When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion.
Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you do tell Facebook about you and others. Its interactive and solves a pain point - keeping in touch and interacting with others, your community. Feedly does not do that.
One of the few times I’ve heard a counter to this was an old fisherman who took us out on a boat here in Melbourne, Australia. Proper bloke, skin like leather from the sun, done nothing but run fishing trips his whole life.
He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.
Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook.
Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand.
Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentials of the original forum that you signed in from.
Edit: I know discourse [0] is kind of working along these lines, but I don't think they're designed to have activity between forums.
I run a popular forum in a certain niche -- and have played around with discourse as an alternative. It doesn't seem to solve any important issues with growing a community. Additionally, it is rather difficult to customize, making it even harder to solve problems specific to my community. I am not a professional coder, but I can hack pretty much anything I need into my php based forum.
Though, maybe discourse has gotten better since I tried it a couple of years ago.
To be fair as Ruby/Rails developer I say the same about discourse VS everything else. It follows a lot of rails standards which makes it incredible easy to hack. While phpbb and friends are hacks in itself to begin with.
It follows standards that you need to know if you want to be able to easily hack it.
Which means learning standards.
Ruby On Rails is really powerful, but it is not easy to start hacking on without a fair amount of base knowledge. In addition, discourse uses a lot of javascript, which makes it even more difficult to modify. The barrier to entry, in terms of creating a custom template, is quite high. You need to learn quite a few things before getting started.
On the other hand, hacking something like a Wordpress template takes almost zero knowledge. You can just start poking at things.
The lack of a relatively simple templating system is a big drawback in Discourse. Especially if you're not a rails developer, and you're running a community forum as a hobby.
I know how to program because of software such as phpbb and Wordpress, which are pretty much hacked together. Maybe because they're hacks, they have easier entry points.
I do think the Discourse people have different goals than I'm talking about here, however. If their goal was to make software that was easy to modify, hack, and deploy, they would have made different choices.
Yeah when it's a pristine beautifully structured code base people are more cautious about weighing in because they can't code as well. When it all looks like shit no-one worries about hacking their own.
WordPress has both it's own forum bbPress and it's social network buddyPress. As far as a hackable system for everyone it's an attractive start. WP is based around the concept of everyone installing their own. Their 5-minute install is still the gold standard as far as I'm concerned.
So as controversial as it is on HN I think the idea of using PHP is still a sound one. But as a geek I'd much rather go down the Python route in some kind of homage to the foundation of reddit.
Python is a great language for beginners to learn and it's designed for them. Plus it's still a very relevant skill to learn.
1. Open source StackExchange :- ) There's Talkyard, which looks a bit like StackExchange. ... Minus the single-sign-on part though. I'm developing it. Here's an example StackExchange discussion, copied to Talkyard: (CC-By-SA license)
2. Single sign-on, and (as you wrote), "using the credentials of the original forum":
What about using Scuttlebut's identities? Everyone has his/her own ed25519 key pair. "The public key is used as the identifier", see: http://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html. These can be created in a decentralized manner. The keys are really long, but maybe, in a specific forum, one wouldn't need to show the whole key. One could instead show a forum-local-@username + the shortest unique key prefix (unique in that forum).
He learned to sail and fish, he can learn to use a key pair.
I despise cynics who in the process of underestimating others crash the party, our party.
If the man wants his damn forum back give him his forum, in as many possible flavours and sizes as we possibly can. Then let him deliverate, hopefully learn and ultimately adapt.
Actually when one installs Scuttlebutt, one doesn't need to know about ed25519 key pairs. Instead one just downloads the software, picks a username and starts reading & posting. (As far as i remember.) The user interface makes everything fairly simple.
Distributed community discussion/chat clients, with universal single-sign-on, could maybe be equally simple?
Two tricky tech things could be 1) how to share one's key, between all one's devices. And 2) how can all one's browser tabs, and discussion apps, get access to the key, once it's installed on localhost? without being able to steal the private key.
(If one is a Scuttlebut developer, though, then one might need to know about ed25519 identities.)
This is basically the setup I've been discussing in my articles about a decentralised Reddit alternative. A system where forums are all hosted independently, but can share login data, reputation data, post history, etc.
It would hopefully avert the issue Reddit like sites have where different groups want to control what others can say on the platform, by taking control out of the hands of a large corporation.
Excellent post, pretty much exactly what I was thinking of
> Of course, it still raises questions about how it’d be financed or supported. No investor would back a service that couldn’t be controlled at all and could lose most of its userbase overnight.
