Comment by andix

True for the popular subreddits, but there are occasional niche communities that imo managed to keep the forum vibe (e.g., r/progmetal, r/cpp).

> I miss phpBB and Invision forums.

As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence before: I remember when they screwed all existing "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again with v4.

Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.

>Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.

On spacebattles you get infracted for chan-like (or instagram-like) behaviour. It's all about how strict moderation is. They do allow likes (but there's no algo)

phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about.

People's habits changed.

I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.

I miss slashdot 20 years ago :/

The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.

It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.

Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.

After a certain point, these threads start sounding like,

"I hate my rights. I hate the town square. There is litter in the common square. There is a child outdoors. Take away my pubic square."

I use old.reddit.com but I feel like I have complete control over what I see. It's new posts, I check them and then I leave.

That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.

What I find particularly bad about Reddit is the platform is specifically designed to amplify group think and silence competing opinions. All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. It can turn subreddits into little bubbles where like-minded people upvote each other and almost never have to see dissenting opinions. That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit, but it can be a big problem or even dangerous elsewhere.

I agree completely about Reddit. It's a clickbait factory with a misinformation density that makes my Facebook feed look downright informative.

I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of quality.

Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've known feel like they've had their hope about the future hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a stream of content telling them that everything is awful and will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket website now.

I've been on reddit long enough to get sick of the constant reposts. They really should have a filter for that.

Smaller subs can still be decent but I agree about popular and larger subs. They’re just brain rot and engagement bait now.

> I no longer call them social media.

Social media is the correct name for what they are now, they're channels that push curated content out to their users.

The thing they used to be is social networking.

it started with FB before IG, but infected IG once Zuck bought it

but things really took off when TT cracked the code for endless scrolling of "relevant" content

Really good question...TL;DR: I'd put it around when Mark Z decided Instagram also had to be Snapchat. (copied Stories) It normalized a behavior of copying.

I had gotten completely out of these apps, then ended up in a situation where I needed to use Snapchat daily if not hourly for messaging, and needed to use TikTok to be culturally literate. (i.e. I got into something romantic with someone younger).

It was a stunning experience. Seeing _everyone_ had normalized this "copy our competitor" strat, hill-climbing on duration of engagement.

YouTube Shorts is a crappy copy of TikTok with mostly TikTok reposts and no sense of community.

Snapchat has a poor clone of TikTok that I doubt anyone knows exists.

TikTok is the ur-engagement king. Pure dopamine, just keep swiping until something catches your attention, and swipe as soon as it stops. No meaningful 1:1 communicating aspect (there's messages, but AFAICT from light quizzing of Gen Zers, it's not used for actual communication)

Instagram specifically is hard for me to speak to, because Gen Zers seem to think its roughly as cool as Facebook, but my understanding is millennials my age or younger (I'm 37) use it more regularly, whereas Gen Z uses it more as like we'd think of Facebook, a generic safe place where grandma can see your graduation photos, as opposed to spontaneous thirst traps.

You're in luck! They recently rolled out updated parental controls letting you block it.

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/updates-youtube-supervi...

"YouTube has introduced enhanced parental controls allowing parents to manage or block YouTube Shorts for teen accounts. Parents can set daily time limits for Shorts ranging from zero to two hours, configure custom bedtimes, and set "take a break" reminders" (AI summary)

If WhatsApp got banned, all those groups would simply switch to Telegram or Signal or similar. It would be very easy.

Check out the NewPipe app. It works only on Android — it’s YouTube for minimalists. No Shorts, no feed, no ads.

The second a ban is announced everyone would just migrate to the next thing. That's the nice part of social media and communication apps, they're easy to migrate off of.

> extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.

If you want to block Shorts. I recommend you to try out revanced which gives you youtube without any ads and a lot of other customizations.

To be honest, I find it funny that paid youtube customers might shift to revanced which is technically piracy jsut to remove shorts.

I was this close to rooting the phones but she had just bought a new phone.

But if pricing wasn't the concern for me (which right now it is but I don't think for many HN users it might be), here's what I suggest.

