Nonetheless, insofar as people who post content I want to read on Twitter, or the ActivityPub ecosystem, or the AT protocol ecosystem, I'll do my best to read it where it's posted. The ActivityPub ecosystem has serious flaws and so does AT proto, but they're at least free software projects that people can hack on to try to make them better (although of course in any kind of distributed system, the hard part isn't making your changes it's getting a critical mass of other nodes to agree to them)
Maybe we need regional microblogging services so people would be incentivized to use them, maybe China was right all along
There's also this: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirect...
I quit my Twitter account pretty much around the time Musk took it over (he became a more of a looney around the time he had contact with Putin in end of 2022), haven't looked back. I added the ASNs to my firewall, this was before they went with Cloudflare. There are some proxies which allow you to quote from there, but a lot of people are now dual stack (e.g. Twitter + BlueSky or Twitter + Mastodon). So for example following the latest concerning Ukraine is still very much possible without Twitter.
From what I heard, it is pretty much 4chan level nowadays.
I still use RSS and Mastodon.
I think the bar analogy lacks some important nuance. Not participating on the platform is one thing but drawing a distinction between being informed and support for the platform needs a little more thought here.
To continue the analogy, I need not go to a Nazi bar to read the headlines of the local newspaper to see what the latest propaganda is.
95% of it is garbage, but as a member of a targeted class of people I like to see what angles they are coming for us from way ahead of time.
I follow a few game development companies, quite a few language developers (go, rescript, etc), a few news reporters (left and right), an account that posts old maps, Dionne Warwick (no idea why). That's it. What's with all the drama???
I hate these socials. While some posts here and there are interesting, I'll still have to read people's thoughts on politics, what they ate for lunch or how was their vacation in Vietnam. I wish you could only read the authors you follow on the topics you care, but the algorithms don't work like that, and they post about anything.
On the other hand, more in-topic focused boards like HN and Reddit, value short-term visibility over depth. Sure, at least you're only discussing one topic at a time, but how much insights or reflections can you have when discussions die in 24 hours?
Say what you want, but good old vBulletin-like forums are peak internet discussions.
Like how in the world can you compete for insightful-deep topic discussions with something like a plain old forum?
Where in the world can you find so much information, e.g. about the Mercedes W211 E class?
https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w211-20/
I with there were places to discuss, e.g., a specific technology (sometimes github issues are a surrogate), or software design philosophy in general (the mail group of Jon Ousterhout is again, just a surrogate).
But these places just don't exist.
Even more at work, companies would benefit from having long term discussions and threads about product, technologies, etc. Instead we spreading (and forgetting) the same information over and over with teams, slack, jira, issues, conflunce, sync-calls. ugh
It was definitely a good move.
Also stopped using Twitter/X. Immediate mental health++. I was afraid I was losing access to the "pulse" of ML/AI, but the opposite actually happened when I replaced a Twitter feed of shallow AI takes with Huggingface's Daily Papers email list [1].
More papers read, less shallow takes
It's not like this cycle happens every year. There's no reason to put this defeatism out there.
When social communities allow the type of tone you are using, that is precisely how they end up worse over time.
Hacker News downvoting comments like yours is how it has maintained quite high quality over the last 16 years I've been on this website.
If you don't see the irony, let me point it out: this is a real time demonstration that your following statement is not an inevitable thing:
> eventually converges on the same thing in the end: a place to dump out ugly things
When a community has the tools for self governance, then it can resist influences that it does not appreciate. In the case of Bluesky in specific, you may not be familiar with how easy it is to subscribe to labelers and blocklists. This decentralized self governance model allows anyone to curate their Bluesky experience, and it allows sub communities to collectively govern in ways that filter the cesspool and remove the ugly things.
In short, the fact that you are complaining about downvotes while simultaneously saying that it is inevitable for communities to devolve into places to dump ugly things is highly ironic. One thing that you are complaining about, is the solution to the other thing that you are complaining about.
You can’t seem to depolarize yourself from extremes. You call your original post “highly intelligent” and equate any disagreements as being shouted “stupid” at like those are the only two options here or something when they are not.
This was not an intelligent comment. You haven't even identified any real problem or conditions. You've made up a hypothetical to get mad about and called yourself intelligent for whining about your irrelevant complaint in the comments.
An intelligent comment would have some sources, even anecdotal. It would identify a problem and suggest how it might be solved. You've assumed that a problem exists, can never be solved, therefore the whole situation is stupid along with all the people involved.
Not one single word of your comment had any kind of positive or charitable intent. Just pissing and moaning over a problem you imagined.