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Comment by lnxg33k1 | Hacker News Reader

How many social networks recently, Lemmy? The other one with crypto guys? This one? It's 2005 all over again? I am wondering if it's either because it's a relatively easy thing to code or because investors are likely to throw money at it?

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More, smaller networks seems like a big improvement over a handful of too-big, everyone's-there networks.

I think the "everyone's there" networks were nice due to the cross-pollination aspect. I would see random trending stuff that I didn't know I would find interesting pop up.

Probably because we need new ones badly. Reddit and Twitter are two sinking bot-infested enshittification ships and we need a new place to go. Network lock-in is proving to be a very difficult nut to crack in the dystopia we have created though. You need people to jump ship but no one wants to go where the millions of eyes aren’t.

Why do you think any halfway popular social network won't be infested with bots and commercalizers?

My hope anyways is that there are more effective countermeasures. I remember Twitter not being nearly as bad before, but that was possibly just because verification actually meant something more than "have $10" and blue checks weren't turbo-boosted.

The fact that the verification system is paid, and that is abused by bots, means twitter no longer has any incentive to remove said bots.

Its basically the entire ad industry, there's little proof ads work, the metrics for ads are all inflated, yet its one of the biggest money makers out there. Same deal with the bots grinding views and likes for marginal payouts.

Reddit wasn’t for a long time. Having leadership in place that actually cares about the users and doing something about bots would go a long way. Maybe when Reddit IPOs and it is a huge bust we can get some new sites going.

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