But also, I think to some degree, “building meaningful platforms with an abundance of excellent communication options” is kind of just. Investor speak. It’s kind of impossible. Systems are brittle, communication needs to be flexible, to some degree.
Speaking more specifically, right, if we’re looking at reddit and lemmy as examples, we have to think about the kinds of content that these systems are incentivizing. Upvotes float a post to the top of the front page, top of the comments section, right, and then that kind of lends itself to platforms where the top posts are snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely agree with, while the most downvoted posts are going to be snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely disagree with. And then you’re getting the full range in-between, with really no way to kind of properly find things based on what their substance is. The organization structure, basically, is arranged based on the kind of collective idea of quality, which isn’t really a specific enough kind of organization to be useful to most people.
So, that has drawbacks. What if we just went at it like a classic forum, right? People make accounts, people make posts, maybe you even have a membership fee. Well, now post quality has maybe gone up, but we’ve also created a large barrier to entry, which is a really bad strategy for growth. That’s maybe not a problem, as people tend to kind of, stupidly prioritize rapid expansion over steady growth and the quality of their core product, right, without really understanding the value they are actually looking to create.
Realistically though the biggest problem is just that the insularity of the forum is kind of going to be a snowballing thing, especially depending on subject matter. Jargon and in-jokes can develop that make it basically impossible to interface with as a newcomer, and that’s going to lead to a kind of inertial collapse where forums just slowly come up and then slowly go back down. Also contributing to this is kind of a point at which every discussion has been had before on the server archives, so any time you make a new post, refer to post 1224. If they don’t just die from inflation of basic goods, and can’t afford to keep up hosting costs, which is also a major killer of classic forums.
So, conventional forums also have drawbacks. So maybe we get rid of the accounts, now it’s anonymous, and everything is still going to be organized chronologically, right? Nope, that sucks, because now there’s not really any incentive to keep up post quality and your forum is going to get spammed to death with the maximum amount of possible noise, meaning you need to take on bot filters, which means you need to create more brittle systems to try and sort quality posts away from chaff. You could also just, not do this, and let chaff kind of swim around on your platform, but, that might not be a great idea, I dunno.
If you do end up somehow making a platform that can be, at the very least, popular and desirable for communication, then you’ve basically just ended up making a public good that you’re probably not massively paid for. Queue the platform getting bought out and ruined by an idiot stooge. Not just elon, but also, every other platform on the internet ever.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to look at all that and just think. Man. I want some more dopamine! Turn on the dopamine pump! And then the corporation says, yes sir, here is your dopamine pump, “free” of charge, of course, go to town.
Basically the cynicism is from two ends, is what I’m saying. It’s from the fact that the internet is kind of constantly undergoing a kind of expansion and contraction, where the systems work at the low end, and then rise, and then collapse under their own weight once noise starts to accumulate, right, so an ideal system is somewhat impossible, at least, under the current kind of economic constraints, maybe, but maybe also in general. So there’s a cynicism to that, right. There’s also the cynicism of being conscious of that. And then there’s also the cynicism of like, people just not really wanting communication, and wanting dopamine pumps. Though, I think people might really want both, if they were pressed on it.
You’ve outlined pretty much all of the challenges. I thought for years about just making a reddit style forum without any voting buttons, or maybe voting buttons but no visible scores. Maybe prioritizing comments like yours, which have actual substance. The threaded format is better than traditional forums for conversations, but the voting hurts meaningful contributions like you said already. The biggest reason why projects like that fail is the same reason why every successful company is another wham, bam, thank you ma’am platform. For a social community to work, you need a community. The best platform in the world doesn’t mean anything if nobody is there. Most people aren’t interested in building communities either, so if no one is there, no one is ever going to be there. MySpace and Facebook succeeded because they were novel, and people were interested in the new concept of having a presence on the Internet without needing to know how to create a WordPress website. That was 20 years ago now, so the novelty is gone. TikTok succeeded because they had financial backing from one of the largest countries in the world to create a huge userbase in a short amount of time. I don’t think it would have caught on like it did without CCP support. So that leaves us where we are now, and not a lot of paths out of here. I really enjoyed old forums, and I enjoyed visiting people’s blogs even more, but there aren’t many people doing that stuff any more, and you can’t find the ones that are since Google prioritizes enormous websites and paid content over relevance now. Oh well. I’m glad that I was able to be a part of the beautiful creation that was the early internet. It was a truly magical experience.
dopamine pump goes brrrr.
