Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdnordy | Hacker News Reader

> That would explain why messaging, which is mostly based on phone contacts and therefore more in the user’s control, would be the place people now trust for their social graph.

This is the reason the I wouldn't be interested in an new old Facebook. I'd add that Messaging Apps have significantly improved since the time old Facebook was relevant. They allow Group Chats that function like a "feed" and include images, videos, memes. You can even search your chat history.

Group chats are basically old Facebook feeds with a select part of the social graph. I never thought about it this way, but they totally are. This is actually where Messaging Apps improve upon the old model. A Facebook feed was your entire social graph and your "posts" went out to that entire graph. I don't want this. I never did, really. I like the scoped social graph my "posts" reach in a Group Chat.

View on HN

Yeah, it's like you can create different circles of friends to target your messages to

Since there are probably people on this forum that are young enough to not actually remember Google+'s launch (or just not be paying attention), this was one of its headlining features (limiting post visibility to specific "circles" you chose). It was a great idea, and would have been super useful if it was ever used by anyone but Google fanboys.

Google decided that the way to launch a new social network was to piss off the nucleus of it, namely, the users of its existing social apps. By canceling Reader, and going on a long, obnoxious push to unify gmail and YouTube accounts, two things literally no one wanted.

If they'd been clever enough to make Google+ an extension of those things, it might have gone somewhere.

They additionally alienated many potential early adopters with the "real names" policy...

That "real names" policy is the reason I have always been careful to never open YouTube while logged into any Google account: the understanding I gathered from the noise back then was that, if you ever logged into YouTube or Google+, and then Google for some reason decided that your name was not your real name, you could permanently lose access to more important things like Google Talk or Gmail.

Ah that fiasco! I'd memory-holed it. That was the final mistake, killing Reader was the first. I haven't forgiven them for it and I never will.

The sad thing is that Reader was already a successful social network on top of a RSS reader. But not successful enough for Google I guess...

I'll never forgive Google for killing Reader. I truly believe the internet would be very different today if Reader had stuck around.

I joined Google+ when it first came out and the idea of circles was good.

The problem is Google+ is that it was trying to be a new Facebook without anybody on it.

Those types of social media sites are only as good as the number of your friends, peers, family that are using them

The sad thing is that Facebook had the exact same functionality with lists. You could scope posts and everything. Someone made a clone of the Google+ Circles UI using the Facebook SDK to sort your friends into lists that I used and I still use those lists to scope posts to family only etc.

I think you're right. I recently came to the realization that Discord has functionally replaced Facebook for me and most of my peers. We use it to chat, coordinate events, share pictures, etc. And it gives us all the tools we need to organize this stuff how we want, with no algorithmically curated feed.

Discord is essentially group chat on steroids. And because it's a chat app first, it is fundamentally incompatible with the various "features" that ultimately enshittified Facebook.

Yeah, Discord is it.

One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think).

Everybody has taken a few loops around the merry-go-round at this point, we don’t need to do the whole thing where we try to make it look grown-up and serious. The solution is somewhere in the ballpark of MySpace, AIM, and IRC.

I'm really curious about Discord for social, because literally _no one_ I know uses it here in the UK for anything social. is it a US thing? Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?

> Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?

This one, mostly. Discord has the "cringe" (or at least, silly/quaint/unprofessional, take your pick) "uwu Gamer" feel because that was its target demographic when it launched and is probably still its "home base". It's broken into more social uses by a wide variety of social groups (especially younger generations who like the silly Discord is for Gamers theming in a weird post-ironic way, because it is just memes all the way down; social groups built around group chats of memes can laugh about the silly gamer memes, too).

> One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think).

Yeah, Discord weirdly seems more trustworthy by seeming so unprofessional and silly. Part of that is "yeah, it will be easy to toss if it gets worse", but part of that is how much on the internet "unprofessional" and "silly" is frowned upon. ("You'll sell less ads." "You'll have fewer corporate users." "Complaints" like that.) That also seems as much a feature as a bug: Discord's branding sells less ads, good. Ads seem to be killing the "professional" web.

I also appreciate Discord's weird monetization tools today. Nitro memberships are personal in a weird way that most social media isn't. They mostly just give you more emoji and other memes tools. You don't have to get your whole social network to buy in to the membership, you can just do it for fun for yourself. Same with selling the silly animated name plates and profile cover picks, it's mostly harmless fun that doesn't make the experience worse for everyone and encourages Discord to focus on individual interests on the platform to keep them having fun and buying silly things, rather than the interests of other big corporations or ad buyers or "professional users".

Discord's monetization also makes them come off more trustworthy than other social media companies. Any transaction where I, the user, am also the customer, automatically feels more trustworthy than one where the user is the product.

Hopefully this helps then fend off enshittifying a little longer than most.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com