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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Think of it this way: no one banned phpBB. There are plenty of 1990s style forums around. But they are deserted - precisely because they are not addictive enough and their engagement is poor. Same happens to everything that tries to opt out of enshittification - it never picks up usage.

What happened to the guy who created an AI-powered free replacement for Bloomberg? No one heard of that thing since its launch. Because it is too boring. But everyone scrolls their eyes out of X full of ragebait and slop.

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There are plenty of semi-private invite only or private phpBB forums that have walled off the bots, grifters, shills, trolls and AI. Many of us found that being too inclusive invited everything that facilitated the enshitification. I encourage people to create their own small community and keep it small. Quality of quantity of crap.

I saw a great lot of forums decline and evaporate without being hit with any of the ailments you listed. People just lose interest because it is not "fun" enough - unlike the social media ragebait.

Certainly true in some cases. People also migrate as a flock to a new thing and stay if enough of their friends moved if there are enough colorful flashy widgets. I see it more as corporate capture and mass surveillance for sales, marketing, selling trends to governments and many other reasons. Those of us that remained in our little isolated bubbles are also on those platforms and remain connected even if the platforms get too censorious or controlling. People are less afraid of being "cancelled" if they have a place to fall back on.

Biggest example of it, is Blackberry. It ceased to exist while being a great business tool loved by managers of fat ass companies everywhere - who were more than willing to shell out a lot of cash for Blackberry servers and handsets, so money was never a problem at all, it was a key business tool for F500 corps. It only died out because users BADLY wanted the enshittified iOS experience with IG and the like that Blackberry locked them out of, and begged and lobbied their bosses to switch them over to iPhones for corporate messaging...

Adding Blackberry was just like a private forum in that it's users data was kept inside the corporation on private servers and outside the view of governments. That is a threat to many third parties that would love to have visibility into that data for a myriad of nefarious reasons. The same switch-over also happened with internal systems moving to Google docs and other centralized monitoring. I would love to see a chaos monkey test of all the big centralized systems going offline to see what breaks.

I think you misuse the term enshitification here. E. is intentional and top-down, what you discribe is a demographic shift that you dont nescessarily have to wall off. A reputation system, like here on HN or user customizable filters, can work in your case too. The difference is, is a top-down authority in charge or entites below.

I totally get it. Having small semi-private bubbles escapes the top-down. There will always be someone operating a forum but anyone can run a forum, especially today with tools to automate deploying them. I see each forum as a distributed directory of categories that are independent from the corporate capture top down. No corporate, no capture, only as censorious as each admin. Forum operators are only beholden to the law. Reputation systems are no perfect as they can amplify echo chambers which HN and Reddit are certainly not immune to. They are quite the double edged sword and create their own sub-class of enshittification which I must compensate for by removing karma from my view. Nothing is perfect nor ever will be. I will always use a balanced combination of walled off forums and bigger platforms like this to dip my toe into the pool of the masses which I can escape any time I want a break from it.

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