Relatively niche but traditional bulletin board forums are good. Recent posts to the top do tend make some threads be attention hogs, but there's a human mod in the loop if the forum is small enough.
I suppose chats (usually Discord) also fall into this as well. A smaller community there can be similar to a smaller community on Mastodon, forums, etc.
Any other thoughts? How do people discover new blogs?
Side note, I think I realized or came to the belief about 10 years ago that large groups of humans suck. Moderation becomes impractical or ineffective; content discovery becomes manipulated like this post is talking about. Similarly, large communities on a monolithic platform have to be monetized -- which results in clickbait of a sorts to maintain engagement.
And RSS. It never went away. Just use RSS.
So whatever they share on there is how I get my social-media awareness. It's basically intentionally a very very narrow filter. It has to be.
Then, subscribe to paid publications, journalism, podcasts, newsletters.
And I feel society could go further in acknowledging the evolution of social networks.
They border on surrogate families, at this point.
Q: So, are there terms for the rules which are implicit or explicit, that apply to joiners of these private chat groups? Pseudo-kids?
I'm a huge fan of the channel, and that video is mostly great and insightful. But his being "puzzled" at the way people use the subscriptions "feed" is kinda surprising. The low percentaged from that feed should lead to asking questions to understand why, instead of assuming people are "doing it wrong". People use subscriptions as a sort of meta bookmarking system. It's also a way of honing their algorithm. People can have a wide variety of interests. Just because someone is subscribed to a channel on anime doesn't mean it's the thing they're looking for at the time they dip into that feed. And some channels just fill the feed up with posts that don't always necessitate the work of pruning it. So, that firehose ends up being a lot of noise. The ideal would be some sort of in-between. Where you can pare down the subscriptions feed based on a current interest. One doesn't need to see the very latest post by a creator of they aren't someone who is chronically online.
I think we will still see the emergence of "human algorithms" that personally curate content for you.
Launching from the Subscriptions is an intentional act by people who are actively trying to avoid the Recommendation page, or where the Recommendation page failed to surface what they wanted.
I would not be at all surprised if any using of the Subscriptions page triggered YouTube to adjust their algorithm for that user to see more of what they played on the Recommendation page. They probably see the use of the Subscriptions as a failure of the Recommendation engine.
For a short while my YouTube app on my AppleTV was showing Watch Later and Subscriptions when it launched. I loved it. I assume they were just A/B testing, because it stopped doing that after a while.
What works for me is checking if people I respect in a domain also blog or link elsewhere. That is how I found Peter Norvig's blog... or maybe it was on hacker news.
Some of my favourite YouTube channels post very infrequently (one video every few months) whereas others post every single day. The YouTube algorithm seems to know this and pins the low frequency guys’ new videos right to the top when they come out.
However... for me, the communities come first. I mean I do have a goal in my internet usage, and this goal comes before any principled stands (mostly; there are exceptions). So if, for example, the hobby communities around games and crafts I enjoy form in Facebook, what can I do? Facebook sucks as a platform, but I want to be in those communities because I enjoy being part of them. It's a trap, but one where there's no easy way out.
As for YouTube: my search history and the algorithm are my main use of YT; I wouldn't dream of turning them off. Because I basically use it for two things, my hobby things (subscribed to several channels I like) and watching cartoon clips with my daughter, all the algorithm ever recommends me is exactly those two things: cartoon clips and things related to my hobbies. Never rage bait, never random nonsense. When I click accidentally on rage bait inducing stuff, I remove it from my watch history; I know this isn't perfect but it works in the sense I don't get recommended that crap.
Also, YouTube Premium because I can't stand ads. Yes, I'm aware I'm paying the mafia thugs to leave me alone. It sucks.
This is no defense of YouTube, I know it can turn to shit any minute, but at least for me the algorithm works.
The one thing that is absolutely driving me nuts is the AI-driven en-slopification of the internet. I wish AI got magically banned from most venues. I want to interact with humans and human-created stuff, not AI spam. I think this is a battle that cannot be won, to my eternal sadness.
Again I must repeat I do agree with the sentiment of the blog post, and I wish the internet got de-enshitified again. I'm not sure it's that easy though.
uBlock Origin has been able to block 100% of Youtube ads in my experience so far; granted I don't visit Youtube all the time. I also use yt-dlp to download videos so that I can timeshift them and watch them later when I'm not connected to WiFi and yet not burn through my phone data. This also happens to exclude ads, though that's not my primary purpose in using it.
