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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

High end restaurants work against this trend by cultivating taste. They convince their customers to eat their vegetables, literally. They can do this because there is an ethical value associated with dining which is embedded in our culture. You enjoy a fine restaurant because it is right to enjoy it.

Facebook failed because there is no ethic associated with social media. You can continue to degrade the quality and nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that". FB bootstrapped by co-opting the instinctual value of social connection with your friends, which TikTok and IG also copied but with strangers instead of friends.

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HN is a kind of this thing. It's netiquette. We still stay around here because it's the only place with tech discussions and at least some amount of decorum.

Probably because it looks so boring and dry that anyone motivated by blinking lights and fast cuts is immediately turned away.

The prospect of having to read is a large turnoff for many people.

> nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that".

Is that not exactly what drew people from Myspace to Facebook in the first place? There was a lack of appetite for the flashiness and gaudiness, and an appeal to how classy FB was.

This is partially true. FB was initially much more classy in its exclusivity, i.e only certain universities had access. That only worked while they were scaling up, and ended in 2006, long before Facebook became dominant.

There is definitely an ethic associated with 'being informed'; I remember being told to read the news as a kid and it felt like vegetables.

Scroll media is fast food, and fine dining is books or long form sub-stack-- which cost more money but also will-power. The question of how scroll media can deliver high quality information is similar to asking how drive through can serve vegetables. I think it comes down to the fact that you can't cultivate taste unless people are paying with will-power.

I would venture to say 95% of people don't enjoy (and/or cannot afford) "fine" restaurants. But mostly don't enjoy. And a restaurant would go bankrupt trying to convince them to eat healthy. The proof is the existing state of the market. Although daily GLP-1 pills might be able to change that.

This is very true, and pairs well with the other comment about netiquette.

95% of people would not enjoy polite technical discussion forums, but the 5% that do are enough traffic for a site to survive.

I don't really get your comparison with restaurants. Could you elaborate?

That was parent comment:

> That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy

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