You’re not wrong, but arguments like this ignore the point. For many authors and maintainers, ‘free software’ and ‘open source’ as traditionally defined result in unsustainable outcomes. The original article cites articles explaining several such issues.
Many people in the software industry are looking for new licensing models that take these systemic issues into account. It’s the ecosystem evolving to address current conditions. This should be expected and welcomed, but instead the idea is consistently written off by folks who would rather live by the old rules. The commons continues to suffer for it.
> For many authors and maintainers, ‘free software’ and ‘open source’ as traditionally defined result in unsustainable outcomes.
I'm very grateful for all this free software, but if a maintainer doesn't think what they are doing is sustainable then they need to stop doing it. That isn't much of a revelation. And if people want to release software that can only be used by people on their ideological wavelength then they can do that, but:
- The projects are probably not going to find much popularity.
- In many ways it is a remarkably entitled position; after all my dishwashing machine doesn't test my moral purity before cleaning my dishes. Why should my software?
- Any ideology that centres on identifying "the bad guys" is too naive to hold a community together without becoming unbelievably corrupt and an insult to whatever ideals the original believers had.
Those "many people" can go ahead and come up with their own brand name for their "new licensing models" instead of hijacking existing ones. The only reason they so insistently want to re-define "free software" and "open source" to include their licenses is to ride on the goodwill associated with them for personal profit; they criticize free riders while themselves attempting to hitch a free ride on the FOSS label.
It's entryism, "long march through the institutions", etc. Glad we're slowly waking up to the far-leftism that's left many software projects and communities dead in its wake.
And the point should be ignored even more. Free software is a fairly specific thing, trying to co-opt it into something it isn't makes you the bad actor
Make your own idea instead of stealing and leeching off the success of others. Thats frankly disrespectful to even have the gall to do this. You definitely don't deserve ruining another's image for your idea of how society should work.
This is precisely what the author is attempting to do.
> I know my goal: shift the default in open source from “it’s free for anyone to use” to “please don’t use this if you’re evil”. I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.
> I remain unconvinced at the societal value of “freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose”, often called freedom 0. I don’t want to donate my work to the bad guys!
They never use the term “free software” to describe their goals. To the extent they use the term “open source” it’s in the lowercase informal form. How else should they describe their ideas if not using this terminology?
There are lots of alternative movements to Free Software and Open Source, like Ethical Computing, Fair Source etc. Use one of those, or the more generic "source available" term.
Wild experience building a PC today and discovering the prices are less competitive with Macs than they’ve always been. Building a well-appointed gaming/production/CAD rig is suddenly very expensive between RAM, GPU, and nvme prices being so high.
Basically every integrated circuit is exempt from retaliatory tariffs, current custom MacBook Pros are shipping from China direct: which tariffs are you referring to?
I can‘t imagine Apple doesn‘t have capacity booked well in advance, and their suppliers aren‘t going to stiff them because they‘d lose those long-term contracts. Sure, if the shortage lasts a year or more, there‘ll be issues, but if it‘s short term they might be fine.
Gamers Nexus is reporting increasing DDR4 prices, but it’s unclear to what extent it’s driven by the DDR5 market. DDR4 production is expected to be slowing anyway given the move to DDR5.
Meta point: why does that matter? They launch 90% of the demand for payload to orbit. Some of that demand is from a vertically integrated part of the company. It is still part of industrial demand, given that Starlink is profitable already.
The launch count of SpaceX per year compared to the rest of the world is quite large.
SpaceX in 2025 has launched 134 times. Everyone else in the entire world has launched 115 times combined, including other US companies. SpaceX launches a lot of stuff very often.
EDIT: Originally meant to do 2024 but accidentally read the wrong bar. Regardless, this holds for most years.
They're booked out years in advance only in the sense that bookings are sorted out years before the payload is ready to fly. SpaceX has emphasized that they're capable of swapping out Starlink launches with a commercial payload if needed on short notice.