Also, while Youtube claims that adblockers are also against their Terms of Service, if you actually go read https://www.youtube.com/t/terms you'll see that their claim is not supported by the actual language of their ToS. They forbid you to "access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content" without their express permission. But adblocking is not altering the Content of the service, it's blocking certain videos while letting other videos through. If there was a service that detected "here's a word from our sponsors" parts of the video and removed them, that would be altering Content. But the ads are not part of any given video, rather they're external videos inserted at certain points into the video you're watching. Selectively blocking video A while watching video B is not forbidden by any part of Youtube's Terms of Service.
So go ahead and use uBlock Origin with a clear conscience, unless you can find the part of their Terms of Service that actually forbids blocking certain videos while letting others through.
What about mobile and the YouTube app?
But, AI search is here. When you write for hours will it be just to have AI quote or amalgamate it, so you can have a link sit by it that few will click on? Or will you submit it to some old Yahoo-like index, HN, or peer-messaging app that reaches maybe typically 10 people typically or 100,000 once for your 15 minutes of fame?
When you write something fairly long, don’t do it for the clicks, unless you need the money. If you have something to say that’s that you think is important, sure, write it, but don’t bet on anything but making a few people mad. Do it because it’s what you want to do. AI can’t take that away from you, yet.
I’m sure I’ve recently read something great that was written by AI, though. It’s not all slop. It’s only a matter of time now before Armageddon.
Reminds me of the last line of R.E.M.’s ‘Radio Song’ (1991)… “Now our children grow up prisoners All their life, radio listeners” < https://open.spotify.com/track/5UBeN0XvvIvnEjyp6uThr4?si=V_Q...>
However, RSS! People have literally emailed me to tell me that they are unsubscribing from my newsletter but "Don't worry, I follow you through RSS." My traffic is larger than ever thanks to RSS. I syndicate the full content, not just a summary, yet people still click and visit my tiny blog.
Google traffic, mainstream social media, all of them don't care about my blog. But from time to time, random people send me an email, and that makes up for it.
Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs.
Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010[1]. And Technology Connections is only a moderately popular channel. If you look at the bigger channels like Mark Rober it is more like 350x.
What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video.
It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people. Nothing stops people from writing blogs today. They'll probably even get roughly the same (small) number of readers that blogs pulled back in 2010.
[1]: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist...
That's what's kind of insane, community forums took maybe 20-30 people to feel "active", but you can't get a big enough slice of attention from that many people to actually use forums, even though the Internet has grown massively. Discovery is really hard: it used to be that community websites were able to claw their way up Page Rank, but these days it's just hard to compete with major websites and SEO slop. Even if you manage to snag a few people, they are very likely to drop off quicker, and the "feel" is a lot different when they're all social-media-brained anyway. The proof is in the pudding: most forums are dead, and forums that are still alive are mostly ancient and very obviously less influential and smaller than they once were. People are too distracted by things that actively claw away attention, and people who are drawn in by social media tend to bring a bad kind of energy to traditional forums anyways.
It is true that you have bigger audiences nowadays with modern social media. Part of that is just the fact that the Internet is bigger (somewhere between 2x to 3x bigger) but another major part of that is the consolidation. Though, it's also worth noting that comparing YouTube subscribers to blog readers may not give the best representation. Entirely different concepts, for entirely different media.
Unlike social media, few of these forums have mechanisms to "like" or upvote posts so there is no reward for posting just to attract attention, whether it be positive or negative. That changes the dynamic IMHO. People post to seek answers to their questions, or to share their knowledge and answer other people's questions. This is the way.
I'd include HN in this group of ye olde internet forums. It does have a mechanism to vote, but it's different and the expectation of the readers are brutal to frivolous posts (of which I have made only couple and paid for dearly).
Today's kids will still do that, in their own way. I'm not convinced there's anything here other than old man and cloud. We did it our way, in our time. I don't think this generation is actually for-reals-this-time the one where technology finally neutered human curiosity and wrecked it all.
jmclnx•1h ago
But yes, I agree pretty much with the whole article.
NegativeK•49m ago