Slight twist on dead internet theory.

It's not that the internet is full of bots, it's that the internet is full of self promotion. Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand".

Similar to the Black Mirror episode about social credit score.

Yep, same has been happening here for years too.

Whoops, what I meant to say was:

Hi! As a developer at ACME inc (http://example.com/ACME) I have been following the trend of self-promotion here too, while sitting at my utra-comfortable ACME Comfy(TM) chair, and I have noticed that some people, even the ones not using our ACME Inc. TNT-as-a-service(TM), have a tendency to self promote. I have written more about it on my block on our ACME site, http://example.com/ACME/blog.

Would be interesting to see the rate of this self-promotion here. It's definitely not as present or in-your-face as other places, but it is noticeable

I find that HNers are generally respectful about this. There are some outliers, but the posts they make tend to get downvoted and therefore rendered invisible.

But there are probably at least as many instances where someone refers to their experience with a topic and pointedly leaves out the name of their company, and then other commenters ask for more details and the company name.

I’m not commenting on your theory, but what I love about HN is that, for the most part, people comment purely to talk about a topic. There’s very little self promotion. It’s very nice.

Unless you're posting a show HN, in which case every brother and their mother chimes in with "this is nice but here's my cloud service that does a similar thing but better" sideswipes

Personally I find this useful, because it’s rarely just a pitch (at least I tend to assume some degree of honesty from an active HN user). Also it allows to explore a subject area even if you’re not interested right now. I often make bookmarks or simply threadshots of other products people talk about in show hns.

I seem to remember someone saying on here that if you're looking for suggestions on something, the best thing to do is put up a half baked version of your own and watch as swarms of people come in to talk about their version.

I guess it tracks as well, in general on the internet I find you get better advice claiming something is the case and then getting corrected than just asking for advice

Basically a variation of “the quickest way to get the correct answer on the internet is to confidently assert the wrong one.”

I have mixed feelings about this. From the perspective of the HN audience, it's useful to see what other startups are serving a particular need/niche. From the perspective of the poster of the Show HN, this is probably annoying. However, it is at least marginally useful to see what the competition looks like, so you can figure out how to differentiate your product (or whether there are too many free competitors, and you should give up).

> Unless you're posting a show HN, in which case every brother and their mother chimes in with "this is nice but here's my cloud service that does a similar thing but better" sideswipes.

I don't understand why you are classifying as "sideswipes" posts in a "Show HN" where others chime in to "Show HN".

I mean, "Show HN" is about showing and discussing stuff, not a pulpit to worship a submitter.

As long as it's done in relatively good faith, I'm not entirely opposed to this sort of thing. I'm especially OK with this if the OP is presenting their product as if it's the first of its kind.

Yeah but Ask HN is clearly marked. I don't have to click it if I don't want to see self promo stuff. With social networks, you don't get a choice at all, just an endless, unpredictable feed.

Eh, the big name corps/marketers/astroturfers are so good, its impossible to notice them. Especially as HN mods made it a bannable offense to call it out.

They banned it because that sort of call out is meaningless in an age when everyone accuses everyone they disagree with of being a "shill", "astroturfer", "troll", "fake news", and what have you.

The hyper commercialization of the internet has turned people into spam bots. That’s why todays internet, with billions of users feels less populated than what we had in the early to mid 2000s.

I know it sounds very “old man yells at cloud” but I truly miss many parts of the old internet, when YouTube was new and social media was still in its fledgling phase. There are a lot of perks and quality of life improvements thanks to all the advancements, but being subjected to 4 ads per 11 minutes on YouTube, Google being much less useful thanks to SEO optimization and all the self-indulgent self- promotion on just about every site has gotten incredibly old. It’s all so boring and repetitive yet seemingly impossible to escape.

That’s not really what I meant. Ads rarely get through my Adblock anyways. No, the problem with the dead internet isn’t that powerful entities flooded it with artificially generated bullshit, the problem is that the hyper commercialization incentivized real, living people to behave like inauthentic robots, mindlessly maximizing everything they do to drive engagement metrics.

Grab YouTube premium to not see ads. You have to pay for it somehow, either you watch ads for free or you swap out your LTV for cash by just paying outright.

This isn’t a mark of degradation at all. “Back in the day” of non-monetization isn’t sustainable for any decent length of time because eventually the people donating (VCs) will want a return or will run out of money.

You act like they NEED to make every video have 5000 ads. It wasn't that bad before when you watched a short ad. But now they are just shoving them in your face. Go look at how much profit they made and tell me that increasing the ads to proposterous amounts was necessary.

Are there truly no ads? Have been putting it of thinking it just removes the google injected ads, but keeping all the promotions and such

There are no ads at all provided by YouTube. Obviously Google can't prevent content creators from embedding their own ads, which is becoming increasingly common.

> Obviously Google can't prevent content creators from embedding their own ads

Of course they could, just make it part of the service agreement.

I would feel much inclined to pay for youtube if they filtered out all ad-funded content.

Even better, they could have a model where content creators for the paid service got their piece of the revenue based in quality metrics rather than quantity metrics.

Sponsorblock[1] works pretty well for the creators’ advertisements.

[1] https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

I use this when I'm watching Youtube on a computer, but that's by far the minority of my usage.

Adblock availability is the reason I watch exclusively on a laptop.

You can also watch on mobile using FF instead of the app

Take a walk into the past and use the before: after: operators on youtube. I have recently and discovered the past feels rosey but the amount of content, length, quality keeps increasing. When you go back the rooms feel much empier

I think there's a good bit of truth to that. Even the platforms where self promotion is a rule violation such as Wikipedia and Reddit tend to be dominated by cliques of unpaid mods with an agenda either ideological or related to the interests of a government's national security apparatus.

The main reason why I'm pessimistic about the prospects for Threads to be a success is because it seems to be leaning very strongly towards LinkedIn on the scale of authenticity vs inauthenticity and that is death for a social media platform unless people literally use it to find jobs. I don't think most actual human beings want to use a platform dominated by corporations and people trying to turn themselves into a "brand". They're basically attracting all of the spam accounts from Twitter and amplifying them which might be a good way to attract advertisers but it isn't a good way to attract users.

Or a dead society theory. The less people need each other for creating value, the more of their communication goes down to attention seeking and identity pandering.

Its what society promotes. Social media just happens to be very fast and visible. Almost all signalling from society says the most important people are the attention seekers.

In my view, a lot of society only want to win, and don't especially care how. Society signals and says, "those people are winners." They attention seek relentlessly. They say anything, as long as it's said confidently. If there's some scandal or controversy, its probably better, cause everybody wants to watch catfights and trainwrecks anyways (see Trump).

Its like that Goodhart quote everybody likes recently, "when we use a measure to reward performance, we provide an incentive to manipulate the measure." I've talked to music artists recently that were also very blunt about music making these days. "What do you make?" "We make what gets more views on streams."

Its not "they don't need each other for creating value", its that what society has determined "valuable" represents is effectively paradoxical.