Go buy a phone which can be easily rooted and also use an somewhat secure os (just short of graphene)

Patch revanced (I have even made a nix flake or some nix file [i don't use nix that much but I was curious and ended up using LLMs to generate the file] whose purpose was to take android file and patch it when I was in nix, but I don't have it with me right nwo as I may haev lost it)

Have in the options the short block option.

Newpipe is great as well but it doesn't really allow having comment support.

Also given that HN is a very techie and well hacking with software community. If anyone's interested to take an challenge within Java/Kotlin (Unfortunately, they scare me) then I have got an idea for you guys:

"But the option of turning shorts back on can still be toggled. I wish if anybody whose an expert in java/kotlin can take a look at how revanced works and maybe how to have a revanced patch which can block shorts by default (additionally with ads preferably too with the download option patch as well & the sponsorblock) while atleast in the revanced specific settings option blocking just the option/toggle switch to turn shorts back on."

Also I am a teenager. I would consider the fact that I am on this website partially because of a loop of youtubers that I started following [ Fireship the goat before he turned VC -> Primagen the legend -> Theo t3 (I do feel like he's not the best guy following but he covered so much about YC that I ended up opening news.ycombinator.com and reading it and not watching him read it and ended up making account)

oh yeah before Fireship, I used to follow Code with harry when I was around ~13 yo. I learnt python from him many years ago before it was introduced to us in school so much so that I ended up picking the finance subject out of curiosity and I enjoyed both finance and tech.

One of the funniest stories from this whole is when Code with harry loved one of my comments on youtube loooong time ago and I was around 14 or osmething and then my mum saw it and she didn't know what loving a comment in YT mean and she got suspicious about it and questioned me and then I had to describe hearting a comment to her xD.

Oh yeah. I started learning about python itself around this time because one of my cousins whom I deeply respect who works in aerospace but back when in his university started mentioning how he worked on a ~2-3k loc and he mentioned python and I was like hmm what's python.

I don't know if a parent is interested to hear this but I feel like teenagers really replicate those they admire. A lot of my traits first started just being around that cousin & he actually taught me about assets/liabilities when I was in 5th grade and taught me chess which both became very obsessive points for me later down the life (My joy when I finally ended up beating him at chess fair and square)

I don't think that I do that well academically per se though, it really just depends on my mood so :/ yeah but I really ended up butchering some prestigious college's paper real hard and still tensed about it but honestly as a teen, I don't even know why I am typing this but my point is that your kid would have a personality and just nudge him in the right manners & let him think for himself to think that he reached at a particular conclusion. I do feel like that's generally how I approached and I was the youngest of my whole entire family tree so that made me more mature but I do feel like it came at a trade off of wishing to grow up fast asap when I was a child and now wishing to go back too seeing say not being able to cope up with massive study efforts or competition but that's another matter I guess.

Though parenting is definitely really really hard, kudos to every parent out there.

Did go a little tangent so sorry about that.

Hackernews is also addictive. Fortnine is addictive. World of Warcraft is addictive. NFL is addictive.

Addiction does not strike to me as a unique trait of the social media.

The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.

i think most users need more screen blocking control than they get out of the box on iOS. tools like one sec [1] have been invaluable for me.

[1]: https://one-sec.app/

> Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic chatrooms.

They were not a downgrade, they just worked the other way. With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did that too.

With early Facebook, you would meet somebody at a party, have fun together, and decide to become friends on Facebook, not much different from exchanging phone numbers, but somehow better.

I remember people complaining about the degradation of the Usenet experience after AOL brought more people online.

Not many digital cameras, not enough bandwidth for multimedia either. Your “face” was a nickname.

Agree, I consider Reddit worse than Tiktok because of the downvote. Even a mild lean in one direction immediately results in extreme viewpoints bubbling up to the top and all other opinions silenced. Few people I know spend much time there, but the one that does sticks out like a sore thumb, always finding every opportunity to get upset about whatever the outrage of the day is.

It's a shame that HN's "don't talk about HN is turning into Reddit" guideline is there. It's preemptively used to shut people down when there are real issues with threads randomly devolving into uninteresting politically charged therapy sessions.

thanks for that insight

> ....the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such

I wonder where tate got his ideas and influences from. And why he's free in the US.

I'd argue it's closer to the ability to search it with Google to get alright non-clickfarm responses to questions, or product reviews.

likes and comments aren't social?