I think the WordPress/WooCommerce model works for this. So you handle forum set up for businesses, or have paid for plugins. You can also still have a centralised system like basically reddit/wordpress.com , but allow subdomains just to be redirected to someones own domain (all for a minor cost).
I actually mostly appreciate the moderation/censorship Reddit does nowadays. E.g. banning subreddits like "beating cr-ppl-s" and "r-p-ng w-men". Isn't the world better of, when it's harder for people to give advice about, and encourage, those things?
Anyway, you wrote (in the blog): "independently hosted forums" — I like that, for various reasons.
Actually, I might slightly have built a Reddit alternative minus single-sign-on. Here's an a bit Reddit like discussion:
And one can create per site sub communities, a bit like subreddits. Actually, there are improvements over Reddit: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... . Someone is actually emailing with me about migrating their subreddits from Reddit to a Talkyard community at their own domain.
You wrote: "It would be a very complicated forum aggregator with a ton of features necessary to create the combined community side like on Reddit or its alternatives." — I agree. And it'd also be lovely with a mobile phone app, that could connect to all these disparate communities. So one didn't need to type the address in the mobile phone browser. Instead one just clicked in a list of recently visited communities. And it showed notifications too. ... A bit like mobile Facebook and Reddit, but connected to 999 decentralized communities.
I do not get discourse. I've only ever come across it on Jeff's own blog, but it seems no different to Disqus. And both don't load with uMatrix without manually activating them. I don't want more Javascript in my life. I want more static forum posts.
Disqus is a centralised data harvester and no better than Facebook as far as I can tell.
Discourse is just another forum software, but it's open source and you can setup your own. Jeff's taken some of the ideas from StackOverflow and tried to apply them to forums. To be honest I think most people are happy with regular forums, they work as you expect and there aren't many rules to learn. I've come across Discourse forums a couple of times. Plotly charts use Discourse for their forum [0]. They work well, but as you say Discourse tried to rebrand the forum and so introduces a layer that most people just won't get.
I'm not convinced there's much payoff waiting for you if you were to create such a system.
I think that Reddit's format is so popular because you get to just scroll a stream of provocative/vetted headlines. Even the comments are geared in a way where you're scrolling a stream of one-off provocative comments. There is no long form conversation over time. Everything is ephemeral.
I think they were raising the possibility of having multiple reedits, each owned by a separate entity, yet still compatible. Like we have multiple email providers, for example.
The each owned by separate entity bit. I think the earlier posters meant that if (somehow) a Reddit-like service was federated and anyone could set up their own server that hosted its own subreddits while sharing auth, it would be a very interesting product.
I was reading something the other day about how reddit has killed the community feel of forums. And thinking about it I agree, I can remember pre reddit I used to be reasonably active on a few forums, made friends etc. Reddit interactions feel a lot more ephemeral if that’s the right word.
Because there aren't avatars and signatures. Those are essential to recognize users and also find out what they're about (signatures with links to other sites helped everyone). Also even a little personalization will be an incentive to invest a little more time in the community.
Yeah, without bumping threads on new posts, there's almost no reason to even comment on older topics on HN/Reddit. If it's not on the first two pages, nobody is going to see it.
Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting.
This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online.
The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
Yeah for sure, and even here on HN. I don't reply to comments older than a few days because the only one who will see them is the person I'm replying to. And if my comment is a correction or a clarification, the person I'm responding to may not take it well, so my comment hits 0 or even negative numbers, without the possibility of the general population correcting that (then again, without the risk of them further correcting me if I'm wrong). It's just not worth it.
Here's a Reddit & HN like discussion system (I'm developing it) that mitigates? (solves?) the problem with Reddit & HN that [only the one you reply to see your comment]:
Because: 1) when you post a comment, the topic bumps to the top of the topic list. Like a normal forum. 2) inside the topic, people quickly find the recent comments, via the sidebar (as shown in the video "Finding new comments").
(B.t.w. agree that Reddit & HN feel ephemeral. I remember maybe 2 usernames here at HN, and 2 at Reddit, although having spent a lot more time here, than what I've done at Discoure's forum — nevertheless I remember many more people over at Discourse.)
Stack Overflow has the 'active' sorting. This is similar to bumping a topic with any activity to the top. This is the default as opposed to new.
The mentions there work nicely too, I never get swamped with inbox messages, you can only mention one person in a comment, so there's no @channel nonsense as with Slack.
The ability to express yourself in all it's unprofessional ways is important. It's a way to show you're not Facebook. Each topic is built up from the colours of the people that participate there. Individual expression is allowed. Then it's just up to the forum owners to decide what crosses the line.
