I don't use it at all. Social media is terrible, why can't we quit it? I include HN in there.
The two big social media apps I use are HN and Youtube. (Reddit used to be up there but a lot less now because I don't get recommended anything good. They really upped their reliance on the "algorithm" so after I clicked a "drama" link once my recommendations got destroyed with trash.)
HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time. Youtube is either very high value content or very low value content. No in between. Sometimes I find myself getting recommended garbage and I click into it and get mind trapped for a few minutes but catch myself and get myself out of it. I don't want to have to navigate these "dopamine traps" every time I want to watch an interesting lecture or video on a topic I actually care about.
edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless but I still click in a semi autonomous way.
Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube. There seems to be a pattern. Like I've been researching hardware designs for real time image processing lately. Over time the same search terms reveal more and more relevant links. Overall youtube search is completely useless.
And one wrong click and you're inundated with garbage. Same for all social media really. At least hn doesn't have a per user "feed" (yet).
One thing I've noticed about goodreads is there are two distinct types of users. One type gives thoughtful reviews that are all text. The other type give shallow vapid reviews replete with emojis and memes and usually end with "didn't finish the book".
I've had a similar problem with YouTube. What helped me was a) disabling the history; b) heavily curating my subscriptions. I only try to consume content that comes from either my specific searches (e.g. "how to change oil in a motorcycle") or from the channels I follow. You still get occasionally sucked into "recommended" videos, but it is much better than having to rely on the front page of my account feeding all kinds of garbage.
As well as with their parent Google. Did you know the minus sign is meaningless in the search now? Man, Google search is so useless now I'd actually pay a monthly fee (up to $10) for them to give me a bloody regex based search.
youtube is for long-shot the best discovery(maybe tiktok) is not uncommon now that you get high quality videos for channel whith sigle video and dont show trash content from known creators,the new problem is maybe that the high quality content require high quality teams means more money and more pressure to monetize but youtube video quality is leagues ahead from what it was 10 years ago, now you have science, philosophy, history content than produce consistent research by various people content, such as Asianometry.
use instagram reel or twitter and most content is trash, the latter rquiring you to follow the correct people, thats virality.
discovery is hard that why you use more netlfix than hbomax, tiktok than instagram
I tried to navigate youtube search by simply sorting by view count, since I figure that's at least moderately more difficult to game, and not subject to the algorithim.
But it turns out that for more general search terms youtube will simply not show lots of high view count videos, and which ones specifically can change with each search. (It does always does show a large amount of music videos, Indian media, disturbingly repetitive gaming/meme stuff, children's videos, etc...)
So even a ranked list of which video has the most views apparently is algorithmic to some extent.
Youtube recommendations are really good if you exercise self-control over what you watch, conscious of your view history shaping your recommendations. Never click on any video that uses a clickbait thumbnail or title, even if it seems relevant to your interests. The algo will pick up that you enjoy clickbait slop and give you more of that. Ideally, don't even use an account in the first place; use a browser cookie with no account, and delete that browser cookie to start over if your recommendations ever stray too far from your desires. Seed the recommendation system by searching for specific videos that are relevant to your interests. And again, never click on crap, even out of momentary curiosity.
Learn to recognize signals for slop. Slick well-produced video channels with multiple people working for them will tend to become slop even if they don't start that way; having a cameraman/producer/editor on payroll pressures a channel to perform well to pay for those people, so such channels will tend to pump out shallow content to keep revenue steady if not growing. As soon as a one-man channel hires a cameraman, that's usually a good time to tap out. Particularly if the host is chummy friends with the cameraman; the pressure to perform by compromising quality will be greater when the channel creator is paying his friends to help. This is why I had to stop watching NileBlue; as soon as he got a chummy cameraman his video quality took a steep nose dive with sensational gimmicks taking precedence over substance.
I've gone so far as to only go to YT with a browser that clears everything on close. I don't log in to YT, all I do is keep a local file that I use as my home page where I keep the link to the video tab of content creators I enjoy.
When you go in "fresh", the world is your oyster for approximately three videos, maybe four, then the algorithm has completely made it useless. So, I either go through a link to a creator and see what they've been up to lately or I go to a fresh YT homepage and search for what I'm looking for. The first search is probably still heavily curated, but it seems to give me more interesting options. When I find a video I like, I go to the creators page and add the link to my home page.