Another issue is Productivity Punishment. See this article on "loyal work punishing" [1]. Short abstract. If we have John, in Loyal and Disloyal versions, with reputations for those behaviors. And management wants extra work with no pay. We give the scenario to 1000's of managers and then see who they try to exploit for extra work repeatedly. Uniformly try to get extra work with no pay out of guy with Loyal reputation. Nearly everybody says, "you're Loyal, that means we can exploit you. You're valuable in the sense that a mine is valuable." And if they're punishing Loyal John, then who are they rewarding? "Wanna go play some golf?"

See my previous comment on 'what society has determined "valuable" represents is effectively paradoxical.'

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...

I think attention seeking is either pathological or for making money. The great majority of people continue to need eachother to create value but that is mostly hijacked by venture capital trying to monetize, extract value, etc

> I think attention seeking is either pathological or for making money.

For a few decades we've been bombarded with the idea that our career depends mostly on our visibility instead of our qualifications and experience, that our next job will certainly be dictated by our social graph, and that getting ourselves known is key to have a good career.

Consequently, we see a whole universe of self-promoting loudmouths generating noise just to get themselves out there.

Perhaps this is a US thing that's leaking.

>Perhaps this is a US thing that's leaking.

This is a human thing.

The US culture is less shameless about it.

Ah yes that wonderful time more than a few decades ago where ... Knowing people didn't help you get better jobs?

> Knowing people didn't help you get better jobs?

I'm not sure you got the point.

It really is not about your connections not leading to job opportunities. It's about the belief your job prospects are tied to the number of people you're connected in social network apps, and this belief leading people to try to attract followers by continuously generating noise in social networking services.

Also, some of the most sought after jobs in tech, such as the covetted FANG positions, are not achieved by the depth and width of your social graph. How does knowing people help you with that?

Wow this hits home.

I quit reddit a few times, but kept coming back to ask engineering questions.

Now with chatgpt, I've found myself not using it for engineering, but rather to talk politics that would benefit me.

At the risk of sounding mean, Threads really is the dumbest place on the Internet.

It’s vapid beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.

That's because it's still full of people who just read that you can Build Your Brand by flooding it with dumb engagement-thirsty posts before everyone's follow lists start gelling.

Once you are following some people and the app is able to find enough content from there, your feed's quality should improve.

It seems like it's too early to judge it on almost anything

It’s a Meta product directly tied to Instagram, I’d be genuinely shocked if this isn’t the high point.

> It seems like it's too early to judge it on almost anything

It's specially too early due to the trainwreck which is Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition. If Musk continues to destroy Twitter, we might see the whole world drop it in favour of Threads.

We are seeing corporate and brand promoting types and 50 million signups the first day. Compared to Mastodon where real people are having real conversations and the numbers are much lower even with a head start. This tells me threads will be a very corporate platform. At least it's offering something different

How is the onboarding process? Are people logging into their instagram and then see some big new button "Threads is here, click to try out!", or along these lines?

Because if I can trust my very quick internet search, instagram has 500 million DAU. So this means 9 out of 10 are not interested in threads?

More vapid than tiktok? Could that even be possible?

Is it worse than LinkedIn?

I can't imagine such a place

> At the risk of sounding mean, Threads really is the dumbest place on the Internet.

Have you met Twitter?

Big part of it, as far as I can tell.

Slight further (and darker) twist: our economic model is dying, but nothing substantive is being done to make appropriate revisions.

Essentially: we have excessive, but still increasing, numbers of people with skills and in economic classes / roles that are "tertiary" and beyond. As processes have been made more efficient over time, and the surplus wealth has been accrued in an ever more concentrated fashion, we increasingly seem to have a sort of "surplus" (oh boy, can it get more Dickensian?) of people in something of a "middle class limbo".

Of course, the very efficiency that has pushed workers out of roles, is efficiency that means we (can) produce plenty for the people presently around. Further, it's basically always the case that people ultimately pushed out of roles contributed in substantial ways, even if just indirectly, to "our" ability to replace them. But, the "tally sheets" we use to divvy up resources, account for contributions and "deductions", etc., are more and more fundamentally broken.

Throwing the so-called "AI" into the mix only makes this worse.

... I'm a bit too tired and pressed for time right now to try to really tie this off nicely, but, hopefully the outline of this (current iteration of this) hypothesis is clear enough. It's an argument (in the sense of dialectical &/ rhetorical debate) that has come up many times. For example, Vonnegut's "Player Piano" springs to mind. But, I do think we're finally at a point where there will need to be some adjustment in economics, culture, etc. Or, we're heading into "French Revolution" territory.

Also, it's not as though humans haven't been through this before - not only at times like during the "Reign of Terror", but also, when people like John D. Rockefeller were in their heyday. At that time, Rockefeller, for example, became quite community-oriented himself. He made substantial contributions to the well-being of society / humanity, in ways that often went beyond simple provision of money for charitable efforts.

No idea which way things go this time...

Edit: correction - when I wrote "produce plenty", I was in a mindset focused on NA / Europe, in particular. Simply the areas I'm most familiar with. Throwing countries like India, China, etc., into the mix, makes the situation more complicated and difficult. Far too much there to touch on right now.

Your talk of middle class makes it sound like it's the average for the world when in fact it's a tiny minority.... Making between 100k and 1mil usd

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class

Food insecurity is real, widespread, and getting worse. setting aside your 'let them eat cake' comments, though, surely you understand that a society is only useful to the people that compose it when it does a good job of somewhat equitably distributing the fruit of the society's labors. When a few men have as many resources as the bottom decile or three, the system is broken. People are working longer and harder for less and less. It's not about 'beong billionares' it's about a basic level of human dignity. It's about being able to afford medical care, having a secure place to live, being able to afford to spend quality time with your family.

Fair point. I was thinking about the US, not Pakistan.

I started participating in a Discord server and it was awful in all the ways that have been said. Strange UI, info scattered everywhere, mediocre search, can't find anything. I can chat with real people though.

Then I realized, maybe all this is good in a way. Discord allows you to chat with real people, but if you want to promote yourself or do some stealth advertising, it sucks. In the end it seems to be full of honest to goodness normal people who share an interest.

The internet is full of monopolies.

They stifle innovation. They lock up funding. They buy anything that looks remotely competitive then stick it inside their walled garden. They demand 30% of your revenue for simply being middlemen.

Of course, in this environment, all that's left for people is to constantly self aggrandize in the hopes that one of these monopolies will hire them and give them a decent salary.

> Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand".

Humanity breaks into three groups: originators, amplifiers, mimics.

Probably 95-97% of humanity or more are mimics. They will never produce much of anything original, that includes writing long-form blog posts or original media content (eg YouTube). They have little to no interest. This is backed up by stats on pretty much every platform, including Reddit and HN (the extreme majority are voyeurs not contributors). It's one of the reasons TikTok was so successful, it enabled the mimics to easily participate and pretend they were creating something new (while they were actually doing nothing but copying what someone else created, and getting a mental reward for it via likes/watches/followers). It's also why modern cameras in smartphones are so popular for the masses (+ Instagram), anybody can take a photo and feel at least ok about it (you don't have to be an expert photographer, you don't have to really create anything interesting and or new).

