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Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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.

Sure this can lead to a billion dollar business. See: Reddit and Discord

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