it-is does have a relation to the underlying reality (and who checks?), that relationship is accidental/beneficial for whatever story we are currently being sold.

Yes. Science is a human institution, with all of the mess that entails.

But at least the ability to challenge authority with evidence is science's central dogma (rather than "this book is infallable"). It means one way to find fame and fortune in science is to conclusively disprove some accepted wisdom, in a way that others can repeat and see for themselves. That's not to say you won't meet resistance, partly because of human nature, and partly because, heuristically, most unexpected results turn out to be flawed on further examination.

I'm interested in specifics of which scientific institutions you think are trying to influence us in what way, and to what purpose.

Do you ever challenge any evidence? Have you even tried to put information out there that is outside the norm? I have and can confirm that most places - eg HN - is an echo chamber. This specific environment is cultivated by the administrators. Now, I don't mind administration, but it is clear to me that on certain hot button topics there is only one direction of discussion allowed - it is a controlled conversation.

> which scientific institutions you think are trying to influence us in what way, and to what purpose

Its a bigger issue than a specific institution. When you think about science in the US - it is all funded by one of 2 (or 3) sources - government (military) and corporations. If you then consider that government and corporations are really the same overarching control structure (eg FDA officials will go to work for pharmaceuticals, corporate lobbyists write the legislation for government officials to approve) you can argue that, in a sense there is only 1 source of funding! Funding is centralised.

Say you then want to prove/'have it widely believed' that helium is beneficial (I'm making a ridiculous hypothesis up to show the methodology in play) and you undertake 10 studies. The results are that 2 studies are supportive, 6 are neutral, and 2 are against. If you then promote the 2 that are supportive in journals, and fund more similar studies, and repeat that process for a while, you will soon end up with reams of supportive evidence. I think this shows any agenda can be promoted by funding alone, regardless of the assumed good intentions of the scientists who receive the funding.

Does that method help understand truth? No. Will your agenda appear to be very well supported - yes.

Now think, if it is your business to administer people in general - isn't it better to have those people desire for themselves the solution that you already have in mind? That it is better to engineer people's consent? If so, why wouldn't you use science, history, academia or whatever to engineer people into wanting whatever you have to sell? Why not provide the studies that move the people in the direction you want them to move to? You could say the studies are to get the turkeys voting for Christmas.

Ok, I partially agree.

Favourable studies getting to publication, and unfavourable ones getting left in the desk drawer is a thing. But the same thing can happen with surprising results vs boring results. It is why some argue for preregistration of studies [0].

There is more than one government in the world, and corporations are in competition with each other. I'm not convinced that they amount to a single funding source. That's not to say that there is a perfect plurality.

Academics are also in competition with each other, and can make their name by demolishing a false consensus. They are also often motivated by things other than money, otherwise they would be quants or something. So there are balancing forces to those that would distort the truth.

At this point we're both just describing, without much evidence, how we think the world works. I agree there is plenty of shady shit and bullshit science going on, it just doesn't make sense to me that all the bad actors would be super-competent and pulling in the same direction on everything. At least not to the extent that it amounts to something akin to mind control.

Consider, there has been a hell of a lot of oil money poured into science funding, but the consensus has settled on "fossil fuels are heating up the planet".

There examples where a powerful lobby has held back the tide for years (tobacco, for example), but we know about them because the truth reasserted itself.

I'm not particularly familiar with HN moderation. I have expressed some reasonably controversial opinions in a calm and reasonable tone, and not been moderated. But perhaps my opinions are not among those you believe to be surpressed.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preregistration_(science)

I would argue for pre-registration of studies. Good call. And I would also argue for free access to all studies.

> corporations are in competition with each other

I don't think there's as much competition as you might think! Are Apple and Google competitors? Have you seen who their shareholders are?

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders

Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) - 8.33%

Blackrock Inc. - 6.58%

State Street Corporation - 3.66%

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/holders/

Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) - 7.14%

Blackrock Inc. - 6.23%

State Street Corporation - 3.27%

Meta?

Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) - 8.18%

Blackrock Inc. - 6.91%

State Street Corporation - 3.93%

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/holders

erm.. Amazon?

Vanguard Group, Inc. (The) - 7.05%

Blackrock Inc. - 5.92%

State Street Corporation - 3.23%

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/holders

> Consider, there has been a hell of a lot of oil money poured into science funding, but the consensus has settled on "fossil fuels are heating up the planet".

Ok - have you personally noticed anything at all? I have not. For example, I have been to the same beaches for years and there has been no change. Can you forests be mis-managed with the result that there are huge fires? Yes - this is a man-made crisis though. Can you remove trees and build in flood plains to make floods more severe? Yes, and again - man-made. Can the media make it seem that the world is burning up? Yes again - but this is just perception management - using alarming graphics and allocating large slots to whatever.

On the other hand, I do see the control value of climate change. Everyone will willingly move to smart metering of water, electricity, etc though. This allows for the governance structure to exercise fine grained control over individuals.

> Ok - have you personally noticed anything at all?

As it happens, yes I have. Summers where I am seem way hotter than when I was a kid 30 years ago. But to be honest, what an unreliable way to judge! Better to measure and analyse the data methodologically.

Tracking sucks, but do you really think people need global heating to convince them to put data-sniffing smart devices in their homes?

And what about the trillions in the oil industry? We've fought wars over the stuff, but now the oil lobby has been defeated or paid off because enough powerful people want to know when I make a coffee?

It would be strangely comforting if our chaotic world could be explained by a grand conspiracy. It's too easy an explanation for me. It feels like religion.

By the way, not sure if you're aware that Vanguard operates index funds. Those shares are owned by very many different investors, many of them with small holdings. I only know this because I'm one of them, so this may be the case for some of the other big hitters in those lists too. As far as I know they don't get actively involved in corporate strategy. They are passive funds with very low management fees.

> Better to measure and analyse the data methodologically.

Have you? Or do you mean you trust the data provided?

Do you recollect the climategate email, where historical data was "updated"?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/11/23/climateg...

“I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

> Tracking sucks, but do you really think people need global heating to convince them to put data-sniffing smart devices in their homes?

Yes - to accept pervasive monitoring and control, you need a good reason.

> Those shares are owned by very many different investors, many of them with small holdings. I only know this because I'm one of them, so this may be the case for some of the other big hitters in those lists too.

AFAIK, you don't get to choose where and how they invest. And these funds are somewhat larger than the corporate strategy level. They would be more at international legislation level, no?

>AFAIK, you don't get to choose where and how they invest.

Fair point, but neither does Vanguard really. Index funds are automatically allocated to all the stocks in an index proportionally to market cap.

> Do you mean you trust the data provided?

I'm a software engineer. It is not feasible for me to sufficiently collect or analyse data outside my limited areas of expertise. As I said at the beginning, I must provisionally accept and make personal decisions based on the consensus view of experts. In theory that leaves me open to manipulation by shadowy, powerful forces capable of exerting influence over an entire field of scientists. In practice I observe enough skepticism amongst scientists to give me confidence.

I'm not talking about acting on every story of the form "study indicates link between x and y". Talk to me when it's been replicated, and confounders controlled. Talk to me about reviews and meta-analyses.

I remember reading about climategate emails at the time. I see a few out-of-context quotes cherry-picked from thousands of emails. I could link articles defending the scientists [0], but ultimately the grand conspiracy hypothesis is unfalsifiable - you can keep expanding the conspiracy to include anyone who denies the conspiracy. Conspiracies can exist, but the wider you have to go to make them work, the less plausible they become as an explanation.

And on climate specifically, it's especially implausible when there are huge, wealthy vested interests who stand to lose money if we burn less fossil fuels.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2019/nov/09/climateg...

Thanks for your thoughts.

While I think its fair enough to 'default trust' the world you know, there is a risk in so doing. I think you're acknowledging that conspiring is a possibility - most people can't consider this. Although, I can't imagine anything more natural - of course people would work together to gain advantage!

There is lots of information to support the grand conspiracy hypothesis if you choose to look. Eg the fact that all the US presidents are bloodline relations. Or that the UN (a non-elected entity) is determining the future infrastructure in your local city (pedestrianised, apartment blocks, smart meters, etc). Or that all the worlds' governments acted in tandem during the last 3 years - it was no long 'the economy stupid' but a mass media campaign. Etc.

I would encourage you to look more deeply into any area where you are already an expert, and see who determines the parameters of acceptable discussion. Is there legislation, an administrative body, a licensing scheme? Who gets to determine the parameters under consideration, that all the companies and institutions then have to follow? Then consider, are these the parameters you yourself think are important? Can you envisage a way whereby the data can be subverted to misrepresent the reality? I think you'll be surprised how available the information for a grand conspiracy is.

Of course its far more pleasant to imagine that life is unfolding naturally. IMO it simply is not the case and never has been. As Edward Bernais (the father of public relations and Freud's double nephew) expressed it, in 1928, in his book Propaganda:

> The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

Each individual is faced with a question - do I want to know the reality of the situation, or not? Its not as easy to answer as you might think. Each of us has to answer this for ourselves - pretending we weren't aware or something, is disingenuous.

I would encourage you to consider: what evidence would convince you that you're wrong? If the answer is "Nothing, any evidence against the conspiracy could have been manufactured by the conspirators", then you have a problem.

For me, I would be convinced by an insider or two turning whistleblower. With documentary evidence that stands up to scrutiny. I was convinced by Snowden.

Obviously I would expect a backlash and smear campaign from outlets under the influence of the conspirators in response. But I would expect a good proportion of established, serious journalists and experts (not just the usual suspects) to recognise the truth. You could say every established journalist is compromised. To me that just expands massively the pool of potential whistleblowers.

> There is lots of information to support the grand conspiracy hypothesis if you choose to look.

Do be wary of anomaly-hunting and take care to guard against confirmation bias. Seeking out confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis (rather than repeatedly trying to disprove it until it starts to look convincing) puts you at risk of this. Anything a bit weird or unusual becomes evidence for a conspiracy. But you should expect to find weird and unusual stuff all the time if you go looking for it, because the world is a big, chaotic place.

Sorry - a bit late to see this.

You think whistleblowers are real. Ok - but there used to be footage of Snowden which showed some seriously odd anomalies - eg the arms of glasses his disappeared, his hand was see-through, etc. This is hard to find nowadays - but I have seen it.

What that says to me, is that it is more than a possibility that footage of Snowden was faked - that he was a made-for-tv character. I don't know why that would be the case.. Perhaps its a case of the info he exposed was something of a controlled release - we were meant to hear about it in the way we did.

What that also indicates is that one needs to be wary of the source of information. Eg what to make of the BBC reporting that WTC7 collapsed on 911, when it is still standing in the background? Or when Rishi Sunak's briefcase changes colour live on a news program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyHfzcItoFs

(Re Rishi - I didn't see it myself - but the colour change point isn't under debate.)

The question is who is mediating your information? Which sources are trustworthy? Can Snopes be part of the control mechanism? Is it possible that a trick can be played on the whole world? Once you are aware that trusted sources of information lied, should you continue to trust them? Or is it more plausible to accept that they are intentional liars? (And no, not everyone has to be in on it.. very few need to know.)

So, if I reverse the question now - why would you continue to trust proven liars, who are using news etc to present a fictionalised version of reality? Are you able to discern the facts from the fiction from what is presented to you on a screen?

Of course the media lie, distort, and make mistakes. And media organisations have their agendas. You have to be careful to attempt to figure out fact from fiction. This is hard and I am honest with myself that I do it imperfectly.

This anomaly hunting is precisely what I'm worried about though. If you take every anomaly as confirmation of your theory then you're lost in terms of the scientific method. Like scientific studies that haven't been pre-registered, you're subconsciously trawling through reams of mundane stuff that we all ignore, and eventually finding something superficially strange, remembering only that, and leaping from "this is unexplained" to "therefore my unfalsifiable hypothesis".

This essentially lets you believe any number of things though. Perhaps there's a god that enjoys testing/messing with us, or we're in the matrix, or we're mentally ill and delusional, or everything we were ever told was a lie, or there is alien interference in human affairs, or our perceptions are being manipulated by a mind control device for the purpose of profit. All these theories are essentially unfalsifiable - which one, or which combination, to pick? What evidence can we use to discriminate between them? I put it to you that there is no evidence that could possibly do this.

Sometimes apparently weird things will happen for ultimately mundane reasons. Sometimes those reasons will be obscure, but often they will known and you'll distrust the explanation. It took me seconds to find extremely boring explanations for two of the three anomalies you mention (I couldn't find anything either way on Snowden's glasses). So now I have a choice: believe that one rolling news reporter somewhere in the world made an honest mistake in a confusing and rapidly developing situation which then, by grim coincidence, later came true. Or believe that, what? The news were incompetently following a script? Even if 9/11 were an orchestrated inside job, why risk sharing the script so widely when you could just let them report events as they happened?

Believe the Sky news producer who says the video editor changed the colour of a folder as a probably-too-subtle special effect intended to illustrate the script of a prepared piece about the UK budget statement (asking how "green" it would be). Or believe what? This piece of video was faked, and therefore all mediated information is deliberately manufactured by a secret world government?

Again, I encourage you to honestly consider, what sort of evidence would convince you that you're wrong?

> I encourage you to honestly consider, what sort of evidence would convince you that you're wrong?

ditto. If you have some evidence of a trick, should you ignore that evidence, because of the consensus view? Are you authority of yourself, or is the consensus right?

I'm not anomaly hunting. Perhaps there is a god messing with us, perhaps we are mentally ill (most of us, myself not included - most people are in 'default trust' of their authorities). I don't care about god and mental illness - not when there are are real examples of fakery that can be seen (and I have pointed to). And you can also read about the 'mega plans' - the plans are not hidden - look at the Huxleys for an example.

The changing of the briefcase colour is a comic example - but it is also a signal. Had you realised that they are able to edit the visuals in real time on news shows, without any disclaimers? What else do they do? Is this acting in good faith? The message I take is that media companies show that they have a strong control over the presentation. You are of course free to believe it is just a bit of fun.

The bottom line is that you cannot know the truth from anything you see on the screen, or even anything you don't personally verify. You can only know what you personally experience, as discomfiting as that is. And even then, the ideas you have been provided by education, culture, parents, etc will have moulded and framed what you are able to consider.

I've gone very deeply into several areas, and I'm certain that the media is there as a governance tool - their purpose is purely propagandistic. To say otherwise, is to fail to acknowledge reality - which is entirely understandable. Media is literally there to support and promote whatever narrative is considered to be the best to support. Russian propaganda is in kindergarten, compared to the Western form - but no, the news programs won't tell you this. Not only the media, but science (consensus science, not the scientific method), history (written by the victors), religion (always a form of control to promote the servile mentality), law (an extranised and controllable expression of morality), politics, etc - all are bent to serve the interests of a landed bloodline.

When you think of the output of the apparent consensus, and then compare that to what an individual with only a fair handle of reasoning would decide, you can see that all human tendencies are bent to serve an agenda that is expressed. Despite all one's cultural training, one ought to have trust and faith in oneself and one's reasoning - the truth is consistent, no need to provide excuses and justifications for the control structure. Unfortunately the external world is already under mind control (a self-affirming group psychosis) and there's no reasoning with it. However, one is free to follow one's own reasoning, and act according to that. Truth, and acting in alignment with truth, is foundational to the individual.

Science tells you there's a truth and gives you the methods to find it.

Religion says it's the truth, and wants you to follow it.

It's the same thing as giving a fish or teaching how to fish. Receiving a fish is convenient, but I'd rather not depend on someone for food.

i disagree. i’d posit that science finds the truth about the cosmos. religion offers a lens through which you can interpret and apply the truths that science has discovered.

i think what you’re describing is how various practitioners of each have traditionally presented the tools of science and religion.

I think science and religion are even less coupled than that. The newest gravimesobaryon discovered through the LHC probably doesn't have any bearings on religion, and rituals such as Ramadan aren't performed for a benefit based in science. One's moral values/axioms and one's factual understanding of the universe can largely be separated, but a lot of people nowadays seem to heavily conflate them.

I think it’s because some people wants to impose their values on others, especially if it gives them an advantage in society. Moral values are fluid and can be manipulated, facts are not. Religion used to shroud values into fictions and present them as the truth. But, because science are demystifying most of them, leaving only the moral parts, people are starting to see that moral values are relatives, not absolutes, and it involves only oneself. So now, they want to dress science as one of the other religions, something that is wrong.

Real! I mean uhhhhh well said. Many people absolutely twist facts though.

Religion is a black box. Science is FOSS.

It's somewhat better in FOSS than in science-land because there are generally at least a few people who find a new FOSS project genuinely interesting and worth supporting, whereas scientific conformity is much less forgiving.

i believe the point is that the consensus is the verification.

repeat the assay under the same conditions and record the results to verify the original findings. repeat. it deliberately creates a monoculture to generate results.

the “religion” of it all is interpreting the results

> You think science is what the consensus says it is, even if you cannot personally verify it?

Well, no, but I might be able to see how you got that. I'm all for falsifiable hypotheses, empirical data, repeatable experiments, and revisions as we find limits to our collected hypotheses and data.

I do think that others(e.g. Planck, Kuhn) have observed the effects of consensus in science, and to treat science as though those effects are not present is a form of religion.

Yup. The fun posts are where the site demographics clashes with the ideology- check out posts about Affirmative Action for example.

People seem shocked that a site with a large Desi and East Asian population may be against AA. It’s good fun.

Also known as woke capital, California style.

Optically left/ultra progressive when its inconsequential anyway, neo-libertarian when it counts.

I think about the pros and cons of a monoculture vs a polyculture every once in a while, and I suppose that this is an example of one of the benefits of a monoculture. That the existence of norms prevent/mitigate out of bounds behavior by individuals (although that of course could be a good or a bad thing depending on the bounds, and if the bounds are reasonably changeable)

nah the monoculture isn't a big as you'd think -- see any posts about BTC or unions.

but it is a small sample of mostly STEM / technically oriented folks, and generally better educated (and paid) than average.