It doesn't matter what you do or what you change, the extreme majority will never meaningfully contribute. Even on services like TikTok and Instagram the masses have little to no interest in meaningful contribution, they produce a couple of videos or photos and then largely stop; the same holds true on Facebook, most people don't contribute very much into the network. They don't want to. They lack the desire to put in the time and effort (people are tired after work, have children/lives to tend to, etc etc), and they lack the creativity to originate persistently (the feedback isn't there because what they're producing won't get much attention).

Everybody isn't the same. Everybody isn't Picasso or Hunter S. Thompson and can't be. So what you're mostly left with are the people desperately seeking attention/self-promotion and the rare slice of originators.

You have to specifically build a platform to cater to the smaller slice of originators and intentionally block/disrupt the aggressive self-promoters that often don't contribute much new value. And if you do that, your platform will never be overly popular (which isn't what most VC backed services aim for obviously).

Hm, I doubt that not actively contributing on a forum makes you a "mimic". Perhaps your wording is a bit too strong?

I agree with you that these people may lack the energy or creativity, but there could be dozens of other valid reasons for not contributing. For one, I think most people who ignore social media are quite wise. A lot of time is lost here on more important matters.

As long as we're throwing out stupid triadic models of humanity -- [Pythagoras said that] human life seemed to him comparable with the festival to which people flocked form all over Greece in order to see those magnificent [Olympic] Games. This is an occasion for which some people have gone into physical training in the hope of winning the splendid distinction of a crown, while others are attracted by the prospect of buying or selling for profit, whereas a further category again – and these represent an especially good class of people – are interested in winning neither applause nor profit, but come merely for the sake of the spectacle, to get a thorough look at what is going on and how it is done. And we too, said Pythagoras, as we enter this life from some other kind of existence [as he believed in reincarnation], behave like people who have moved out of town to join the crowds at this sort of show. Some of us are enslaved to glory, others to money. But there are also a few people who devote themselves wholly to the study of the universe, believing everything else to be trivial in comparison. These call themselves students of wisdom, in other words philosophers [“lovers of wisdom”]; and just as a festival attracts individuals of the finest type who just watch the proceedings without a thought of getting anything for themselves, so too, in life generally, the contemplation and study of nature are far superior to the whole range of other human activities. (Cicero, Tuscalan Disputations, 5.9)

This is why Peter Thiel is so obsessed with René Girard

That seems to be the logical conclusion of commodifying literally everything. Now that everything is commodity every interaction is a sales pitch.

Hrmmm....

People act like self promotion is almost braggadocious and it bewilders me... The problem is spammers and promo shills that spam for commercial entities and brands under the cover of acting as if they are honest human beings. The enemy is not the individual tring to promote their mixtape, legal advice, or knitted hats.

Social media and sites like Reddit have shut out honest individual self promoters based on moderator arrogance that is very self destructive, anti-competitive, and also very hostile to everyone's ability to be an independent entrepreneur. They shut out small promoters because it leaves room for larger companies to shill all day while using celebrities, manufactured celebrities, and even well known personalities that are already very wealthy. I think it's disgusting how marketing works now, charging the smallest creators the same price as wealthy {fully staffed} big companies for online ads even before small entities are properly profitable is deeply unethical. It creates a business economy in which only the wealthy thrive. As the cost of living rises. None of us normals are safe from this unfair financial manipulation. And the threat to devaluation of our ability to create and run a successful business of our own/

If that attitude of banning self promotion prevails, no one will be upwardly mobile, because as social media is already throttling everyone for money. Eventually if this attitude prevails, there will be no way to let anyone know about your business or skills, and we'll all be at the mercy of only working for large corporations because business promotional costs will be prohibitive to success.

I have noticed data working across even competing social sites, which worries me greatly. I think there is already a social score at plat for most of us even when we aren't signed up for web apps... Our phones are the likely underhanded snitch//

Who else would want to talk to everyone on the planet simultaneously?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror) ?

Reminds me of Reddit. Can’t post if your karma is too low - of course you start with zero as a new poster.

Do you have a better suggestion for mitigating spam and abuse? Reddit could do what everyone else does and tie your account to a phone number or video selfie, but I'm personally not hot on that idea.

This is a rule put in place by people being drowned in spambots.

I wonder if it’s worth the cost in a horrible new user experience.

Spammers have also countered with karma farming bots that further pollute discussions - decreasing the value of such measures; reduced effectiveness and increased spam pollution.

Redditers in turn countered with bot detection and banning tools … that may no longer work soon - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spa...

Bad new user experience and increased spam … things are looking up for Reddit. /s

I believe it’s still possible to have that experience but you have to go down the personal site + email route.

There you’ll still find people willing to have thoughtful conversations.

At least, that’s my experience.

I find that experience a lot in real life too though. Just recently, i went to an event i have heard of with a variety of topics. It almost felt like the schedule was picked was designed with a good diverse hn homepage. I was so hyped, because i don‘t know anyone in real life to talk about a variety of topics like that in depth.

I went there. After the first day, i was so incredibly disappointed. Everyone, even the „anti capatialist“ speakers, were so eager to hand out their business card. It‘s not like the were scharlatans, they were experts in deed, much more knowledgeable than me in their fields of course, but it seemed all they truly cared about, is being expert in something that way easy to them. It was just one of those marketing events, that exists for companies to feel good & important to find people to transfer big loads of money to, to get a pet on their back by the boss. I mean business tickets were about 1000 euros.