I don't log in mainly for privacy reasons, but it also causes me to only be able to search my particular bubble, pretty much. Going in from the outside gives me much better results, at least before I've watched too many videos in a chain. I'm a patron on patreon for a few my favorite creators, which I generally swap around every now and then for those who have Patreon accounts. I don't think I've ever bought anything from a creator's sponsor. It weirds me out that randos on the internet are now expected to be commercial shills and personal brand curators as well as video creators.
They also completely broken the search functionality. If I look for a topic I get 10 videos the algorithm decides are relevant and after that I only get random stuff.
So many times I remember to have seen a video about something and I just can't find it even with the right keywords. If I'm lucky I find it on...bing search filtered by videos.
Someone explained magazines to me a decade ago as discovering stuff you don't know you don't know about. That's the value of HN.
I also find that keeping up with the news on the regular basis is a waste of time and it's mostly regurgitations of the same, but when I tried cutting it completely, I find that in a couple of months I am completely out of the loop and it takes quite some time to catch up.
This is not a useful example, but it's a funny one. I was out of the country and away from tech for 3 months and when I opened my door on returning to the US, the delivery guy was a teenager, and says "Man, you have so many good Pokemon in your yard!". I had NO idea what he was talking about and said "Oh, cool". Found out Pokemon Go was a thing a few weeks later.
I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram. Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section. Points aren't even shown next to the nickname so people are more or less equal in comments. Personally I don't have "friends/followers" on this site nor I seek them (which seems the main drive on sites like facebook/Instagram/twitter).
Does HN meet the definition of "social media"? Yes it does, but is it the same kind of social media as these others? I don't think so. I don't see many negatives of sites like HN. Even Reddit could be a nice experience if certain things were tweaked there (atrocious user interface, showing up/down votes next to posts, showing account age, probably a better algorithm etc)
>I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram
I don't either -- HN is the same category as Reddit which is much worse to me.
>Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section
There are plenty of people taking things personally here, all the time, and if you stick around you'll notice that a good number of them either use their real names as a handle or have it in their profile. And there are "celebrities" here just like there are on Reddit, except here it's usually tied to some high-ranking position at a company. For instance, the CEO of Matrix has many comments under the username Arathorn in almost every single post about Matrix.
>I don't see many negatives of sites like HN
Tree-style nearly-endless commentary combined with an algorithmic ranking of "top" stories that may have a big payoff if I just press refresh one more time turns out to be way, way more addictive than "traditional" social media, at least for me. Twitter never hooked me, and I kicked Facebook a decade ago, but even after forcing myself to use a privacy frontend for Reddit and never, ever logging in, I'm still addicted. I spend hours a day scrolling, and resolve to quit, and then go back.
I do the same thing here. It's so bad that I consider HN and Reddit to be as addictive as video poker.
I don't include HN as 'social media' either mostly because it doesn't constantly ping me when I get a reply. I have to check manually. It also don't change much so checking it once or twice a day for ten minutes isn't a big deal.
I feel if we include things like HN as social media then we need to include Newsgroups/BBS, Forums of the late 90s, etc. and literally every site online where a person can post a comment.
Perhaps technically they are all social media but to me when someone says 'social media' I think of the never ending feed of content that is manipulated to keep you coming back like a drug along with notifications about every "like" or comment or retweet (or whatever we call them now), etc.
There isn't any clear definition out there of what "social media" is I'm aware of, but I'd say the basic criteria include some combination of:
- User-submitted content
- Individualized experience based on algorithmic curation, follows/subscriptions, or both
- Ability to directly interact with other users, whether publishing to some kind of profile or "wall" of theirs or sending direct messages
- Users have some kind of durable persona (at minimum a human-readable, memorable account name, but usually a multimedia profile of some sort)
Hacker News mostly has none of these things. A very small proportion of top-level content is user-created and there is algorithmic curation, but not individualized. This is really more of a newspaper without writers or editors. The stories come from other platforms instead and every reader's letter gets published automatically.
Reddit isn't social media, either. It's a discussion board. There has to be something that made MySpace and Facebook different from phpBB and Usenet or why'd we come up with a new word at all? People seem to be using "social media" as a general derogatory name for any potentially addictive, high-noise, low-signal time sink that encourages mindless consumption of undifferentiated "content" and creates bad incentives to creators of such content to abandon truth and artistic integrity in favor of flashy gimmicks and trend surfing.