I don't really agree..... if you look at my post history, I've posted quite a few very controversial things (not about politics but programming itself) and... lots of people disagreed with me heavily but there wasn't any flamewar or anything. It was quite civil for the overwhelming part, which I actually found surprising, it's been a breath of fresh air compared to everything else.

(note: this is a repost from another comment because I accidentally posted it in the wrong place)

Controversial posts go down waayy better here than on reddit. To the point that its ridiculous to even draw the comparison.

So why do you draw the comparison?

Cool, find another forum that handles it outside of those accepted norms. Thus forum does not have to give alternative views placement. With politics it's especially bad because people can't separate their feelings from the discussion.

And, I believe, this is the way it should be. I don't want one forum for everything. I don't want those identities associated.

Could you specify what characterises those topics, the discussions concerning them, and their treatments in your view?

In particular keywords or phrases which appear, preferably in titles, though perhaps also in comments, would be useful.

I'd also be curious as what might falsify a sense that HN's membership shies from politics, can't discuss political matters reasonably, and/or has a specific political leaning.

(I've created an archive of HN front-page submissions from 2007 to present, and am investigating various aspects of the site. The data itself comprises the post date, page position (1--30), submitted site (as noted in parentheses following the title, I'm not capturing the actual URL presently), the submitter, and the vote and comment counts. I've done some cursory exploration based on sites that correspond to political commentary, such as think-tanks or highly-partisan media, and a bit of looking at phrase patterns in titles, but not much beyond that. Sentiments on what topics HN discusses poorly might be useful here.)

> This site doesn't even have half the problems as most social media.

All social media has the same problems. This site is no different. It is just a smaller social media - essentially a single subreddit with one mod who you agree with.

> And there is no customised feed, everyone sees the same thing.

The entire site is a customized feed which everyone sees after it has been customized.

HN has more in common with a bbs from the 1980s than it does a social media site of today.

Right before LiveJournal there was MovableType and when MT crashed and burned because they changed their license terms to be less open source, WordPress took off. That moment was when the road forked into social media vs open source publishing on WordPress. Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.

> Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.

I wonder if anyone has ever critically evaluated the methodology used by W3Techs [1][2]:

> We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website.

> We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of wix.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website.

So if Microsoft has a wp.subsite.microsoft.com subdomain, W3Techs considers WordPress as part of the technologies that Microsoft uses.

Is that really 43% of the "relevant web"?

[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies

[2] https://w3techs.com/faq

What that statistic means is that nearly 40% of business card websites and similar sites use Wordpress. It’s nowhere near as significant as some people seem to think it is.

Personal blogs are a vanishingly small fraction of that. The only reason it might seem otherwise is due to social bubbles or interest bubbles.

It remains the clear front-runner, with no close competition, for most any site that'll be run by non-geeks, unless you're hosting on a managed platform with its own (closed) content management system. Exception for certain narrow use cases that are well-served by special-purpose software, but it's broadly true. That includes use cases well beyond personal blogs and business card sites.

>Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand

The trick is to follow experts who do understand what they are on about, eg a top general on Ukraine, top scientist on covid. Having done that I find it disappointing going back to reading mainstream journalists who post with less understanding.

You have to fight a little with the recommendation algos pushing random nonsense at you but it's doable.

This was my great frustration with Twitter the last time I tried it. Even when I carefully curated my followers, random crap would constantly sneak into my feed. It was annoying enough that I started just manually navigating to a few bookmarked profiles periodically to read their latest tweets.

publicly traded companies in the social media space need to get clicks. so do influencers and pundits.

no surprise that economic forces push them together, to the detriment of your feed.

I find clicking "not interested" followed by "show fewer tweets from..." kinda works. But yeah it's a battle.

But why? The current top reply sums it up so well: "All of it is actually useless, and it does nothing but eat time."

Better info? In my case it's mostly a hobby interest so you could debate if it's worth while.

I don't know, I have too little faith for even that. For your "top general" on Ukraine example, do you really think a top general is actually going on Twitter and writing tweets telling you the honest truth about what's happening, vs. just writing what they're expected to in order to maintain the wartime propaganda message they're supposed to be pushing? For your covid example do you think a "top scientist" would go on Twitter and really risk being cancelled and having their career and life destroyed if they write what they believe to be true, if it goes against the narrative they're supposed to agree with?

Well even the top guys have bias so you have to choose who you like to follow but personally on Ukraine I like @general_ben who was Commanding General of the US Army Europe and also Mike Martin @ThreshedThought who wasn't a general but was an officer fighting in Afghanistan and has a PhD in War Studies, teaches at Kings London and written various books.

There are also a bunch of scientist on twitter. Personally I followed the lab leak stuff and pro lab leak you have @R_H_Ebright Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers and anti you have @MichaelWorobey, Professor and Head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Both pretty outspoken, especially Ebright. I guess they have tenure.

It's sometimes interesting to follow both sides a bit when there's an argument going on.

Friendster in 2002/2003 was pretty great

reddit and youtube were my last remaining social platforms. quit reddit because of the API changes. might be quitting youtube, as well, because of the ads. and then there'll be nothing left for me to spend time on except code and family.

Your experience is isolated to your own network of friends and the people you're following. It doesn't represent the platform itself.

Reddit was arguably the last “social media” I was using until a few weeks ago with the protest. I resigned as a moderator of a decently large sub and deleted the app. Let me tell you, it has been the best few weeks for me mentally in years. I set up inoreader and only grabbed a couple of publication/writers I really like. I don’t doom scroll, there’s no capability for comments so I don’t get dragged into any arguments, and even with HN still in my life the churn and burn of content and simplicity/general culture keeps me to a few comments a week at most.

I know a lot of people talk about “delete Facebook/hit the gym” etc. but gym or not, my life is infinitely better without social media now. It is very clear to me that it’s not even a situation where the cons outweighs the pros now, there simply aren’t any pros left.

Someone enumerated the issues with Reddit, as well as social media writ large, at the start of the Reddit blackout. There’s a lot of interesting insight about the failures of Web 2.0 from a consumer standpoint, but one line at the end really resonated with me: “The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.“ Obviously that’s a pretty broad stroke and we should always be wary of rose-tinted glasses, but I can’t say I don’t get what they mean.

  Utter futility! — said Koheleth —
  Utter futility! All is futile!

I left WhatsApp when it was acquired by Meta (née Facebook) in 2014. I actually lost friends because of it-- they didn't answer calls or texts or any other form of communication on another platform reliably. It was surprisingly difficult to stick to my guns. I did--but it very much impacted my life.

Same, but I'm pretty happy about it. I want my friends to share similar values and this is a good filter for that.

Wow, and this is despite the fact that WhatsApp is end to end encrypted and not monetized?

I’d be interested to know what, if anything, Meta does with WhatsApp metadata.

I'd be interested to know too, the social graphs they can build must be mesmerizing to browse through.

How does Meta make money? That is your answer.

We can suppose endlessly and make all the assumptions we want. I am more interested in facts.

Here’s a fact: Meta grossed $117 billion in 2022. Almost as much as a major car manufacturer. They’re doing things with that data. It’s a scary amount of power.

Hence my curiosity regarding the specifics.

It is an extraordinary expectation that a piece of software under that ownership will not collect data.

It's also an extraordinary expectation that your friends will use the messaging system you dictate.

If I tell a friend "I am not going to use WhatsApp. But you can call me, email me, text me, use Signal, use Matrix, knock on my door..." and this friend refuses to keep in touch, who is the one "dictating" the messaging system?

You.

If 20 of your friend's are using Whatsapp to communicate just fine, and you demand they change their mode of communication to suit your needs.

I'm starting to see why the trope of techies are anti social is so prevalent. Some of you really are absolutely socially inept.

I'm not asking them to change their mode of communication with others. I'm just saying that I'm not going to join something that I believe to be harmful out of peer pressure.

> Some of you really are absolutely socially inept.

So if someone tells you "I'm sorry, I am not available at this channel, can we arrange some other method?" and you refuse to accomodate you take the other as socially inept?

It seems like you are projecting. Hard.

This is madness, I will say it explicitly, spelt-out.

There exist systems which may violate your privacy, and you think that a possible demand to use them from any third party would be "fair", aproblematic?!

Good normalcy is that if some acquaintance put as a condition any controversial constraint, such as destructive behaviour ("binge drinking" etc.), irresponsible behaviour, degrading behaviour (that spyware is part of this latter) - the reply is simply "No".

And that would be antisocial behaviour, "No, I will not get tattooed (etc.) just because you would like that"?!

Children have replaced Men in this world.

Edit: oh, and by the way: behaviour that would stick to the framework of proper Society would be «[anti-]social»?!?!?! That is a dire reversal terms, and it shows the (satanic) perversity these """societies""" have reached.

That sort of depends on your threat model. Are you making some ideological stand, or are you protecting yourself from harassment by the authorities?

It's not so weird to expect that your friends will acquiesce to your demand that they wear a seatbelt in your car, for instance.

you are an extraordinary man

Your friends dictate, many times subconsciously, much more important things that you do such as the clothes you wear or where you go on holiday.

But hey, I draw a line in the sand at the instant messenger! :-)))

> more important things

And your reply remains "No", right?

I have no control over what they do. If they’re so attached to using whatsapp that they’d stop being friends with me rather than use signal, the friendship wasn’t worth a lot in the first place.

I hope you do not have the expectation that in order to contact """friends""" one would ever adopt bestial behaviour. It takes a beast to act like a beast. Everybody will live according to nature.

Your post seems to be assumptions loaded. It sounds as if you were accusing strawmen of expecting people to behave rationally, wisely etc. That image has been superseded even in the theoretical grounds in which it had been used historically as a premise (e.g. Economics).

- They don't need your contact list to still build your contact graph.

- They still collect things like your location, your call history, etc. In Brazil it's quite common for people to use WhatsApp to call their doctors. This means that Facebook can know what type of health issues you have just by checking if you are calling/texting a specialist.

- They are still owned by Facebook and they take whatever data they can to feed the Borg.

- I can not prove it, but I am convinced that they scan the video stream in the device.

> I can not prove it, but I am convinced that they scan the video stream in the device.

You can't prove it, alright. But do you mind sharing why you are convinced they scan the video stream?

In a public forum, I do mind it. Sorry.

It's nothing really embarrassing or wrong, but I worry that it might be taken out of context.

Ok. that's fair. thanks for taking the time to respond. appreciate it.

Why wouldn't you assume they do? Sorry if that sounds argumentative, it's not my intent. As I understand it, their software processes everything you send to/through them. (And it's easy to imagine reasons why they would be interested in doing so)

Taking your first three points as true, the trade is you get free global multi-way instant messaging, including pictures and video/audio clips, and video calling, for no cost other than minimal data costs.

Lots of people are currently willing to make that trade, at least until a competitor comes along that offers something better.

The fact that lots of people are willing to make that trade does not make it good or ethical.

> at least until a competitor comes along that offers something better.

Next year, the EU is going to force all messenger platforms to interoperate. Then we will be able to really compare.

Love to know how e2ee will work with this!

I recently started using WhatsApp regularly because it's the only convenient end-to-end encrypted messaging app I know. The only thing they seem to be getting out of it is some metadata and the opportunity to sell services to businesses. Seems like an acceptable compromise to me.

Previously I used Matrix/Element but never got it to work reliably with my friends (decryption issues, session verification obsession). And Signal has no web app. So WhatsApp it is for now.

Can you tell me in words the value (V1) or values that you're filtering for with this life choice? And whether there are other values (Vall) that you hold and would like your friends to hold. And talk to me about the correlation between V1 and Vall.

Because my opinion is that my friends willingness (or preference) to use a non secure messaging app owned by a giant tech corp has very very very low correlation with whether I'd like them to be a friend.

I agree with this completely.

I'd also point out that this is exactly how bubbles occur. "Everyone I know hates WhatsApp/Facebook/whatever" says the person who refuses to communicate via those platforms.

> I'd also point out that this is exactly how bubbles occur

No it isn't. You'd be surprised in the variety of people that you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so. Just because you only maintain relationships with people who are not so glued to WhatsApp that they won't communicate through any other means, does not mean you have created a bubble for yourself.

So do you just call random phone numbers or something?

They might walk somewhere and talk to some of the people they see on the way.

They might do something when they get there and talk to people who are doing the same thing (or who just happen to be there).

People who use WhatsApp also go places, do things and talk to people. They don't sit at home alone in their room on WhatsApp 24/7. That's what Hacker News is for.

Then guess what? You might not find yourself in a bubble if you stop using WhatsApp. Which... is exactly what I said before.

> People who use WhatsApp also go places, do things and talk to people.

I'm sure that is true. I was suggesting alternative ideas to calling random phone numbers as a means of getting out of one's "bubble".

i use whatsapp to call my grandma and my aunt among other people, because that's what they use. Actually, my parents too, now that i think about it, they fall back to whatsapp all the time. How in tf is that an "algorithmic people-meeting system"??? did it pick a grandma for me according to some algorithm?

> think about it, they fall back to whatsapp all the time. How in tf is that an "algorithmic people-meeting system"???

It isn't. Nor did I say it was. The person I replied to said that not using WhatsApp is how social bubbles are formed. It isn't. That's what I was refuting.

Actually it is.

It's true you are always able to avoid bubbles, and nothing I say precludes that ability.

However, information bubbles are a function of friction and defaults. If communication lessens with a people who don't share a particular view (ie, that Whatsapp has to be avoided) then that friction lessens exposure to that viewpoint, forming a bubble.

> you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so.

AFAIK there is no algorithmic system on Whatsapp to meet people.

I think it’s a negative correlation. I’m fairly likely to like people that realize a FB monopoly on communication isn’t a good thing.

Or you just exclude all non-ideologues and most non-techies that don't give a crap.

Which I guess is a useful filter if you want to be surrounded by techies and ideologues.

Most non-techies don't give a crap indeed. Maybe these people haven't traveled much at all. When you are in the middle of a non-US city, you're trying to get the keys to your stay and the night is falling, you fire up that one messenger you're not supposed to use because zuck bad, and figure out the key situation in 1 second. Then you lecture your newfound "whatsapp bubble friend" who brought you the keys about how low and unethical it is of them to use whatsapp.

This is a useful thing to consider when using social media or, say, dating apps in general, come to think of it.

Like you, the choice of messaging app is quite beside the point (except FB Messenger being out of the question for reasons I'll explain). So, I still use a combination of WhatsApp, Signal and Skype.

If a friendship depended on me having a Twitter/FB/TikTok/Instagram profile though, I'm more likely to let that fade away. Similarly with dating: it'd be a dealbreaker to have to maintain a social media presence or find someone solely through Tinder or Bumble or whatever. I enjoy life more without social media in it, and without tech companies gatekeeping human connection through a mobile app. Some things just have to stay offline for the sake of me and my mental health.

I want friends with a diverse set of viewpoints and values, within a pretty broad window.

Practically it's impossible to quit WhatsApp, more so in certain countries. However if you still have that old account, you can choose not to accept any of Meta'a new terms and agreements, and surprisingly they still let you use it! The last time I accepted the terms was probably around 2013.

Eh—not really.

I just say "can we use Signal? It's super secure." And people generally are fine to use Signal. They don't use SMS because it's expensive and many that own an iPhone in countries where Android dominate don't use iMessage because, well, few around them use iPhone and the interface (i.e., the phone number) doesn't really tell them that they won't get charged for a text message.

I've posted up in many countries, and it's rarely a show stopper.

That's fine but you aren't on the group chat, so won't know about the hike next Sunday.

Anecdotally, all of my friends who are part of group chats are annoyed by them. Too much noise for too little signal. On a personal level, if there’s anything in a group chat that would be relevant to me I’ll know about it from one of the participants through another medium, like an SMS or phone call or when we see each other.

You can be both annoyed and find value in them.

Mine are annoying too, but I keep them because they also keep me in the loop.

if they are people worth your while, they'll make sure to let you know about it using other means...

They might not be your friend by the local hiking/diving/parent/whatever group. They don't owe you anything.

And you don't owe them anything either.

If they are really your only option, you can use whatever insane platform they are on long enough to forge a couple friendships, explain your stance and then quit.

If they are your friends they will understand, if not it wasn't worth the effort to begin with.

Well if you valued them as a friend you wouldn't make their life more annoying and just install a communicator app

"If you valued me as a friend, you wouldn't force me to use a communicator app.

My life is so annoying as a result of you, now I have to buy and maintain another phone, and then remember to check it, for your app.

Maybe, you could use something we agree on, like <insert plethora of choices>".

Someone does not have to understand your idiosyncrasies to be your friend.

Most people will not, in fact, understand why you are so picky about the chat platforms you are willing to use, and they will think (correctly, I would say) that you care more about your social media stances than you care about their friendship. So you will think they were not worth the effort to begin with, and they will think the same in return, but ultimately they are not restricting their potential friend pool nearly as much as you are. If it works out well for you, great, otherwise you have to be a bit more pragmatic.

"and they will think (correctly, I would say) that you care more about your social media stances than you care about their friendship."

Poor reasoning. "We should go do hard drugs together, we're friends, right?", "You should just let me have sex with you, we're friends right?".

Using friendship as a cudgel is disgusting, and quite frankly, unfriendly. The above examples are extreme, but there is a cost to everything.

Pragmatic-ism cuts both ways.

My statement still stands. If you ask me to do hard drugs with you, I will say no. Does that mean I value my physical and mental integrity over our friendship? YES! I absolutely do.

It is perfectly fine to value certain things over friendship. You just have to be conscious of the friction that your convictions will cause and ask yourself whether it's worth it for you. Health is worth it. Chat apps? I don't know. If you ask me to use Signal, that seems reasonable enough and I'll do it, but if we're a group of 10 coordinating over Whatsapp and you want me to tell you whenever plans are being made, it's like, OK, but I'm doing the effort for our personal convos, can't you meet me halfway or something? That's the kind of friction you're going to deal with. Up to you.

"Chat apps? I don't know."