OT: All i wanted was to find people like here, who love to jump from discussing coding, AI and climate change, to explorations silly ideas, like how beauty is a weird thing, as it’s just the product of natures waste… the green nature we love, is just their of excess energies and a fun evolutionary luck for our eyes, that we see color & reality like that. Because if we perceived the basic reality much differently, who knows what sense of beauty was the filter for source of true inspiration: the urge to live, which is, the need for control (at least whatever makes our mind feel we are in control, which is much easier & keeps humanity going), because of what color actually is the frequencies of the excess energy, „thrown away“, for stupid humans to come along, and adore the nature for it… oh, when did people start planting plants for beautys sake? Or was the beauty in the protectice plants / good plants, there, before we learned and adapted our human reality? Was this a hint from the nature? Does it reward us for something? Lure us in? Is natures poop, what we perceive as powers, but are just by design uncapable to see it? Are humans like GPT to GOD(s)? Now, what if this was a simulation? It must be like a room with no windows or doors, you just woke up in this room, and don’t even know words, have no memory, nothing to hunt, no need to fulfill, no one to learn from, because of lack of other beings like you and even if, no needs means no need to learn anything, or teach, or remember, there is nothing and you don‘t even think about what difference could exist… there is no light in this room, no features or any similarities of the real laws of physics, no light, nothing happens, no time, no need, no pain, „consciousness“ (whatever that is), but nothing else… how could humans, possibly breakout? Or just grasp, what that is? How would you view the outside of the room, from the inside, if no windows, no doors, no experience(s)? Either through technology which works in a dimension we either haven‘t fully figured out yet, or, don‘t even know about… maybe, yet. If not, it must be Phantasia. If we develop such a technology, then it must serve a purpose within that room, right? And even if no purpose or even if this just a stupid question, but wouldn‘t that mean, that either looking for the „real“ technology, might lead us into a trap? If the room is constructed like that, it must be, because no one wants you to look outside. And if there was, why is it there? Which makes me think: even if Phantasia is not the actual key to making us look at the outside, how would we find the real way? Probably not, without imagining what it could be like, which shouldn‘t be too close to the reality of the outside… which means two things: either way, phantasia is the only thing we could rely on, in that case… and: if true, it means, that the further away from reality, the realer it gets. But not as a figure of speech, and not just based on the assumption that in that room, the „perceived“ (whatever that is) laws of physics couldn‘t resemble the ones outside of the room. Even within this very weird explorative silly idea, this assumption seems a stretch. But that doesnt matter still. Because the idea Phantasia must be the furthest away from reality, is the way our minds work either way. Most ideas are based on reality. Even the thoughts i find unique, they aren‘t for most of you. But i haven‘t read many of them yet anywhere. But they are just combinations of my experiences of the way i perceive the world. So even as unique as they seem to myself, the experiences creating these ideas, only exist because of the reality, so the ideas are real… and if reality is the room, then these ideas are based on what‘s in the room. But if there was any „beam of light“ (or any other physical ground for the real reality) coming from the outside of the room „shining“ (not real light, just examplatory– if it wasn‘t light but sound, that we imagine as coming into the room from the outside, i‘d write „being audible“) into the room, in a way, so that we can perceive it, can either come from, yet again, technology or phantasia. But even if the former: the route to this technology leads to an end, without phantasia itself… this seems like actually phantasia is the basis for reality either way… Or imagine, as weird as a lot of the „aliens“ and „ufo“ stuff sounds, what if… i mean a species that would come here to this planet, must have interesting technology (or whatever that ability would be to them, maybe no technology, maybe something natural, if they even have „nature“ as a concept as the basis of reality), if they had abilities to come here and thus „travel“ faster than light, faster than time, couldn‘t a million human years be nothing to them, so maybe once every 50k-10m years they come here? Or maybe they haven‘t… maybe they have put one of their own into some kind of advanced jail, just like the room i described above, and maybe this jail is not constructed as a physical space confinement, but a state of nil… and because it has nothing to do, since 10m human hears, it end up briefly thinking „thinking“ about a world like ours, as if it was a thought, a phantasie of that prisoner, who somehow by doing that „creates“ us, which we can‘t understand because of these multiple nested realities, and maybe we only exist for an equivalent of a split second in the respective mother-reality. And maybe less in the real reality?… and then talk about how all the fear mongering should be under punishment, because if all our minds have the same fantasies, we end up changing „reality“ (whatever that is)… i mean the opposite effect seems to be easily visible, but is garnered with facts & logic… i mean, i am typing this on my phone via mobile internet access, just because a long, long, long time ago someone started the idea of „more advanced“, or even a „future“ at all which is only possible because of the way humans perceive reality and how this artificial concept of reality based on time, is a lie but it works much better than not having one, and no other seems reasonable from this biased point of view, this one human looked at a stone, and found inspiration in „natures“ (whatever that is) poop (which seems like it is all there is), which led everything after that… all the way up to me with a smartphone… doing nothing, but typing symbols into the void, being lonely, thinking how interesting these thoughts are to me, and nothing else excited me, but how pointless, because even if they weren‘t as silly, i ain‘t even smart enough to be a good software developer… and even if, it would still just be pointless… will i be a good father? Will my mind still be occupied when my child is here? Must i stay in this room forever? Why not make the best out of the room? Can’t see shit in here anyway… might as well be naked… so that’s why i just post this random chain of thoughts. I wish they wouldn’t captivate my mind, i can’t focus on the things that matter… i always wanted to create, now that i did, i didn’t… aaaand then back to the next thought that i had much earlier when gyping this but totally lost the way… the thought was about how the octopus mind might have unimaginable potential, but is limited by their short life span & anti-social behaviour, excluding them from having culture & knowledge transfer… which made me think about how i behave anti-social with my weird arrogance… and rather writing crazy words that i know people will perceive as crazy and that i didn‘t even proof-read because i know it wouldn‘t be worth the effort any way… which might limit my potential as well… just like the octopus… hmm… maybe i must… hm… well… maybe… revelation… why don‘t you just follow me on twitter to find out more about this journey? There is also a book, podcast, vlog, social-media, influencing stuff & propaganda (that i myself am unaware of) & of course: advertisement deals!

…

Back to reality: sorry, usually i would delete all of this again, after writing (if i don‘t write this into my notes or on pen & paper). I just wish i‘d know what to do with this… i wish i could somehow spend all day thinking about things like that… but i am mute and blind… at least in real life… i think…

I think there is a larger question about the role that celebrities, influencers, meme accounts, thirst trap accounts, or any other account that is incentivized to post play on social media.

You immediately saw the energy and positivity drop as these groups arrived to threads. Perhaps it was a mix of egotism, phoniness, and shallow attempts at engagement, but you also saw engagement and follows rise with that group.

The head of Instagram has said that news is going to be less of a priority for them, which coincides with Canadian legislation demanding pay for links and upcoming US legislation that is expected to be similar.

I would love to see them deprioritize these financially motivated accounts and try to focus more on local and more genuine interactions, otherwise they will just fall into the same trap Twitter has been stuck in for years.

Ultimately, these accounts drive engagement but perhaps there is a cost to the long-term health or viability of the platform when taking this approach. Given Meta has seemingly no need to monetize Threads, I hope they try new approaches that are healthier for the platform and better for their users rather than cheap engagement.

> and try to focus more on local and more genuine interactions

It's amazing to me that people expect one of the largest companies on the planet to be capable of doing this with any measure of success.

Meanwhile, there's tons of groups of people who meet under the banner of shared interest, probably right now, right in the town you live in. You can just go do that if that's what you _actually_ want.

> I would love to see them deprioritize these financially motivated accounts and try to focus more on local and more genuine interactions, otherwise they will just fall into the same trap Twitter has been stuck in for years.

Meta goes farther than Twitter ever did, as they actually deprioritize the more news-like content.

After all, why pay for less engaging content when you have users tripping over themselves to game engagement for free? Ignoring long term health (and the health of the society they inhabit) seems to have worked out for Meta so far.

> Meta goes farther than Twitter ever did, as they actually deprioritize the more news-like content.

I think an interesting experiment would be to also prioritize some "news-ish" "good news" of the type that wouldn't quite make major TV news broadcasts. The type of stuff that John Krasinski was doing with Some Good News during the pandemic.