F9 launches are available anytime a customer wants them. SpaceX will bump down a Starlink launch to accommodate a paying customer, All they would really need would be the payload assembly time?
I spent a couple years in Europe and found that most local news websites in the US blocked access entirely. My guess was that they all share IT resources / policies of the conglomerate news corp, who decided it would be cheaper to simply ignore traffic from GDRP countries.
I have the same experience. I assumed it was a mix of (as you say) not wanting to deal with EU rules, but also not wanting to deal with licensing concerns (eg "do I have the right to show this media in this country").
Part of why I assumed the latter is that sports, in particular, had a high occurrence of "this content isn't available where you are" blocks.
How much sail area would it take to move a 20000 TEU ship at, let's say, even 12 kts? How tall would the masts have to be? Would they fit under bridges? You guys are talking about total fantasies here.
But you don't need 12kts, right? The ocean logistics is ~only about costs, as evidenced by the reduction in travel speed. That being said, cost is currently not dominated by fuel cost either. That means unless you reduce crewing requirements or build cost, there is probably not much savings that will pencil out. Plus you'd need more ships and the physical capacity to build more is limited
> How much sail area would it take to move a 20000 TEU ship at, let's say, even 12 kts? How tall would the masts have to be? Would they fit under bridges?
For ocean-going ships, isn't 99.x% of the trip in the open ocean? If so, what limit is there on sail dimensions? It's a genuine question; if coastal infrastructure isn't the limit, what is the next limitation.
They could lower sails, and use a motor and/or smaller sails, around coastal infrastructure.
The power required would be the same as that provided by the bunker fuel engines in common use. Modern, computer controlled sails are efficient and very powerful. It’s obviously working for this ship, which is a conservative build.
> The power required would be the same as that provided by the bunker fuel engines in common use
And that is a lot of power! Emma Mærsk has an engine output around 80-90MW.
The largest off shore wind turbine today is 26MW with a rotor diameter north of 300m/1000ft(!!). Common (modern) offshore wind turbines today are about 10-15MW with rotor diameters of ~220m/720ft.
I will not conclude it is impossible at this end of the scale, but you need a huge foil area to match such engine output.
You do realize that none of those ships could get into any port, right? We've made modifications to accommodate that.
I tend to agree with you that putting a fixed sail on top of a container vessel won't fly.
Maybe ships would need to be smaller. I think the size of ships was mostly increased because it makes it more efficient. But if fuel is free, you could have smaller ships take direct routes instead of the layovers we do now. That might compensate for time lost as well due to lower speed.
If it isn’t cheaper it isn’t on the board for the next decade or two outside niche routes. The hard part is in making it economically viable. We already know sailboats work.
That’s a decision we, as a civilization, need to make. I personally hope we manage to enact transnational policies that effectively price environmental and social externalities in my lifetime. Or else witness “free market” capitalism continue to degrade our planet and the lives of millions of less privileged people.
> That’s a decision we, as a civilization, need to make. I personally hope we manage to enact transnational policies that effectively price environmental and social externalities in my lifetime. Or else witness “free market” capitalism continue to degrade our planet and the lives of millions of less privileged people.
Name one decision that the entire human civilization has ever consciously made
There are very many. Sovereignty of nation-states, the international passport system, international standards for airplanes/airports/flight operations, Unicode, every other IT standard, every ISO standard, outlawing aggressive warfare, the international financial system, the UN, the Law of the Sea, compact discs, time keeping (60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hrs, 7 days, etc.), time zones, calendar, names of celestial objects, names of elements, international science research, Enlightenment scholarship, ........
That really big question for society is how to force GHG emissions externalities to the polluters. In the current political climate it doesn't appear possible...
> how to force GHG emissions externalities to the polluters
Not happening for decades. Not until America’s boomers, Xi and his wolf warriors and Putin and his circle are dead.