If the content is compelling enough you will chat where you both agree to. If not it is like telling someone the only way you will talk is in the park by the chess tables.

Sure maybe you talk to them by chess tables sometimes, but if they won't meet you for coffee then they aren't your friends, just chess table acquaitances.

It's the group apps where it's the issue though.

Real example: My friend group has a hiking group on WhatsApp and there is one friend who is not on it. One person will propose a hike, and will keep messaging the group with information about it. Someone then has to message that other friend and tell them about it, every time there is a slight adjustment to plans.

Let's say you are my friend, and Bob is arranging a hike for 10am on Saturday. You usually come on the hike so I let you know. Even though all the details are on the group, you ask me all the questions and I have to fill you in. Then on the morning of the hike Darcy's car breaks down and the time gets rearranged from 10am to 11am, so then I have to tell you that as well because you aren't on the group chat, and suddenly I feel like I am becoming your PA (and if I forget to tell you the time has changed then suddenly it's my fault - even though i'm not arranging the damn hike and you could have been on the group in the first place you just refuse).

Some of my best friends decided to quit certain platforms like Facebook and yes, Whatsapp too (two people). I definitely understood. I even have signal and telegram installed. But I never remember to check them. It's just not practical.

> if they are people worth your while, they'll make sure to let you know about it using other means...

Ugh, I might but it's annoying for me (your friend) to be your personal messenger whenever there is something you might be interested in on the group chat.

Why is it on me to keep you in the loop? It's why we created the group chat, Dave.

Particularly that time when you got all annoyed at me for not being invited camping - I didn't even organise the trip in the first place, it's not my job to tell you about every event on the group chat just because you won't download WhatsApp.

sounds like your friends really love you

If you want to know what they talk about, then you have to use the same platform. This is trivial, and doesn't have much to do with being able to quit WhatsApp.

It does have a lot to do with quitting WhatsApp - because WhatsApp is the platform that is the de-facto application for this in some parts of the world.

Absolutely increases it's stickiness.

For this use case, I use a burner Google voice number, give that to Whatsapp and don't give it access to my contacts or anything on my phone. Late model phones don't give apps IMEI or real MAC.

It's not perfect: when you connect with people they can easily associate your WhatsApp account with your identity (add contact) and also share info/pics/etc about you that you wouldn't want shared. They can do this even if you're not on WhatsApp, and Meta can use face recognition and other techniques to create a profile for you, then associate that profile with the other days and profile they have for you. It's trivial to narrow the down to a few million users then match on photo etc. Unclear if they bother, given that 99% of users just give away their privacy.

Also, Whatsapp verification uses SMS. If they'd used a verification URL, they could've (bounced through) Facebook.com, Instagram.com, etc and associated the account via (first party) cookies. I'm guessing they don't because 99% of users happily give the app all the permissions it needs and SMS is more universal.

When you type a number into the Messages app it will tell you if it’s a text message or iMessage in the message bar on iOS.

It's not that simple.

In countries where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it is used for more than just messaging friends.

For example, many childcare places will send updates through WhatsApp groups. So you have to convince the business and all their clients to switch to signal or do without notifications for your child's childcare.

True, here in Spain WhatsApp is practically a basic utility. Nobody is not on WhatsApp.

Aside from people, a significant number of companies, and even government services, offer service through WhatsApp as well. In some parts of the world it's really impossible not to use it.

Why have they been so successful? Why didn't MMS 6.0 implement everything that exists in modern chat applications. Why is Meta anything more than the anonymous humble entities producing sms and "phone" apps?

I guess because Whatsapp provides a unified and standard way to communicate between people on different provider networks / countries for free? You get groups, text/images/location sharing, video/audio calls, cross-countries, that works very reliably, and you only need internet (which can be found almost anywhere even if that's just wifi).

MMS still don't work reliably for me (lost a message just last week that someone swear to have sent). And for a long time they were not free as well.

This is still where normal phones work better (no internet).

I'm not actually suggesting using MMS. I just wanted to illustrate that we've had instant communication technology (even "rich" multi-media) long before Whatsapp etc. Why didn't the providers of that technology (telecom companies) become Meta?

The difference is that MMS/SMS is standardized and agnostic to the client interface. While WhatsApp is proprietary and monopolizes the client.

We could easily have had a "internet direct message" standard implementing most of WhatsApps features. (Wait... Isn't that SMTP?)

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but what does WhatsApp bring that let's say email++ does not have?

Telcos hire vendors to run their networks and services. For them WhatsApp is yet another vendor.

It was a great and useful cross platform messaging app ... and still is after Meta bought it.

MMS has been exorbitantly, insanely expensive and with extremely high failure rates in much of the world until...

... actually that's still the case in varying degrees and locations. And once you've got great market penetration in an area, there's little to no reason to switch unless the competition is noticeably better, which MMS really has no claim to.

Point is: why did an open standard for direct messages not win over proprietary solutions?

They put in quite a lot of time and money to build it and make it work on a ridiculous array of devices running weird embedded OSes.

Open standards hadn't.

Or if you're referring to MMS: insane user cost and insane unreliability, standards mean nothing if the implementations are all trash.

But why didn't email win over WhatsApp? Doesn't email run on all devices?

Not saying it should have, just that I don't really see the difference in functionality.

Email definitely did not. When WhatsApp was beginning its rise to domination, it was on tons of feature phones - mostly just calls, texts, and WhatsApp. Email implies a lot more general internet access than was generally supported or understood by people, since it supports arbitrary data and hosts.

For example, try to get hold of taxi services in Africa without Whatsapp.

Where in Africa? People just use Uber or alternatives, and it works fine pretty much everywhere I've been (I'm Kenyan. I've lived in South Africa for extended periods, and travelled extensively in Namibia and Tanzania). I've never once heard of anyone using WhatsApp for cab hailing. It gets pretty exhausting finding people talking about a whole continent on HN in broad strokes as though it's some small town they once went to on holiday, and can now offer their expert opinion on.

As an Australian I sympathise, it's not all HN'rs [1] but there's certainly a strong core of proud ignorance confident in their assertaions about other cultures, countries, political systems, etc.

[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/850:_World_Accord...

PS: I met a guy in Mali once, d'ya know them? [2] /s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOValSt7YOY

Thanks for the recommendation You may also enjoy Tinariwen, if you haven't already come across them.

Cheers bigtime.

Here I was expecting something from Tanzania or Kenya and we're back in Northern Mali!

I'm a bit old - I travelled extensively about the globe when I was younger doing geophysicsl survey work and ground truthing the transition from many paper map systems to WGS84.

Africa has some fantastic musicians.

All I can offer in return is some Australians and their collaborations ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDlbCfybbE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3iI8gg2fo

English x Yolngu Matha x Bemba:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrM8Ly17lw4

Why not:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTmGpJJsQEU

Haha! I thought we were just trading desert blues today.

Here's some Kenyan fare for you, an odd mix of things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ig9DHit6K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or2sMfOcTtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb0k0LuJFw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlMw5uOFyaU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Jwf-Y1uww

Tjamuku Ngurra is beautiful. I don't think I've listened to Aboriginal fusion (there's all sorts of interesting things happening there) before. My consumption of Australian music has mostly been limited to Tame Impala, whom I love, but this is special. Thank you so much for sharing.

There's some gorgeous music there, thank-you.

Australian music is surprisingly broad for such a small (population wise, physically it's the same land area as mainland USofA (and together the US + Australia are less than the area of Africa ..)) .. "aboriginal fusion" (that works) is also broader than many might imagine.

To barely scratch the surface:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMqG_LyD9s4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdpoWcma4HE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLQ4by3lUJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBAv36KM4rI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myKF9mxAJ70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-AgvUEVm4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7XevQAVoBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VMcnKM09w0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqfyHzL0G-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHJFfSmnCnY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWibGemExd0

(I can go on forever here)

Meanwhile, 'back in Africa' (well, perhaps, out of Adrica)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGomSuDPeSU

https://youtu.be/tvY31eN3gtE?t=38

In 2019 I can assure I was only able to get taxis in Tanzania via Whatsapp.

To be honest I never used Uber and never saw a taxi with stickers telling otherwise.

Likewise arranging trips with the local tourist agencies.

That may well be true for your one experience in Tanzania. I wasn't there with you. I have neither a reason, nor the desire to counter your personal experience.

Here's what I find baffling. You had a single, curated, extremely limited travel experience, in (I'm guessing) a handful of places, in one country, over a limited time period. You extrapolated from that experience to making a bold, sweeping claim about an odd 1.2 billion people living in 54 countries. And with an air of worldly confidence, to boot. What you said of Africa is not even generally true of the city of Dar es Salaam, let alone all of Tanzania. How could it possibly be true for a whole continent? I'm genuinely in awe of both the audacity it takes to make such a claim, and the thought process that leads to it. I do feel a bit bad for singling you out (but only a little bad) since it's sadly not unusual for people to choose to talk about places in this way when they don't expect to be challenged.

If it makes you feel any better, people also do the same sort of inaccurate cultural reductivism about the United States -- a vast geographical area containing many strongly differentiated local regional cultures -- on a daily basis.

It does, actually Quite unexpectedly, too. I have an American friend who keeps recommending places I should visit in the States, but I always respond by saying I don't want to get shot or racially profiled. It's a source of constant frustration for him. I did not expect HN to be where I'd find empathy for his perspective.

I'm only in Telegram. And is also good because the family groups are only in WhatsApp, so I can have an excuse.

how was that worth the impact on your life?

He felt good :-)

I did the same (although some years after the acquisition) and had a similar experience, though over the years I've managed to claw back some of the friends I lost. Though it's still hard to communicate with them.

It's been slow, but I've noticed a slow trickle of users towards Signal, at least in Europe. I was happily surprised when the owners of a house we viewed defaulted to reaching us via Signal instead of whatsapp.

Most people I know are on Signal here (Germany), that includes older relatives.

Alas, for group conversations or bad connection situations (e.g. at a festival), everyone uses WA. Not sure why groups are always WA, but Signal (and actually any other messenger) sucks for bad connections.

In my experience, Telegram excels at speed and bad connection situations.

and at unsecure communication. Their chats aren't e2ee by default, making it worse than Whatsapp. Also, videocalls in telegram are much worse compared to said messenger

I could have sworn WA isn't true e2e. As in it's encrypted over the wire, but the Meta servers decrypt the data during relay.

No, WhatsApp is truly e2e encrypted and uses the same Ratchet algorithm in Signal, IIRC. That's why tptacek and moxie were generally positive about it.

I think there's something about key rotation and a default setting where it doesn't notify you if the keys change, or something like that, at one point.

It's most likely e2e up until the moment LEO requests information on a particular user and then Meta updates your app to a trojaned version, that just APPEARS E2E.

It also heavily encourages you to “back up” your messages to them in an unencrypted manner. It will bug you literally every time you enter the app if you opt out of this “feature”.

Can’t confirm, it’s disabled for me, and it has never again asked me to. It also offers the option of encrypting my backups.

I guess that could be, I only know one person using it, though, a US American who also uses WA. Everyone else is Signal/WhatsApp, and maybe Threema.

For what it's worth I have a few Signal group chats going. We had our video call to talk to the owners (we're moving to the Netherlands from Ireland) over Signal and it worked well, but that was on a strong wifi connection

Didn't mean they don't exist, just that everyone creating groups in my circles uses Whatsapp, even if they otherwise use signal.

For me it's been telegram. Even my in laws are on it. Cutting old social media never impacted my life much though.

Telegram is getting almost as common as whatsapp for my social circle, including friends, co-workers and family. Most people I interact with are on either platform.

I moved my parents to telegram and I can't complain.

same for me, but thinking of moving them to signal due to privacy concerns and ads

Thought something similar, but for my personal network of friends and contacts. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised to learn, that yet another person I know has or is willing to get Signal.

We need to build and keep asking people whether they have Signal or would please get it.

(UK) I got rid of signal when they dropped SMS support.

Using an alternative sms app that sometimes upgrades messages to signal was nearly zero friction.

Keeping an alternative messaging app for one contact is borderline-charity.

I'd do it to help with network effects if I wanted to support the company, but the attempt at crypto integration already cost them my good will.

The crypto integration put me off as well. Not because I'm opposed to crypto currencies in principle, but integrating them into a privacy focused chat app is plain idiotic.

Crypto disposals are taxable in the UK and I believe in most other countries as well. So tax authorities have a legitimate reason to look into what's going on there. There is no right to privacy when it comes to buying and selling securities.

Everyone I communicate with uses Signal now. In Europe using Signal costs the same amount as using WhatsApp, if not less because of the missing bloatware (backups etc).

In a lot of the world, WhatsApp is free (I assume some kind of payment from Meta to the telecom). There's no way Signal will compete with something that is bundled with every phone contract for whatever reason.

In Australia both Signal and WhatsApp are free, aside from using the data service rather than the "telephone" service, and we pay for a monthly or annual data quota with our phone plan.

Do you have separate charges for Signal and/or WhatsApp?

Yeah I guess I confused a lot of people: the charges are for the data, not the app. They are tiny, but if you use the app heavily and rely on it, you don't want to be disconnected when your data runs out.

You pay for signal? Which bit of Europe are you being ripped off in?

I read this as a phone contract having a bundled: unlimited whatsapp, Spotify, Facebook bundles where data usage is not counted towards your total data allowance in the contract. For example in my country in the middle of Europe you have bundles with unlimited traditional communication and 20 50 80GB of mobile data.

When you WhatsApp all day sending videos, gifs, messages, voice messages, pictures, documents..I can consume up to 12GB per month, this costing me an amount of my 20GB data plan. While a other provider I can choose has a 20GB data plan with a unlimited WhatsApp bundle. Sadly they don’t offer eSIM and 5G so it’s a no go for me.

Not sure where in Europe you're from but in the Netherlands WhatsApp and the likes are just considered Internet usage, no special costs.

Wait… in Europe it costs money per app somehow on a phone? Or for data?

In the US I get similar benefits with YouTube and T-Mobile. The soft data cap doesn’t count YouTube at 480p in the data usage calculation.

Without net neutrality many providers favour the incumbents.

Is it still impossible to use Signal without phone ? That's the biggest stopper for me

Yes. You are identified using the phone number.

This has been a big downside for years, I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed yet. Your account has to be tired to a phone number (though you can use voip) and only their mobile apps act as a primary that can register the account.

I don’t see much adoption of Signal, but Telegram is inching forward in the UK and UAE, in my circles at least.

My whole extended family is on Line. It does it all really, and no ads or intrusion. It has only one single drawback - one device only (or one, plus a Windows PC, which is not an option for me).

The social-media business is neither trustworthy for me as a consumer nor more fulfilling than a real conversation with a real human somewhere. I don't want a relationship with social media.

But I'm not going to be delusional about it, if literally hundreds of millions of people are depending on social-media business for their social happiness, I can see that it works for them.

I want a secure, trustworthy, minimally-viable telecommunications channel for some contacts. I support Signal, it has characteristics that I trust, including being open source.[1]

I also have shown other people how to enable Google's RCS messaging.[2] It's better than SMS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

[2] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/13508703

As European, I don't know anyone that uses Signal.

Meta Messenger, Skype, Whatsapp, Viber and Telegram? Tons of them.

In Eastern Europe Signal is very popular.

As someone else in Eastern Europe, 99% of people I know communicate over Messenger, Instagram (if more hip), or Viber (if 40+). I believe that the messaging app situation varies a lot from one city to another or even one "group" to another.

Interesting, my contacts are mostly in Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, and mostly IT savvy (as users, not programmers), so the latter could well be a factor.

That seems to be contained in the German-speaking side of Europe. But even Germany is 50-50 Whatsapp.

In my view, and as someone who's never used instant messaging, it should be a small accommodation to make for a friendship. In the same way that I would be happy to provide a vegetarian option at a dinner.

Let's say that person A refuses to use $APP and person B only communicates through $APP.

Then, from A's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for B to communicate through alternative means. And from B's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for A to use $APP.

Unless one of them says:

"Look, I am not letting Zuck suck up my personal data and watch ads if there is an alternative that's owned by a non-profit, does not show ads and end-to-end encrypts everything as a rule."

Asking to use Zucks apps anyway as a small accommodation would paint the one asking as an ignorant who is being unreasonable and does not take care of their digital hygiene properly. Sure, they might resent the other person for pointing their own failings out, but it's hard to actually argue.

I think it's pretty clear at this point that most non-techies place no value on digital privacy. So, from the perspective of someone whose friends all use Zuck's app, the other person is trying to complicate their life for no benefit.

Within their value system, they're not being ignorant. Rather, they're perfectly rational.

Usually B has several friends, A1...An, that all ask B to use $APP1...$APPk, where k >> 1.

There is an incentive to converge to $APP, the tradeoffs are not collectively symmetric when one $APP is already globally dominant.

The analogy doesn't work because providing a vegetarian option is something you only have to do once, or at least only the few times the vegetarian friend has dinner at your house. Changing your messaging platform for a friend is more like becoming a vegetarian yourself and convincing all your other friends to go vegetarian to please your friend (because a messaging app is only useful if most of your friends are on it).

Also, more people understand your morale position of "I don't want to kill animals".

Few people understand "this messenger is slightly less privacy focused. It's owned by Meta. It's against my principles".

I am vegan so I would definitely break ties with friends that make mean "jokes" about veganism or myself. But I certainly would never let go of friends because they want me to use WhatsApp.

Probably true. Still, perceptions change over time. Not too long ago vegetarianism (never mind veganism!) was widely seen as an irrational fringe position.

Similarly, I live sans messaging for the simple reason that I never upgraded to a smartphone. In the 2000s this solicited reactions of amazed befuddlement and surprise, occasionally mirth. Nowadays, in my experience, most people intuitively understand the decision.

I don’t get your analogy having multiple messaging apps on your device is not forcing you to do anything. Just to get in the right messaging app to talk to your different communities. I mean my kids are doing that all the time between snap (their friends), whatsapp (family) or Signal (me) (and I’m pretty sure they use at least a lot more channels (discord, insta, etc.)

