A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
As someone who helped run a few video game forums back in the mid-00’s, it was pretty common for a pure forum to start posting blog or article content if it didn’t already as a way of attracting people to the forum. Once this happened you needed to share that content to sites like digg, del.icio.us & Reddit in order for people to actually discover it and then consider joining the forum community.
Problem is it eventually just pushed people to consume from those sites and join the meta-community there rather than actually engaging in the community back at the site itself.
After that, the standard conglomeration you get when there’s only a few players left happened and thus we ended up with Reddit being what it was for the last decade.
Most of those sites were community first, content generation second and once the community dried up, the sites all died
I didn’t read it yet but wanted to share that according to Graeber, the rise of social media (and podcasts btw) came with what he calls “Bullshit Jobs” (in the book of that name). Before that, browsing the web was a much more active process, you searched for forums, clicked on a topic you are interested in or went on websites and clicked through them, always deciding what to click on.
With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions. That’s something you can do at work when you have some free time and something might come in. It’s not anymore “I want to know XYZ” but “Let’s see what’s new” if that makes sense.
Eh, I’m not so sure about this. I used to spend hours browsing BBcode forums back in my first corporate job just as well. In fact one could argue that bullshit jobs supported Web 1.0 internet since you had more time for the effort required.
I would argue that forums are somewhere on the continuum and the “direct predecessor” of social media if that makes sense. You already see in which topics something happened which isn’t too different from following a Facebook page.
On your last point, I disagree. Time is relative. There is a difference between free time you can actively plan and idle time between meetings where your boss could bump in any time. At the end of the day looking back, you might have had enough time to write an article, but there could always be a call coming in so you end up using that time looking at cat photos and arguing with strangers about football.
This might depend on the kind of BS job though. Graeber described a wide variety and for some, your argument works but not for all.
With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions.
I mean before broadband Internet you could sit around and passively consume cable television or radio pretty easily. There’s always been a role for people to act as curators and recommendation engines, from the shelf of staff picks at a library/bookstore/video rental store to the published columns reviewing movies and books, to the radio DJ choosing what songs to play, to the editors and producers and executives who decide what gets made and distributed.
I don’t buy that social media was a big change to how actively we consume art, music, writing, etc. If anything, the change was to the publishing side, that it takes far less work to actually get something out there that can be seen. But the consumption side is the same.
I think you misunderstand my position. I’m not a cultural pessimist saying social media made us all into mindless zombies. You can use social media very actively by putting much thought into your posts and conversations and researching them thoroughly. And there is alot of stuff you can mindlessly consume at home long before the internet.
What I’m saying is that Bullshit Jobs created a whole new demographic with time on their hand to idly use online (since they work on computers) but not enough to be productive. As I wrote in another comment, in the time between meetings when a mail might come in or your boss might bump into you, a social media timeline is the way to go. You don’t have a TV in office but access to the internet.
Bullshit Jobs
No, the actual definition that Graeber uses for bullshit jobs is not relevant for this discussion. Corporate Lawyers are his classic example, but those are jobs that don’t have a ton of idle time. Other jobs, like night security guard or condo doorman, are by no means recent inventions, and exactly the type of people who used to pass the time with radio and magazines.
If you’re saying that there’s a rise in idle time for people, I’m not sure it comes from our jobs.
Nowadays, I hear a lot of people say that the alternative to these massive services is to go back to old-school forums. My peeps, that is absurd. Nobody wants to go back to that clusterfuck just described. The grognards who suggest this are either some of the lucky ones who used to be in the “in-crowd” in some big forums and miss the community and power they had, or they are so scarred by having to work in that paradigm, that they practically feel more comfortable in it.
I’m totally in agreement.
I agree that the subreddit model took off in large part because centralized identity management was easy for users. We’ll never go back to the old days where identity and login management was inextricably tied to the actual forum/channel being used, a bunch of different islands that don’t actually interact with each other.
I’m hopeful that some organizations will find it worthwhile to administer identity management for certain types of verified users: journalism/media outfits with verified accounts of their employees with known bylines, universities with their professors (maybe even students), government organizations that officially put out verified messaging on behalf of official agencies, sports teams or entertainment collectives (e.g. the actor’s unions), and manage those identities across the fediverse. What if identity management goes back to the early days of email, where the users typically had a real relationship with their provider? What would that look like for different communities that federate with those instances?
That kind of verified identity management for particular users would be great!
The collective of federated servers is still a huge impediment to public growth, since Lemmy isn’t just one thing, and I expect it will continue to hamper growth here for a long time, as new users are confused about how to choose a home base.
new users are confused about how to choose a home base.
Second most active instance. Good admins.
I absolutely want people to pick other solutions than reddit and zuckerfuck, but I’m not sure Lemmy is the solution either.
The large Instances already overdo the moderation, cracking down on specific words, or people not agreeing with gender issues or vaccination issues. Just a few examples.
And no, you can’t just join another instance because the ones without similar moderation rules are defederated from Lemmy.world, which acts as the center hub of content. So in practice, any Lemmy experience without Lemmy.world is a poor one, filled with tankies and insane things. That’s not what anyone intelligent wants.
I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes. It was fine to not agree. That’s why the discussions were interesting. There was no downvotes. No popularity contests. No karma points (or ok, some forums actually had user levels based on how much they posted, but nobody cared I think).
If you want to build a proper discussion forum, it needs to allow for actual discussions and actual emotions, heated debates, insults sometimes.
At least that’s the way I see it. Or you will just have memes and pointless things scrolling by.
I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes.
I remember mods and admins that would ban you because you gently disagreed with something they said.
There wasn’t a moderation team – it was one weird guy that got off on power.
Yes, but since you had many forums, you could move to one with more relaxed admins. They had no dependency. On Lemmy, instances are connected and there is pressure to have the same moderation rules or you get defederated because your instance is now creating discussions that leads to reporting of users on other instances.
people not agreeing with gender issues
LW defederated about gender issues?
Not really. This is a result of people “forking” Reddit due to a real fork being dumb and impossible. Everyone brought the same site culture with them. Mastodon is cleanly divided between Eugene’s hellmouth of Twitter liberals and evil anime libertarians who should all be legally executed for their very real crimes. That wasn’t inevitable. This place seems tailor made for people with a functioning honor system. Internet points are an abomination. People need to inquire more seriously into what is grinding the gears with social media. Techno-libertarian idealism outlived its usefulness long ago. I certainly don’t have any better solutions than ActivityPub and private frontends.
I had high hopes due to the defederated nature of the technology, but first thing that happened was that instances with different views started to defederate… That wouldnt be so bad if not all content came from just one or two large instances, but since it does, the entire network is now depending on them to survive.
This is 100% caused by every website about Lemmy linking to Lemmy.world, so that’s what users pick. It can be argued that there was very good intent behind this, giving users an instance with experienced admins to start their Lemmy adventures. But the downside of this is the very controlled, centralized nature of the Lemmy network now.
I only skimmed it but didn’t see this: part of the issue was that forums were prone to be shut down completely, or lose user data when migrating to a different forum system. It made it hard for you to have a repository of knowledge on a topic/ hobby when it could just disappear. Reddit/ Facebook/ discord promised an easier way for organizers to set up their communities, and community members had more trust that these new communities weren’t going to go anywhere.
