We need to get away from content farms. Get away from shitty monetization driven efforts. Get away from shitty people moderating communities without giving members any locus of control.
Bring back the 90s web. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.
God I hope Reddit sticks to this API nonsense and kills themselves in the process.
Part of me wants this to happen to Hacker News too. This community sucks, but for different reasons.
> Bring back the 90s. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.
Not sure if you remember the 90s like I do. The percentage of people sharing their own content on their own terms was dwarfed by that of content hosted on 'ecosystems'. In fact, I'd assert that the path to accomplishing the same is far less steep now compared to then.
Today's reddit mods are the same as Digg's power user's back in the day. It's an open secret that a few dozen or so individuals control the top 100 or so subreddits, and calling that fact out is often met with site wide bans.
Reddit died a long time ago, and it's time we let it go.
I said something akin to this on a 4chan post a little while ago and people hated me for it, but I stand by it. People need to 1) get more in touch with the technology they're using and 2) take back control of their content.
If you are into tech and what it provides for us but don't have your own website where you can post and design however and whatever you want, then what are you even doing? It's 2023, a .com domain costs $5 and HTML and CSS can be learned in less than a week.
We need to leave these massively-populated corporate data farms and go back to specialized media like content-specific forums and personal web pages. We've oversimplified and under-stylized our potential web presence as individuals for the sake of companies who farm our data. At least with forums the hateful comments are coming from people within your niche and the posted ads (if any) pertain to your interests.
No! Hacker News at least has room for reasonable discussion.
Reddit seems to be full of mean-spirited 8th graders with a political agenda. The only problem is the amount of interesting content that flows by is too compelling.
Discord, Patreon, are.na, read.cv... There's lot's of smaller communities out there you just have to stumble into them (maybe pay a small fee for them)
Hacker News discourse is of a much higher quality than any other social media website.
That said, the priorities of the community is frustrating as a lot of it's driven by venture capital and money. I know it's Hacker News, but that doesn't change the point that in order to participate in a higher level of discourse I have to tolerate a bunch of capitalist stans.
The community also has a profoundly noticable difficulty with empathy for people outside of tech.
The community also loves to self-congratulate itself for how much better they are than other communities while still having their own issues.
There are other aspects as well like when people are talking about X but then commenters chime in and start taking about Y or Z, and say it's so much better and completely go off course.
Lastly I cannot emphasize how much I hate the articles that make it to the top where they say "X is bad" only to try and sell me on a solution. I'm getting quite sick of that as well.
Again, the discourse is great and I love it. But I still think this community suffers.
Decentralized platforms with no shitty middlemen fiduciarially responsible to shareholders to exploit you even harder next quarter? Where's the $$$$$ in that?!
I hate it so much. I'm tired of ecosystems.
We need to get away from content farms. Get away from shitty monetization driven efforts. Get away from shitty people moderating communities without giving members any locus of control.
Bring back the 90s web. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.
God I hope Reddit sticks to this API nonsense and kills themselves in the process.
Part of me wants this to happen to Hacker News too. This community sucks, but for different reasons.