That can work if groups of contacts are still grouped by app, like friends and family using different apps and you don't need to talk to both at once. But in the example given by the OP, if one friend wants to use a different app than other friends, it would be really awkward. You'd have to copy every message to your friends twice -- once on the app with the other friends and once in the app for the contrarian friend. In practice, that friend would be left out of many social events.

There was a time when you could contact anyone on any platform through a centralized application which simply called into libpurple. Really the problem here is that you along with everyone else have caved into big tech's insistence on being incompatible with everything.

More than that. There was a moment both Google and Facebook could be contacted via XMPP so you could have one account to rule them all

Sure. The point was more about the many small frictions that may or may not exist in any given friendship, with a lack of messaging capacity being no more egregious than any other.

Demanding all your friends switch or kill their messaging apps is quite another matter, and an eccentric one at that.

So it was a very bad decision, you gained nothing, changed nothing, but lost something quite substantial.

He lost nothing. He gained some information that some people were never his friend.

And how was WhatsApp incentivising them to pretend to be friends?

Because, I am guessing it was less like friendship and more like convenient boredom reduction. The WhatsApp group is there, a joke or whatever gets posted, maybe a lets go to the bar guys (or girls?) but the bond is not strong enough that they bother to contact people who are on another medium.

This is called "splitting", or all-or-nothing thinking. It's a common psychological defense mechanism.

You don't just have friends and non-friends. It's a spectrum. By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's.

At the "far end of friendship spectrum", that is the closest form of friendship, there's no one there. Given enough obstacles that you yourself put up eventually you'll lose absolutely everyone.

I genuinely don't get how people manage to find excuses to talk to most people. Even before I left Facebook I mostly spoke to people face to face and when that became impractical I stopped talking altogether.

"By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's."

This is completely ass-backwards thinking. We don't have apps growing out of us and we are not doing things to ourselves "because of our own actions".

Leaving a bad app is a bit like leaving a country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop. You didn't decide to rape murder and pillage your neighbors, the corrupt leader did. Getting the hell out of dodge is an extremely reasonable thing to do, and you are not cutting yourself off from your acquaintances, the evil dictator is.

Besides, app messaging is completely backwards anyways, we invented protocols because they are the best way to reliably communicate.

If you leave a "country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop" you will also almost certainly lose friends and acquaintances. And if you don't you won't. It's always heartbreaking for all kinds of refugees. But leaving, arguably, has more upsides, for example not getting brutalized by the internal security services.

I think this sentiment underplays how useful casual acquaintances are, on their own but more importantly as a step towards forming those strong bonds in the first place.

As an adult, how do you make the strong bonds that lead to people going out of their way to remember to invite you to things? Maybe you meet someone and click immediately, more likely it's someone you know from work, and commonly it's acquaintances from seemingly superficial activities that become close friends after you're mingled and mixed with enough folks to find your tribe.

"everyone complains about group chats being noisy" but there's a good reason they're still in there (obviously a big part of it is fomo but it's not obvious to me that everyone's lives would be better rejecting them. Human social dynamics are messy and not efficient).

That second step is the hardest part. How on earth do you make new close friends, I try to be the first to reach out but people seem too guarded or busy the only way they'll meet is if the gathering is large enough but the problem with that is those are very hard to organize since everyone has their own schedule.

I think the answer to that.... is that you can't, unless by accident :( All of my close-ish friends I met randomly and we just clicked.

But like, the world is going in a direction sadly where meaningful human friendships are disappearing, being replaced with endless acquittances who do not care about you, and you do not care about them either. Which I find really sad.

Most of organising problems are btw due to the lack of effort, not a true lack of time. "I am busy" is usually just a convenient excuse to why you don't want to do something together, not that you don't actually have time. (You do have time binging netflix, do ya?)

I guess I should be out more so I can have those "accidents" with like-minded people. Ironic how we're more connected than ever yet so distant to each other. You'd think it would make things a lot easier but it's like it's done the opposite.

I have personally found that "being out more" doesn't help with it at all. The accidents happen in unexpected places and times. Going "out" mostly gets you the "usual" activities - where you are almost guaranteed to not find anything like that.

Yeah, the internet has been a blessing in the past in terms of socialisation, but nowadays, it has made it even worse than before. IRL activities are dying because everyone is on social media - but not spending any time with each other, just scrolling alone. I find it very sad.

With that being said, if you want to chat, I'd be happy to :)

I'd love to chat how do we exchange contact here?

Reply to this message with a messaging platform of your choice. Or click on the link in my profile, that also works.

Did the same for a very long time until recently I had to join a group for colleagues from Istanbul. Just wanted to be notified of any social activities in that group still refuse to use it for anything else. It even cost me a job opportunity one time. You should see the look on peoples faces when I ask them to email me something.

I didn’t have WhatsApp in a country where it’s synonymous to instant message. It did very much impacted my life, missed parties, etc.

I caved in during the pandemic. Lots of dear friends and family members, especially elderlies who couldn’t be bothered with anything else, and volunteer work to help the medical emergencies.

It felt ridiculous to ask people to use other means of communications under such circumstances. My noble ideologies felt very small and I said fuck it. I’m glad I did.

It’s the only Meta service I use, but I’m a heavy user. There’s no turning back.

I don't have WhatsApp in a country where it’s synonymous to instant message, and it's pure joy. the joy of missing out.

I get that, but it wears out.

Until you want to chat with grandma or that girl you really like.

You could use the damn phone as such and call. They even might appreciate it more. (Unless you have to be “chatting” continuously, of course.) And no, nobody really wants to see your face, believe me.

I don’t think those people use the video function of whatapps really often. In many places the default app to text is whatapps.

But fair; if in the same country you can call. ( and if not, you can go thought a service allowing you to call abroad. Like the now senile Skype )

Are there really phones that exist that don't have the SMS app?

> And no, nobody really wants to see your face, believe me.

This is such a sad perspective.

That girl will have IG. And from there if she likes you you can take it to any other platform

So your argument against Meta app WhatsApp is "nah, she'll have Meta app Instagram, so we're cool"? :-)))

IG is not a messaging app though. So exchange IG then move to whatever messaging app you like and start convincing her to get off that hated Meta

How much of that joy comes from telling people on a message board run by a venture capitalism firm about how virtuous you are?

[comment flagged for overt self-awareness]

virtuous?

I was am expat in a country that used WhatsApp everywhere. Not using it myself was a huge pain on quite a few occasions, I was nearly forced into making a WhatsApp account when I had to take a Covid test before travel.

It's similar for me, but I have WhatsApp on a separate device that's at home and I only use it for WhatsApp. This keeps it strictly isolated from my primary smartphone and the list of contacts on it. Meta still has part of the social graph that surrounds me, but not all of it. How effective that is in the end is of no concern to me. I enjoy not just giving up completely, but resisting within my means. It reminds me a bit of the people who didn't pull their masks up over their noses during the pandemic. That's exactly how we should relate to tech giants if we can't avoid them completely.

By continuing to use a problematic messaging app you are feeding its network effect. You give it the blood that keeps it alive, and propagate the privacy issues that it brings. You know that 99% of your contacts will not take any of the measures you take and just deliver entire graphs, with yourself included, to the evil Meta or whomever on a golden plate. How many have a spare smartphone solely for this app? How many will deny it full access to contacts?

Coincidentally, just like not covering the nose with a mask in protest, this half-measure only makes the problem worse.

The only way to affect this is to pull up the mask. Stop the spread. Quit using such an app with explanations, offer alternatives to people seeking to contact you, support legislation that breaks shady business models like that, etc. Sadly, few people have courage to look weird, boring or slightly crazy in this way. (Not unlike people who are afraid to be thought of as ugly if they wear the mask.)

(I have no such problems with WhatsApp, but I’m guilty of the same with regards to Telegram. It’s built intentionally insecure by default: I have literally no contacts who use E2EE chats now, because those are opt-in and so half-assedly implemented—I used to have a couple of “secret chats” but one vanished and another broke so nothing is delivered anymore; we switched to plaintext and I keep postponing quitting the app.)

I see it as a consensus problem, like boycotts or voting.

If enough people join you, it's a win. If not, you've wasted your effort / money / vote / time.

Sometimes it's hard to discern if that critical mass exists.

I don’t see it as just yes-or-no consensus.

How did it start? Some people adopted it, then their friends adopted it, etc. How does it stop? The same way!

If people are made aware and meet resistance (e.g., a person they really want to keep in touch with who doesn’t use that app), things change.

A boycott that does not drive the company out of business is not automatically unsuccessful: more people learn about the issue, some stores might start stocking competitor’s goods, etc. In a functioning system, if a bunch of people voted for the loser the winner would feel the pressure to adjust policies (vs. if no one did and the winner feels righteous enacting the extreme version of the policies you disagree with), and if not well next time more people may support the losing party.

This is a disingenuous argument.

Chat programs are not stores in any typical sense of the word.

Chat programs are effectively clubhouses. Convincing a person that they’ve joined the wrong club, invested time and effort in the wrong club, and should make better and more informed choices in clubs…

Lol. Have you MET a human before?

Good luck and don’t hold your breath.

Chat programs are not stores. That part was responding to the analogy of boycotts and elections.

Chat programs are also not clubs. There is no associated identity. No hardcore WhatsAppers it Telegrammers.

In fact, if you regularly meet actual humans, you might find out that most of them simply don’t care.

You dislike WhatsApp? Give them something equally convenient but that cares about privacy and they will just use it. Refuse to add them on WhatsApp and if you are an interesting person they will install whatever you use, even Signal, to stay in touch.

> This is a disingenuous argument.

Please keep it polite. I don't see how you can know that commentator's intent.

Excellent point! I agree - viewing it as a simply binary issue ignores the role of forces that can get the ball rolling.

Hey, I don't want to argue with you and I wish you all the best. But you are twisting my mask comparison. In my comparison, pulling the mask all the way over your nose means giving in and using WhatsApp without any objections. The comparison is not a moral one but refers to how one behaves to an imperative that does not come from an individual but from a mass of people that surrounds one.

I also think that WhatsApp is evil, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of communication takes place via this medium. Doing without it altogether has real opportunity costs. In this respect, it's up to each individual to decide whether and how to use it. It's similar to criticism of consumption and capitalism: in the end, you still have to buy your food somewhere and pay for it with money.

Choosing not to interact with people has opportunity costs, but we do it. For example, many of us choose not to interact with people with certain views (political or moral), even if we would gain a whole lot if we did.

I get what you're saying, but realize your response is tone-deaf when the GP comment said that they had to give in to support the elderly and emergency responses in their area during the pandemic.

There's some opportunity cost you just can't accept. If your only two options are a) don't use Whatsapp or b) use Whatsapp to help your elderly neighbors, I'm going to think you're not a good person if you stick to your ideology in this specific case. You can't really start arguing 'what-ifs' because you don't know the details of their situation and the decisions they made, so we should take them at their word that those are the two options they considered.

All to say, the world isn't as black and white as sticking to your guns no matter what. People that want true change would do well to remember that, since a majority of folks do not think along these lines and act with much more simple motivators.

>It reminds me a bit of the people who didn't pull their masks up over their noses during the pandemic.

That's a terrible comparison. One is a selfish moron, the other idealistic.

See

The way I read it was “hmm that’s nice, people are now able to see the lunacy of that period in such a way as to make an off hand comment like that.”

The masks did nothing positive. It was the law of the land in public health that they were useless at preventing respiratory infections before people in positions of power wanted to scare people into compliance with massive overreach of their authority, then it became “mask up.” And once everybody “masked up,” all we got was yet more confirmation that yeah they are pointless in trying to prevent respiratory viral spread. Even if they kinda, sorta worked for that, which they don’t, the costs are still far too high.

All the masks contributed to was oxygen deprivation, micro plastic inhalation, and the degradation of the fabric of society. Think about it, it was bad enough for adults trying interact with faces wrapped up and concealed, “think of the children!”(actual legitimate usage of the phrase, btw) much worse for them having to do the same. People were harassed, assaulted, tased, arrested, for not wearing a “mask,” it was insanity.

Stop being a creepy mask person.

Sad truth is most Spanish-speaking countries are effectively run on whatsapp and twitter. Whatsapp is where your mailman will contact you to clarify an address, and twitter is where you will receive customer support for your internet. Emails are not getting responded to or very very late. Regular phone calls are also disappearing due to staff shortage - no one to take your call.

Hah I sent an email to a Spanish website about a shipping issue.

I received a response. Three months later. They said “please send more money and we’ll ship your item”. Very helpful. I’d guess they check that email inbox once every few months based on this.

I remember there was that one beautiful little moment where both Facebook and Google chats were available via XMPP.

I could use any existing XMPP server, or even start one, and be able to contact directly with any of my both Google and Facebook contacts

It was wonderful glimpse of what it could be if greed and drive to herd consumers into their own walled gardens wasn't the main driving factors.

The flipside of this is that the only people who actually bothered establishing an XMPP server at scale were those who wanted to spam Google or Facebook users.

Think of it this way: why doesn't Gmail just close their SMTP gateways and defederate from e-mail? Because there's shittons of systems that expect to be able to send mail this way. They'd have to spend loads of time and energy corralling people out of open standards and into a proprietary Gmail API for no externally-visible benefit.

That doesn't apply to XMPP. It was an entirely new protocol with only two very large adopters federating with one another. Legitimate automated systems that needed to send messages didn't really exist yet, so there was no legacy cruft holding people to the open standard. But there were plenty of spammers who realized that they could get into literally every Gmail and Facebook screen with it.

In e-mail, we have a complicated setup of blocklists, heuristics, and domain authentication to handle spam. This inherently costs more time and money to set up than just having a closed messaging system with sign-ups that are controlled by one entity. But the big e-mail providers deal with it because open[0] federation is an iron rule of the e-mail system.

[0] Ok it's more like "open if you spend enough time getting an originating IP that isn't on every blocklist, setting up SPF/DKIM, getting your recipients to add you to contacts and check the spam filter, and so on"

Okay so now we know the downsides. Destruction of friendships and negative impact on your social life.

Can you tell us a bit more of the benefits/upsides of your decision?

When you die and go to secular-heaven you will be able to tell Saint Dawkins that you successfully resisted the billionaires by not giving them the pleasure of messaging your friends on their platforms, and will be permitted entry. Just don't tell him you were resisting from your iPhone.

Kind of like Marquess Brownlee reviewing tech phones, recommending a ton of them, being asked constantly which one of them he uses, saying it's one of the phones he recommended.

And then seeing him in non phone review videos reading stuff constantly from... his iPhone :-)

https://youtu.be/zfHTRMnqY5I

I did the same in 2014 and lost touch with lots of friends. I am now in touch with a very few via Signal and email or phone. But I couldn't convert many to use Signal, even though they I got them to try it with a lot of effort.

Not having WhatsApp here in Brazil is tough - Basically my entire family and close friends(?) use it as an asynchronous way of communication, which is good at the end of the day. But not answering regular phone calls is not good.

Unfortunately I cannot just walk away from it because of this.

I left FB when somebody on HN leaked they were feeding data straight to some military intelligence agency pipeline. I lost many acquaintances because of it but I saved a huge amount of time and completed two graduate degrees after.

Can you dig up that comment? I'd like to read it.

The HN search doesn't show anything like that. I wish I saved the link somewhere. It was a long time ago but IIRC they had some bug that browser was directly contacting the agency instead of doing it via a backend or redirects so people monitoring their own online traffic could see the target servers directly.

i really need to figure out how to export media from WhatsApp so I can delete it. I have too much and the export option they provide fails.

Yes, I'm in the same boat.

And we can all thank the EU that it will be forced to open the API to other chat applications!

Why not get another "unsafe" phone?

>I actually lost friends because of it-- they didn't answer calls or texts or any other form of communication

You made an effort to reach out by other means, and they ignored you? This is an odd definition of a "friend".

I was ready to post the same thing. If someone is unwilling to communicate with you, well… I have some bad news for ya: they aren’t much of a friend.

I don’t use any of these social media sites, don’t use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or whatever else is out there, and still manage to have a robust social life and actual friends. They know my phone number if they want to talk, and I know their numbers. It doesn’t have to be complicated or mediated by some megacorp.

Every additional form of communication you take part in is a burden to some degree, and depending on the person they may only have the capacity for a handful before it becomes overwhelming. Personally I can handle like 4 forms of primary communication before either further forms become mostly ignored or it starts hurting my ability to communicate with anyone on anything. I can understand that someone, no matter how much they may want to stay in touch, may just be unable to through some forms of communication.

Yep, I use SMS and email, and don't see a need for anything else. Neither of these impose any particular demand on anyone who wants to contact me; they don't need to install any apps or set up any new accounts.

Who says they ignored them? Everyone seems to be jumping to this conclusion that these people weren't friends and that they disliked him in the first place.

We've all lost touch with friends. That's how things happen in life. We move on and what not. If you're using one app to talk to all your buddies and one person messages you on a different app. It's very easy to not even notice the other app especially if they don't have it installed or don't get notifications and only go in and check messages once a day and go through the list so they don't get constantly distracted.

It may go against the principle, but it is possible to use whatsapp (and others) bridged through matrix.

> I actually lost friends because of it- they didn't answer calls or texts or any other form of communication on another platform reliably.

Those people were not your friends

I think the only way to break the cycle is to selfhost.

Google will not scan your mails, will not scan your drive. Microsoft will not scan you drive. Apple will not process your pictures. Twitter will not control your speech. NSA will not see if you were at a protest, or went to a medical facility to perform a surgery of any kind.

"But does it matter if NSA sees me at a protest?" asks somebody. We will see. We will see. Maybe in a year. Maybe in two. Maybe never. Let's hope so.

Most of things you can self host. Probably the biggest problem is to selfhost videos, as they are heavy.

"But it is difficult to self host, and dangerous" says somebody. Yes it is. Yes it is.

"But I will not be able to talk with my friends" complains somebody. Let's wait how it all pans out. Maybe corporations and governments will not see and control everything we do. Maybe they will.