Threads is literally just textual Instagram and TikTok. I don’t get the feeling Twitter users ever really used those, and Threads is much closer to those

I'm interested in the contrast between the news producers, who want you to pay for content, and the flood of people desperate to attract your attention without anything of value.

It feels like there is a certain amount of worthwhile stuff, despite vast numbers of people seeking ways to create it. You'd think with billions of people trying we'd get more things worth actually looking at.

Is is because a lot of people just really have nothing to contribute to the world?

'Is because a lot of people just really have nothing to contribute to the world?'

We all have something to contribute but, like a single ant in a column of ants moving from one hole to another, that thing may be minor and not newsworthy.

Why should contribution to “the world”, the gargantua of global culture, history, and economy, be the yardstick of worth? I believe almost everyone has something valuable to contribute to their friends, family, neighborhood, or community. We can step away from the chaotic, nebulous global village and focus on the tangible human connections of actual village systems, where “the defining trait of a village is that it’s group of people where the average interaction over time is with people you’ve seen before.”

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/82_killing_community/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296882

In this case I'm thinking of people who are trying to make a living. If it were up to me everyone would automatically receive enough money to stay alive, and nobody would have to grasp at straws like that. It would be interesting to see what they would create.

Meantime I am distressed by that grasping, which I understand to be necessary, or at least desperate. I wonder if they could do better creating something, anything, more useful than vast quantities of the lowest possible effort.

Employment, housing, and healthcare should not be inexorably interlinked. Losing your job puts your housing and healthcare at immediate risk, and activism can look like unprofessional behavior or a brand risk. Chilling effect.

== Is is because a lot of people just really have nothing to contribute to the world?==

Perhaps they simply have a different definition of “contribute”?

Seems there are plenty of things for other people to look at given the download and signup data.

There are plenty of things to look at, though it seems to be a constant maw that is never satisfied.

And on the other hand there are "influencers" and "content producers" and "digital marketers" who want to slip into that gap, but know full well that their contribution is not of any value. They're trying to be middle men in a world that's overconnected already. They plagiarize and copy and SEO and use generated content in the hopes of snagging a fraction of a cent simply by being in the way.

I don't mean that as personally derogatory as it sounds. I don't know them or their story. But I've seen many thousands of human lives spent in quiet desperation and wish that there was a better way to use the mind they were born with.

> It feels like there is a certain amount of worthwhile stuff, despite vast numbers of people seeking ways to create it. You'd think with billions of people trying we'd get more things worth actually looking at.

Have thought that this was a problem so have been working on a solution. At some point intend to announce on HN. I'm supposed to do a "Show HN"?

Yep, that's how it's done. Good luck!

This is a fools errand. Stop using it for a week. The product is a literal MVP right now and lots of stuff is in the pipeline. You’re spinning your wheels on this when shortly you’ll be able to see a different timeline.

That may be true, but I really don’t think I want to.

It’s Instagram in words, and Instagram by and large is an awful, fake and vapid place.

Threads might be decent software, but the content is horrible.

Instagram is my most used platform. All my closest friends are there. All the top tier meme content is there. Group chat is lit.

It’s not a fake and vapid place. All social media are just vehicles to communicate with other people. If you feel it’s fake and vapid you’re just following the wrong crowd.

but that’s kind of the thing with threads. no matter how curated my follow list is, my feed is filled with the type of content the OP calls out. there’s no “following-only” feed.

What is so bad about Instagram? It's my most used "normie" platform. I don't choose to have fake friends or follow awful creators, so I don't see that on the website.

It’s not intellectual.

I love it, it’s great for workout and vacation pics and seeing what people you know are up to. I get the feeling Twitter powerusers hate it

I use instagram occasionally but it’s mostly for eye candy and maybe a few will post stories with vids, it’s really a pure form of internet junk food.

If Instagram is eating junk food then Twitter/Threads is trying to find bits of steak in a pool of toxic waste

I follow a few of my favorite bands and celebrities and my friends and it works well. I wish there was an easy way to filter all reels though. I don't like the tiktok type of experience.

Yeah, I used threads for a few minutes and quickly discovered that’s it’s just not a product that caters to me… yet. Right now I think it’s probably only great if you’re really into the e-celeb scene. But this is Meta/IG we’re talking about, I’m sure they’ll get their near-freaky level of algorithmic content targeting precision in there soon enough and my feed will become full of stuff I care about. I’ll check back in on it in a couple months.

> But this is Meta/IG we’re talking about, I’m sure they’ll get their near-freaky level of algorithmic content targeting precision in there soon enough

I keep hearing this. "Oh! The Algorithm gets me so well! It's so freaky!" about TikTok, IG, everything really... But let me tell you how my IG feed goes:

I get 3 posts at the top, posted by my friends. I like all of them – even if I didn't like it. I'm just pleading to the algorithm to show me more from the people I care about. I then scroll for another 30 seconds through endless muck of golden retrievers, frat boys, etc. I'm hoping to see another post from my friends, but it just doesn't come. I leave the app for another week, until my friend shows me a post she made 2 weeks ago that was never shown to me.

The algorithm makes social media a painful experience I avoid. I've enjoyed Mastodon, Snapchat, and BeReal MAGNITUDES more... Platforms without one, platforms where I'm actually "social".

exactly. the instagram algorithm is horrendous. until this thread I'd never heard a single person praise it. suspicious? I don't know

for example, a while ago a friend sent me 3 or 4 relationship memes. I didn't like the posts, I may, at most, have reacted to one or two in chat, but since then my suggested posts have been 20-30% relationship memes. no matter how many times I say "I am not interested in content like this" or after blocking about 30 of the most common relationship meme hashtags, I still get the same 20-30% of posts, just now they have no or unusual tags. and then more recently, seemingly appropros of nothing this time - bodybuilding/fitness memes! it's the opposite of freakily good

I primarily use Instagram to follow artists, but yeah, my experience is about the same as what you listed. Before I took a hiatus from it, I just started going directly to my friend's pages to see if they shared anything new, and directly to the artists' pages to see if they were selling prints. Better than being forced to look at ads for essential oils vape pens.

Same here. These days I only use Instagram to post art made and rendered during my commutes and consume similarly fashioned content. I haven't reached the point in "making prints available" nor have the desire to at this point in time.

I’ve stopped using the algorithm on IG. Instead I use the “Following” feed (tap the Instagram logo in the top left on the home pane) which is a reverse chronological feed of only the people I follow.

