I am a member of three (admittedly weird) niche communities. These have been orders of magnitude more impactful in my life than Facebook. The friends I met there have become real-life friends. We've flown around the world to visit each other, we've laughed and cried, we send each other quirky gifts, and cheer on each other's kids. These are the only close new friends I've made in the last 10 years. Two of those communities are based around subreddits, the other a 90s era web forum.
The thing that makes them work where Facebook groups simply don't, I think, is pseudonymity. One of those groups has been particularly powerful, and it is a group that inherently involves being mutually vulnerable, so I certainly would never have joined under my real name, and I enjoy being part of the community even though only a handful of people know my IRL identity.
Reddit has some big problems, but is the best platform I have found so far for these niche communities. And my experience totally chimes with this article: big social media is as shallow as a puddle. Small niches are where real communities form.
Two other reasons Facebook really doesn't work, at least for me: a) the UI is not that of a proper forum or chat (small amount of characters per row, lack of controls for embedding content including quoting, content burried in between a ton of no-related content, etc). Actually, in my opinion the UI is abysmal when it comes to conveying information which is more than a picture of video or few words. b) when you're not in a closed group there's virtually an unlimited amount of people you don't even know who ca chime in and want to present their idea (which is almost like you're trying to have a serious discussion in real life and there's constantly a bunch of drunken people interrupting you st start spitting out whatever is on their mind).
It just does not work for me for having proper discussions (it does have a ton of other features which do work great, but not that). Reddit is sort of ok, if you find the right community. And many of the forums I already visited before there even was a Reddit or Facebook stil exist nowadays and some of them are even more alive than all those years ago. Most of them are specific (eg. one sport, one music style), the general ones are mostly gone.
As a user I just like standard forum software as established years ago. Not too much frills, just works. Think vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse, SMF. Actually there's not a lot of difference between them, and there's not many which are really bad. Don't have any experience as an admin though.
One thing that FB groups have going for it (and I agree it's a terrible interface) is that you don't have to click on anything to see posts. Whereas in discourse you only see post titles, and a tiny blurb, the FB group is kind of like a custom group news feed. It's much easier for people to scroll through, and engage with.
Unless discourse has an "inline recent posts" view? That would be superb, for users not willing to commit by default to clicking on a post. It's amazing how big a difference that can make, with the scroll-happy click-averse folks trained on Facebook.
Can I ask what are your thoughts about this a bit in between flavor: https://beautiful.demo.ed.community/latest — it shows the first parts of each post, + some images. So by just scrolling, one gets a fairly good understanding about what each post is about. But to read everything & discuss, one needs to click.
(I'm developing this, and tweaking it a bit, maybe adding a config option so it becomes even more like the Facebook feed, is maybe something I should consider, hmm)
If you look at it on a smaller screen, like a mobile, it'll look a little bit even more like Facebook, ... but maybe more text from the posts should be included.
On one side I agree, it's easier to just keep on scrolling. On the other hand: having 'unread posts sice last visit' titles only acts as a filter from which it's easy to discard uninteresting things. And I'm not afraid to miss out since after years of 'training' on the internet we're probably all very quick at seperating the interesting from the less interesting by a couple of cue words. Moreover, often I have days or even weeks between visits and if that would all be available inline it would be a wall of text without oversight. But yes if you want it the Facebook way and regularily visit and don't mind having to scroll through uninteresting stuff instead of being able to skip it at a glance, it could be pretty interesting to have this added as an option next to the standard way.
If you are looking for open source, I think Discourse is the best out there. We tried to move a community from an old phpbb forum to a newer software some years ago and checked several projects and most projects are either unmaintained or old (with old style PHP programming) or new but lack features we needed.
We ended up using NodeBB because the person who was going to maintain it was more comfortable with Javascript than Ruby.
Something brought Facebook Groups to a period of gradual decline and I haven’t forgiven them for it. Even more frustrating is I cannot put a finger on what changed them, but it seems the ones I liked a lot all just got bigger? Or, they feel bigger and less like a community somehow.
