Step 4 is that communities die.

Well over half of all web traffic is from cell phones, and the mobile-first web is hostile to long text content. It is also incredibly hostile to user-created long text content.

With the exception of people who need keyboards for work (tech workers, academics, journalists, writers, etc) there's no one left online to make community content anymore. Hence, HN (a community for tech workers and similarly minded people) and Twitter (where most organic, non-public-relations major players are journalists, academics, or writers).

What passes for web communities have almost entirely become playgrounds for intellectual lightweights to spew memes at each other combined with a platform for entities posting inorganic content that pretends to be genuine.

> With the exception of people who need keyboards for work there's no one left online to make community content anymore

I was about to agree with you, then I thought about Instagram. It is truly a passive consumption platform. Getting 10 comments on a post by a user with 500K followers is pretty normal.

I can't trust those numbers after my recent experience. I made a fake account on facebook to check it out and then logged into all the other services. I got 50 followers on instagram within a day by following < 5 accounts on the recommended list. Nothing posted, a weird fake name.

I am still getting more followers.

Wow, really? That would be depressing for me.

You have 500k followers and only 10 of them comment on your posts. That's terrible engagement.

still beats the engangement of a TV advertisment

and that's what instagram is all about

This does happen. But are you sure those are “real” followers? There are services you can pay to give you followers.

> Twitter (where most organic major players are journalists, academics, and writers)

You can curate your following list to make it feel like that’s true, but it’s really not at all.

And who do you think the organic major players are?

Lots of people from all kinds of backgrounds, journalists and academics among those for sure, but also influencers, celebrities, politicians, artists, bloggers, even just more or less regular people, etc.

How it seems to you just depends on whether you go to Twitter for the latest tech news or fashion trends. And there's probably bigger interest in the latter. It's just like the internet in general.

Genuine, unrelated, question: What is an "influencer"?

I've only recently started seeing people refer to others or themselves as "influencers" (I'm not on Snapchat/Tiktok/Instagram/Twitter).

The distopian cynic in me only understands it as "person with a bunch of followers on social media who occasionally peddles products" a.k.a a human ad. Is this about right?

You’re factually correct but yes that is a cynical way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that they’re entertainers of large audiences that make money through advertising. You know, just like TV/radio/newspapers do.

Thank you for the level-headed view of it. I'm not level-headed when it comes to advertising and I'm not very apologetic about it.

Somehow it feels more gross than a radio commercial. On the radio I can tell the difference between a song and an advertisement for the local law firm. When these people build a rapport with viewers and then peddle a product, it feels more manipulative to me.

I generally share your view, but I imagine influencers can also add value for the consumers, because they put their name behind the products they advertise. While there probably are more than enough influencers that just advertise anything, I'd expect there are some who actually use and like whatever they advertise. So they kind of provide a product vetting service to consumers. As long as you can tell their ads from their regular content, that is.

Total speculation though as I'm also not really active on that kind of social media.

99% of the content is made by 1% of the users, so I don't think this logic applies. Most reddit users do not participate in discussions, they only consume content.

Maybe if people who post any kind of self-promotion for content they create weren’t so aggressively punished on Reddit so often, maybe it’d get more people sharing on it.

As an example, I was once shadowbanned on the entire Reddit site by an admin for posting two links in gaming subreddits to show off a game I had spent almost six months developing full-time as part of a small team. I didn’t submit too many other links because Reddit was my main source of discovering content, but I commented a ton on the site, easily had hundreds of comments.

I was proud of what I had accomplished and I wanted to share with what I thought was my community at the time. I didn’t even realize I was shadowbanned and was commenting for months after until a moderator informed me and said they were manually approving my comments on a particular subreddit.

I tried their appeals “process” and never got a response, which is apparently is how 99% of appeals works on that site.

Harsh lesson I learned there. I never submitted any link for anything there ever again and didn’t read or comment again for a couple of years afterwards, in which I created a new account to do so.

Same here. Lost my interest and never able to gain it back.

I got into board games in a big way and started reading /r/boardgames, and that lured me back eventually, although since then I discovered all the people who work in the industry are using Facebook groups so that's where I talk board games now. It's also nice to see actual names associated with their comments when it's a bunch of people you know, instead of just usernames you have to mentally translate.

Apparently my shadowbanned account was unblocked eventually and I can post normally from it again, but I know it was banned for at least 4 years, because I checked periodically (If you're not logged in, the user page looks blank. I thought it was some weird glitch but no, it's because I was shadowbanned).

I've been mostly posting in /r/coronavirus lately since I don't want to get into fights with friends on Facebook about my thoughts on it.

Step 5 is then that an open, federated and/or decentralized protocol gets developed, and it either gets traction or dies.

Unfortunately, for many such communication channels, we are still only in the middle of this step 5, and we have no idea how it ends. E.g. Matrix for chat, ForgeFed for source hosting services, PeerTube for videos, or various other (mostly ActivityPub-based) efforts.

I wish this where true, but protocols aren't products. The normals want polished products. Only weirdos like us on HN care about protocols, or even know they exist for that matter.

For a protocol to matter to a normal person, it has to enable killer features that aren't currently possible.

This article about unbundling Reddit made the rounds recently

https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-...

The unbundling concept is making the rounds through the 'indie hacker' community. I've heard it mentioned a few podcasts recently. It'll be interesting to see what business spring up in the next couple of years that chip pieces off of Facebook and Reddit.

I wonder if in a century we'll understand the economy of the Internet as constantly oscillating between concentration and decentralization.

I think the communities that will be 'unbundled' are the ones that want to get away from memes and foster a more discussion-orientated community.

All other content gets drowned out by memes eventually, which is a real shame.

That concept traces back to unbundling Craigslist, from 2010:

https://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-c...

(That's been submitted to HN but with no traction to date: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

There is definitely space for unbundling reddit. The key is, you have to give something of value to that specific community to lure them over. Solely copying a subreddit won't do

Too late for Reddit now but free services should consider and publish their sustainability plans from the start, if they want to avoid this trap anyway

Step 4 is always issue stock.

Hm . Well Yahoo was a bundler in the past . There doesnt seem to be a step 4 unless a new trend takes over and renders all of the old guard obsolete.

As other have said, their end goal is cashing out in an IPO

I don't know but I'm pissed. That's why I started working on my own social platform as a replacement that has some core values that are aligned with the needs of the community:

- UX is paramount on any device.

- Your data is your own. This is especially important for community administrators who have literally no control over how the content is organized (true for Reddit, Facebook, etc) or where the content goes

- Communities define their own rules

- There is an easy way to organize meetups as well

It works with a simple subscription model where we host the service. No ads, tracking or other shady shit involved. If you're interested I'm gonna post it here once the MVP is complete.

There is already high friction for existing communities to switch over to a new platform before you factor in the dealkiller that is a subscription cost.

No fee for members, only for the owner of the community.