It’s funny how I spend so much time on HN, yet couldn’t point out a single username (that I don’t know IRL) besides dang.
This is one reason I feel an odd disconnect (anonymity?) with HN that isn’t felt on other social platforms I’ve been a part of. Those often have avatars or some other visual form of recognition that helps put a “face” to a name.
I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I definitely think it’s intentional.
Reddit was originally designed this way, and HN sort of accidentally copied it. Back then, we always said, "content is first". We wanted people to get upvotes for their content, not for who they were.
If you tell me that slashdot is also younger than reddit, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself. I swear it was around in the early 00s, if not before.
The irony is, I had an account earlier but forgot the credentials. By 1996 or so I'd devised a standardised system for creating different but memorable-to-me passwords.
Then again, it blows some folks' minds that I've had and been paying for my primary email (on cix.co.uk) since 1991. My email address is older than the world wide web.
Reddit was originally designed to share links. Then to steal images and memes from other sites. Then to steal short videos from mainly TikToc and Instagram creators (now we're here). It's still a content-first site at its finest. It's just that 'content' itself has changed.
There are a handful of people I recognize, most because they’re people I knew from outside HN (and one because he has the same last name as someone I went to high school with and lives local to me and I always wonder if they’re related but I’ve never asked). But yes, the de-emphasis on user names is, I think, a good thing since it ends up being interacting with content rather than personality.
As an old lag there is a fairly large number of names which I recognise on sight, quite a few of them from the old days of /r/programming and even the main reddit. I'd have trouble listing many of them completely unprompted though.
> It’s funny how I spend so much time on HN, yet couldn’t point out a single username besides dang.
That’s very true. These days, when I come across especially thoughtful comments, I’ll sometimes click through to the user’s profile afterward. I think it’s better to judge a comment on its own merits than to let implicit bias creep in based on things like “CEO,” fame, a high-karma account, and so on.
I've had these same opinions for years. It is an under appreciated social network of some of the top minds and quality comments.
I've been collecting a long list of ideas on what you're describing. Thanks to AI encouraging me to really dive in and use it, I've been quietly working on something for what you're describing.
First step is to improve the HN UX a tiny bit and flesh out a framework for how to code it. Next will add some interesting social features I've been brewing on. Why can't I easily follow someone?
Open source. GPLv3. It isn't perfect, but this is not AI vibe slop, and there are lots of tests from day one. I want to make this sustainable over a long period of time and become genuinely useful to a community that I've gotten a lot out of.
Note, the chrome store is really slow at getting releases out (or I'm too fast), best to install from github releases. It is also buggy and I'm fixing and improving things as fast as I can.
It’s part of why I’ve tried to move my Internet time to smaller forums in recent years. It turns out it’s still possible to have that feeling of community that old forums had, but only if the users you encounter aren’t constantly changing. Forums with personalisation like avatars definitely seem to help a bit, but e.g. new reddit still feels impersonal with avatars and tildes manages personal with a very similar layout to HN, so I think size is the biggest factor
i revoked my HN credentials on my phone because i was arguing too much and otherwise not getting enough sleep.
When you have to get up and walk across a house to tell someone they're wrong on the internet, I try to make sure i won't have to delete it. I am contrite about a few of my off-the-cuff comments.
Either they're joking (and should've added an emoji) or more likely, parent is being childish and phrasing points to finding a "clever hack" (i.e., not injured). There's nothing clever about unethical and criminal pro tips.
The problem with analogies to things like cheeseburgers, gambling, drugs, cigarettes, etc., is:
1. Availability -- you have to go somewhere to acquire/participate in these things*
2. Cost -- you have to have money to spend. That is, it's not something you can consume/participate in for free -- you have to have money to spend.
* Gambling is theoretically freely available via gambling apps. But still comes at a cost.
With social media, anybody can do it for unlimited amounts of time, and for free. All you need is a phone/laptop/desktop with internet access -- which nearly every person on the planet has.
To your points I would add the following difference between TikTok on the one hand and cheeseburgers, drugs, cigarettes, etc. on the other.
3. Targeting -- even under the (debatable) premise that they are intentionally designed to be addictive, cheeseburgers, drugs and cigarettes do not actively target each addict by optimising their properties to their individual addiction.
If I am addicted to smoking, the tobacco industry does indeed try to keep me hooked, among other things by offering me many flavours and alternatives. However, the cigarettes I personally consume are not constantly adjusting their formula, appearance and packet design specifically to satisfy my tastes and desires.
Yes. Target the algorithms, not the method of delivery. Hacker news also counts as social media, but here we all are seeing the same feed on the same site with minimal (if not zero) tracking to try and extract info from the audience.
Even a first step of requiring transparency in the algorithms would quickly shatter this stronghold on people's minds.
Indeed. In fact, you may notice I explicitly left out gambling from the list of 'non targeted' addictions. The reason for that is that the delivery methods for gambling cover the whole gamut from zero to fully personalised targeting, and I didn't want that to distract from the point.
case in point: lots of places have lots of restrictions (either through legislation or just industry norms, usually a combination of both) about advertising for alcohol or tobacco.
And those efforts seem effective to me, at least anecdotally. I don't feel particularly bad about those restrictions either.
Social media companies are also regulated, but we are talking about whether social media companies should be liable for creating addictive content when porn has the same qualities of being easily available and free.
> having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024
That's a mind blowing statistic, and I'm sure this is much more common than we think.
This is why I hope we wake up and realize that social media is going to be the ruin of our society. I hope this trial is the beginning of the end of social media platforms that prey on addictive behaviors.
Sometimes when I notice friends drop off from attending things or talking in group chats, if it's because they have fallen in some pit of social media / internet addiction. I agree it's probably more common than we think because the people who have fallen in to this state are the least visible.
I think AI is going to level the playing field with all these bots that have been used for things like this (including scalpers for those low supply/high demand items), and retailers will (hopefully) have no choice but to address the issue once everyone starts to use/abuse them.
Not to mention a (potentially illegal?) 100% overlay for cookies that only has an “accept” button.
EDIT: there is at least a way to reject them by clicking the link to manage cookies. Still debatable whether this is legal, but at the very least, a dark pattern.
It won't be long before this becomes:
> I largely stopped making _____ because imo unless you're in the top 5% of making _____ AI is probably able to make _____ better than you.
Especially where _____ is anything that can be created digitally.
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