Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
yle.fi734 points by Teever 3 days ago
734 points by Teever 3 days ago
Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with.
Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of the virtual world would actually hurt their business model. People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching ads.
So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.
Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be good. It's a postmodern toilet that flushes into its own tank.
I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
> I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB
I'll one-up this: I miss USENET.
I never understood how anyone could like phpBB, compared to USENET news readers, it was a chaotic mess. But USENET, that was great for discussing things.
Usenet before the Eternal September?
I remember using some forums, and there'd be pages and pages of idiots just replying "Wow, this is great, thanks OP!", or "Thanks from me too!". How the fuck do you think you're contributing rather than polluting?
And nowadays they can even create Github accounts and do this...
I first got on the Internet in 1991. The older students told me to lurk on Usenet and not post anything for a month or 2 to avoid getting flamed. I did and then I loved it. Once all the @aol.com people started showing up it went downhill. By 2000 it was so full of spam and garbage that I stopped going. I connected to a Usenet server last year for the first time in over 20 years and it was just full of junk.
> Usenet before the Eternal September?
Even well after it, in many places. The effect wasn't universally immediate.
The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.
It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.
Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.
I'm not a good marketer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the only thing I've found that works is replying to relevant comments in popular threads with neutral looking promotional material (e.g. github links). A well placed reply in a hot thread will easily drive 10x the value of a blog post.
Sadly a few have started doing this on HN now.
(Short low effort comment agreeing with parent comment) I wrote more about this here...<url>
I think it's possible to do it ethically, but anything that works is going to get gamed.
It's a pretty dark dystopian future where the only way for anyone to hear about anything is advertising or paid promotion by influencers because we're so aggressive about policing individuals marketing themselves.
Well you wouldn't want independent creators and small start-up businesses getting exposure over large corporate ventures with full marketing departments would you? Think about the pour investor class that has sunk so much money into marketing, and then some chick in a basement hand weaving some silver wire pendant gets a sale and only earns 15% markup instead of the mass produced cheap zinc pendant with a 300% markup.
/S
Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
> give subreddit moderators a fighting chance
Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem.
As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person.
The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't trying to gain something by participating and organizing. But they're so few.
> But they're so few.
Given how many subreddits there, I have to ask if you have statistics to back up this claim.
My intuition is that people have problems with a bunch of popular subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits are just fine. I have no statistics to back up this intuition.
Do you?
There’s a whole vibrant industry of people you can pay to market whatever you want on Reddit. They can’t all be competing for the same few popular subreddits. They must be differentiated by targeting niche subreddits.
There's about 138,000 active subreddits. I don't believe that this industry is targetting even a majority of them.
That number alone is a very good reason for the industry to target as much of it as they can / dare.
You say "sudreddit". Marketing teams say "self-selecting target segment".