They have all the money they want. They can make all the money they want.

They have a machine, they can make all the money. It's not about money.

It's about control, it's about their vision of how they wanna see the world.

Self hosting is not sufficient. We saw that with the kiwi farms website. I didn't follow their story too close but it's wild how not just Cloudflare dropped them but also how big ISPs were willing to drop routing to them.

You can self host. It helps. Won't help you if major ISPs decide your self hosted ip shouldn't exist online.

I would argue that the vast majority of self-hosting business-cases/needs are not as 'edge' as KiwiFarms.

True, but only if you threaten their business model, which is unlikely if you selfhost for yourself and relatives.

There's a huge difference between some random techie self-hosting their own website and email for personal use, and a server full of people who spew hate and actively attack others.

If you're worried about getting the same treatment as KiwiFarms...maybe don't spread hate or dox and stalk people??

https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html

Governments make the same arguments. If you want encryption you are either a terrorist, or extremist. Everybody should be able to self host, and nobody should be looked down upon for selfhosting.

It is not a bad thing that somebody wants not to rely on any centralized government or corporate system, or want their data to be private.

Centralized bodies are prone to abuse power. We should work towards decentralized systems, and towards self hosting.

I mean, I agree that we should both promote and support self-hosting, but it does not at all follow that what happened to KiwiFarms was in any way an injustice or a cautionary tale about the horrors of centralized power.

If the ability to self-host came, without exception, at the cost of being able to prevent groups like KiwiFarms from bullying, harassing and abusing people, then it would not be worth it.

Fortunately, that's not the case! We can have a middle ground, where people who treat each other with respect and dignity can self-host without fear, and people who abuse the system to actively harm others can be taken offline.

This is a feature, not a bug.

How can people honestly self-host though? Mail for example, is hard to self-host, I do wonder though if this is a good use for something like (calm down) blockchain? Where we all just run a light weight piece of kit like a rasberry pi and host a hub which runs a mesh network and messages are passed over that automatically encrypted with your private key which can also be retrieved over the network.

It seems possible to create separate tiny devices for different applications and sell them prepackaged. The installation process would look like plugging it into electrical outlet and connecting to your local Wi-Fi. Redundancy can be achieved using close friends and family devices of the same class.

I am running a set of SBCs, but I read that it is better to use one server [1]. I suppose one could go with a VM, or portainer, or Yacht, or some other software to visualize everything.

Right now I am using a set or solutions:

* email * [2]

* files * using NextCloud

* blog * using Hugo

* news * using my own RSS reader

* pihole * to filter things

What I consider to use in the future

* pictures * using photoprism

* citadel * I found some sort of suites like citadel. Not sure if that works, if it is good, or if it fits my needs at all [3]. At the first glance seems like a fun project.

Links:

[1] https://specbranch.com/posts/one-big-server/

[2] https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/emailwiz

[3] https://www.citadel.org/

All in all it is time consuming to setup up, and update regularly.

For me it was mostly one time setup cost and once-every-2-years Debian upgrade.

unattended-upgrade does the security upgrades and I occasionally upgrade the rss reader (as it is not packaged)

mail was pretty much fire-and-forget postfix+dovecot on file config, no DB for list of accounts + some catchalls.

If I had to pay say $5 for each of those services vs pay myself to manage that it would more less come out the same, minus ability to fix any little annoyances I had directly vs hoping cloud provider gives an option for it.

I do use syncthing for file sync so no annoying dealings with PHP apps

> How can people honestly self-host though?

They can't or won't.

...and the ones that do are an insignificant drop in the bucket in terms of numbers. Unless "self-hosting" one's digital infrastructure can become easy and off-the-shelf for non-tech folks (or even tech folks that value their time and effort), it just not going to happen.

Mail isn't hard. There are several one click mail set ups for docker or a VPS. I ran Mail in a Box for years and never even had to look at it because it was all self updating, unlike my webserver, which I had to remeber to go update occasionally.

Can you recommend a specific one?

> I do wonder though if this is a good use for something like (calm down) blockchain

I think you might have meant distributed and decentralized systems in general. But the answer has nothing to do with technology. We have all the decentralized technology we need (long before blockchain by the way), even e-mail is somewhat decentralized (well, at least distributed), yet it doesn't solve the problem by itself.

Mail is not hard to self-host. There is a one-time setup toil you need to just sit down and get past, but then… it just sits there working. I’ve self-hosted Email for over a decade, on a $5/mo Linux VPS running Debian, exim, and dovecot. Multiple domains, multiple users, SSL, SPF, DKIM, the works. Since Email doesn’t cost anything in terms of computing load, I do light duty web hosting from the same box. $5 a month to not have to rely on the graces of megacorps to function on the internet.

Even if you’re scared of Linux and writing exim.conf, there are more or less turnkey docker containers out there and whatnot too. I can’t recommend one because I think docker is pointless for a single host running a few applications.

it's pointless to self-host mail (except for backups maybe) because 99% of your normal-life recipients are likely to be on Google and the content of your emails will be ingested by the big brother anyway.

My reason for self hosting is not to keep my data away from BigTech. That’s a fight nobody can win anymore.

The reason I do it is that E-mail is often the only identity on other services I use (it’s often the only way to reset your passwords), and I feel it is too risky to be dependent on a megacorp for my identity, a megacorp who may decide out of the blue to suspend my account for no reason.

I’m dependent on my VPS provider, but I have backups and can take my Debian config with me to a different one. Or bare metal if I have to.

I’m dependent on my DNS registrar and haven’t figured out a good way to mitigate that risk.

Besides that, that’s it.

I agree about identity, but this can also be accomplished by "owning" your domain and using a mail provider that allow you to use it. Even Apple does nowadays.

Has domain management gotten easier over the years? I had always hard how much of a game it w trying to keep up with making sure a self-hosted email server isn't blocked or flagged as spam.

That plus the fact that the receiver on almost all my emails would be storing them on one of the few big providers and it just never felt worth it.

I basically don’t even have to lift a finger. Once set up, everything just hums along. Security updates only.

I have very, very rare deliverability problems, maybe once every two years AT&T decides to block mails from my domain but I resolve it through their easy process.

I have the advantage of having done this for 15 or so years so my IP has some good reputation, but I don’t think IP reputation is really that huge or necessary. The first rule of self hosting Email is “never spam—not even once.” Follow that and you’re in good shape.

Great to hear, thanks for sharing! I self host a Nextcloud server for the basics, sounds like it's time for me to revisit email self hosting as well

Until Google and Microsoft decide they don't like your IP, or you missed a step in setting up the things you mentioned like SPF or DKIM. It is easy to stand up a mail server, but deliverability is still a challenge.

Neither Google or Microsoft use long term IP reputation. They may temporarily block an IP for various reasons (it will even reflect that in the SMTP error message), but never in the long term. All major email service providers work with domain reputation, not IP reputation.

However, you do need proof that you 'own' the IP address by means of a reverse IP address. ISPs generally don't allow their customers to set a reverse-DNS record for the IP address, because you do not own the IP. Since most spam originates from botnets from consumer IP addresses, adding the reverse-DNS requirement resulted in a huge reduction in spam.

The email service providers didn't ruin email, spammers did.

100%

What if you could self host on all your devices and they were all seamlessly connected to each other like a single distributed OS without any kind of server in the middle? Then when your data is abused you have nobody to blame but yourself and all your data is always available so long as your devices are connected. No ads, no weaponized personal data, no spam, no extra expenses. Its just your hardware, your internet connection, and just the right software solution.

The problem there becomes bandwidth. Its better, but upload speeds are still not great and sometimes I think that its intentionally done to help funnel people to using monitizable web services instead of just self hosting everything.

In asymmetric networks this is true, however as asymmetric bandwidth is an old trend that is dying out. That is good. On high bandwidth networks, 300mbps+, everything is symmetric. For example my home network connection is about 860-920nbps up and down where the upload is generally quite a bit faster than the download.

The reason why networks used to be symmetric is because ISPs believed users downloaded far more frequently than they uploaded and therefore a greater percentage of the pipe was dedicated to download channels. That increases QOS on bandwidth constrained pipes but comes at a traffic management cost. Now IPS figure if the network is already fast and the user wants it to be even faster then they can just pay for a larger pipe and everybody's happy.

>Google will not scan your mails

Except the ones you send to people using Google...

so you punish your lazy "friends" like, i dunno, your real estate agent by refusing to read emails from them because they sold their souls to Gmail. This is so absurd.

Arguably then it is no longer your emails.

Why can’t a non-profit with a community board run these types of services? Like Wikipedia.

They can. People just have to give up higher pay to work on that instead.

But I think this basically exists and is called indieweb?

This is the order of preference to store my personal data (i.e email, files, etc.):

1. Self-hosted by me

2. Stored by a for-profit company I am paying

3. Stored by a megacorp

4. Stored by a non-profit

2 and 3 have an economic incentive not to lose my data, and have money to pay for decent engineers. 4 is basically having my data stored on a crappy Core2 Duo server under a staircase, managed by a teenager

I'd agree on that about e-mail but honestly wouldn't care for chat, as long as I can keep logs locally.

> 4 is basically having my data stored on a crappy Core2 Duo server under a staircase, managed by a teenager

... isn't 1 the same then ? Aside from teenager part

See my comment, but I have some terrible trenched stories with how non profit run service.

A last one : I was ask to pry open the personal windows of a freshly dead employee because apparently a bunch of critical informations were stored on it ( payroll, bunch of passwords to Linux boxes running stuff )

I refused, then asked to get permission of family.

Then I learned that the plan was to basically reclaim that personal laptop of a dead employee because migrating stuff was too hard.

I told them I was busy.

I think they stole that laptop containing private correspondance and still use it today.

It’s a NGO you heard off. Running on most continents.

My take : IT and security are a distant thought in those places and you need strong top down directions and training to enforce basic hygiene

1 and 4 have an incentive not to keep your data, munch it into AI/ML, sell it to advertisers, governments, anyone who asks.

2 and 3 have absolutely no incentive not to lose your data. When was the last time any company got seriously hurt by a data breach? Hell, even password managers lose data and keep chugging on.

The teenager is now 38 and has moved states 3 time. But still has the full set of credentials on his personal laptop.

Oh wait. He don’t anymore .

since he switched laptop and don’t care anymore, but weirdly nobody made backup because their is a sense that this once teenager ought to keep things running, somehow.

( inspired by real life even. )

Wikipedia is still a centralized service. It is better than some others, but I can see countless examples of spooks editing the pages of important people or issues to tell the desired narrative. Many of us do not bother viewing or citing Wikipedia on some topics.

I do selfhost as well, but unless your partner or child is also a nerd, digital legacy can become a problem.

Every site analog has `ads`, `ads`, `ads` at the top. Then, when you waste a few minutes watching a banal video, full of unoriginal cliches, and bored to distraction, you're asked to buy merch. It's hard to tell the difference here between parody, idiocy, and the commercialism that I assume is the target of the parody.

Maybe it is a clever way to make you to think about these subjects and make money in the process?

But the ads on the site tell me that Capitalism is Stealing.

And stealing is bad.

As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I find that people who complain about capitalism have not typically experienced another form of economic system.

Most recently, my Uber driver was a 20-something year old from Brazil who thought capitalism was evil and seriously wanted to bring back communism. She went on a long rant about capitalism, how we need a revolution and how communism was going to make things better.

- "Have you lived in Communism?"

- "No, but I read about it"

The grass is always greener, especially if you read books that tell you how it's so much greener on the other side.

You make a fair point, who in their right mind would want to live in a centralised command economy claiming to impose a dictatorship of the proletariat on some mythical road to an imagined communism.

Have there been any actual communist states?

For that matter, is the US a "capitalist state" or just something flawed in the vicinity of an ideal.

People can rightly complain of Citizens United and extreme wealth disparity without wanting some farcical wealth leveling via a Bolshevist revolution and a bunch of tossers rabbiting on about Marxism | Leninism while imprisoning millions.

The USA is the "Kardashians" of countries.

Its all fake. Lies, ego, corruption, vapid vanity.

LATAM is a total headscratcher for me.

Much of the region is socialist. Much of the region is deeply corrupt. Citizens protest endlessly against their governments for said corruption. Citizens think the solution to their problems is more government control over their economies...by the same corrupt government that they're protesting.

I think the real problem is that people in the region deeply think that their own well being is somebody else's problem to solve. Taking control over your own life is anathema.

Hi! Capitalism is not simply the exchange of goods (merchandise, in my case) and money. Capitalists accumulate excess capital (hence the name “capitalism”) through the exploitation of the environment and workfore (RE surplus Labour value). I do not have a workforce, and I use Teemill because they are—at least purportedly—sustainable. I am self-employed because I do not like to be on capitalists’ payrolls. That means I have to think of other ways to make money. The notion of making money any way but having a job (working for a capitalist) being bad is an internalisation of capitalist dogma.

IMO a capitalist that merely hoards wealth is a bad capitalist. They will eventually be surpassed by someone better.

Good capitalists reinvest in better technology, processes and the labor force that executes their mission. That’s how you stay competitive.

Regardless of whether an economy is capitalist, socialist, communist, whatever, there will be wealth hoarders and exploiters. This is not intrinsic to any economic system, but rather human nature.

I hail from a formerly communist country and one time during his youth in the 70s my dad hosted a few Americans for a short while. He asked them at one point if they're not worried that communism could get a foothold in the US, to which one of the Americans replied:

"Nah, if it happens we'll just start selling hammer and sickle t-shirts."

Looking how it's currently normalized that every activist of any kind has a book to sell I'm beginning to think that at some point they really started selling those Ts.

> at some point they really started selling those Ts

Che Guevara t-shirts have been a thing for a long, long time now

When I hear/read the word merch I get little sick.

Why?

Smash the like and subscribe buttons and ill tell you.

Yes, also 'veg'.

This was exactly my thought so I am very confused by the positive response of so much of hn.

Exactly my thoughts, cliches, bad humor, and merch ads. I'll pass.

What actually happens is people often just come back to TrueBlue - like when Paul Graham left Twitter: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168.

For those unwilling to follow a twitter link: the latest post is from 2 days ago. Which is much more recent than his "I'm leaving" annoucement.

EDIT: I guess this begs the question then, how do you break the cycle? Do you just stay trapped in one walled garden despite it getting much worse, or do decentralised platforms offer temporary/permanent respite?

You break the cycle by sticking to your principles and when you leave you leave and 'stay left'.

A way to further help breaking the cycle could be deleting the account. Probably it would avoid the sunken cost fallacy.

I did just that with Twitter. But HN plays it smarter, you can't delete your account. But one of these days...

HN could milk the whales by monetizing deleting your account and individual posts. The higher your karma, the more it costs.

Hehe, don't give them any ideas. How are you otherwise? I should come and visit. Or you should come and visit. Or both!

If you really wanna, you can ask manually for deletion and they will do their best to comply if you justify why you need to delete it.

It shouldn't need justification though. And it really should be automated.

Apparently the YC lawyers are convinced that the current mechanism is GDPR compliant, I'm not so sure about that.

I guess their lawyers ignore the GDPR because they are not a business doing business with europeans.

If this forum had any kind of paid offerings this might differ, but what do you want, them to block the whole EU a la Threads/Bard?

As I understand it, this is due to the limitations of current (mod) tools, and justification just means you have to provide a human for some good reason to do -free work- for you. Like fearing being doxxed or whatever.

I dunno, I'm a happy member of this forum and I appreciate dang and how the moderation works here, it could be better and automated but this is a small niche tech forum after all and not some giant social media network

> I guess their lawyers ignore the GDPR because they are not a business doing business with europeans.

That's not how the GDPR works. The GDPR does not kick in when there is a commercial transaction, it kicks in when you're talking about data, specifically data provided by EU subjects.

That's not how law works, you cannot force other countries to abide by your laws just because you say so, well you can if you're the US, and you say so (but there's also the subtle threat of physical violence if needed)

YMMV

> That's not how law works, you cannot force other countries to abide by your laws just because you say so

No countries are forced, just corporate entities in those countries that aim to transact with EU citizens. And that's perfectly fine, lots of countries have laws like that on their books and ways to enforce them. The only people that tend to object are those that are part of the group that wishes to trample on the rights of the people whose data they collect.

YCombinator has business in Europe and thus is within reach of European legislation.

Well, they might fund business companies, I would really want to know if they do have any kind of presence as a business entity in Europe (think not)

They will go even to great lengths to make European founders register as LLC's in Murica too, Investors security yadda yadda

I don't see how that translates to doing business in europe tbh

That’s why the US and the EU have a data agreement. If I understand it correctly.

And sooner or later there will be a reciprocal law as well. It only makes sense.

You can also actually just ask dang for it via email, and if you've good reasons for it they will remove it.

Why should you have a good reason? It's your data, fullstop.

Because there's no automated system, (and I guess, since there's not lots of requests, no need for it)

And so for you to want to utilise a finite resource (moderation time) for something that should benefit you, you better have a good reason for it?

Why should companies go above and beyond to comply with laws that don't affect their country or business doings?

The only reason a US company might comply with EU directives, is if they plan to do business in the EU, not if they're storing data or not from an European citizen

The content generated by you benefits the site tho

Why leave HN though? It’s nice here

It is. But it also eats up time, and that's your most finite resource.

Relaxation and contentment (times when you don't feel the urge to be productive) is actually the most finite resource.

That's a fair point. Off to play the piano :) (thanks for the reminder)

Changed my password to a really long random string.

Still, here I am with a new account…

I've had this with other platforms before:

  - Change your account email. 
  - Change HN password with password generator (don't' record it)
  - Log out.

The account and info are still there, but at least you can't get in! Obviously if they later introduce account deletion you've retroactively made a small mistake.

It also helps to delete your account when you want to leave.

That’s what I did when I stopped using Facebook years ago. Deleted my account completely. All data gone. Profile gone.

If he had deleted his Twitter account then all followers would be gone and there wouldn’t be so much point in coming back.