Solar is a success because it’s economically viable. We need more solutions like that. Not conference presentations wrapping a regressive carbon tax as a sailboat.
Solar wasn't economical until China made the strategic decision to invest into cutting solar costs and scaling production up. Putin isn't relevant, nobody really listens to him (the reason why he is so mad). It's really the American boomers who are happy the cook the planet to own the libs.
Taxing CO2 isn't regressive - poor people don't fly to vacations or commute in unnecessarily large single-occupancy trucks.
It certainly is. Everything poor people need is manufactured and delivered with fossil fuels. Rich people could afford extra costs for carbon without blinking.
My question for you all is: do you consider HN to be social media?
I got off traditional social media (twitter, fb, insta, etc) years ago and feel all the better for it. But I still visit HN and YouTube multiple times daily. For the most part I find those to be information-dense and part of my continual personal development practice. That said, YT in particular has a tendency to draw me into endless shorts holes.
Yes, and it is addicting as any of the others. I quit Twitter and Bluesky a while ago, locked myself out of my Reddit account, but HN is one of the hardest that I found to rid of.
To me there were two ways of using social media: #1 interacting with people I know about things in my life and #2 interacting with third-party content and then people I don't really know.
To me Facebook, Instagram and Twitter went completely downhill when it became about #2 for me and my social circle. Twitter was the first, followed by Facebook and then Instagram. I just deleted them in that order. To me they became divisive, angry, political, it made following certain friends impossible, it made people addicted to it, it generated influencers, it made certain friends behave strangely IRL (communicating via meme language only).
HN is definitely #2, but way less political due to moderation.
I like the fact that there's less politics - I know that many people might call it censorship or something, but I feel like it does do somewhat to reduce doomscrolling, as it is one of the topics that people are deeply invested about. Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism (low-effort social conservatism, kneejerk reactions to technology, toxic startup grindset positivity), that I still tend to get sniped by.
For interacting with the people I know, I try to collect Signal/Discord contacts for those who I find valuable enough to talk at a future point, with the end goal of moving all contacts I know to Mikoto Platforms (a messaging platform that I am building).
I wonder if we can even call what happens here with politics "censorship". Apart from things that get flagged, political articles, or anything that causes flamewars, are still there if people want to keep posting/replying... they just get dropped out of the homepage. So it's really anti-doomscrolling. And the exact opposite of what Facebook/Twitter/Instagram do!
> Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism that I still tend to get sniped by.
> they just get dropped out of the homepage. So it's really anti-doomscrolling
Can those two sentences really live together? I mean, if you go hunting down content and more importantly discussions outside the homepage, isn't that some flavor of doomscrolling?
It's the only social media I use. I used to use Reddit too, until they blocked usability/accessibility tools.
YouTube has social media features, but they languish in comparison to its use as a video broadcasting platform. I suppose for people who regularly comment and chat on streams, YouTube is a social media platform, but for the vast majority of its user base, it's more like Netflix than Twitter.
> It's the only social media I use. I used to use Reddit too, until they blocked usability/accessibility tools.
Same. Did lemmy for a while but fell off it. Was just doing the reddit thing again. I’m guilty of that here from time to time but I feel a little more accountable on HN so I generally find I can keep my cool more often than not.
It's not engagement-optimized social media (good old sepia orange, sorted by upvotes only) but it is social media, albeit in a form closer to private communities. Engagement-optimized social media is definitely the problem for me, hours and hours can fly by. HN + no recs/history yt has been the trusty setup for a while.
I don't think it's quite social media as most people think of it. I treat it more like a message forum.
To me, social media is a broadcast type of media where people are posting for their specific followers and people are following individuals, so you end up with people posting specifically to get more followers (maybe not initially, but it's what fuels further posting).
Hacker News is social, but I don't go here to follow individuals. I usually don't even look at names of who's commenting.
