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Comment by brushfoot | Hacker News Reader

"Users near you" functionality is sorely needed in online spaces, considering how much interaction has moved online.

Reddit has worked around their lack of it to some degree with location-based subreddits like r/AtlFilmmakers. But subreddits are high maintenance, and they isolate content. Plus, the naming conventions aren't standard. Maybe there's r/AtlFilmmakers for filmmakers in Atlanta, but another subreddit for musicians uses the state in the name instead of a city.

It's a bit like folders vs. tags. It would be nicer to have a single filmmaking subreddit with the option to filter on users' locations -- and default filtering out of location-specific posts in other places.

That wouldn't just make for better dating, though it probably would compared to something like Tinder. It could also lead to stronger local communities and better health outcomes.

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> "Users near you" functionality is sorely needed in online spaces, considering how much interaction has moved online.

Funny this got mentioned as France just successfully got that very feature removed from Telegram by arresting the founder and citing that feature as the one being used most for abuse.

Bunch of sources about that here: https://ground.news/article/telegram-to-start-moderating-pri...

That might have been cited as the reason, but I think we all know the real reason is that France is fighting against Russian troops in their former African colonies, and Russian troops mainly use Telegram for their communications.

Who are those "we" you're talking about?

Anybody aware of what’s happening in Africa between France, Russia and Wagner

Is it some kind of secret bunch of people who know this?

The secret bunch who pay attention to Africa. It's not exactly shouted from the rooftops in western countries as public opinion is not quite as favorable towards colonialism and patronage as they were 100+ years ago.

I'm more interested to know how this secret bunch of people links all that to arrest of Telegram's CEO (who is a French citizen) in France. Sounds like a regular conspiracy theory and claims like "we all know..." just give more of the same conspiracy vibe.

Yeah, I highly doubt Russian soldiers/mercenaries using Telegram is the main reason France went after Durov, but the conflicts and influence wars between Russia and colonialist powers in Africa is well-known and has been happening for a while.

Do you consider the Tuareg a "colonialist power" in Africa? Because that's who russia is fighting in Africa: https://apnews.com/article/mali-tuareg-violence-c0b85f6ab284...

That's who Wagner is fighting in Mali right now, but the French were in Mali until 2 years ago. Wagner is also active in many other African countries other than Mali: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group_activities_in_Afr...

Russia is also providing economic and political support to many African governments, especially those who have turned away from the west and are afraid of regime-change operations.

The French left Mali before Wagner arrived.

The conflicts and influence wars between Russia and colonialist powers in Africa is well-known and has been happening for a while.

That the conflicts are well-known and have been happening for a while is quite true of course.

But this bizarre framing of these conflicts as "between Russia and colonialist powers" (as if Russia was not also a colonial power, or its influence games in Africa were any different from those of the Western powers) is just propaganda, and rather trite propaganda at that.

Russia is not a colonial power though. The empire and later the USSR conquered a lot of land, but that was contiguous. Even if you try to argue that all imperial and Soviet expansion was colonial, Russia never colonized Africa and can't be considered a colonial power there.

Russia is not a colonial power though.

But indeed it was, and this is an extremely basic fact of its history. It wasn't run on exactly the same model as the overseas empires of the Western European states, but its modus operandi absolutely fits the definition of a "colonial empire" per the definition in Wikipedia:

   A colonial empire is a collective of territories (often called colonies), either contiguous with the imperial center or located overseas, settled by the population of a certain state and governed by that state.

The empire and later the USSR conquered a lot of land, but that was contiguous.

This idea that conquest can't be called a "colony" (or that territorial contiguity has anything to do with the definition of the term) is just silly. As if the American States didn't promptly set out to settle and colonize the West after 1789 (because these places were contiguous to it), or Germany didn't very explicitly set out to colonize Poland in 1939, and so on.

Haha alright. Easy there. I am not a conspiracy theorist at all, nor is it ‘a bunch of secret people’.

It’s well documented that France is fighting with Wagner in their former colonies, as well as Russia undermining their influence there.

It’s also well documented that Wagner and Russian troops mainly use Telegram for communication, same as in Ukraine. Again, well documented.

And these messages are stored on Russian Telegram services.

Telegram was completely fine to use in France, until Wagner started causing issues in Africa and then it suddenly became a problem.

But we’ll see what happens with the court case.

> Telegram was completely fine to use in France, until Wagner started causing issues in Africa and then it suddenly became a problem.

This statement is demonstrably untrue.

The last part doesn't sound very convincing. Russian mercenaries are not glued to Telegram, and can quickly switch to Signal if needed. I think "we all know" that real reason maybe more related to French gov't being a bit more direct about their wish to have a hand inside popular messengers.

> France is fighting against Russian troops in their former African colonies

France and Russia are at war now?

Wagner mercenaries moved into Mali after French troops withdrew from it. That's hardly the same thing as French soldiers 'fighting' Russian soldiers.

There have been some skirmishes, but mainly it’s a Cold War for influence. France got kicked out and replaced by Wagner for example.

France actually does take their control over their former colonies rather seriously.

Perhaps my previous statement was a bit too bold. Let’s just say I would be very surprised if this wasn’t a factor in their decision to now prosecute the owner of Telegram.