Yes, there's that. But I'm referring to the visual connection and neurological wiring. There's something about label + picture that transcends just one or the other.
I've developed my own set of, ugh, "collateral" -- avatar, icon, hero -- which seem to work well across several sites. I find the anchoring works pretty well. And see the same for others I follow, again, both over time and sites.
Not so much. The "flair" I've seen is very, very limited (so a bunch of people will end up with the exact same ones; there might only be a handful of choices). And part of the usefulness of Reddit is having the same user account across the entire site, so you don't have to separately log into a dozen different forums about different topics. A creative username for a car-related subreddit is going to be pretty useless when you browse over to some subreddit about programming, where no one cares about your obsession with Skylines or whatever. Finally, that stuff isn't really visual the way iconic avatars are, where someone has some small picture for their user account.
There are custom text flairs available on some subreddits (for, say, camera models in r/photography) as well as icons (the club badges in r/soccer). It's quite flexible.
Reddit now has profile images too but they are only displayed there.
Most of the subreddits I frequent allow you to choose freeform flair, and it's specific to each subreddit. Sure, though, it's limited in length and it's more closely analogous to a signature than an avatar.
Just pick smaller subreddits. Of course if you stick to one with half a million users, you're not going to have a good time - the Facebookization of the site has been extremely evident in recent years, but smaller subs are still more or less independent forums.
Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.
I read newsgroups a lot (and posted some) not before the web was born, but certainly back when the web had only hundreds or thousands of users whereas newgroups had millions.
I used to miss some things about newsgroups. For years, I missed the simplicity with which I could make a local copy of a news article for offline use -- something the web was always pretty bad at doing in such a way that I could count on being able to read the article while offline. But eventually I noticed that I almost never read those local copies (even though 25 years later they still exist on my current local machine and being plain text are still easy to read in isolation).
If something on a web page does not register as interesting right away, but only after I've gone on to the next web page, the page after that, then the page after that, I can with .999 reliability go back to the web page that I've slowly come to consider interesting. (In other words, I can use the browser's history menu or history page to return to the page that was current 3 pages ago -- or 5 pages ago or whatever.)
Going back to the news article I was reading 3 articles ago on the other hand was much less reliable. I learned how to use the arrow keys combined with the "tree view" in trn to get the reliability of the operation "go back 3 articles" up to something like .6, and going back one article could be done (with the = key in trn IIRC) with a single keystroke with a reliability of about .85, but if the article I wanted to go back to had fallen off an edge of the "tree view" (which consisted of no more than about 35 columns and 16 lines) then I would just give up on ever getting another look at the article.
Of course this deficiency of newsgroups could've been fixed simply by someone's writing another newsreader, followed by my switching to it, but there were other things about newsgroups not so easily fixed that discouraged reflection and contemplation: for example, chances were about .07 that that the parent or any particular child (i.e., reply to) the article one was looking at was missing from one's news server. Often this had a predictable reason (i.e., many news servers culled articles over 30 days old, and the parent is probably older than that) but it was not rare for it to happen for no discernible reason.
In other words, for me, a reflective reader, i.e., a reader who often wants to revisits things he read 10 minutes ago or a few hours ago that at the time of the initial reading I did not consider interesting and consequently did not bother to bookmark or make a local copy of (the rough newsgroup analog to the making a bookmark to a web page), the web or at least the web of the 1990s was a significant improvement over newsgroups.
Subreddits also have a strong tendency to become echo chambers due to how Reddit works. Controversial opinions are downvoted into oblivion and fewer people see them. Traditional message boards have none of that.
The reddit model is more centralised than I'd imagined.
Each forum could still have their own domain and installation.
Ideally it would be in some way compatible to existing forums.
Perhaps better integration of forums via RSS. One thing regular forums tend to still have is RSS feeds built in. They can also be a nice go between of email and online users (although as has been said many times, email an be the death of forums).
Liking the wrong thing might not get you persecuted or killed in your current time and place, but there's no guarantee that those opinions which are safe to hold here and now will continue to be safe.
Social media creates a semi-public record for bad actors to identify targets to persecute for whatever they've decided to retroactively declare to be a crime. That may be a small risk in a stable democracy, but it's still worth considering due to the magnitude of the potential consequences.
That is a good point. If any type of legislation should come out of this, it should be about usage of social media data by companies. They should not be able to discriminate people because of things they do in their private lives. In fact, they shouldn't have the right to investigate it unless it relates to the job (i.e. checking that a community manager does in fact use Twitter and Facebook in an efficient way). There may be exceptions but for 90% of the jobs out there - it makes no sense.