But also, I think to some degree, “building meaningful platforms with an abundance of excellent communication options” is kind of just. Investor speak. It’s kind of impossible. Systems are brittle, communication needs to be flexible, to some degree.
Speaking more specifically, right, if we’re looking at reddit and lemmy as examples, we have to think about the kinds of content that these systems are incentivizing. Upvotes float a post to the top of the front page, top of the comments section, right, and then that kind of lends itself to platforms where the top posts are snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely agree with, while the most downvoted posts are going to be snippy little nothings that everyone can kind of vaguely disagree with. And then you’re getting the full range in-between, with really no way to kind of properly find things based on what their substance is. The organization structure, basically, is arranged based on the kind of collective idea of quality, which isn’t really a specific enough kind of organization to be useful to most people.
So, that has drawbacks. What if we just went at it like a classic forum, right? People make accounts, people make posts, maybe you even have a membership fee. Well, now post quality has maybe gone up, but we’ve also created a large barrier to entry, which is a really bad strategy for growth. That’s maybe not a problem, as people tend to kind of, stupidly prioritize rapid expansion over steady growth and the quality of their core product, right, without really understanding the value they are actually looking to create.
Realistically though the biggest problem is just that the insularity of the forum is kind of going to be a snowballing thing, especially depending on subject matter. Jargon and in-jokes can develop that make it basically impossible to interface with as a newcomer, and that’s going to lead to a kind of inertial collapse where forums just slowly come up and then slowly go back down. Also contributing to this is kind of a point at which every discussion has been had before on the server archives, so any time you make a new post, refer to post 1224. If they don’t just die from inflation of basic goods, and can’t afford to keep up hosting costs, which is also a major killer of classic forums.
So, conventional forums also have drawbacks. So maybe we get rid of the accounts, now it’s anonymous, and everything is still going to be organized chronologically, right? Nope, that sucks, because now there’s not really any incentive to keep up post quality and your forum is going to get spammed to death with the maximum amount of possible noise, meaning you need to take on bot filters, which means you need to create more brittle systems to try and sort quality posts away from chaff. You could also just, not do this, and let chaff kind of swim around on your platform, but, that might not be a great idea, I dunno.
If you do end up somehow making a platform that can be, at the very least, popular and desirable for communication, then you’ve basically just ended up making a public good that you’re probably not massively paid for. Queue the platform getting bought out and ruined by an idiot stooge. Not just elon, but also, every other platform on the internet ever.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to look at all that and just think. Man. I want some more dopamine! Turn on the dopamine pump! And then the corporation says, yes sir, here is your dopamine pump, “free” of charge, of course, go to town.
Basically the cynicism is from two ends, is what I’m saying. It’s from the fact that the internet is kind of constantly undergoing a kind of expansion and contraction, where the systems work at the low end, and then rise, and then collapse under their own weight once noise starts to accumulate, right, so an ideal system is somewhat impossible, at least, under the current kind of economic constraints, maybe, but maybe also in general. So there’s a cynicism to that, right. There’s also the cynicism of being conscious of that. And then there’s also the cynicism of like, people just not really wanting communication, and wanting dopamine pumps. Though, I think people might really want both, if they were pressed on it.
You’ve outlined pretty much all of the challenges. I thought for years about just making a reddit style forum without any voting buttons, or maybe voting buttons but no visible scores. Maybe prioritizing comments like yours, which have actual substance. The threaded format is better than traditional forums for conversations, but the voting hurts meaningful contributions like you said already. The biggest reason why projects like that fail is the same reason why every successful company is another wham, bam, thank you ma’am platform. For a social community to work, you need a community. The best platform in the world doesn’t mean anything if nobody is there. Most people aren’t interested in building communities either, so if no one is there, no one is ever going to be there. MySpace and Facebook succeeded because they were novel, and people were interested in the new concept of having a presence on the Internet without needing to know how to create a WordPress website. That was 20 years ago now, so the novelty is gone. TikTok succeeded because they had financial backing from one of the largest countries in the world to create a huge userbase in a short amount of time. I don’t think it would have caught on like it did without CCP support. So that leaves us where we are now, and not a lot of paths out of here. I really enjoyed old forums, and I enjoyed visiting people’s blogs even more, but there aren’t many people doing that stuff any more, and you can’t find the ones that are since Google prioritizes enormous websites and paid content over relevance now. Oh well. I’m glad that I was able to be a part of the beautiful creation that was the early internet. It was a truly magical experience.