Comment by fellowniusmonk

Comment by fellowniusmonk a day ago

I think it goes far deeper than curation, it's that all tooling that encourages self determination and discovery has been stripped out of UIs.

Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes)

The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives.

We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine.

We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki.

But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens.

So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb.

We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.

ryandrake a day ago

Even when we do have the search tools, we have no assurance that the output of the tools is trustworthy and not biased towards whatever brings the most money to the toolmaker. And we have a lot of history with reasons to believe that our tools are not trustworthy. The software industry has shit its own bed and thoroughly lost all credibility. To the point where I have zero doubt that any new software is acting in its own best interests and not the user's.

Reply View 0 replies

vladms a day ago

I honestly think we have more tools and they are more powerful than "before".

I would give an example: find a weekend hike.

Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.

Now: multiple websites both hike focused and more generic that give you reviews, photos, comments. Generic websites (openstreetmap, google maps) that allow you to check further details if you wish so, some with open data.

I think people should take more responsibility and stop blaming so much "the algorithm" and "the profit". It's the same as with smoking. Even if most people agree it is bad for health, 1 in 5 people still smoke.

Reply View 2 replies

darkwater a day ago

> Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.
Counterargument: the hiking app was good 10-12 years ago when it was used by the overlap of tech enthusiasts and hiking enthusiasts, which provided good routes made by expert people (just like the books and maps before). Now you have a cacophony of tracks recorded by anyone, with lot of back and forths because they got lost as well while recording it. Oh and you need a monthly subscription to properly follow the hike!
(Yes, I know you can still find books and maps)

Reply View | 1 reply
- vladms a day ago
  
  Not all areas had a hiking app 10 years ago. I doubt is the case even today.
  And then, if you were "different" than the average preference, you had to put the effort to select the stuff good for you. Not that different to "fighting" an algorithm.
  The difference might be now that more people have a "chance" to find what they want, and "before" there was just a "specific group" that was happy. I get that "the specific group" might feel "is worse" in such a case.
  Regarding the quality, I hate "following the hike" (I mean people complain about "algorithms" but then following a hike is fine ...?) - I just have some markers and look each 15 minutes on the map (which also means back and forths are not an issue).
  What I would love to see more often (and maybe would fit with the use-cases described here of curation) would be finding "favorite" people and getting their "content" across applications. Like, now I can't check the google maps reviews of people that I follow on strava or on Instagram or of editors of openstreetmap... Everybody does their own little walled garden (which I am fine with) but I need to find again and again the reasonable people.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies

Henchman21 a day ago

You make a solid case for abandoning the web. To be clear, in my mind I separate “the web” from “the net”; the web exists on top of the ‘net!

The web has become a cesspool of AI slop, SEO trash, walled gardens, and of course, bots of all kinds seeking entry points to everything. The dead internet theory seems more real every day.

I think humanity will ultimately abandon the web. The day cannot come soon enough for me.

Reply View 3 replies

immibis 13 hours ago

The net has also gone to shit with ISPs blocking things, NAT and CGNAT. (I'd ignore CGNAT if every ISP with CGNAT also supplied IPv6, but they don't)

Reply View | 1 reply
- immibis 5 hours ago
  
  Addition: A recent front-page Hacker News article was censored by my ISP, but I could access it through Tor.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
whytaka a day ago

It's no complete solution against AI slop but I've been working on www.webring.gg which is a democratic webring manager. To join, websites are invited and voted on by current members to keep slop from polluting the integrity of the webring.

Reply View | 0 replies

th0ma5 a day ago

Kinda wild to read a post on here so true it stops you in your tracks. People are missing a lot of opportunities.

Reply View 0 replies

BlueTemplar 21 hours ago

Platforms are closed by definition, if it's open source it's not a platform any more.

Reply View 0 replies

tomjen3 17 hours ago

Tv tropes seems an undervalued platform for "finding media that engages with a specific idea", however the downside is that once it starts to get used for that purpose, someone will learn how to use it to push their content and then it will be worthless.

For curation to work, you have to trust the currator.

Reply View 0 replies

AlienRobot a day ago

>We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins

No. Not really, no. We have like 20 open source platforms already. Nobody uses most of them. The ones that people do use are extremely boring compared to any closed platform because they were created for the worst possible use of social media: letting people post their opinions online. For the average user they often lack highly requested features like making profiles private because the open source platforms decided to be decentralized as well adding enormous complexity to them. That also comes with privacy issues like making all your likes public.

People could just use Tumblr if they wanted. Text posts of any length, add as many images as you want anywhere in the post you want, share music, videos, reblog other's posts. But people don't go to Tumblr.

You could create the perfect platform but people still wouldn't use it because they are too addicted to drama, arguing online, and doomscrolling to calmly scroll through a curated catalog of music that someone spend 3 years publishing on their blog.

Reply View 2 replies

immibis 13 hours ago

This comment was down voted but it's right. We don't need more open source platforms - we need more successful open (source code doesn't matter) platforms.
Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering).
Also open source people tend to make software instead of services. Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone - it's software you can install on a server to make your own Twitter clone. Mastodon is software and Twitter is a service. mastodon.social is a Twitter clone. The only exceptions to this are highly P2P softwares like Bitcoin, where the software and the service merge into one.

Reply View | 1 reply
- AlienRobot 3 hours ago
  
  >Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering)
  I watched that PewDiePie video[1] of him using Linux and I found it extremely funny that this guy was like "Linux is awesome! Freedom! (literal USA flag in the background) You are a god now!" and then every Linux-focused channel reacting to that video was like "yeah, you can play games, but not all of them. Yeah, it works, except... Yeah, you can customize but he will grow out of it when he needs to get work done..."
  Linux people are downers. It's like I was watching the second coming of Stallman selling to everyone the idea that you get to control what your computer does, unlike on Windows. You can customize it, you can optimize it yourself, you can remove everything and add anything. And that he had been having so much fun doing it. The man literally told his audience that everyone should use Linux so Linux gets better. While the people who should be promoting it the most insist that "Linux is not for everyone."
  It really feels like I peered into some sort of alternative reality in that video and it was really refreshing.
  And I think that's the problem with FLOSS, what FLOSS truly lacks.
  FLOSS tends to be merely "an alternative." It should be more than that. It should be freedom. It's absolutely ridiculous to me that I can change the font and color of the text of my post on Tumblr, a proprietary closed source social media, but I can't do that on Mastodon, on Bluesky, on Lemmy, and I bet not even on Pixelfed or Peertube although I never really used them. Where is the freedom? I don't have the freedom to change my text color? I don't have the freedom to opt into an algorithmic feed in Mastodon because the developers have opinions about that? I don't have the freedom to follow someone from Threads because my instance's administrator wants to LARP as Internet police? Richard Stallman would be spinning in his grave if he had one.
  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0
  
  Reply View | 0 replies