I've taken the position that if something is too expensive without ads, it's too expensive for me. My life is blissfully, nearly entirely, ad free. The only downside is I'm an alien on my own planet, blind to the continuous swamp of advertising everyone around me lives in.
I feel you on that, I almost never see ads and don't know how people subjugate themselves to it (by not running an ad blocker of any kind, nor paying to remove ads)
* Comment sections - encouraging pile-ons, and vitriolic debate
* Short form content - TikTok videos, etc, quick, snackable content and destroying people's attention span
.
Then there's the overall ad-based incentive to put all these together to keep you engaged. TBH the fact hacker news has a different model, makes me feel better about it, rather than caring if its social media or not.
> Comment sections - encouraging pile-ons, and vitriolic debate
The early millennium blogosphere had comments sections, and lots of vitriolic debate. They inspired XKCD 635, after all. I think the problem today is not the opportunity to comment and debate, but rather the fact that the phone keyboard is the input device for the majority of internet users. Population-wide, phone keyboards discourage longform text and nuance, even if some individuals will claim they can comfortably type just as much as on a physical keyboard.
It's crazy how much vitriol there is in local newspaper websites, and this is something that's been going on since the 2000s indeed. It wasn't just flamewars, it was law breaking stuff.
A bunch of the local ones that were super vitriolic just started removing them 5-10 years ago. Godspeed.
Ha, I just recently had uBlock Origin remove all HTML elements on news sites that 1) link to comments (in my country this is usually in the form of comment count right after the headline - and typically the comments are printed in red, ugh), and 2) allow me to comment (usually a button at the end of the article).
News comments in my country have really become almost completely pointless. It's ridiculous or even incredible - honestly, you have something like 1 sensible comment out of 30 or 40. Things started to go noticeably downhill during Covid, and it got worse with the war in Ukraine (we are battling Russian trolls over here). In this light, the uBock Origin solution has really worked wonders for me. Having also removed some other "cruft" like content marketing stories etc, I can read news in a calm, peaceful atmosphere again. Not thinking about commenters (dubbed "commentariat" by a witty local intellectual - scornfully hinting to "proletariat", obviously) or commenting at all.
A lot of sites removed even tranquil and harmonious comments sections due to fear of legal liability, and also because moderating them was a cost center. IMDB used to have a comments section where film buffs could talk about cinema, often in much greater depth and competence than one would find on e.g. Reddit today. Lonely Planet had the Thorn Tree forums where one could discuss travel with a real community of fellow travel nerds. All gone.
Beyond the decline of longform text due to phone keyboards, I actually think that the restriction of active communication to a handful of detrimental social-media platforms is a big part of why people report feeling more lonely today. Back when the blogosphere and Phpbb forum ecosystems were healthy, people talked about finding friends around the world online.
I was wondering if the removal of IMDB's comment section coincided with Amazon's purchase of IMDB, but I looked it up, and apparently Amazon has owned IMDB since 1998?! Somehow I thought it was more recent, like within the past 10 years, at most.
I guess Amazon was content to leave it alone for many many years, but more recently decided to push harder at monetizing it. Even the mobile IMDB app now has ads for random products on amazon.com. It's gross.
I never participated in IMDB's comment forum, but I would sometimes read through some of it, and generally found the quality of discussion to be very high.
I think HN has aspects of social media, but I wouldn't call it that. I do get some similar feelings and "rewards" from reading and commenting on HN that I used to get with Facebook, Instagram, etc. But I quit FB & Insta years ago because those sites were overall making me feel bad and unhappy. HN isn't perfect, and I do occasionally get those negative feelings, but overall I enjoy reading the articles people post, and reading and discussing people's reactions to them.
Certainly I waste some amount of time on HN when I could or should be doing something else, but I think I've also learned a lot from HN, and get to read reasonable points of view that differ from my own.
I think HN's user moderation system (as well as HN's guidelines, and how the in-house moderators moderate and engage with the community) also push more toward HN being a discussion forum and not social media. While HN's moderation isn't perfect, it's not the engagement-at-all-costs popularity contest that plagues most social media sites and makes things unbearable.