It's just very hard to make laws against that. There are laws forbidding discrimination based on gender and race, yet we still know that this is commonplace.
I personally think it is better to tackle the issue by making it harder/impossible for companies to obtain this data and allowing users to force companies to delete ANY data they have on them by request.
It is hard but needs to exist. Discrmination will always exist and its no reason to give up and not have a law. The law is important.
Information should be freely available. Making it impossible to obtain would lead towards information control like China and Russia. Its the wrong approach.
Gambling won't kill you either, but we still try and encourage people to gamble responsibly rather than become addicts. An unhealthy behaviour doesn't have to be physically unhealthy to be an issue.
I think it is pretty clear that the information and social stigma campaigns run by people who care about the health of their fellow citizens have been effective.
This means that they are addicted. They still want to quit. They know it's bad, but are incapable of quitting because they value the short term fix over long term health.
So why not try to help them do what they know is best for them instead of throwing our hands up in the air and saying "your problem buddy".
Humans are notoriously bad at estimating future vs. current value. I think we should help people make good long term decisions instead of letting biology sabotage us.
Not only do (our) family and friends have no idea what Feedly is, most of them would have no idea where to start with the websites / content providers they’d want to add to their feeds.
This is clearly a huge appeal of social media sites, as they act as content aggregators that do the ‘dirty work’ (oftentimes very poorly) in getting relevant content to chosen eyeballs.
As much as I want there to be a reversion to more ‘vanilla’ content consumption, I’m completely in agreement with your refutation that Feedly would indeed be a nonesense bet to make on where we should be headed.
it's also a fault of the websites themselves. In the off chance that an average facebook user uses google to search and end up in a website outside facebook, they 'll be typically be pestered with signing up to a newsletter and then with a popup to get browser notifications (along with a cookie popup in europe). The User experience will be usually atrocious, with content hidden way behind the ads. At that point the user is not only lost in the UI, but has lost all trust to the website itself and runs back to its trusted facebook. Why would they ever want to subscribe to such monstrosities? It's a tragedy of the common monetization "secrets" that marketers promised equally to everyone.
If webmasters and bloggers realized the benefit of a honest , dead simple user experience, they might earn themselves a bookmark (which is currently the only alternative to social media that average users can probably understand)
and it is also sometimes the peoples fault when they forget civility and humility in discussions and behave like a$$holes.
othertimes sane and healthy online communities fail to defend themselves against those and against more sneaky trolls.
on top of that communication manners seem to degrade more and more with social media usage. I am often appauled by the tight lipped one line responses to contact messages on $craigslist-like-service. a friendly message asking about the availability of an item on sale is met with "yes it is still available.". no "hello", no end greeting, nothing along the lines of "if you'd like to buy, give me a call at $number".
> When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points.
Another anecdote: a few days ago my Mum mentioned she was going to cut down on Facebook and move to other social media in light of what's been happening. And she's about as non-technical a user as you get.
There is nothing wrong with Facebook. Its a legitimate use of the web.
We just need to tweak the advertising model to disable micro targeting by both advertisers and platforms. Google is a far worse offender here. This will kill the incentives for surveillance and stalking at source.
Nope. That's a false argument. Advertising does not in any way depend on micro targeting.
People stalk others because they want to, because there are no rules against it yet, because they are greedy and don't care about externalities, because they are happy to profess and expect ethical behavior from others in society when they can't demonstrate it themselves. Advertising existed and thrived long before the existence of the internet.
Advertising by textual context and immediate location will retain their business model. The hoovering up of data, stalking and building profiles for micro targeting is unethical and has to go.
> Advertising does not in any fundamental way depend on micro targeting. Advertising existed and thrived long before the existence of the internet.
I get that.
The comparative advantage of Google and Facebook was that they could provide a demographic with greater specificity than anyone before, by a lot. There is an old saying, "I know half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half." Google and FB were going to end that.
The goal of course is that technology like RSS is presented in a way to non-technical users so that they are happy to use it without needing too learn all about it.
Right now privacy is such a big deal with 'older' people around me. Nearly every friend of my parents will ask random questions in the last weeks and months.
I agree that RSS and Feedly are no replacement. But other replacements (closed media enabled chats) are happening right now and people happily switch because they see their privacy in danger.
>When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points.
This scandal is so incredibly overblown it's crazy. I've been arguing this since the beginning.
Media blew this up because it's loosley connected to Trump and because there's no better story than when you tear down a high flyer. Facebook was/is an American success story.
Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you do tell Facebook about you and others. Its interactive and solves a pain point - keeping in touch and interacting with others, your community. Feedly does not do that.