>There have been some skirmishes,

Source for this? Skirmishes between French soldiers and Wagner mercenaries?

It’s one thing to list yourself as being in Atlanta and quite another to basically publish your exact location.

Strava has a feature called Flyby that allows you to find out other Strava users who you ran past (flew by) on your activity. With a single click you could get the other user's entire route, likely including their home (start/finish).

After some backlash about safety/privacy, it was disabled on everyone's account and required people to manually opt-in:

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/10/strava-flyby-feature.htm...

Very few people opted back in so the feature became useless.

Most people still have the setting that matches them with people who have run with them on a group run (same exact route at the same time).

Wasn't it also Strava or a similar app that revealed military bases by the staff on patrol having the app on?

I mean given sattelite imagery is a thing I doubt army bases are secret, but that was still a bit of a whoopsie, on both the personnel's part and the app's.

Yes, Strava's heatmaps revealed some military bases. And it's been implicated in the assassination of a Russian general.

Good gravy that sounds like a stalkers dream

Strava has features to make this safer, e.g. allowing you to hide the first n meters of an activity, though a dedicated individual could eventually determine your route.

Honestly, though, there are easier ways to determine where you live and your routine, e.g. address books + parking a car outside of your house & observing.

Unfortunately “Users near you” has the same problems AirTags has to deal with.

If you’re looking for someone, these features often make finding the names of their new accounts trivial. It also tells you that person is within the app’s range.

Airtags are very near you. Knowing someone is within 50 feet/a couple of meters is much different than knowing someone is within 30 mins drive of you, in a dense urban environment.

All you did was describe the feature. That is the entire point.

TikTok is the only app I’ve encountered that gets this right. I’ve made connections with people from my town and places just outside where I live. I’d love to see more apps do what TikTok does.

How does Tiktok do it? Edit: I meant how does Tiktok help person above meet people locally?

By giving people what they want. A lot of this emergent behavior falls out of doing good search science. By optimizing other metrics YouTube etc are giving people less of what they want and more of what YouTube wants. YouTube would be useless if I couldn’t ban so many channels from my recommended feeds.

At the early stages of TikTok there was some controversy that diverse, disabled, marginalized etc people were being underrepresented compared to other platforms and we now see how that turned out.

I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to give people what they want and I consider TikTok to be so addictive that I’ve avoided using it, but it’s definitely a successful idea.

>At the early stages of TikTok there was some controversy that diverse, disabled, marginalized etc people were being underrepresented compared to other platforms and we now see how that turned out.

The controversy was that they were being actively suppressed as a moderation decision.

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

There is more than one way to give people what they want, and in my haste I clumsily muddled two of them. All the platforms are being moderated heavily with thumbs on the scales to advantage one group over another.

My personal preference would be to have no thumbs on the scales.

Additionally I hate TikTok for the intentional addictive mechanism that requires an attention 'ante' to find out if a video is interesting by preventing jumping to a later point in the video to see where it is going. Basically gambling but with attention instead of currency, the algorithm optimized to give the user just enough to keep them coming back but not too much to satiate their desires.

Search Science is one of those research domains where it appears things are going backwards, google barely works anymore, facebook videos was terrible from the start and AFAIK stayed that way, YouTube only works for me because I have a subscribe list to people I support on Patreon. Amazon is being flooded with duplicate listings which should be trivial to de-dupe and clean up but I guess they suck at search science as well. If Amazon doesn't fix their search and fake good problem people might as well buy from Temu. Almost forgot, Twitter can't find bots that are so easy to find that they become 'X in bio' memes.

FWIW, you can fast forward or jump to any point in a TikTok video - just start dragging on the bottom of the screen and a scrubber will appear. Or tap to pause and a playback bar will dispay.

In practice, you are right that there is an attention ante; most videos are short enough to sit through them to see the payoff without making the effort to scrub.

> we now see how that turned out

how? no idea what you’re referring to.

Yeah. It’s highly addictive. I have screentime for “fun apps” set to 30 mins now because it will suck you in for hours if you’re not careful.

I can honestly say I’ve never viewed a single tiktok video, and I intend to keep this true.

Fuck that noise.

It also has a lot of educational content, etc. - just like YouTube or Twitch.

So does the Bible

Edit: as does the Art of War, the Quran, the 1981 fall almanac, etc. education is almost a farce in 2024

Are you okay with instagram reels and YouTube shorts, or is it all short form content you object to? Large swaths of tiktok is cross posted to other platforms, so if you use those other ones then chances are you have watched plenty of tiktok content.

No, this is my only form of social media beyond some group friend chats. I slap ”Reddit” on the end of searches sometimes if that counts for anything.

Is it a setting or something?

It just adds the additional dimension of user location (where a user has tagged their post with their location, a lot of people just tag no location or Big Butt Mountain). So if you’ve taken an interest in chess, it will show you popular chess videos, but also throw chess videos in from people close by.

On other apps like FB, it does show location-based content, but nothing I’m ever interested in (it doesn’t seem to understand interests+location, only interests or location). So like sure, it has posts from my neighbor, but it will be about lawn care or something else I’m not interested in.

Same, I met one of my friends on TikTok, commenting about an event nearby.

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