Nope, but only because I use it anonymously, same as reddit. To me, context is the key to every designation, so it's not whether a site is or isn't social media. Some platforms support social media usage, but it's the way the individual user uses it that makes it social media to them. I personally do not have a social media presence, and can't see ever wanting one.
EDIT: At best, HN is a link aggregator in the form of a discussion forum.
You're not doing the "social" part of it, but, depending on how you browse, your habit might still be unhealthy, driven by the engagement/addiction algorithms. That's up for you to decide, though, of course.
>But I still visit HN and YouTube multiple times daily.
Youtube is definitely the greater evil here. Anything with an algorithmic feed and an engagement-based UI will be harmful to you. HN could be harmful in a much more mundane way, the way that some kids could get addicted to Pac-Mac. There's nothing really addicting built in, but some people are susceptible. When it comes to algorithmic feeds, everyone is susceptible.
This is actually a really good "bright line" distinction between something being a forum and something being "social media". On any site (forum, S.M. or otherwise), comments or articles must necessarily be ranked top-to-bottom, where top usually is the most visible. How this ranking happens often is the main driver of what the site is like.
- Chronological (either first on top or last on top): Not social media
- Site-moderator curated: Not social media
- User-voted: Social media
- Algorithmic (usually based on some opaque measurement of engagement): Social media
I don't think user voting automatically makes something social media. I think there's a blurry line between voting/"likes" and user-driven moderation.
User-driven moderation can certainly develop aspects of a popularity contest like social media has, but often it looks like a somewhat hopefully objective assessment of the quality of a comment, regardless of whether or not the moderator agrees with the point the commenter is making.
I'm not saying that HN's user moderation is fully objective. It certainly isn't; I don't fully moderate that way, myself, even. But HN's user moderation is absolutely not the same as the liking done on a Facebook post or its comments.
A funny thing; the Ars Technica front page sorta feels like social media—they don’t quite algorithmically rank the comments, but they do hide very downvoted comments (as a sort of community moderation feature), and sometimes the author of an article will highlight your comment (making it visible on the article page). I would call it exactly the dividing line between social media and not social media, to the point where I’m not sure which side it falls on.
Meanwhile their forum feels more like an old school PhpBB thing. Actually I think it was PhpBB at one point, until a recent redesign.
Now their front page comment section and their forum have exactly the same back-end. (Like if you leave a comment on their front page, it also goes into a thread in their forum). Largely overlapping community. But, the vibe in the two different areas is completely different.
The definition of Social Media [1], as opposed to say, forums, email lists, or comment sections typically includes algorithm-driven content pushes and a social network. In that sense, while HN facilitates communication between posters, it is not what is commonly referred to as "Social Media."
So Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, BlueSky, YouTube, LinkedIn... Yes. HN, Slashdot, no. Reddit is now social media; it has both networking and algorithmic pushes now, though in it's better days was more like HN or Slashdot.
For myself, HN yes because I interact. YT, no because I rarely even like a video nevermimd comment or I teract with anyone, although I do sometimes read comments. YT is basically equivalent to TV for me, but I have shorts blocked.
I think the right way to frame it is that the particular format of a site doesn't necessarily dictate whether or not something is "social media". It's important to look at how people actually use the site[0], as well as whether the voting/ranking/whatever system looks more like a popularity contest or objective moderation. It usually won't be 100% of either of those, but it will certainly lean one way or the other. I think HN leans toward objective moderation much more than Reddit does, even though HN's moderation is certainly not fully objective.
[0] This use can be heavily influenced by how the owners of the site push things, e.g. HN's guidelines and in-house moderation decisions vs. Facebook's algorithmic news feed that chases user engagement above all else.