In some cases even deleting your account is not enough. For example I recently deleted my Reddit account, but I still come back to check the posts on Reddit now and then.

I tried to run a Lemmy instance but got hit by a wave of bot accounts, so I turned off my Lemmy instance for now. When I have time to get it back up and running then hopefully I can get more real people to come join the instance and the I can stay active on my Lemmy instance instead of continuing to read posts on Reddit.

At least I have stopped posting to Reddit though. So I am not providing their business with free content anymore. But still providing them with my eyeballs for their ads for now.

In the case of Twitter, people who had a lot of followers and were frequently tweeting would probably be better able to leave if they deleted their accounts. And as a bonus thanks to recent changes if you delete your account you can’t even read Twitter anymore, since reading requires that you stay signed in. So in a way Twitter helps people when they want to leave, as long as people do their part and delete their accounts.

My solution was to not make a "I'm leaving for X" post but rather "I do most of my social media posting on X now" post. I do still make a few posts on Twitter but not nearly as many as I did before.

People like Paul are tied to twitter because they are addicted to popularity. I bet you don't have that same problem, so you just leave. Just stop going there one day, and keep doing that every day. You'll notice that, although it felt really important, your life will not change at all.

I started to read a book on a summary of Norse myths. In the introduction, it suggested that since in pre-Christian Scandinavia there was no strong or even existing belief in a timeless afterlife, people, particularly of the Viking stock, would seek their fame as a way to live on after their own death.

I thought this was interesting in that it could be profound in the minds of public individuals, whether conscious or not, particularly if they share a lack of an eternal life.

Neat. What's the name of the book?

The Penguin Book of Norse Myths :)

But the Vikings did have believes in afterlife. Later records of Valhalla or Folkvangr speak of that very clearly. There is also the fact that items were added to burried bodies which usually is done with the believe that these items would be useful for the deceased person in the afterlife.

> in pre-Christian Scandinavia there was no strong or even existing belief in a timeless afterlife

Pre-Christian Scandinavia is a rather long span of time.

Well he mentioned Norse mythology and particularily the Vikings. The whole Pre-Christian Scandinavia of course is a way too wide a time span with very spotty historic records the further back we go.

I was careful in using the book's words: "not a timeless afterlife" or suggesting at least "not eternal". Because we know what happens in the end :)

While it's true that the afterlife was not eternal (Ragnarök) the same goes for the fame or legacy because the whole world is pretty much rebooted in their belief and with that the legacy vanishes.

Tangentially related: the story of Herostratus, whose name it was forbidden to mention since he destroyed the temple of Artemis simply in order to have his name remembered. The ban didn't work out; he is now one of the more famous ancient Greeks, but had his name not been banned he would surely have been forgotten.

Tangentially related to that: the urge to "be someone" is likely shared by all, but the "being" that follows from having your name in the paper (or on Twitter) seems likely a surrogate for one's impression of being remembered and appreciated by people that knows you well, or something that can compensate for a lack thereof.

Point in case: the large proportion of of petty criminals and social outcasts among terrorists and the like.

At least they get to be in the paper (and/or on TV/Twitter/Facebook/Threads/Youtube/Mastodon).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus

Ironically, after watching "The Emperor's Club", Shutruk-Nahunte is the only Elamite leader I'm aware of, and I had to look up the name of the film to write this comment.

For those who haven't seen it, the main character starts the film making a big point about how Nahunte is largely forgotten despite his efforts to be remembered, because he contributed nothing of value.

> I started to read a book on a summary of Norse myths.

When you mention an interesting book/movie/any piece of media in a post, please include its name. There will always be someone interested in checking it out. I am.

> I bet you don't have that same problem, so you just leave.

I believe lots of Twitter users have the same problem. As long as they see a bit of engagement on their tweets/comments, even if they have 10 followers.

I get more engagement on Mastodon than I did on Twitter. New twitter accounts are essentially shadow banned by default whereas that is not the case on Mastodon.

Besides, most people announcing they are leaving or pondering it loudly are doing it exactly for popularity ("I hear that 'Twitter is now awful' is the latest trend! Acknowledge me as a cool person that flies the outrage flag of the day").

People who actually care for decentralization and the like over popularity, have long gone.

I did post that I was leaving as doing so did genuinely interrupt some nascent friendships I had developed on Twitter. I am sad I lost those, but staying there seemed worse at the time.

I left twitter because I was addicted to popularity. I said the absolutely worst shit all in the name of driving engagement. I spoiled secret product announcements for Big Company because I loved the high of getting 1000s of likes on a tweet.

I moved to a different platform, left behind that community, and I feel a whole lot better for it. Barely anyone likes my posts any more, and I barely post. I feel great.

Non-commercial platforms have less pressure to drive engagement to pump DAUs, so I think they will always inherently start from a healthier base. Even if they do have algorthmic timelines, I think they can be done healthier because there's less incentive to send you engagement-bait and can instead just focus on sending you think you'll genuinely be interested in.

It did change for the better

I don't understand that mentality. I'm a nobody-have-nothing and I dread the day somebody would link some of my Internet pseudonyms to my real-life identity. If I had a few billions stashed somewhere and it was of public knowledge, how could I ever know who is earnest and honest when interacting with me?

All this microblogging drama lately has really shown just how addicted manybpeople are to the popularity and attention engine. Its kind of sad. There were a lot of people saying they would leave when Musk took over. I have not been there since then, but several of my friends have gone back, and its a bit disappointing.

I've been off Twatter since November. I'm enjoying Mastodon / methadone right now. Satisfies the random info itch, not enough of my social network to be addictive.

> I guess this begs the question then, how do you break the cycle?

Depends on what you want. If you want reach, then you have to go where the eyeballs are.

If you don't want to deal with platform churn, then just build on a platform that you control (website).

For a select few, it's possible to do both at once.

Falling out of the tech-cultural zeitgeist is a terrifying prospect for some.

Since I was never in it, it was very easy for me to stop posting to Twitter.

You do break it by replacing the walled garden with something more sane. I personally left all traditional social media and replaced it with a personal blog and private emails and mails to people and I couldn’t be happier.

HN is also a walled garden. A nice one, but still.

are you kidding

it's a dark forest

I honestly don’t consider HN social media because the vast majority of the content here is driven by 3rd party content since it’s mostly external links.

I see it more like a forum than a social media platform.

Forums are just another branch on the social media tree.

You're not wrong but we can stretch the definition of social media to the point where it's no longer useful. Still, doesn't change the meaning of my original post. Sharing content on your own site, on your own terms and interacting with others directly via email is by far the best replacement to the current situation. At least it is for me.

I think the differentiating factor is a simple one: you interact with people that you would not have known in real life, a global 'two way street'. If it doesn't have that component then it isn't social media.

For me it is easy - I am very bad at social media-ing so there is little fun in it to begin with.

The fundamental misconception - as the original video lampoons - is that you must necessarily adopt some alternate platform.

I get regular questions about where I've landed after leaving twitter and the answer is 'nowhere', and it may well remain that way.

Didn't he come back because they fixed the linking policy issue that made him leave?

Exactly.

I read “the last straw” as being the final bad decision among many (which I think is what the idiom means). A tipping point. Usually you can’t remove “the last straw” to fix the camel’s back.

If the linking policy was the sole issue I think that tweet didn’t convey his meaning. However, I actually think that, like many people, he returned despite some remaining issues he had.

Also, I get it, social media is made to be addictive. Even more so when you have a following. My original point was that I think moving through a long chain of alternatives on moral grounds is not a common pattern.

Incredibly repetitive for being only 2 minutes long.

We get it, VC funded social networks become worse over time so you have to periodically jump ship to something new, which will quickly let you down again once it gains critical mass.

Really? I thought the best part was about the autonomous armored car that learned to be anti-Semitic on terabytes of unmoderated Nazi posts.

Repetitive is the point, because we repeat ourselves, but in time periods long enough that we forget and don't notice. This is our stupidity, compressed.

Yeah, I guess that's one of the points that the video tries to make: the repetitiveness is so numbing that you stop noticing that the behavior of the platforms is getting more and more egregious...

Or maybe: Stop. Get some help.

Stop chasing "VC funded social networks". Let's look at the indieweb for a sustainable model. Let's patronize separate, small, independent service providers to keep the servers running.

That's all that it takes to fix this mess.

Like Mastodon/Fediverse? They in turn have problems with censorship.

You either have problems with censorship (or moderation, if you want to use a more moderate term), or you have problems with raving lunatics and trolls scaring everyone else off your platform...

You can't justify censorship by across the board smearing censored people as "raving lunatics" or "trolls". The "scaring off" excuse for censorship works for forums like HN, but it doesn't work for social media sites, since on those you choose whom to follow yourself, and even in the replies to posts (of yourself or people you voluntarily follow, and whose followers are likely similar in opinion to yourself!) you can selectively mute or block people. So individuals do not actually need any additional censorship.

> you can selectively mute or block people

That's a fantasy solution. Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people. They might be a minority but even if you block them all, you've still received 10,000 hate messages and you have to spend a lot of time doing your own policing.

And then everyone else still has to wade through all this crap, or see "blocked message" everywhere.

Moderation is essential for most online communities. And then those 10,000 people can do the same to everyone else.

> Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people.

That's a completely fantastical example. A normal person will never have close to unmanageably many replies. This is at most a problem for celebrities, which can be granted other solutions, e.g. only people they follow can reply, which solves the problem.

> Moderation is essential for most online communities.

There is a big difference between forums and social media, where you choose your own filter bubble anyway.

It's not that "moderation" is a more moderate term, it's that this is entirely a misuse of the word "censorship".

Which "they" are you specifically referring to?

Yeah, it's a trick question.

The majority of Mastodon servers. And if you are on a minority, your server is probably blocked by the majority. So it's a general problem on Mastodon, not just one of specific servers.

This is categorically false.

I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship.

If each instance is a home, we should expect to follow their owner's rules when we are there. No owner is forced to give you a soapbox in their home for you to talk. If you want to have your own space, with your own rules, you are free to do so. You can invite whoever you want to your home and no one is going to come after you for the things you say in your home.

> I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship.

It has a lot to do with system wide censorship, as in the end the effect is approximately similar.

> If each instance is a home

That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy. You could even say that each country is "a home", and if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.

> That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy.

And that would be perfectly justifiable. None of the big social media networks are forced to provide service to a customer that they don't want. It's not an utility, it should not be treated as such.

> if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.

- The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself is negligible compared to the cost of moving to a different country

- To "emigrate" to a different country implies having to abandon your original home country. In some cases, it even means having to renounce your original citizenship. Online, you can have different digital identities.

All that is being asked of you is to respect the rules of the home you are in. If this is difficult for you to understand, it's not a problem of your social peers.

> And that would be perfectly justifiable. None of the big social media networks are forced to provide service to a customer that they don't want. It's not an utility, it should not be treated as such.

The effect of big social media sites blocking free speech are not much different from the state doing it. It's like saying: "You are perfectly allowed to state your opinions! (but only at home, where nobody hears them)" This wouldn't be functionally different from the situation in China.

> The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself

Doesn't solve the problem, as free speech instances get blocked by the other big instances.

Your problem is not of "free speech". Your problem is that you feel entitled to other people's attention, and you think if you are not "getting heard" by them, you are being censored.

Sorry, this is complete bullshit.

> but only at home, where nobody hears them

You can still invite people to your own home. If nobody is hearing it, it's because they are not interested to join you.

> Your problem is not of "free speech". Your problem is that you feel entitled to other people's attention, and you think if you are not "getting heard" by them, you are being censored.

That's false. On social media, everyone is free to follow just the people they want to follow. Muting is also an option.

Your problem is that you hate free speech. You don't want to just choose what you see yourself, you want also censor what other people are allowed see.

> You can still invite people to your own home.

Yes, that's possible in China as well. According to you, this justifies state censorship. After all, you are only censored in public on social media.

> That's false. On social media, everyone is free to follow just the people they want to follow. Muting is also an option.

This right here shows why you don´t understand why instance-wide blocking might be needed.

I can give you one clear example: my instance is running in Germany. As such, I need to comply with German laws. Now, if anyone from my instance follows someone from a "free speech extremist" instance and my server ends up with Nazi propaganda, guess who will be under investigation?

Substitute "Nazi propaganda" for "instances for sex-workers who might be victims of people trafficking" if you prefer.

> Yes, that's possible in China as well.

No, it's not. The Chinese police will come after you if you try to organize any type of opposition and they will have the power to hurt you without a fair trial.

Eugen is not going to do anything with you if you go talk shit about him on your instance. I know because I did it. ;)

> I can give you one clear example: my instance is running in Germany. As such, I need to comply with German laws.

Of course no admin can do anything about the law. That's in fact what Elon Musk said: The platform should only censor as much as is required by the law. But in practice on Mastodon much more is censored than on Twitter.

> The Chinese police will come after you if you try to organize any type of opposition

The Chinese police will certainly not come if you utter your opinions in your own home, precisely because nobody will hear them. Restricting free speech only to areas where it can't be heared isn't free speech.

> will certainly not come (...) because nobody will hear them

> Restricting free speech only to areas where it can't be heared (sic) isn't free speech.

You missed the part where I said you can invite others and use that space to organize opposition. Was that intentional?

Also, I can't believe that you are making me say it:

- There is no global/universal definition of what is Free Speech.

- You don't get to decide what is or not "Free Speech".

- Even in the US, "Protection of Free Speech" is only about avoid persecution from the Government, not about being able to say whatever crap you want without consequences.

God, even for a conservative like me, this shit is tiring...

> "Protection of Free Speech" is only about avoid persecution from the Government, not about being able to say whatever crap you want without consequences.

The same thing could be said to you when your political opinions get censored. But it seems you can't imagine that.

You keep saying "censored", yet you haven't provided one single example of actual censorship.

Let me try again: can you give one example of something you said that got you in trouble in any social network?

I don't post things on social networks but I follow people. There are plenty of examples where people on Twitter (pre Musk) got censored for alleged "hate speech", which was just an excuse to censor tweets or people the (yes, far-left) censors hated.

And it never occurred to you to tell them "hey, if Twitter is blocking you, you can use these alternative networks where you get to control your presence so you don't get censored, and I will follow there"?

Shit, has it never occurred to them? Are you telling me that the overwhelming majority of the right wing influencers sees themselves as beholden to Big Tech that much? Wouldn't you at least consider the possibility that all this talk about "censorship" is just a lame excuse to rile up gullible people into a "fight" that doesn't really benefit anyone but themselves?

It is totally different than the state doing it, because people are free to associate with other websites, but are not free to associate with other nations.

Imagine if the major social networking sites censored a certain opinion. The effect would be basically the same. Just like if Google removed your website because they don't like your political opinion.

Ok I imagined it, and once again noticed that, no, the "effect" is not the same at all, because once again I'm free to associate with other websites that do not choose to remove my opinion.

But Google's market dominance is so high that most people won't see your website because it is blocked on Google. The result would be almost the same as if it was blocked everywhere.

No, a dominant private business is not like a government, for the simple fact that it cannot throw you in jail.

You're so close to getting it. It's a good analogy because you could equally say that each social network "is a home". That is indeed the case.

And yes, countries do indeed also get to choose their own laws through their own government process. I'm happy to live in a country where our laws forbid government restrictions on speech but allow private "homes" to make their own rules. I think that's the right balance. But I don't get to tell other nations what their laws should be.

> And yes, countries do indeed also get to choose their own laws through their own government process.

Not really if you censor speech that challenge the status quo.

You mean if the government of that nation censors speech that challenges the status quo? I think it's very bad for governments to do that, and would go to some length to ensure that the government of my own nation does not allow that, but I also don't get a direct say in what the governments of other nations do and how the citizens of those nations respond. I can certainly criticize from afar, but I don't get to vote or protest or fight to change the laws of those nations.

> You mean if the government of that nation censors speech that challenges the status quo? I think it's very bad for governments to do that

And if the major social networks are doing it, wouldn't that also be bad?

No. The private freedom of association is important. I'm similarly free to disagree with the choices the social network makes, as are you. But it is not bad for them to make their own choices, it's good.

Absolutely false.

I've been using Mastodon for about a month now, and I've never had any issues with censorship, specifically regarding queer, furry, and nsfw content.

The censorship is mainly of people or instances which aren't left-wing.

Can you point to specific cases of censorship that you experienced?

It's publicly known that large instances block instances that aren't left-wing.

My instance is not "left-wing", I have had plenty of (civil) arguments with people all around the spectrum and no one is trying to cancel me because of that. I also have so far managed to go by without having to block any instance (but I did personally block a bunch of trolls and assholes from poa.st and fse)

I was initially inclined to invite you to my instance as well, but I'm starting to get the feeling that you are more interested in not being called out for any BS you put out than in a healthy social discourse.

The large instances block other instances whose politics they don't like, and since the majority of Mastodon has a certain political direction, that in turn results in homogeneity in which political direction is blocked. It's admin tribalism that goes beyond what individual users can decide.

- Why isn't Truth.social/Gab open for federation?

- Why doesn't Jordan Peterson (which I bought the book, watched the videos and love to rewatch destroying Cathy Newman) take his thinkspot.com platform and make a Mastodon version out of it?

- Why no popular conservative figurehead left Twitter to create their own server on the Fediverse?

Twitter no longer censors right-wing people like in the past, so there is no need for them to switch. Twitter still doesn't censor left-wing people, but the left-wing people preferred the previous situation where right-wing people (their political enemy) did get censored. So many of the left-wing people were upset with the subjectively worse situation, so they switched to Mastodon, which is why most of Mastodon is very left-leaning.

You are so invested in the cultural wars, you didn't even stop to think about I asked and you rushed to find a rationalization to explain the current situation.

Some more questions for you to ponder:

- why hasn't the right wing got out of Twitter when it was dominated by the left?

- why was Mastodon popular for the woke leftist crowd since, I don't know, 2020?

- Jordan Peterson is still complaining about YouTube censoring/blocking/demonetizing his videos. Why doesn't he make his own Peertube?