Yeah. That's better, agreed. I've been muting lots of accounts I want to follow, just to get the feed down to a clean friends only feed. It's better, but I guess my big point is that algorithms suck, at least from a user's perspective (I'm sure 90% junk mixed with 10% content to keep users engaged does wonders for profits)

Twitter unambiguously separates out the feed of people you're following and the algorithmic feed ("For you") in separate tabs (plus you can pin separate lists as tabs). It also opens up the feed you last used when you open a new session. Plus, the algorithm for the "For you" feed is open source[0]

0. https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

I just signed up for threads to hopefully help annoy Elon which is very petty and useless of course but I ended up following a bunch of nat geo photographers who are all over threads and really enjoy my feed at the moment. Nothing wrong with admiring beautiful pics of the world. That sounds like instagram and you're not wrong, but the photographers themselves are more present so you can ask questions which feels different enough. Also, now is the time to annoy anyone famous on their because even the big dogs only have a few thousand comments. lol

Do you mind dropping the names?

Yeah, first follow

* natgeo : Then you'll start seeing that account replying to its photgraphers and you can build your own list.

* michaelgeorge

* reuben

* cosmic_background (I don't think he's natgeo but still neat)

* benashtonart (Also not natgeo but fun)

I discovered that it doesn't cater to me before actually using it. Googled how to use it on desktop, found that there is no way other than emulating the mobile app. Not for me, I pass.

I expect that they'll add a web client this year. And then we'll be able to add whatever filters we can dream up (and implement)

The algorithm on Instagram has never been freaky in how well it targets my interests. It cares not. It just wants me to look at ads. It's always freaky on how well it advertises stuff that would be the most annoying to me based on something I said a few days ago, though. However I haven't been on since April, so maybe they've changed it again.

Unless I don't want to hook my Insta friends to Threads.

Meta is courting the risk of going full Orkut, where people come by to check out early hype on an unfinished product, find the feature set underwhelming, and head off elsewhere. The tradeoff with getting tens of millions of users at launch is that it will be harder to get a disappointed user to come back and try again than it was to get them to try the first time.

I'm sure for the dev team this is a busy time, and the work they need to do to accommodate so many new users creates a feeling of forward progress. But none of that work (from what I'm seeing in discussions) seems to involve adding basic functionality, while in the interim people are forming a durable first impression of the service.

If non-working product was the stuff they've ever cared about. IG: - reels were rolled/rerolled so many times with so many bugs. - have you tried to open some old post from your grid? Scroll is soo broken and loads 1 page of images, freezes, loads another. So, to scroll 300 posts you need to spend 5 minutes. Never was fixed and probably never will. - Chat for IG does not open images on desktop (or some images). Yea, I know desktop is not a priority anymore.

It feels like it is neverending AB testing or neverending beta.

Good insight. I think what might help them a little bit, however, is that the features they're sure to add in the coming weeks are known commodities at other networks, so people will already be aware of the value the features add, such as a timeline that only shows folks you're following.

I feel like Twitter has gotten worse for this lately too: I've had to use the mute button much more frequently than I used to. In the past, Twitter's feed was almost too smart/focused, and kept giving you basically only the same subjects and content over and over again.

Now day's it's broadened what you see, but also keeps giving random (and sometimes, offensive) nonsense that I have to mute.

It also doesn't seem to learn from mutes very well: shouldn't mute not only mean "I don't want to see tweets from this account", but also "I'm not interested in Tweets on this subject"?

Similar issue with Spotify. I feel like it used to be better at finding me NEW tracks based on what I'd liked in the past. But now it just mostly wants to play the same things I've listened to before, over and over?

Reddit app does this too, it’s risky but it can help discover new content areas. Threads has that dialed to 11

Turns out quality content targeting hurts views and engagement.

For me, Reels has never been able to zero in on my interests in the way that TikTok has. Reels mostly shows stupid, low denominator content compared to TikTok which is showing me math videos, videos about ML, etc.

Algo-feed only Threads means trusting the same sort of algo behind Reels and I am not convinced that it will work. Twitter allows for much easier bootstrapping.

Already, I am pretty turned off by how inundated Threads is with celebrity content that I really could not care less about.

It's very possible that ranking will be a lot better for threads though, simply because NLP models are currently so much better than what exists for video

This is Meta. In no time it will be the same old "tailored for you" experience. Soon his timeline will be spammed with tractor ads. He and other early adopters should just enjoy this wild-west phase, it will be tamed soon.

This forced recommended content is infuriating. It's the platform rudely getting in the way of the one purpose I want to use it for — staying up to date with things happening in my followees' lives, with zero entertainment. Their promised ActivityPub support can't come soon enough.

I’m sincerely asking: has any modern social media platform delivered this? I know it used to be that way on many sites, but over the last decade, we seem to really redefined the expectations.

Personally, I’ve really come around to the idea. I follow a few baseball accounts - if an amazing highlight gets popular over on the LA Dodgers account, I want to see it without needing to trust the Mets might repost it or it’ll make the MLB’s accounts or whatever else. I don’t make a habit of following public entities like teams or brands or sports meme accounts, but sometimes they post things that really resonate with people who follow the accounts I do follow

A big part of “social” is the buzz in your corner of the world, and recommendations help me be far more clued in

>I’m sincerely asking: has any modern social media platform delivered this?

On Twitter you can simply select "following" instead of "for you" and all the tweets you see come exclusively from the people you follow, in chronological order. If I was forced to sift through the endless mounds of garbage recommended by Twitter (or any a social media company) there is a 0% chance I'd use it.

>A big part of “social” is the buzz in your corner of the world, and recommendations help me be far more clued in

I think the big question is, what does "social" mean to you? Personally I only want to see posts and messages from friends, people and organizations I proactively choose to follow. As long as I'm able to personally curate my own experience the toxic brew of e-celebs, SEO nonsense, advertisements and government/corporate propaganda of all kinds if almost entirely absent from my timeline. It may appeal to some people but it is absolutely repulsive to me (and others).

Being active in an ActivityPub space lately, a bunch of folks there are very vocal against Threads being part of the ecosystem. They're confident Meta will Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.

Also, a number of Mastodon servers already plan to block Threads' servers.

Doesn't seem likely that mastodon.social will block it (and they are the largest)

it's not like they tricked you into using it, and then changed the algorithm to make it harder to "stay up to date with things happening in your followees lives".

this is clearly not a platform that caters to that use case, so if that's what you want then you shouldn't use it. if you're infuriated because the entire world isn't designed to specifically cater to your expectations, you're going to spend a lot of time being infuriated

The irony being that it's twitter's use of the same that drives so many to seek alternatives. At least twitter has a 'following' feed, even if it's far from ideal.

You don't have to use it. I don't understand this obsession to have to do something because it's trendy.

It is not even trendy. FB literally killed Pages before and now is actively killing IG. Many creators just don't really care about any new Meta products anymore.

If you have to put that kind of work into a platform to make it usable, I would suggest putting it into a platform that aligns with your values. I just can't understand why anyone, even "normals", would be so eager to jump into bed with Facebook again after the last decade.

I saw some posts urging people to “get in on the beginning” in order to take advantage of the primitive ranking and go viral. Everyone wants a chance at that. Just like the promise of pump and dump crypto’s or the still private startups that told me “you just don’t understand how equity works, we are about to IPO soon, take our lowball offer”

It’s 2023, and people are still grasping for Internet Points?

