Notably, unlike Reddit, HN isn’t a business that needs to be profitable, to my knowledge. It’s a recruiting tool for a major Silicon Valley VC firm. Brainrot isn’t going to attract as much of the talent or stimulate the ideas they’d want to fund, so HN has been good at resisting brainrot. This is my own analysis, I don’t have a source for it.
The internet has always had nice discussion forums that were labors of love of generous people. In the case of HN, the generous person running the forum is actually a company managing billions of dollars. In the absence of a better funding model for the internet, maybe that’s the solution: altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly.
The exponential growth required of publicly traded social media companies drives different motives in moderating and promoting the discussions.
They don't have to be billionaires, but they do have to be altruistic. The good corners of the old web were run by one or two guys spending a few hours a week, and that's all that was needed because each corner was small, but there were many of them.
> altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly.
A certain person tried that, but HN has given them nothing but hate over it.
If there’s a specific idea you or others had in mind that was different, I haven’t seen any serious proposals or roadmaps posted. I’d love to see it though, I’d rather things be more decentralized without the contemporary gatekeeping that comes with it.
Also I’m not sure what you had in mind for altruistic. There’s a difference between financing people’s nostalgia fetishes and financing the repairing of society, but either could be squeezed into the definition.
You mean Twitter? It's pretty much opposite from what I want from a platform.
What I want is more or less Mastodon. A feed ordered by date, a complete lack of algorithmic suggestion (unless maybe I explicitly ask for it), a complete lack of advertising, and stringent moderation that enforces things in my preferred direction.
I’m sure there’s some bozo GitHub repo out there that does exactly what you’re asking for. But you or someone needs to make a serious pitch with a viable roadmap and explain how it will add to society, and be prepared to tirelessly champion it as a movement, not just another shitty pet project.
If it’s to service a nostalgia kick then that’s not going to be a big enough sell. Otherwise it needs to be a business, which is obviously not an option either.
Xitter obviously made a lot of mistakes, but the appeal to society wasn’t one of them (the execution is another story), but that’s the only reason it is still around. There’s obviously a demand for it that isn’t being fulfilled.
I’m not referring to “free speech”, I think that is the wrong message to focus on, though I do think big tech and Reddit had that wrong. Social media is responsible for the enshittification of society at large. It just takes a click to make someone an un-person at the slightest offense. Whether that be to exclude them from their social community with a block or ban, or expose something they said out of context.
It’s not really a censorship issue as much as it is a self-censorship issue with the secondary effects that has on society as a whole. To put it more plainly: people are too afraid to express themselves, even under pseudonyms. There are exceptions but when they stand out it has a tendency to look weird, so it’s passively discouraged in that way as well. Even if you are allowed to do so, that doesn’t stop cancel culture from taking things you said or did out of context. You can’t have the old web culture back until that’s solved, and I don’t even know if that’s possible to do.
So instead, we are stuck with gatekeepers and overzealous moderation (though the latter was a problem in the old days too). What a way to live, eh?
The internet has always had nice discussion forums that were labors of love of generous people. In the case of HN, the generous person running the forum is actually a company managing billions of dollars. In the absence of a better funding model for the internet, maybe that’s the solution: altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly.
The exponential growth required of publicly traded social media companies drives different motives in moderating and promoting the discussions.