1), 3) because of the network effect.

2) I don't think Mastodon was more than a rounding error before Musk bought Twitter.

Does it matter? It didn't stop Trump from creating Truth.social, did it?

Why couldn't other right-wing influencers get together and do something similar? Perhaps because there never was actual censorship?

Perhaps they just attracted more suckers to support them by bitching and moaning about "censorship" and "deplatforming" than if they went on and actually took control of their own social media presence.

Thats the core group of Mastodon though.

No one worries about censorship of mainstream opinions, and that’s the Mastodon mainstream

Every network has problem with censorship. You can only choose which kind of problem impacts you less.

I'm just saying that Fediverse solutions aren't automatically better than centralized ones.

4chan is pretty good in that regard. Not social media per se, though. I wish there were more "only as much censorship as necessary" platforms.

Almost every platform is "only as much censorship as necessary". The threshold for necessary is just different. (4chan gets away with a lower threshold since the posts are very ephemeral)

I don't really agree.... many censor things they shouldn't out of scaremongering for "safety" and "brand integrity" and "protecting the users"

They do it because the overwhelmingly vast majority of people don't like all that crap, and they are more interested in catering to that large group of normies than to the tiny group of edgelords out there. You just aren't their audience, and as you say, there are other places you can go for that experience.

That's not true. I know of no social network which censors alt-left/woke activists. So they certainly don't just appease the normies.

You know Twitter. https://www.businessinsider.com/left-wing-activists-banned-f...

It is true, you just don't like that it's true. Which is fine. You're entitled to that opinion.

And yes, every mainstream social media network absolutely does remove toxic radical posts across the spectrum, left right and neither. And toxic radicals across the spectrum all complain that it is only they who are being "censored", while the rest of us roll our eyes.

4chan was never good

You mean with the people who host servers choosing not to host certain content? That isn't censorship, it's just people making their own choices.

It's server admins making their choices for/against users, by blocking entire instances whose politics they don't like. There is a big difference between users making their own choices and admins making them for them.

Ok, so what? Server admins are just private people hosting their own thing. They can do whatever they want. It's honestly none of your business what they choose to do.

I argued that there is a lot of censorship on Mastodon. You may be okay with this (presumably because the censorship doesn't affect your own political opinions) but that's a different point.

It isn't "censorship", it's private people choosing not to host stuff they don't want to host. That's their choice, and it's good for them to be able to choose.

Call it what you want, the effect is the same.

No it isn't. For instance, even though you seem to be mad about having your reach there limited by the choices of mastodon server admins, here you are freely expressing your opinions on a different website. You have not been censored.

Okay, Google removes your website from the search index. You have not been censored, after all, you are still on Bing. Oops, Bing also removed your Website. Don't worry, you are still on, err ... yandex.ru?

Yes, correct. Your website is not entitled to be included in any search index; many websites are not, for many different reasons.

This is a uniquely internet-era phenomenon, where people feel they are entitled not just to speak, but to be heard.

Nobody ever argued about whether the Wall Street Journal has an obligation to publish any article sent to them by anyone, or whether CBS is required to broadcast any television programming sent to them. It's an absurd idea.

No, that gets you a different shaped mess.

Actually, I'd argue that it makes different messes. Plural.

However, these messes are of a much smaller scale, have less long-lasting effects and are easier to work around.

Indieweb is by definition not sustainable.

Either you are a generous person who is paying out of his pocket to host a platform, or you require people to pay for usage (or your platform it truly p2p but good luck with people having the means to self-host nodes).

Fact is, most people are freeloaders so this is not sustainable either way.

Let's just say it like it is: most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat. If I had $20 to spend I'd rather buy a bunch of books instead of 4 months of whatever mastodon server would ask me to pay for.

Usenet days, in which you paid a single amount to a single provider and all the boards were populated by technical people, are over. There is absolutely no single place on the web where you can interact with knowledgeable people in every field all clumped together (except sci-hub + email heh)

Gotta make a Pied Piper type thing that uses the indexedDB and some light blockchain to store data on all devices, maybe while tricking Cloudflare to do the bulk of the caching and serving lol.

Perhaps you could host on twitter while stenographically hiding from twitter. Let them collect ad revenue for rendering ads in a headless browser to nonexistent users.

So I take that as a "No" for the "Ask HN" I did just yesterday?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674034

> most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat

Maybe this is more a problem with how we've structured the web and less a problem with the type of app or our expectation of it.

99% of what I view on the web doesn't have to be absolutely up to date. I can tolerate some latency. If we dropped the whole request-response thing in favor of pub-sub, and just had the servers wake up for one minute every hour to propagate state changes, we'd only need to pay for 1/60th of the uptime that we currently are--the cicada approach.

I realize that this would be very inconvenient for advertisers who are trying to create a controlled experience re: which material I see when. They would absolutely hate it if the default mode of consumption happened in an offline-friendly way. But given that I don't give a damn about what they want, I think it would be ok.

You could have an extremely optimized text-only platform that would cost pennies to run and scale, but who would join?

I would. Especially if the switching costs between paying those pennies and running my own node on a raspberry pi were low. And as the situation re: the normal approach continues to deteriorate, others might too.

If you really need something larger, the text could be an IPFS CID. Sure, you have to pin the data, so maybe that's a few more pennies, but IPFS has nice scalability features that would keep this overhead fairly low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt

Yeah, I guess that reiterates the "who would join" point. I've tried to get my friends to join me on SSB. No luck.

We may have to wait for the solar flare that knocks out the internet. Then point-to-point stuff like SSB will be the only thing that's working... between the seventeen people that were using it in the first place.

Also, for the sake of humor, the offenses that the companies did should escalate. This started with the first platform declaring that it owned its users' pancreases and everything else seemed pretty minor compared to that.

The discussion around this topic is severely limited by the tech echo chamber we're in.

Ask random people on the street whether they care about their data or privacy, and if they care enough about it to boycott a popular web service, and you'll likely get blank stares or be laughed at for making such a proposition.

Most people don't care. Which is why this cycle of service hopping will never[1] be broken, and only privacy and tech enthusiasts will keep using privacy-respecting services. All this technobabble about privacy falls on deaf ears.

[1] Service hopping will still exist, but the only way privacy-respecting services will catch on in the mainstream is if they also offer a clear user experience advantage, and if they gain enough momentum for everyone else to want to use them. This is unlikely to happen with the modern indieweb movement, which is focused on the wrong things.

This is not just about privacy.

It's about ad-funded internet that can makes content creators prioritize quantity over quality.

It's about the destruction of healthy civic debate by having media channels that increasingly polarize public opinion, because it's easier to sell sensationalism than good reporting.

It's about how unsustainable the current model is.

Regulations would be welcome.

They also worked back in the starting days of telephony (imagine everybody being forced on the same telephone network because telephone numbers were unrelated between networks, that would be pretty shitty, so ... we did something about it! [1])

[1] http://som.csudh.edu/cis/471/hout/telecomhistory/

Oh they will, but not in a way that anyone will like. With LLMs getting cheaper to run in the coming years it'll be passport based verification and login for everything or drown in completely human looking spam.

> but not in a way that anyone will like

If that is the case then it is because we just let it happen.

Repetition as a form of comedy is a classic. Monty Python used it a lot (eg 'The Larch'). I found this really amusing. Maybe you need to be British though.

You say “we get it” but seems like you don’t actually get it

I forgot it was a literal video and thought it was a CSS trick, where it randomly selected among text options and constructed the cycle forever, never stopping.

That would be amazing, by the way. Make it look like a video, and then the progress bar just slows and stops, and you're still there looking at new silly names and dumb stunts, hours later…

It’s British humor. They think just being sarcastic is funny.

Everybody's looking for a technical solution to a human problem. There's no COC, algorithm, policy, federation, whatever that will fix social media. The only thing that worked long-term where limited scoped* forums with 100% human moderation that basically had one single rule: "this is my forum and I appoint moderators that enforce my vision". You built long term reputation and relationships on these forums so whatever you posted was taken in context.

* limited scope = geographically, culturally, interests, numbers of people. But this of course will never make a billion dollar business.

So until people give up on the idea of the global app and return to "local" communities I don't think we're going to have decent social media.

EDIT: by local I don't mean subreddits, discord servers, etc, but the entire site/app to be local. Not a global with local divisions.

> until people return to "local" communities

If the app NextDoor is any indication, going local doesn’t seem to help either, its as negative and fractious as any other online community.

At some point, one gets the feeling “the medium is the message” and it’s a flaw inherent to all online social media.

NextDoor is not local. It has local divisions, communities, whatever you want to call them, but the app is not local. So the owner of the app is not involved in the local communities, he does not personally appoint moderators and so on.

Well, geographically local has never been a particularly good division anyway - neighbor disputes are a story as old as time, and "don't know your neighbors too well" is sound advice.

NextDoor doesn't work because:

1) it gets dominated by whoever shouts the loudest/who can spend most time on social media

2) You only get one local community really, and if you aren't in it, you aren't in it. I can join one of thousands of gaming discords, if any of them get too toxic for me I can just join another one. I can't do that with my local community, so you don't have the stick of "if you continue being toxic assholes I'm going to go somewhere else". You can of course stop using it but that's not "taking your business somewhere else".

>If the app NextDoor is any indication, going local doesn’t seem to help either, its as negative and fractious as any other online community.

In my experience, it was generally much worse, not only for the negativity, but the fact that these toxic people lived nearby.

> The only thing that worked long-term where limited scoped* forums with 100% human moderation that basically had one single rule: "this is my forum and I appoint moderators that enforce my vision".

So basically Reddit before they declared war on their volunteer mod teams.

No, Reddit has local subs, but the app is global. You have global karma, rules, admins and so on.

Reddit was a cesspool long before their recent war on mods. In fact, the war on mods wasn't a bad thing, since SO many mods were such horrible people; there's countless stories of people being perma-banned for just asking a mod a question (which is something that happened to me once too).

The only social media I've ever seen that was really nice was back in the USENET days, or later some things like Yahoo groups, where there was a small group/forum dedicated to a very niche topic, with a decent moderator who wasn't on a power trip, and a fairly small group of subscribers. Of course, this was no guarantee of quality of lack of drama, but it's the best I've ever seen. The larger and more general the forum, the worse it's likely to be.

I agree 100%. I have dozens of friends still from those days that i chat/talk to very often. Friends from “global’ apps ? Maybe 2-3. Once you take the personal touch aspect away its all just noise really.

Sure this can lead to a billion dollar business. See: Reddit and Discord

This seems like a thinly disguised jab at people using Bluesky and Threads. I've seen a lot of fediverse enthusiasts who are extremely cynical about those two new platforms, because the former is by Jack Dorsey (ex Twitter) and the latter is literally by Meta, which is of course run by Mark Zuckerberg. I can understand that towards Meta, but Bluesky seem to be trying something different and building a new protocol; when it comes from people who've been on the fediverse forever and regularly complain about how many other people aren't using it, this feels like sour grapes to me. The existing federated social media have some deeply ingrained problems stemming from the protocol, and new ideas ought to be welcomed.

What about the Fediverse flaws that can not be fixed within the context of ActivityPub?

BlueSky creation of a separate protocol is an obvious attempt to create a platform where they get to become the gatekeepers of content distribution. The fact that they haven't opened up yet for other nodes makes it clear.

ActivityPub has effectively become a drop-in replacement for the constellation of older systems (OStatus etc) that the fediverse used to use. That was possible because it didn't require changes in how the nodes in the network relate to eachother. Bluesky on the other hand is trying out a completely different network topology. It's too soon to say if it'll ultimately be better, but if it does succeed, it won't necessarily produce something that could be retrofitted onto ActivityPub.

> The fact that they haven't opened up yet for other nodes makes it clear.

That's far too cynical. A federated social network is a really difficult project and there's many good reasons you might want to start with a single node.

> A federated social network is a really difficult project and there's many good reasons you might want to start with a single node.

And yet, Nostr is growing just nicely, with a perfectly reasonable decentralized model.

I was a bit involved with Bluesky early discussions. It became clear from the get-go that they were not willing to give a chance to AP. They wanted to have something they can control, top-down. Even if that means reinventing all the different wheels they are doing.

Nostr isn't ActivityPub either though.

Not the point. The point is that if Bluesky really has a goal of building a decentralized solution and had seen a fundamental problem with AP, they could work on their alternative while showing how their alternative can scale better. If it they are criticizing AP but their software is as centralized as Twitter, then they are just larping.

> This seems like a thinly disguised jab at people using Bluesky and Threads.

It's not disguised, it's the whole point.

I don't recall a video that got close to 50 upvotes without any discussion in such a short time. Am I missing something?

Everybody left

Came here at 5am to say the same thing.

I mean it is worth the attention and topical for this site. But it is unusual. Bots are active on HackerNews so it depends on whether they got past the moderation here. Hard to do anything about the kinds of bots, possibly just humans from fiver + chatGPT, who post misinformation on the more politically spicy topics. And i could see something similar working to create an upvote bot network too.

It was interesting and worthy of discussion but I have nothing interesting to say.

I was going to upvote and move on, as the video is self-explanatory and fun. Now I feel compelled to leave a comment to disprove this conspiracy theory.

I'm sure that this applies to later upvotes, but the first few minutes when this was posted are off the scale. Once something is on the homepage it will usually stay there for a while because some fraction of the people that visit the homepage like it.

I was mesmerized by the moire effects in the video, and haven't felt that way since watching Hypnotoad for eight hours.

And for your birthday, you receive not one but two tea sieves.

Maybe lots of people got the point of the video, upvoted it, then left Hacker News forever without commenting to tell everyone they were leaving! ;)

Personally, I came here to announce I'm leaving, then not leave.

Hacker News is certainly more hostile to video than links - to me it wasn't obvious it was a video as normally people will append [video] to video links out of courtesy.

Wasn’t even obvious to me after a first glance at the web page on mobile.

I thought it was excellent. A good critique of the loops people get stuck in, but also very funny. And the comic timing was on the nose.

I feel like the humour is quintessentially British (I doubt Harold Shipman is well known on the other side of the duckpond, let alone the cultural subtext of an OBE). Maybe it's not as funny in America.

What I don't understand is why Threads is app-only. Possibly 80% of the tweets I consume are embedded in news articles, and sometimes I click on them and end on Twitter's website, where I then hang around for a couple of minutes.

I have no Twitter app installed on any device and like it that way, which means that I won't ever see any of Threads' content.

Because an app is not the web. And the web is anathema to a properly walled garden.

Sure, but I mean in relation to Twitter, which in that sense is not a walled garden.

Twitter is very much a walled garden and is in that sense rapidly becoming more so, especially because Elon Musk is dreaming of making the Twitter app into the 'everything' app that will be a platform for all your comms and commercial transactions. AOL next gen.

It's also not a "fair" comparison because twitter was born before smartphone penetration and the "mobile first" thing. They launched on the web first, like Facebook, and probably would love to wall things off more and lock out the web, but can't now. (Though Musk clearly made an effort a couple weeks ago by requiring log in to view any tweets, he's had to partially roll that back, though not fully)

When I went looking at any of the various new social network startups that have tried to get into the market all of them -- except the fediverse/open-source/hacker type projects -- were mobile only, even some after years of being on the market. Clearly highly motivated to keep a mobile-only moat around things.

Just had to double check. There is a “copy link” and “get embed code” on every thread.

Example: https://www.threads.net/t/Cuh5XzipVyS

Where do you see the "get embed code"? I found "copy link" under the three dots in the upper right corner, but no embed code. Is it because I'm from EU and so I can't access the share menu?

Interesting, thanks. But then it requires fbcdn.net to be whitelisted in the DNS server, which I won't do.

But checking with a proxied browser also gives a limited UX, "Get the Threads app to see more from ...".

In any case, they're halfway there.

> What I don't understand is why Threads is app-only.

Seriously?

All that extra data collection from your device, that's why.

Also it is much easier to lock into the platform and prevent sharing content. e.g. images in the app.

On browsers, videos and images must be usually presented in standard formats, and you can just download them with browser tools. It is also much easier to inspect the traffic and see all the (bad) things.

On app level for analysis be possible, you often need to set your own TLS certificates or somehow obtain private key of your mobile phone to decrypt the traffic. You could also reverse-engineer the app, but it might be obfuscated (ref. Snapchat).

Browsers are designed to handle untrusted content, even if the user gives some permissions. On applications, you are asked to trust the application (permissions), and then it does what it wants with given permissions. On OS there is sandboxing, but the scope is much larger than in browsers.

If you are very locked in to the platform, you might be more willingly to give the permissions for app to work, which might include more than it actually needs.

If your business is sucking people's attention, and harvesting people's private information so you can target them better, mobile is a much easier way to do it.

Plus there's a generation of product managers who just dismiss the desktop or web as old/arcane/niche and uncool anyways.

It's also not surprising coming from the Instagram backround -- which was a mobile only app for years (well, because it was based on stuff you did with your phone camera, so it made sense). But even Facebook these days is repeatedly broken on the web in ways it never used to be. Notifications go missing, or don't come in in the background, state goes stale, things never load, or require a full site reload to resolve... bugs in the web version that have gone unfixed for literally years. This is not an organization that prioritizes the web, at this point, despite having its origin there. I don't think WhatsApp has ever had anything beyond a barebones web experience.

I was surprised by how many seemed to not even notice or remark on this being the case, tho. I knew mobile was the primary modality by which people interacted these days, but I guess it didn't really sink in for me to what degree: people don't even notice the absence of a desktop computer way of using the thing.

Myself, well, I thought about trying out Threads -- I have Instagram and Facebook accounts anyways -- but I couldn't be bothered with anything that is mobile-only. On a typical day I only pick up my phone to do 2FA sign-ins.

And yes, I know you can view people's posts/threads via web, but that's it.

A for effort. Still I left Twitter. It rewards posts expressing strong negative emotions too much, and the sycophancy around popular accounts is depressing.