If you're good at it, you can parlay it into a million dollars like that Medlock guy.

Yes? I don't really get it either, but for better or worse if you want to build something that caters to the kind of people that use Threads/Twitter, its obvious that it would be better to do it now rather than in 6 months.

I agree with you and I have no plans to sign up for threads, but I have to admit that there's some part of my monkey brain that has softened on meta throughout all this. I am not saying that feeling is justified; only admitting it's there. I think the last decade has given us events and people who went out of their way to make "normal" levels of malevolence seem quaint or even charming.

I have a hard time giving up FB because so much family and old friends are on it, but intellectually I know it's awful. Probably worse than Musk's Twitter, TBH. Zuckerberg has personally done a better job of not being public-crazy than Musk (just cringey), but his platform has arguably net-effects worse on society.

They crossed the line last fall when they put me in FB jail for posting a picture of my son at the beach in his bathing suit as "violating community standards", and then extended my jail-time further when I appealed and complained. The implication being that I was posting .. CSAM... because their image detection algorithm & moderation sucks... that's awful.

Meanwhile they continually try to show me far right or climate change denial material presumably to try to get me to "engage"; yesterday was a meme encouraging people to run over cyclists, complete with a picture of a cyclist being hit by a car, and when I reported it as encouraging violence they rejected my report.

Meta depends on outrage-engagement to make $$. Zuck talks a big talk about creating online community, but he's actually kind of created the opposite. Even the active FB groups I've been in around niche topics have become kind of awful in tone recently, like they're doing the same outrage engagement algos in them, too. Or people are just bigger assholes after COVID, I dunno.

They really are the worst, in actuality, and getting worse. I think I will delete my account ... but it means losing contact with a lot of friends and family.

Facebook is even worse in other countries, where they promote outrage algorithmically then don't hire any moderators to even try and keep it in check. This way they're implicated in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...

Perhaps the softening is related to the open sourcing of LLaMa? I softened a bit on Microsoft after it started embracing the open source approach in the 2010s... even if the motivate was being late to the party.

The LLaMA weights still have a restrictive license.

I've seen it too, I personally think it's a bit of the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" type of thing kicking in. But once you realize how far cyberdespotism can go... normal levels of exploitative do seen a little more chill in perspective.

I don't think it's fair to call it getting into bed. More like trying out the new ice cream place that everyone is trying.

(Continuing this analogy)

Except that the icecream place is run by a group known for extremely poor hygiene, manipulating customers and lacing their other food products with nicotine to ensure chemical dependency issues.

“This Carolina Chocolate is amazing! I just keep coming back!”

I think in this case we —-the customers—- are the ice-cream and Facebook’s tongue licking all over us, as if they haven’t had enough taste of our metadata yet!

I can only imagine 2 use cases right now:

1. You are a celebrity or influencer and you are trying to “colonize” the place

2. You have a business that sells products or services to this people: celebs and influencers are your primary target

If I already use Instagram, Meta isn’t getting much new information from my use of threads that they didn’t already get from IG.

Well they're capturing additional text-based interactions associated with your identity and demographic.

people love twitter. they want twitter run by "normals". zuck has said threads will be twitter run by "normals". this is what they want. this is what they will use.

Mastodon seems like nice people, but it's not well designed. So far, it seems people are posting stuff in the void and creating little conversation because everything rolls past you unless you are looking continuously. Even notifications are poorly designed as it keeps posting your content repeatedly for favorites, etc., so you have little overview of your interactions. I think it could be designed better but apparently, few changes are made to make it more usable.

>looking continuously.

Ahhh! That is the key to the design.

A network of users consuming and producing in real time. Weird feedback amplification effects.

A vast beast with a million heads, muttering to itself.

(Having your notifications turned on might be important for this to work. Remember that Black Mirror episode where having your notifications turned on was legally mandated.)

I can't deal with the way posts are arranged in mastodon. The "timeline" or whatever you call it.

I want a tree of threads. Posts and replies. Like reddit and hn. It's the only way that makes sense.

Boggling that they do it this way.

Follower feed is said by the head of Instagram (and I guess thus the head of Threads) to be coming eventually. There doesn't seem like much to do but wait.

https://mashable.com/article/threads-following-feed-feature

Or you could use other platforms, you know.

I just uninstalled after 10 minutes of use because of this. Absolutely 0 interesting or organic content in the feed, just an endless stream of blue checkmark celebrity and corporation accounts making painfully cringy "hip with the kids" tweets.

Easily one of the most forced product launches I've seen in years.

Already deleted Threads… just a bunch of celebrity promoted garbage. Cannot search or sort by hashtags… just a stream of corporate promoted nonsense mixed with ads. Not sure I where this app fits in with Instagram and Facebook already overlapping.

Twitter is popular in the zeitgeist, but Reddit is the dark horse.

A Reddit replacement with the reach of meta is a very fertile opportunity.

It’s shocking to me how bad the algorithm is in it, especially when they already have your interests from IG, maybe there are some data rules preventing that? But even so it’s quite pitiful when you compare how fast TikTok can figure you out from a bare account.

Really think they dropped the ball not offering followers only feed when shipping with the algorithm in this state.

According to screen time I’ve spent 45 minutes in it but have no desire to look at it again.

> insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

As an alternative, you could just not use the product

Seriously. I didn't sign up for Threads and I haven't had to mute a single account.

Threads is just tiktok meets Twitter, stuff you didn’t ask for but hopefully stuff you really like. They nailed the first part, the second part not so much. I quit it once I figured out they were trying to hook me like all the other social media.

Twitter, for all it’s controversy, doesn’t feel that way.

Sounds just like Twitter. Just more garbage.

The only thing I ever found useful on Twitter was notifications from government agencies. Mostly recently, changes in ferry schedules in NC.

I feel like I need a “Twitter for governments and public services”. Verified accounts and none of the influencer garbage.

Threads may end up being the best place for exactly that. Uncontroversial content on a stable platform.

It must be heavily censored to have low controversial content

What will prevent it from being filled with influencer and other garbage like Twitter.

The app is obviously an MVP. The force-fed feed makes a lot of sense when there's little content, plus helps set the intended style/atmosphere/topics they want on there.

They've probably underestimated how quickly people will rebuild their social graph.

It's obviously an MP; whether it's V remains to be seen.

I'd link to the Paris Hilton tweet where she wrote "If you're not having fun, then just leave.", but alas ...

I remember when she first entered news headlines with the "Paris Hilton Sex Tape". Couldn't give a stuff so never read it, but for years I assumed this was some important business person or world leader who had been discovered having some illicit affair in a hotel in France.

I just find it hilarious how people pivoted from crypto to ai to threads. What’s next on the list? Deffo not something useful. But like i said before - anything that puts twitter out of its misery is welcome.

If you have to put in that much effort to fine-tune the machinery that is supposed to trickle-feed your brain with short-lived dopamine hits, maybe you should try a different product. Not all junkies are the same. You may not be the target audience.

