I hope that no single organization replaces Reddit. Let a billion independent forums bloom. For the sake of discoverability, it would be nice if a decent subset of them implemented more or less the same API that search engines could call from the outside and that their UIs could expose to users so that users could easily move from forum to forum. But discoverability is double-edged - it builds size but it also brings Eternal September and homogeneity.
As for structure, I think that forums and image boards that are basically just chronologically ordered items of text where each item of text can have either implicit or explicit links to previous items of text are in a sense superior to tree-based forums like Reddit anyway because directed acyclic graphs are a superset of trees.
As for upvote/downvote mechanisms, I have never seen a forum that was improved by them. Such mechanisms are probably good for driving engagement but from the point of view of stimulating thought, I think that as opposed to having an outside algorithm preference certain comments over others, it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with. If a forum provides advanced tools to search and sort comments, that is good, but I would prefer that a forum not build any given sorting other than chronological into its default UI.
Reddit, at least, still allows users to sort in ways other than by "best". In my experience and according to my taste, large subreddits usually are often pretty useless unless I sort by "new" or "controversial". Sorting by "best" all too often - not always, but all too often - just brings the least common denominator up to the top. Another good method for using Reddit is to make note of any individual users whose writings you find interesting and to then just read through their Reddit histories - this can also be a good way to find interesting subreddits that you might not have come upon otherwise.
They did. Your first paragraph describes Reddit perfectly.
> it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with
My sample size is small so this might be way off but here is my guess:
Companies fundamentally want* to be able to treat software developers as completely fungible assembly line workers. The company's dream is to be able to fire and replace all of the software developers at any moment and lose little by doing so. This partly explains the heavy emphasis that tech companies place on process, project management, and so on even if the developers dislike all of those things. The company must pay for recruitment - there is no other choice because the company must get employees in. However, to pay for retention would contradict the fundamental company dream of making all of the software developers completely replaceable. Basically, retaining the employees is not one of the more significant company goals. Companies' actual goal usually is to make it so that the developers are as fungible and replaceable as possible. Companies want to be able to treat the engineering team kind of like an abstract arbitrarily scalable asset in a video game. Want to replace all of the engineers? Sure, push a button and it happens - you might lose 10% of this quarter's numbers but that's acceptable. Want to scale your team up and go from having 15 developers to 30 developers? Push a button! Want to go up to 60! Boom, do it - the point is that the company has the process that makes the developers fungible - to focus on retention would be silly, the company's goal is to focus on recruiting and then turning the new recruits into replaceable and fungible assembly line workers who are part of an arbitrarily and abstractly scaleable team. Companies don't dream so much about hiring amazing developers - they dream more about setting up a process that will let them hire developers at scale and plug them into a money-making machine that keeps going no matter how retention is going. As a developer working for a company, the end-users are not your real customers. The management and all of their politics are your real customers. What they want is to not think about you. If I go to a restaurant and order some food, generally I do not want to think about how many people are working there or what exactly they are doing - I just want my food. Same with companies and developers - what they want is to just be able to turn the development team into an abstract source of software development. Focusing too much on retainment would tie them too much to a given set of developers. They do not want that. What they want is to set up a process that lets them treat the engineering team as an abstract and arbitrarily scaleable machine that creates software.
*When I say that companies want something this is of course anthropomorphizing a process but what I mean is that the overall totality of the people in the company operating according to various incentives lead to things happening that might in short be described as the company wanting certain things.
Well hold on man - why tackle it? So many things genuinely suck that negativity is quite understandable. If what you really mean to ask is "how do I prevent my negativity from hurting my ability to gain power in society?", then we can talk about that. But that is a bit of a different matter.
I agree that it is arguable, but I would say that React is a framework for this reason: usually you do not decide when to call React code, instead React code decides when to call your code.