I think this is a good analogy, though something I've noticed is that as reddit has taken their product direction more towards social media, it seems that it has been harder to maintain quality in smaller discussion subreddits, because popular posts get picked up and injected into non-subscribers' feeds, so the ability to have a subreddit approaching HN's level of conversation is reduced.
Increasingly it seems users have no concept of subreddits at all, and simply consume a singular home feed (I don't actually know what the new user experience of signing up for reddit on the app looks like, but this is my impression), more like the major social media platforms.
I've been using reddit for a long time and still check it, but I've become considerably less engaged as they've moved towards this kind of lowest-common-denominator slop trough feed approach.
Non corporate and non-addictive social media doesn't really count. For example, Upscrolled [1] is an ethical social media that's doesn't aim to be addictive (among other ethical aspects). I don't think it's the same as being part of the dopamine machine like on IG.
I don't have my login cached on my phone, plus HN isn't really great on mobile, so that helps a lot. I do find myself spending too much time on it on desktop.
But the toxicity levels I find to be lower - definitely not zero, but much lower than the actual social media where the toxic content is actively prioritised.
Agreed, and that lower toxicity combined with the limited amount of content is what has kept me from trying to leave. It’s the nicotine patch of social media.
I don't really. I'm not on any of the other social media sites anymore (including LinkedIn, to the chagrin of many professional peers), but I remember them being very different from my experience here on HN. I choose what I want to read and engage with here, and there's almost always something interesting to me. I'm not force-fed anything.
It's social media, but an older form that's halfway between the forums and BBSs that used to be dominant and the modern stream-of-ads style. It's not quite as conducive to discussion as a forum with sequential threading but also not quite as detrimental to it as the more ephemeral reaction-based platforms.
The problem for me with social media is that it triggers intense envy. People are constantly talking about their lives, and everyone's doing well but me.
This website doesn't have as much of that. It has a much larger focus on content than on people, so I can just read in peace.
> People are constantly talking about their lives, and everyone's doing well but me.
I wouldn't trust any of it. A huge amount of Social Media is phony "lifestyle porn." A lot of these things you think your "friends" are doing is totally fabricated, photoshopped, and/or exaggerated. Did you know it's fairly inexpensive to rent an hour with a private jet, parked on the ground, so you can take pictures in it and pretend to be rich for social media?
This site is filled with highly successful people who make/have made fortunes (or at least extremely good salaries) by playing around with computers. My failures are my own fault, but that doesn't stop the irrational feeling of jealousy when I read about jobs doing interesting things that pay more than 2x minimum wage and don't involve standing for 10 hours a day.
A lot of people wildly exaggerate on HN. It's become a trope whenever the discussions drift into salary: Everyone on HN works in FAANG, makes $400K, drives a Maserati, has a supermodel girlfriend, and has two vacation homes in Tahoe. I wouldn't work myself up over it if I were you.
40k and works in an office is more than enough to make me jealous. FAANG numbers are so far from my frame of reference that they don't feel real enough to care about.
If this horrible site with its intentionally addictive algorithm traps you here like it has me, you will eventually realize that's not true at all. This website has its uber successfully celebrities and hordes of glazers who appear in their wake: swillison, tptacek, Arathorn, gwern. You just have to pay attention to usernames.
I for one feel intense jealousy about these grifters. Gwern especially -- the guy got lucky buying Bitcoin early and has spent enough of his early retirement writing that he has convinced a huge number of people (especially here) that he's some kind of expert, through sheer volume of writing!
He's a nobody! fuck I hate this website and I'll leave the moment the algorithm is no longer designed to keep me trapped here.
It's a single list that everyone sees. No personalization, meaningful customization, recommendations, or notifications. I'm not sure how it can be considered "intentionally addictive."
And yeah, every forum has its minor celebrities. People can be a bit silly like that. Doesn't really bother me.
> It's a single list that everyone sees. No personalization, meaningful customization, recommendations, or notifications. I'm not sure how it can be considered "intentionally addictive."
