Save the Web by Being Nice
sheep.horse
sheep.horse
If you really don't want to spend any money, Pixelfed [2] is a good option.
Personally, I publish my photos on my own photography website and then syndicate them to Glass, Pixelfed and Instagram.
A social networking platform with over 1 billion users (though I wonder how many of those a real people organically using the site) has a lot of inertia built into it for apparent forward motion, but if the thing that made it work falls apart, it will rot.
Also, for all the newly polished PR talk you hear from Zuckerberg these days about helping users, shit like the above and many other similar things is worth remembering. As the controlling individual at his company he both absolutely knows about these slides into enshittification, and has the power to change them, but apparently doesn't..
We have the tools to compete with proprietary platforms, we just need to commit to them.
I don't agree, but i can't really formulate why. For example is 4chan social media, or Something Awful? I'd say no, they're forums. How is that distinct from Twitter or facebook? Fundamentally the model feels completely different to me. The idea of user centric feeds/content doesn't really fit. Maybe it's that the content is not the OP but the latest days worth of posts?
I see how on that metric HN is not forum-y but social media-y. But there it's the user vs content centric aspect?
Where does Pinterest sit?
Hummm, not at all sure.
Technically, Social Media is a super set of all of those things. They're all media platforms that primarily operate around user socialization (aka engagement). They are, by definition, social media, and in turn social media has been around long before Facebook (eg, slashdot, BBS, Usenet, etc).
I do agree there's a difference/nuance to be recognized here though (eg, old web vs new web social interactions). I think user vs content focus kinda misses the mark, as the truly key differentiator for me is what influences the activity, both in terms of driving people to post in the first place, but also in curating what they can('t) or should(n't) post. In other words, is the platform a community trying to serve it's users, or a company trying to serve it's stake/shareholders?
I have this tendency to start projects whose entire purpose is to prove to myself that something is possible and that I'm not crazy for thinking it. Even when I see it working right in front of me, I feel like I'm insane and that my projects make no sense. When another mind shows up and the idea resonates with them, it changes everything for me. Suddenly it's not insane anymore. Someone else understood it.
I think advertising is unethical so I try really hard not to advertise my stuff. Against all odds, people have managed to find my work despite that. It's incredibly motivating when it happens. It feels like I finally reached out to someone. I've received email about things I've written and published and it really made my day. It's motivated me to participate in more and more open source projects, and it's motivated me to email blog authors too. It turns out people respond when you email them. I used to think they were too busy to reply to me or something.
Meanness hits much harder, and sometimes I would have given up if it wasn’t for nice people reminding me that my work is valuable.
I have made a conscious effort to be nicer online. Above all, I just don’t bother being mean. It’s easy to forget how deflating a mean comment can be to the human on the other side. Some comments have lived with me for days, and I don’t want to inflict that upon others.
I want to build a community, both online and offline. I am trying to figure out how to enforce decent behaviour. If you have any resources, I would be grateful for it.
I recently read somewhere that only 1 in 20 is active in the social space, most are lurkers. And I think personally it might be a lot less.
So if you are a lurker reading this, start to become active! Start upvoting good stuff. If you have a bit coin, give a little to the peeps mentioned it the article. It makes such a difference.
The internet used to be a vast number of places you could travel to, each populated by a small but generally friendly set of people. You could have a discussion with the group about shared interests surrounding a specific topic. Sure, there were trolls, but they were few and far between.
Today's social media landscape is a handful of sites where everyone goes to discuss everything. As a result, it's much, much harder to have productive discussions that don't get derailed or out-and-out attacked by bad actors.
If you convince yourself you don't have to always write or participate or give a hot take, you will find yourself to be generally positive and more constructive and factual.
Any platform you enjoy has ALWAYS been a result of everyones kindness and politeness. Any platform that encourages impulsive behavior is not a good platform for your mental health or others. People are never impulsively positive. Even when a platform have a general thematic negative tendency towards something, avoiding negative interaction in general is the best course. Even if you can't be always positive , you can atleast be constructive, neutral and factual. At the end of the day, a good community consists friends and if you want to be part of the community, you have to make friends there.
Never heard of it before. Is it widely known?
Hold my beer.
The solution is being aware of emotional bait-and-switch techniques. “Does this post try to make me feel strongly about something? Does it push me to polarize difficult subjects?”
which is also incredibly useful offline!
…I see that the top-level comment has been edited to be less aggressive, though. Previously it said something to the effect of "If you can't handle that, you have no business being on today's Internet".
My argument is simple: the internet today is very broad, and humanity — let's face it — on the whole is not very nice. It's admirable to try to create pockets of positivity in it anyway. I simply want to highlight that it is futile, and maybe a more realist perspective is what we actually need to find a way forward.
The issue I take with that is that as the problem is entirely social in nature, the perception of futility is also a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think that's an easy bias to fall for, but also not actually true. If it were true, the world would only ever monotonically get more and more violent over time, until we lived in some kind of exaggerated parody of an apocalypse slasher film, which is not the case.
Sustainable naïve niceness does not exist as the norm. It is still possible to be kind as a default without immediately rolling over for anybody who does not share such values, even if you sometimes have to do so by reciprocating hostility where it is encountered.
Cruelty and conflict are ultimately destructive forces, wasting goodwill, physical resources, and cooperative potential. The social equilibrium may not bend towards kindness as sharply as we would like sometimes, but it certainly isn't a straight drop to apathy and cynicism either. Although perceiving and portraying something as inevitable can go a long way to rationalizing it, or to trying to justify giving up.
Not sure if surrendering your free will to decide how you treat people, and all the moral implications that come from being seen as a person rather than just a creature, is the position you want to be taking.
Just as easily as, seeing the harsh and uncaring nature of the world, we could imitate and perpetuate it deterministically, we also could see that harsh and uncaring nature, and choose to be more caring, compassionate, and understanding as an equally inevitable reaction, a rejection or countermeasure to it. It isn't free will, it's just that our individual experiences and personalities as people determine how we process and predicate our actions on what the world is like, and so we can all choose differently.
And in fact, even the exhortations and rationale of strangers are part of the stimuli in the world that may change how you act. Which is why I think it is worth it to say what I'm saying now.
Superficial determinism is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Personally, while I am not always nice on the internet because I struggled to countenance fools, rationalizations, and people who lie to themselves, which happens surprisingly often, I do really try, and more importantly even if I am not nice, even at my least nice, I try to always be as genuine and authentic as possible, and always be open to having my mind changed and genuinely put my beliefs on the line. And I think that in itself can be surprising and refreshing for the people I interact with.
Because you are correct, making top level posts on a twitter-like social media constantly with this ethos was actually so emotionally exhausting for me it physically affected my health, but the solution to that is just to not do that anymore.
Also, I do this not because I've arbitrarily decided that I've got to bear this cross, as you say, but because it is my default mode of interaction, in fact the only one I know, and it's something I very much like about myself that I always interact in this manner, and I think trying to learn how to be less genuine and less invested and less open, even if just for my online interactions, would sincerely leak out into my character in general in a way I don't like. So I'm not really doing it out of a sense of duty, but essentially out of a sense of convenience, because I don't want to have to go through the effort of learning how to context switch between a mode of interaction for being online and a mode of interaction for being offline.