I agree with your last paragraph, and IMO the reason is reddit is based on common interests, like Usenet used to be, while Facebook is based on random ways you met people in life and twitter is based on people trying to boost their ego.
I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it's a really horrible version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people who use it, but also due to the karma system - in theory a way to collectively highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an end in itself (karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people burying legit posts they simply don't like/agree with).
On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber.
Cliques did exist on newsgroups, but they had less tools at their disposal. In fact one of the reasons people left Usenet for inferior moderated web forums is because while they could (quite rightly) control their own experience, they (quite rightly) had no ability to control the group.
Ironically, although Usenet is considered to be dead these days, it's in some ways in better shape than ever.
20 years ago it suffered from its popularity, under attack from spammers and trolls attempting and often succeeding in destroying newsgroups.
These days it probably has more users than it had before the mid 90s internet explosion, whereas spammers and trolls have largely moved on to bigger audiences elsewhere.
It's strange for me to read people talking nostalgically about how the internet was better in the past, about online forums they were a part of 15 years ago, or Reddit or 4chan, and seemingly have no experience or even knowledge of Usenet.
And that something as similar and simple to use as email is ignored by people who rue the loss of old (web) forums.
Unlike web options Usenet is no-nonsense, free, has no admin headaches, no advertising, no Evil Corp owner (or potential sell out to Evil Corp when the community grows enough), it's anonymous, private and allows unrestricted speech (within applicable law, obviously).
> I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it's a really horrible version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people who use it, but also due to the karma system - in theory a way to collectively highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an end in itself (karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people burying legit posts they simply don't like/agree with).
> On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber.
( And... you apparently got downvoted :-/ )
The most infuriating thing I experience on the Web is indeed to see awfully wrong comments being massively upvoted, next to perfectly right, on the point comments being (even slightly) downvoted. And I am not talking about opinionated comments, but just factual comments. It just drives me nuts.
I noticed that even here, when I write opinionated, or a bit rough and definitive, or a bit provocative comments, I often get upvoted (sometimes downvoted, but that's not a problem, I understand it for this kind of comments); but when I write to state purely technical, factual, documented, provable facts, I get downvoted. I just sounds insane. I can understand the difference of opinions, I can understand being upset about an opinion being roughly put in a short comment. But what I don't understand is people who downvote perfectly right purely technical comments (like for example fixing errors in a program), where there is only one truth, there is no opinion to have about it, it is either right right or wrong. That's beyond me.
Sometimes people are not downvoting the content; they might consider the post was ill-timed, or irrelevant/pedantic, or inappropriate for any other reason in that context. It's hard to even guess without seeing concrete examples, but I often see people assuming too much of the motivations of downvoters.
> they might consider the post was ill-timed, or irrelevant/pedantic, or inappropriate for any other reason in that context.
I find the current single dimensional score limiting because of this. Sometimes I want to see a funny comment, sometimes I want to see an insightful one. Scoring them equivalently doesn't really make sense.
I don't really think "scoring" comments at all makes sense. I'd much rather systems like reddit do away with downvotes and point displays entirely, and only allow you to express your desire for something to be seen by 'upvoting'. That would influence it's sorting order, but nothing else. Users no longer get the dopamine drain of seeing "-15 points" on their post, and you stop seeing people edit things with "really? downvotes?". If someone disagrees so much that they need to express it, they should reply directly to the post.
HN as it appears to regular users is pretty close to my ideal system, except that it greys out heavily downvoted posts and you can see the number of points you have personally.
I can't stand comment systems with anonymous downvotes. It's like being in a group discussion, then someone else, hidden behind the curtain, calls out "You're an idiot!" Most people wouldn't stand for that. They'd say, "Come out and express your opinions, or stfu!"
I had a quick scan of your comment history for examples and the only one I could see that was grey and not simply opinionated was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15849233 , in which you've completely missed why people want lifetime management in Rust.
I agree about usenet, but must admit it’s not very accessible to people unfamiliar with it. I think a good web interface would go a long way to helping adoption. Perhaps one exists and I’m just not aware.
