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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

I think this is pretty on point

The social fabric has been re-configured by the least socially adept people in society

I should know. I'm not terribly socially adept, I grew up on IRC channels and forums because I struggled to connect with people in person

But now everyone is on the internet, using social networks designed by people who aren't very social like me, or worse, people who only understand social interaction through a lens of "what can this person do for me"

We're in a really strange time.

I used to go online to get away from everyone and try to find other people like me

Now I have to go offline to in-person events hosting things that appeal to people like me, because everyone is online and there's no avoiding the crowd anymore

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It has nothing to do with social inept people reconfiguring it. It is the profit seekers, Ebeneser Scrooges and bean counters reshaping society. Why let people have human relationships when you can put an app between them, worsen the experience and make a profit?

> It has nothing to do with social inept people reconfiguring it. It is the profit seekers

Profit seeking is pretty explicitly anti-social behavior imo

expecting compensation for value you create through labor -- profit seeking -- is not anti social at all, it's actually pro social in that it encourages exchange so that eg the baker can get butter for his bread and the farmer bread for his butter, while keeping their specialties and economies of scale.

Whatever you have in mind is not commerce, but is probably regulatory capture or central planning.

So you have to do things for free or you are a profit seeker? What?

It's not that complicated. When you profit based on offloading your negative externality on society at large, its bad. Even free market absolutists should be able to agree to that.

> expecting compensation for value you create through labor -- profit seeking

You're right

The term I was looking for was more along the lines of "profit maximizing" or "profit motive":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_motive

My mistake

I hope people generally understood what I meant even if I didn't use the precisely correct term for this

You designed social networks? Not designers and product and market research and iterative feedback from partners? You did it, and you did it by not understanding social interaction?

Is this an explanation or a just-so insult?

> designed by people who aren't very social (like me)

Parenthesis added.

I agree with parent: it's a reasonable assumption that those turning to the digital world for sociality, including to design digital sociality, are less likely to have previously found success in analog sociality than the median human.

(And it was eminently clear in the comment that they were not claiming personally comprehensive credit for having designed social networks.)

I agree that I disagree with that other guy. IRC and forums were only populated with nerds. It's once the salesmen and marketing people took control of the whole social media things that the internet was no more about being open to a new world, but more focused and closed inside controlled communities. Those people are definitely on the "extroverted" side and were only here to make money out of our social interactions.

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