It doesn't need to be personalized to be addictive, in the same way that tobacco is addictive without personalization.
I didn't say it was a necessary condition, I'm saying that those are the typical ways in which social media sites are designed to be addictive, and this site lacks all of them, so I'm wondering how it can be said to be intentionally designed to be addictive.
> This website has its uber successfully celebrities and hordes of glazers who appear in their wake: swillison, tptacek, Arathorn, gwern. You just have to pay attention to usernames.
I guess it's a good thing I don't pay much attention to usernames then? Other than dang, pg, and one guy who shares the same username as someone in a PC gaming community I'm in, I couldn't name any usernames I've seen frequently on HN.
I considered it, but honestly, social media just tends to have that effect on many people. I don't think humans were built to have this much awareness of how everyone's life is going.
This is totally normal, especially if one is following social-media content related to travel or consumption (e.g. hobbies requiring the purchase of gear). It’s so normal that it is often expressed by the widely understood acronym FOMO, and indeed, it’s commonly talked about as one of the drawbacks of social media today.
No. Only if you are being completely literal. It's 100% text based, no media embedding, no direct messages, no user feeds. It's a forum. I don't think anyone considers text only forums with no bells and whistles to be social media.
I don't consider HN, Reddit and YouTube to be social media because they are not "social" imo. It's more of a discussion board than social as I don't know anyone in person.
Also the lack of any pictures on HN makes it even less social imo.
"social" is the most important word. I'm surprised that so many people in this thread focus on algorithms, ranking and addiction. These things can be part of social media platforms, but they are orthogonal to what social media is: A platform that is centered around the identities of its users and the relationship between users.
For me it falls under the "social news" umbrella. It's content aggregation and commentary. I am not a huge fan of short-form video content, especially if it loops or automatically queues up another video, so HN is perfect for me.
If you can avoid reading too many comments I find it to be fine, I too have ditched all social media except YouTube and HN. I find YT doesn't pester me with toxic content, and HN you kind of just gotta read a few comments only :-)
I don't think the comments are the problem. It's the doomscrolling. On YT, that would be shorts. Here, I guess it would be skimming thread titles and occasionally checking out the link. More convo = less of that nonstop dopamine uptake train. At least I think.
Definitely wrt the dopamine. The shorts are the main issue there for me, and I’m eager to tune my unlock to get rid of those. The content I’m on there for is long-form educational and it’s the best medium/source for that.
Some people are lonely and use the internet as a way of reaching out to other humans. And in those cases, HN comments can become your social media fix.
But if you just use it for news, keeping up, reading discussions, chiming in if you have something important to add, then no I don't consider it social media.
I think it depends on how one interacts with it. As far as I know it doesn't have a personalised feed and I'm seeing the same front page as everyone else. So I mainly use it to scan once or twice a day to pick out if there's anything going on in the world I need to know about.
Then for one or two threads I'll perouse the comments to see what our particular class of HN-esque people think about a topic. About once a month or a fortnight I might even post a comment. But it all has to be taken in context. Half of the time I'll close out the comments section immediately because it's clear the whole thing has gone down a tangent in not interested in hearing about. Another risk is when talking about topics that the HN crowd knows nothing about, which in my case is primarily economics where some of the takes are borderline delusional/ignorant and backed by a kind of tech worker/startup ideology.
The anti-politics thing is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it's one of the last sites on the internet where there is comparatively little vitriol and thankfully, comparatively little populism. On the other hand, it means defacto support for a dominant ideology and compressive censorship of anything that threatens that ideology, and obviously that ideology is the one that supports tech workers, startups and venture capitalists.
I think taking all those things into account you can still get value out of it but know what you're engaging with. But like the other forms of social media since the death of forums, it's not made for serious engagement or deep thinking on a subject, and discussion can't really be anything more than temporally ephemeral.
At the very least it's borderline whereas the other forms of social media can basically be judged to be explicit write offs in my opinion.
