It was interesting to visit the subreddits of random countries (eg /r/Mongolia) and see the top posts all asking if fb/Insta/WhatsApp being down was local or global. I got the impression this morning that it was only affecting NA and Europe, but it looks like it was totally global. The numbers must be staggering of the number of people trying to login.
I think the mods throttled logged in users to discourage over-discussion and thread creation. There’s no rhyme or reason for read-only to be snappy and logged-in to be crawling.
And how simple it actually was, just turn off the sites. Like a giant global, societal parental control setting.
Here I thought that this snake had wrapped itself entirely around all of us, but it really didn’t. All we have to do is ‘flick’, turn it off. Body image issues on Insta? Not today kids.
How simple some of our biggest problems are to solve. It does make one hopeful.
Yes people said the same thing about television and by and large most people think Television had some pretty bad side effects. A dumber society, all kinds of depression began manifesting in people who were sold an image of ‘reality’ via ads/unrealistic shows, the gutting of ‘journalism’ into 24-hour news, none of that stuff was wrong.
The main issue with WhatsApp as the primary platform of communication is that it’s exclusive. You can’t actually switch to Signal and continue with business because you’d need everyone to switch with you. Tech has yet to go through it’s ‘industrialization’ phase where one of the main advents was replaceable/interchangeable parts.
WhatsApp cannot be pointed to another network, it’s total vendor lock-in. Today happened at a non-critical time. If this happened during a hurricane, or any other disaster, the critical nature would be exposed.
Right now we’re just amused, but the implications are real. Facebook has way more accountability in all of this than just, as Zuckerberg said ‘Senator, we sell ads’.
> Tech has yet to go through it’s ‘industrialization’ phase where one of the main advents was replaceable/interchangeable parts.
I disagree, tech has had periods of exactly this. Open protocols and APIs meant that you could write against almost any app or service that used them and switch them out and replace them.
In the early to mid 2000's, this was the case for a lot of things in the tech world, especially when it came to communication and messaging. It's only recently that we've gone removed those open protocols and APIs in favor of proprietary systems and silos.
That spirit is still alive today in some open source software.
> Tech has yet to go through it’s ‘industrialization’ phase where one of the main advents was replaceable/interchangeable parts.
Not going to happen without legislation. Maybe not even with it.
Industrial standardization was driven by the US Army around and after the time of the Civil War. The Army wanted rifle parts to be replaceable by any spare of the same type, not only those from the same batch as the gun.
There is no large single buyer with "social" apps, and the incentives for vendors are to try to lock in their customers.
That's why instant messaging needs open standards like Matrix, which make switching apps and provider a nobrainer, because it almost wouldn't matter which one you would loose.
Additionally, only one of many service proviers would be seriously affected if a service goes down.
Yes, why shouldn't the next standard (like 6G) introduce support for a better messaging network than SMS? With group chats and image support. Each carrier could decide if you can send unlimited messages or a few thousand. In any case it would remove this dependency on a single company.
The problem with tweets on transgender bathrooms is that you can be attacked for them by either side at any point in the future, so the user OverTheCounterIvermectin should have known better.
Maybe if you’re logged in? The past dozen times in the past dozen years I’ve peeked in at Slashdot, not logged in, it’s a pile of “frist psot!” and abuse. That is solid contrast against HN, where I prefer to be logged-out because it hides so much trash; logged-in, I see more down-moderated low-value crap.
Encouraging people to be logged-out must reduce the response rate to bait, and also reduce baiting, especially if tight moderation reduces bait’s impact on sincere and productive discussion.
I had showdead enabled for a while and it's surprising to me how little downvoted crap it actually is on HN. But I agree HN has some quality posts on many topics so lurking experience is great in contrast to many other sites nowadays.
HN basically forces you to build a modest amount of karma capital if you typically post controversial comments (eg your comments have net 0 karma, +5, -5). My karma hasn’t budged in ages because everything I post has a bunch of people agreeing and disagreeing with it. But, I’m okay with that since I built enough capital to do this. If did this around 50 karma, one or two comments on a tough thread would have put me under.
Melatonin works well for me, possibly due to it actually working, or that I’ve created a trigger behavior that my body acts on (pop melatonin == time to sleep).