100 years ago: "legal alcohol is hurting our children"
70 years ago: "atheists and communists are hurting our children"
35 years ago: "drugs are hurting our children"
25 years ago: "violent video games are hurting our children"
Now: "social media is hurting our children"
All were/are probably true to some extent in some cases, but that does not mean that it necessarily made/makes sense to try to turn society against the risky or dangerous thing. Skateboarding hurts some children. Does that mean that we should ban TV shows that celebrate skateboarding? "It is for the sake of the children" is a time-tested way to get people to support authoritarian policies.
Very calm in tone. In Zuckerberg's place, I would have been tempted to instead write something like this: "Hi, censorious ninnies. In the 50s you would have been blaming godlessness for hurting children, in the 90s you would have been blaming video games for hurting children, now you blame Facebook. Please take your desire to police content on Facebook even more than we already police it and shove it up your own ass."
I have no love for Facebook, but my problem with it is not that I think they police content too little, it is that I think they police content too much. No, I do not want to police content on Facebook to save children. Similarly, I do not want to ban controversial books, I do not want to ban extreme sports, I do not want to ban fast food, and I do not want to ban many other things that sometimes hurt people. If I have to choose between, on the one hand, Facebook with all of its shadiness and, on the other, puritanical moral busybodies who want to control what people see "for their own good" - well, I choose Facebook.
I disagree - I think that it should be completely legal to sell cocaine drinks as long as you inform the customers that the drinks have cocaine in them and I think that is should be legal to use even the most psychologically manipulative marketing techniques imaginable. I would rather that it be the responsibility of consumers to avoid getting addicted than to use government power to ban things. Similarly, for example I think that it should be legal to sell skateboards even though people sometimes injure themselves while riding them.
>There should be no question, that what FB is doing here, while not illegal, is highly dubious ethically.
Why, what exactly are they doing that is ethically dubious? So far based on what I have read of this whistleblower's revelations, I do not have a problem with Facebook doing any of it.
Really? You don’t have a problem with an app that causes 1% of teens that use it to develop suicidal thoughts? By the way, according to the leaked study these teens directly attributed their suicidal ideation to Instagram.
Yes, I do not have any problem with it whatsoever. There are probably plenty of books that also cause some percentage of people to develop suicidal thoughts, but I do not want to start banning those books.
This is the kicker I think. Facebook scales 'keeping up with the Jones' up and make it easier. But that's been a common trope since (google search... 1920ish). What Facebook's doing isn't new; it's simply Easier.
When you say, '1% develop suicidal thoughts' - Is that causation or correlation? Maybe I'm missing something; but this seems somewhat like 'biggest target' to me as the world had shrunk.
Politicians who want to de-anonymize the Internet should first do a trial run of de-anonymizing all of their own financial transactions, Internet browsing, use of the post office, and so on. Maybe for a year or so. Then after they have done that, maybe we can get together and see whether they still think that it is a good idea.
This would be sensible because in a democracy the voters are responsible for their conduct. This would make sense. Also external audits of intelligence agencies and their access on information.
To be fair, if China spent several weeks bombing a country that the US did not want it to bomb and, as part of that bombing, China bombed the US embassy there and then said that it had been an accident, I think that this incident would be well remembered in the US 20 years later and many people in the US would doubt whether it had really been an accident.
As for structure, I think that forums and image boards that are basically just chronologically ordered items of text where each item of text can have either implicit or explicit links to previous items of text are in a sense superior to tree-based forums like Reddit anyway because directed acyclic graphs are a superset of trees.
As for upvote/downvote mechanisms, I have never seen a forum that was improved by them. Such mechanisms are probably good for driving engagement but from the point of view of stimulating thought, I think that as opposed to having an outside algorithm preference certain comments over others, it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with. If a forum provides advanced tools to search and sort comments, that is good, but I would prefer that a forum not build any given sorting other than chronological into its default UI.
Reddit, at least, still allows users to sort in ways other than by "best". In my experience and according to my taste, large subreddits usually are often pretty useless unless I sort by "new" or "controversial". Sorting by "best" all too often - not always, but all too often - just brings the least common denominator up to the top. Another good method for using Reddit is to make note of any individual users whose writings you find interesting and to then just read through their Reddit histories - this can also be a good way to find interesting subreddits that you might not have come upon otherwise.