It’s an addictive site, yes. But IMO it’s not social media.
For me one of the primary factors in determining the social media that I really want to avoid / does the most harm - is the primacy of the individual profile. It’s always seemed to me that the most toxic and appallingly addictive sites (X, Fb, Insta, any of the X-clones etc) are all about views, likes, re-posting, and have a user right at the centre of this.
Whereas for me, HN is about the topic, and not the individual. You are interested in a topic, you read it, you vote it up. Yes there are people profiles but they’re significantly unimportant - there’s karma but I’m not sure anyone really looks at that. People aren’t “followed”.
Controversially I sort of apply the same thinking to Reddit. Yes there are individuals and yes the profile side is a bit more visible but you generally (or at least, this is the way I use it) are interested in the topics and not the people.
Broadly, my take is that the less narcissistic something is, the better.
Hackernews is more accurately called a forum, and forums have been around way longer than social media.
The key defining aspect of a social media platform, is that the members are minting social currency and building a network. The social net worth of users comes in the form of followers and influence. The content you post on your profile is an asset, it farms for you while you sleep.
On social media, your media is socializing for you long after you’ve posted it. It exists forever, welcoming people to like, to comment, to subscribe, etc. On a forum, your post is read for a few days then never again, as people move on to newer posts. On social media, algorithms keep your content circulating to fresh eyes.
On hackernews, there are no followers or following, there is no network being built. Your comments are not assets, they are ephemeral ideas that quickly dissolve and are never read beyond the first few days they exist. People’s reputation depends on their good name, and most people will not even remember the vast amount of people they talk to in the comments. Often people don’t even look at usernames. There is a karma system, but it is of limited value in terms of influence, it is used more as a sorting mechanism for good posts within comment sections.
On true social media networks, your profile stats are like a credit score. You can post stuff and if you’re a big shot you instantly collect the attention of a vast number of people and easily pick up new momentum.
On HN, you have to fight for attention, and it doesn’t matter if you are a long time user or a brand new noob, you will fight just as hard. There is no long term reward for writing good comments, only momentary glory. This means there is little incentive to chase trends. If you miss a trend, no one will notice or care, and you gain nothing by following the trend. A key aspect of being socially active is that you have some awareness of societal trends and are able to keep up with them, it shows you are conforming to the larger conversation in society and are relatable. This is what social media is about.
So the takeaway is, just because you are socializing on a site, does not mean it is social media.
But, you can still be manipulated even on a forum. Look at the insane cargo cult around Rust that formed here on hackernews a few years back. You can even be manipulated into becoming enraged, but at least because there is little to no monetary gain from writing anonymous comments on the internet, it is the purest form of trolling.
Funny to see this pop up as I’m reading this book for the first time currently. I’m about half way through and have enjoyed the story so far. The writing is often frantic and sometimes exhausting to read, but it certainly keeps one’s interest. I’ve been surprised to find the social commentary so resonant with life today. I’ll wait to read this review until I’ve finished the book.
It's hard to imagine anything like this making it to publication today. "Ghoulish rigamarole," I've heard it called, that'd be written off as crankish.
On the other hand, a lot more books are published now. There are a lot of books, especially in the genre of experimental literature, that are stranger and more difficult than this. I'd classify Infinite Jest or any of the Irving Welsh books as more ghoulish and harder to read, and those are almost mainstream compared to some things.
Popularity is another matter, but then literary fiction has never been popular, almost by definition, compared to genres: romance, mystery, etc.
yeah, but still, the maintainers need to be paid for their time and expertise. not to mention, although bandwidth and storage is cheap, somebody still have to foot the bill. i suggest people donate to this project.
Many people in the software industry are looking for new licensing models that take these systemic issues into account. It’s the ecosystem evolving to address current conditions. This should be expected and welcomed, but instead the idea is consistently written off by folks who would rather live by the old rules. The commons continues to suffer for it.
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