The company providing the world's most popular email web interface should have been the prime candidate to provide web Usenet, but instead they saw Usenet only as a means to get people on to their own terrible Google-only groups (while producing such a monumental amount of spam, trolling and abuse to Usenet, many people to leave altogether).
A better idea than a web interface IMO is Usenet access simply built into a browser by default. It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, because they are closely related, but not many people use email clients any more, so not many people are going to find Usenet that way.
If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.
One part of me believes this would be the best native addon coming from Mozilla in years.
The other part of me worries it would bring on a new age of Eternal September to Usenet, which has been isolated long enough again to form a particular kind of culture that would seem fragile in the face of sudden mass immigration given the size of the Usenet community today.
Google makes some IMO very weird decisions about seemingly low effort/cost offerings, even if a bit niche, that would seem to be very complementary to products/services that it does put its full weight behind. Dropping Reader didn't make a lot of sense to me for this reason. The lukewarm support for Scholar is another.
Google's infrastructure is geared towards making enormous services cheaper to run, at all costs. As a result, the maintenance burden of Reader was far higher than you might have expected.
That should explain at least part of the decision.
> If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.
Newsgroups were always bundled with email clients, so Thunderbird has support for NNTP.
It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client,
because they are closely related, but not many people
use email clients any more, so not many people are
going to find Usenet that way.
Last time I checked it needed you to subscribe through some provider who charges money, ISPs used to offer it with the Internet access. Is it really possible to access for free?
For some reason your post reminded me of a list I saw quite recently of (surprisingly working) open/free news servers (maybe dotsrc was on it).
I can't seem to remember or find the exact list or page I saw before, but for anyone interested here are a couple of sites with a few of the other servers I remember.
Note: I haven't tested these, some may not work, some may not be deliberately open (perhaps just misconfigured), some may not allow posting, some may require registration, some may carry only a few local groups, etc etc etc.
Also, this post is related to text usage; if any of the following servers carry binary groups it's unlikely they'll have complete files.
The problem with no ability to control the group is the maintainers bearing all the spam costs, as spam gets transmitted from host to host so each user can filter it individually. (Filter it as a group, and you're controlling the group, whoops.) The arms race in email has done severe damage to many aspects of email -- do you think if everyone stayed on UseNet the problem would be better?
Check out Hubski you guys! It's very small right now, but I believe it has a better system to encourage good content. You can filter out anything you don't want to see and follow tags or people you want to see, to create your own feed. When you vote on a post, what you really do is share it with all your followers. The system works very well, even for spam, and it encourages friendly discussion and tolerance, because if you don't behave that way, people will just filter you out and move on.
Being able to find and converse with people who share my niche interests is one of my favorite things about the Internet. It was depressing to be interested in something and having no one to talk to about it.
People are too busy "playing boring politcian" on Facebook. But Reddit allows you to geek about certain topics without getting judged. If i make 50+ posts on FB about my favorite tv show on Facebook, i get called "obsessed" or get defriended
I'm the opposite of this. I spent most of my life up to my mid-20s on internet communities -- first Usenet as a child (8 years old), then SA, then Reddit/4chan. I mostly read Reddit and HN now, but do not read and post compulsively like I did previously. I would easily clear 200+ posts a day on SA and 4chan. There's also the different pockets of people that I met through gaming.
It's been hard, but I've finally broken away from relying on the internet for friends and community. 2017 was the first year that I can remember where I spent more time with RL friends than internet friends.
I agree with this despite probably talking about different communities. It is night and day different than communities based around school and childhood.
Ditto. I wonder if anyone else here spends time on Sufficient Velocity?
It's an unusual place in many ways, not least for having been built by an idealistic (but pragmatic) lawyer who's been using it for, hmm, nation building?
The thing that makes them work where Facebook groups simply don't, I think, is pseudonymity. One of those groups has been particularly powerful, and it is a group that inherently involves being mutually vulnerable, so I certainly would never have joined under my real name, and I enjoy being part of the community even though only a handful of people know my IRL identity.
Reddit has some big problems, but is the best platform I have found so far for these niche communities. And my experience totally chimes with this article: big social media is as shallow as a puddle. Small niches are where real communities form.