Tongue-in-cheek response aside, when YouTube managed to trick me into wasting a couple hours with YouTube shorts, my reaction after reflecting on what I just did wasn't to try and make it even better by curating it - instead I blocked YouTube shorts recommendations with my adblocker.

I was surprised by having no option and forcing everybody to their algorithm when their other platform either show you content from accounts you follow first and tell you when you're done (instagram) or have an option to show you content from your friends only or friends + group (Facebook's "your feed" and "friends").

I personally don't mind ads, somebody needs to pay for the service and I prefer ada over forced paid for content wasting my time.

I suspect they will launch "Following/Friend" soon. Part of me thinks they pushed the launch when Elon was limiting tweets.

I don't mind ads either if they are obvious and targeted (no more penis ads like the early days of the internet). I suspect Meta won't turn on ads for awhile, but when they do, they have one of the biggest ad markets to tap into. I suspect soon enough advertisers will see an additional button in their preferences. Run ads on Instagram and Threads.

> they pushed the launch when Elon was limiting tweets.

Isn't Musk hinting that twitter implemented rate limits because Meta/Threads were scraping them agreaaively?

AFAIK originally he said it was 100 AI companies using it for training data and then eventually morphed that to this line of reasoning, but why would Meta possibly need to scrape Twitter and, even if they did, why would they be so hamfisted about it given that they already have the `facebookexternalhit` scraper which hasn't been causing issues. I'd take Musk's statement with a big grain of salt.

The other theory is that they can't pay their cloud computing bill and therefore had to restrict traffic. Jives with the reports they aren't paying rent at certain offices.

This is what happens to slack channels to me. The big reason is lack of actual control over how often my devices ping me and user abuse. I'm curious if others face this because people in my lab do too.

== Slack Bugs ==

Constantly I will get pings despite having had my settings to be "Direct messages, mentions & keywords". Including pings for threads that I never even participated in or were tagged in. Slack will also notify me for channels that are muted and grayed out! So my only real choice is to just kill notifications all together and it fixes most of these problems. But then I don't see any messages unless I see the icon in my dock.

== False Positives/User Abuse ==

Lots of users abuse the @channel (almost never using the @here). My advisor sends tons of irrelevant papers in the main group channel, so I have to ignore or be spammed, but then miss "important" messages. There's something I don't get, it is that people don't seem to understand that you can't send spam and junk from the same location as you send critical information. Spam and junk is more common and you're just teaching users to ignore everything. My Uni does this too and it is infuriating. I know they might think that this gets people to see more of the spam, but it just makes people not see important things.

Slack people: can you fix notifications. Admin/manager people: can you please for the love of god stop spamming channels and chastise anyone who abuses tags everyone unnecessarily? I just want to do my work without getting distracted every 5 minutes. It's akin to someone knocking on my door: I don't know if they just want to chat or need something. This kills productivity.

Yes, when you have no followers/new posts from followers the feed with fill itself with what it thinks you might like. It's not very good right now because it probably needs more data points, but if I can suggest one thing, it's this: Get More Friends. That way the feed has people you want instead. Algorithms can only help so much in that space. I can't believe this isn't obviously pointed out.

It would be great if all these sites (including Reddit) just had a button "show me content I might like", instead of distracting me with click-bait.

I get too distracted and end-up wasting too much time doom-scrolling. I've deleted all my accounts.

you can't search hashtags yet, once when that works I'm sure it will be much better. discoverability on the platform sucks right now, for sure.

One of the most useful features on Twitter for me was the option to mute retweets. After doing this, my feed's signal-to-noise ratio skyrocketed.

Am the only one who doesn't make profiles on these things and just goes directly to the URL of the people whose posts I'm interested in reading??

That way I'm only reading people I am actually interested in. Might reduce discoverability but eventually the people I "follow" in this way will mention/reply/retweet someone else worth following as well.

Once I saw giant Gary V hustle culture threads pop up on my timeline 1 day into trying Threads I knew I had seen enough.

Yep, same here.

Immediately saw a sanctimonious GaryVee thread and was instantly turned off.

It’s all so cringe, as the kids say.

I feel this; I also have only found the app usable after spending a significant amount of time muting accounts that I don't want to see.

Until they add a real following only feed I don't see it replacing any existing social media platform.

I stumbled into threads like this one that helped me find AI/ML researchers:

https://www.threads.net/t/CuYdZ_oBX8v/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...

Seems bearable now.

Genuine ask (I'll never use threads, same as i never used facepalm): could these researchers have been found using any other method?

Not yet! I agree that as of right now, scientific or ML discourse seems to be something that is happening in an ad hoc way. It certainly hasn't been designed for it.

What amazes me is how consistently people are celebrating the lack of ads on Threads, when I've seen countless posts from brands like Wendy's saying "so what's ur favorite burger lol"

The number of sign up on Threads can show how much broken the world is today.

You should see my block list on Twitter. It used to only be obnoxious people, but lately the number of shady ads that need blocking has shot way up.

Saw this from a mile away.

My wife owns a company. I told her to get on Threads early so she can get ahead of the algorithm.

I had 0 interest.

That is the demographic. Influencers and marketers.

Half hour of blocking and I have no problems at all. No brands or big celebrities. This is not rocket science.

if you go the threads from twitter, it’s likely gonna ng to be a worse experience content wise, but most don’t care because they are there to pull the middle finger at Elon. When that wanes it will be back to twitter

So people don't want an unfiltered, chronological list after all...

The social web today is entirely about the attention economy.

You can set it to see only notifications from those you follow.

Where?

Nonsense. As with any and all "social media", block early, block often. It's your time, your attention, so you should get to choose what you see.

Of course, you run the risk of enclosing yourself into an echo chamber, but that's up to each individual user to consider.

I don't know about Threads, but in Mastodon mutes, filters and the occasional block make the experience vastly better.

Because Mastodon only has a linear feed, I don't even see the point, you're only going to see what you explicitly followed. It actually takes a lot of time just to build up interesting content to follow. One of the more frustrating things is when someone I find interesting goes crazy posting and the lack of algorithm just means I see way too many posts from them in a row. Maybe the mobile apps improve on this, I dunno.

The key to Mastodon is to follow hashtags so you instantly get any content relevant to your interests. I'm only following a few people because most people who have a similar interest to me will also post stuff not related to our common interest. By following hashtags, I get every post I want to see and none of the noise.

> Just move on, you don’t need to ‘purge’ their ability to reach your eyes.

Why not? Why shouldn't I? I don't get it

I haven't used threads, but I mute channels on youtube frequently. It only takes literally one second and I never have to scroll past that person's videos again. This is a lot easier than playing the 'manipulate the recommendation algorithm' game.

You know the Gell-Mann Amnesia meme? You realize somebody is full of shit after reading/watching their content, but then you move on and forget what you learned, falling for them again in the future. Well if you block their content, this problem goes away. The block system remember what you might otherwise forget.

But why would you mute Aldi UK??

Oh, not "mutexes".