Curious how this was made. Seems to have been custom coded to generate each frame?

It's a video.

Correct!

My guess would have been the video was made with an animation program like Adobe Animate (the product that was previously Adobe Flash Professional and before that Macromedia Flash) or Adobe AfterEffects.

>Seems to have been custom coded to generate each frame?

What?

What seems to be "custom coded"?

What even is "custom coded"? Custom as in oppose to "standard coded"?

Why would you need to write any code to generate a frame for a video?

Lots of animations are generated by code partially or fully. But I read the question here as whether this is rendered in real time on the browser via custom code rather than a video codec. This is because the sharp black and white graphics appear almost vector like. However it’s a normal video.

>Lots of animations are generated by code partially or fully.

Few, maybe some, not lots. Unless you count using any piece of software as coding which seems silly.

I meant that watching this video made me realize that one could write a program that generates the graphics, like in a video game, and then captures that in a video file, without any intention to run the program separately. A programmatically created video.

It embeds Vimeo. https://player.vimeo.com/video/844198233

Very apt for me, just ditched my lemmy accounts after realising it's just as inane content as reddit had become.

Were you willing to create content and contribute to make it more to your liking, or are you just complaining about the low efforts of others?

I guess I have trouble empathizing with all the drama concerning messaging apps. I use WhatsApp for a couple international people I sometimes am in touch with. May have one or two other messaging apps I sometimes use. Mostly SMS/iMessage and GChat at work.

These "apps" to the regular folk ("regs" from now on) are akin to putting a new shiny object in a monkey cage at the zoo. The regs don't think or care about privacy implications, the regs just see a new shiny thing they can use to boast and seek attention with, or even better become An Influencer!

Scrolling reddit live or tiktok is bizarre! It's like walking down a corridor in an insane asylum with tiny windows on each cell door, and the inhabitant is desperately trying to get your attention- "look look i play jazz version of Rammstein on accordian!- but you just keep on walking.

I think this is true for anything popular (and harmful).... if you don't listen to popular music, people apply social pressure on you. If you don't play popular video games, people apply social pressure on you. If you don't have an account on $socialMedia, people apply social pressure on you.

This is especially dangerous combined with the trend of people becoming more and more narrow-minded (see how "association by guilt" is a major thing now) so they demand more and more censorship everywhere to deplatform people who they don't like.

We keep trying to solve a business model problem with technology and it seems impossible. Until we can find a way to make the end users the customer and not the product, we will always get the same result in the end. I am partial to the Netflix model, where 10% of users pay per month to unlock premium features, and the other users must be invited by the paying users or pay themselves. No free accounts at all.

The quips against billionaires is interesting given the author is selling merch. What if the merch took off big-time and the author became a billionaire because of it? Would they be different?

Needing money to eat is not a sign of hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is not a sign of being wrong.

"Needing" money to eat just means you don't have the skills necessary to hunt or farm your own food (I am certainly in this camp). But fair point on hypocrisy not necessarily being wrong.

> What if the merch took off big-time and the author became a billionaire because of it?

Seems highly unlikely. Can you name a merch billionaire?

Arguably several members of Kardashian family

    Through different ventures, several members of the family have assets of over a billion dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashian_family

where they, their image, their endorsements and their antics are "the merch".

The best place on the net for your $25 "Capitalism is stealing, stealing is against the law" t shirts.

You’re extrapolating from an imaginary, wildly unlikely scenario. By that logic, no one with even so much as a lemonade stand could criticise the filthy rich.

Let’s avoid becoming Matt Bors’ “Mister Gotcha”: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Funny, he participates in society yet criticizes it!

Do you really believe that anyone trying to make money for a living is not permitted to criticize the extremes of excess in this system?

I wasn't aware of https://briefs.video. Now I am. And it's hilarious!

This is working as intended and is similar to evolution. Every step brings something new and fades when the time comes.

Would suck to still be in ICQ and MySpace world today.

> Would suck to still be in ICQ and MySpace world today.

Bullshit. It was a much healthier world.

/r/OutOfTheLoop Can someone enlighten?

I love that!

I maintain accounts on all of the sites, but almost never go there.

This place is pretty much the only place I do social media, these days. I stopped engaging in StackOverflow, because I was tired of constant low-grade condescension and patronizing.

Not quite true... I have to use Facebook from time to time, as I support an open-source initiative.

This video is amusing and all, but is the author's point that enshittification isn't a thing, or that it's not a legitimate reason to go elsewhere? If so, I must disagree. What's the alternative? To just continue sitting in the slowly boiling water?

I think the point of the video is to advise people to not join these centralised corporate-owned platforms in the first place.

To save a click: this parody video presents a sequence of posts on fictional social media sites, in which the poster describes futilely switching to new sites in succession to avoid whatever issue the prior site presents. A narrator reads the contents of the posts.

The production style reminds me of The Program audio series. A fantastic Sci-Fi audio theater production.

https://programaudioseries.com/

when people actually leave, they don't announce it like a departure terminal announcement; they just... leave.

----

In more contemporary happening, people announcing leaving twitter are just signalling; they might pretend they like the environment of threads, but they thrive on the attention.

People actually leaving are those who just were waiting for a "text" Instagram, and are happy to find a tool that fits their needs.

Do I feel twitter will decline one day? Yes, though not because people are leaving, but because advertisers will leave and twitter will not have money to run, further degrading service.

mod from navygravy.com here......why all the new traffic?

:-)

Domain is up for grabs still!

Am I the only one struggling to understand where the video is?

The black-and-white theme made it pretty hard to see that there were video controls. I thought this was a hero image.

TXT files -> Sticky Notes -> OneNote -> Evernote -> Sublime -> Obsidian -> MD Files

Git and local markdown beats time and all note-taking apps.

I find it tremendously funny a bunch of tech people are fuming over "tech billionaries" all of a sudden when the previous generation of tech billionaires were actively liaisoning with government agencies to erect horrible censorship regimes*

Some revealed preferences there for sure

*https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-requests-stay-order-that-re...

The previous generation of tech people were also up in arms. But each generation gets disillusioned at their own pace.

Whataboutism. Look it up.

(Also, you might want to check on the concept of "multiple people" which may, surprisingly, hold different opinions and express them at different times or events. Noone in this world owes you consistency to other people.)

> whataboutism

incorrect, it's called hypocrisy

"Whataboutism" is a term coined by those who were annoyed at being rightly accused of hypocrisy.

The accusation of hypocrisy is generally untenable from a moral point of view unless the discussion was about the virtues and vices of that person to start with. It's just one of those modern virtue-ethical fallacies. The question of whether a standpoint is morally the right standpoint is orthogonal to questions about the personal consistency of persons who defend the standpoint. A signpost does not need to walk into the direction it points at all.

Another, more general fallacy is the computation that two moral wrongs can somehow make a right. They never do.

These are not moral opinions, by the way. These points are codified into law and common jurisdiction. You cannot defend yourself in court by pointing out that others have broken the law, too.

you miss the point, the problem isn't the message in itself but signalling these from a moral high ground in a patronizing manner.

An observation of hypocrisy does not per-se invalidate the original observation, but it does expose the speaker as acting from motivated reasoning, which may put into doubt their motivations and hence their conclusions. It does not invalidate any evidence presented, but it contextualizes it by showing it to be produced by a biased and selective process. This is particularly important in political rhetoric, where framing is usually more impactful than facts.

> may put into doubt their motivations and hence their conclusions.

That's literally a fallacy, too. Look, you can attempt to frame it as you like, accusing others of hypocrisy is deviating from the original argument and fallacious. It's an invalid ad hominem attack to distract from the topic. The only exception is when the accusation is that the arguer does not really mean the argument sincerely, but that's another type of argument and not under discussion here.

Likewise, to re-iterate this point, two wrongs never make a right, yet in nearly all cases of blaming someone for being a hypocrite that type of fallacious argument is exactly the motivation behind the accusation. It certainly is in the above discussion.

It's only a fallacy if you're looking at the conclusion in isolation. In many cases, that a conclusion was brought to your attention implies a large amount of other conclusions that you assume to be false because they were not raised. This is the difference between "telling a technical truth" and "actually telling the truth" - when you omit observations that would contextualize a conclusion, you're using a valid argument to mislead people. So hypocrisy is not an accusation of lying by falsity but by omission. If I say "X was stealing office supplies from the breakroom" and I omit that every other employee was also stealing office supplies from the breakroom, I am lying even when X was in fact stealing. The exception implies the rule; the rule is a lie. If I speak a sentence that I know will mislead the listener, the sentence being logically true in isolation does not save me.

In the cases under discussion (like the above one), the person accusing the arguer of hypocrisy is trying to distract and is arguing in bad faith. That's why it's called whataboutism.

As a typical example, Russian propaganda sources have replied to accusation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with "The US has invaded Iraq and committed countless war crimes." This is not only fallacious, because US war crimes have no bearing on Russian war crimes, it's also hypocritical and logically inconsistent. It's hypocritical because the accusation would only work (from the perspective of the arguer) if they recognized war crimes and argued against them, but the rhetorical goal is the opposite. It's logically inconsistent because the desired inference is that what Russia does is not bad but the argument schema rests on the accusation that what the US in the past did was bad.

That fallacious scheme is very common. You can observe it nearly everywhere, especially in political discussions, despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever on a closer look.

The original example under discussion has a similar structure but also differs in an important detail. Somebody argued "what about previous tech billionaires who did some other nefarious things." The correct conclusion from this would be that previous tech billionaires (distraction topic) and current tech billionaires (real topic) did some nefarious things, if the claims are true. But that's not what the arguer had in mind. The arguer wanted to relativize the arguments against tech billionaires in the real topic. In this case, the accusation of hypocrisy against whataboutism is made in bad faith because the arguer knows that the two topics do not have anything to do with each other. Understanding the context of what previous tech billionaires did does not help you evaluating the morality of the real topic in this case. It does not provide any context needed because the contexts barely have anything in common (different times, different tech billionaires, etc.).

That's in my experience another common case when people argue against pointing out whataboutism. The people who do that have rhetorical goals, of course, but they are not arguing correctly. Whataboutism is practically always a fallacy. I believe there are cases you describe where pointing out a hypocrisy can lead to a better understanding of the subject matter, but these are very rare and even then they still distract from the question under discussion.

I believe the reason why you're so keen on insisting that you're right and that whataboutism is often wrong is mostly psychological. People want to set themselves apart and it's normal to come up with contrarian opinions about perceived wisdom. I have strong tendency do that myself.

Sorry for the lengthy post. I just wanted to make it very clear that you did not convince me at all. The topic is important to me for various reasons, both professionally and personally.

> As a typical example, Russian propaganda sources have replied to accusation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with "The US has invaded Iraq and committed countless war crimes."

Sure, and if someone only called out Russian war crimes you shouldn't take them as "a person who dislikes war crimes" but "a person who dislikes Russia", and expect them to produce information on that basis. This is not fallacious, it's vital information to understand what they're saying: when they say "Russia has committed a war crime", it does not imply that this is an uncommon crime to have committed. Other nations could be committing that war crime all the time and that person wouldn't raise it to your attention, because they're focused on Russia. The knowledge of their stance is necessary to understand what they're saying at all. And that's even before accounting for positive bias, where you're not mentioning American war crimes despite knowing of them because you have positive feelings about America. (The same thing happens, of course, in reverse.) You can't have a discussion only in the positive space of what is actually said; words simply don't work like that. Every concretization in a message implies information by means of generalizations you didn't make. If I say "jews murder thousands of people every year", then I imply that this number lies above the baserate of murders; if it in fact doesn't or is less than the baseline, then I've been (possibly intentionally) deceptive without ever saying a false word. (Base rate fallacy!) This is not a rare corner case, it's extremely widespread.

> The arguer wanted to relativize the arguments against tech billionaires in the real topic.

Correct, and this is a valid argumentative technique. Why wouldn't it be? That's just a framing/categorization debate. They're a proxy for causal-structure debates for people who don't know the term "causal structure". "Is Elon Musk an usual or unusual member of the category of billionaire social network owners" is material to the article.

I couldn't disagree more, especially about Russia example because the Russian war qualifies, by application of objective criteria from UN conventions and ICC, as a genocide. You're right about the murders example, but this is not related at all to the above debate and, again, a deviation. Whether Elon Musk is an outlier and exceptionally evil as a tech billionaire or whether every tech billionaire is as evil as him has absolutely not the slightest bearing on his evilness. That's why the accusation of whataboutism is perfectly adequate and reasonable in this case.

As I said in my initial post, the moral independence of actions is codified in law and common practice. The "others did it too" defense does not work in criminal court, and I can assure you that it will also not work for Russia.

> Correct, and this is a valid argumentative technique.

It's provably a fallacy. On a side note, framing has nothing to do with making fallacious arguments, it only pertains to how you express arguments. "The glass is half full" vs "The glass is half empty" -- that's framing. Two different arguments about the same topic -- that's not framing. It also has nothing to do with the baserate fallacy. If someone commits a baserate fallacy, you simply point out that they've committed a baserate fallacy. This only makes sense for statistical arguments. Framing and categorization are also two totally different terms for different application domains. Framing does not concern the categories and population you choose when making statistical inferences. I don't know why people misuse the term all the time, it's not hard to understand if you look at the original literature in experimental psychology. Framing is also not related in any obvious way with causal structure/causal models. Moreover, your example about Elon Musk is not about causal structure, it concerns a statistical property; at least, I cannot see how a causal model can be used to support "usual" vs. "unusual" attributions. However, I grant you that maybe it could be spelled out in causal modeling terms, for example in Judea Pearl's approach, but it's not obvious how to do that.

Anyway, for me this discussion is closed. You're not very persuasive because you're using the wrong terminology. As I said, I'm interested in this topic also from a professional perspective. I know what I'm talking about (whether you believe me or not). I'll keep it at that and close this conversation.

Whataboutism is constantly employed by individuals more concerned about their "side" winning than concerns about actually solving problems. It is rarely a question asked in good faith, but rather a thinly veiled accusation of hypocrisy (as per your comment). That the question might have a legitimate answer is never considered.

Getting to the original point: What about the previous generation of tech billionaire? I think Zuck is an awful person and I will not sign up for Threads. I also think that Musk is an awful person and I will not sign up for Twitter. Where is the hypocrisy in this stance?

I mean, the relevant comparison would be Jack Dorsey, I'd think? Ie. Twitter's previous billionaire owner.

I apologise for misinterpreting your comment. I did delete my Twitter account under Dorsey's tenure as I became more aware of his behaviour and policies, so I believe that my point still stands.

Fair enough! But then your strongest counter isn't "you are engaging in whataboutism", but "Yeah what about Dorsey, I left under Dorsey, I act consistently." "Whataboutism" as a concept is only needed if that defense is unavailable.

what makes you say all of a sudden?

"rocket man bad" has reached comical levels during the last 6 months

the french accent used for "sometime later" is funny. anybody know when this trend started cos im seeing it all over the place :)

From SpongeBob: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wjA_TZopeK0

It's the "French Narator" from Spongebob Squarepants, a cartoon about a sponge. There were narrated time cards such as "2 hours later", or "Much much later", in the series.

Variant of https://bower.sh/bowers-law

This may be one of the best things I've seen on the internet in a long time. Thank you.

Very funny I enjoy

- The free media are important in democracy

- Democracy is important because boomers: as soon as they turned 18 they were the majority, ergo huge boost of democratic decision-making everywher

- Boomers are fading and only the US has adequate young voters to support their democracy. You will see a turn towards centralized government everywhere , most of it powered by AI and tech moguls

- The free media are not important in non-democracy, quite the opposite

Ergo, you are fuming over something that won't be important in a decade

now retweet, like and subscribe, sign up to my newsletter, follow me on tootweethreader, friend me on linkedin and swipe right on tinder

This is either performance satire, or you genuinely do not understand how democracy - and more importantly, percentages, actually work.

Julian Assange, long time no hear.

Sure buddy, see ya monday

Your periodic reminder that quitting social media is like quitting smoking.

Facebook et al are the Philip Morris of tech

I do not understand the amount of Gen-X people who are upset about Musk. Most of those virtue signalers spoke in exactly the same manner on Usenet until it was expedient financially to pretend otherwise.

You don't have to take everything Musk says seriously. He speaks like people would speak in 2000.

On Twitter everyone has his own page. There is no reason why anyone should feel associated with political content from others. I would not feel associated with Ahmadinejad (who was uncensored all the time) any more than with a purported far right poster.

The whole thing is a storm in a teacup by people who want government censorship and cannot tolerate different speech on pages other than their own.

How about leaving all .com domains because there are a couple of right wing ones, too?

> I do not understand the amount of Gen-X people who are upset about Musk.

It is not about Gen-X people. If you pay attention what he has promised and failed to deliver on. He promised to get rid of bots on Twitter and all that he has done is to make the problem worse and saying that he owns the contents of the tweets so AI companies needs to pay for access to create more sophisticated bots.

He's also just genuinely made Twitter a worse platform. The vast majority of Twitter's social cachet was based on people viewing tweets, or hearing about things happening on Twitter, without having an account there - Twitter's actual user-base was tiny compared to it's influence.

Now, if people can't view tweets without being logged in to Twitter, there's absolutely no reason to share them at all (i.e. this has led to r/worldnews switching to Mastodon links to share Ukraine war news, which in turn is a convoluted path of telegram and cross-posting from various sources).

The attempt to monetize the blue checkmarks showed very fundamentally he has absolutely no idea what Twitter's value actually was.

Weird to say, but I kinda like the new Twitter. At least in my corner it's a pretty cozy place, which is not how I would describe the platform before the sink was let in.

If things continue to improve this way I may just buy a blue check. Not because I need it but because I think the platform is actually going in a good direction.

He doesn't speak how people would in 2000 at all. It's weird corporate pandering but more politically neutral than bombarding people with identity politics as usual.

It's time we stop with the retarded purity tests.

I never

Feels like someone watches a bit too much Black Mirror and thinks themselves witty enough to generate comparable content.

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