A lot of the main subs you see on the homepage are not explicitly political subs, but they end up having almost nothing but political content (/r/whitepeopletwitter, /r/facepalm, /r/therewasanattempt) and Reddit seems to ignore me when I block subreddits. So, even though I WAS a reddit addict for 10 years, they changed the formula and now I'm just not hooked anymore. Thanks Reddit!
The one I got recommended once (despite not being subscribed) was AITA. Which is cheap (and I'm certain 99% fake) reality tv content. I clicked it once and now that's it, that's all I get.
Reddit and the subs themselves may not be explicitly political, but the site leans incredibly heavily to one side and seemingly can not shut up about politics for even a moment. I honestly think it might be one of the most toxic, worst for your mental health social media sites that exists.
> edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless
I don't much care for the upvotes (nor the occasional down) but the responses are not always worthless. In fact a count of responses (in total or since last visit) would be more useful to me in the top right of the page where the vote count currently sits.
Someone might be correcting or refining what I've said in a way the I'll find useful, or someone could be asking for clarity on what I've said which, assuming I have time to respond back, might be useful to others too, or might highlight that I'm not as sure as I thought I was originally which again may help my understanding.
This isn't true elsewhere of course, HN is one of the few places online, other than private groups, where responses have a reasonable chance of being useful.
I agree, in addition, it's recommendation engine has rapidly devolved into "suggest only the most popular books in this genre" type recommendations.
Say, if I want to read grimdark fantasy novels, and I've already read all of Joe Abercrombie and Mark Larwence books and didn't like Glenn Cook, good luck getting anything else out of the algorithms. There's no discovery, just regurgitation of whatever has been blessed by the masses.
And that's when things aren't manipulated. Take any popular category and it's all gamified. Someone is manipulating the most recent book to the top of the "best of all times" list, even recent self published crap gets into the top recommendations for popular categories. It's all manipulated garbage and Amazon doesn't seem to have any interest in changing it since it gets them sells or Kindle Unlimited subscriptions for that self publisher.
I've fallen back on critics and awards to curate my read lists. It's not as specific, but looking back on what I've enjoyed reading most recently, almost all of them have been awarded a hugo award. So now I just go through the award winner lists and pick something that looks interesting. I recently discovered the Imperial Radch series this way and really enjoyed it.
You don't have to visit the youtube website. People recommend videos here and I sometimes use a search engine to find them. To watch them I use youtube-dl or VLC. It's marginally less convenient but I avoid a world of nonsense.
I do agree that "social media is uniformly bad" is too broad a stroke. That said, humans aren't exactly the best at discriminating something that feels good from being unhealthy or at least unproductive.
That is the most sane way to consume YouTube content. I’m doing the same on reeder. I have all the channels I care about in a folder and that’s it. Only thing that bothers me is that the RSS feed has both videos and shorts mixed together and I really dislike shorts.
> HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time.
Wonder how we could make it more effective. I’d love a keyword filter. Or an algorithm I can train myself to teach it what I like and don’t like. ChatGPT summaries of the comments to filter the wheat from the chaff would be helpful too.
HN works well because the top stories are same the top stories for everyone. Having the #1 story be unique and algorithm-driven for every user would be detrimental to the site and the sense of community.
I've been thinking of this for a while - something like an advanced keyword filter that would work across most webpages, using a smaller LLM maybe?
Personally I'd love to put in the names of some American cult of personality figures - Musk, Trump, the Kardashians etc.
Ideally it would filter out all posts and comment trees on HN or reddit that are about these people and a handful of other topics. Even if it only worked on those two sites it would be a huge improvement to the internet for me.
Not the first time I see a post here about how terrible Goodreads is. I, for my part have always found it doing exactly its job. I am not an avid reader - around one book a month - and I use it to manage my bookshelves, review the comments before acquiring a book, share my reading progress with some of my friends who also use it, which gives me motivation to start the next book every once in a while. I leave comments from time to time too, mostly for professional books, not fiction.
I don't understand what is missing? Old-school UI? Come on, this is not Twitter, you are not supposed to be hooked to it 24/7. I spend 10-15 minutes on this website once a month, I can live with old-school. Ratings not realistic? This is a joke compared to Amazon. There are authors on the website? All the better, I can connect with the author (actually sounds amazing to me!). Lack of content moderation, although I didn't encounter any serious issues myself, is a problem I agree with if this is the case.
Anyway, maybe the fact that there is no popular alternative speaks for itself. I know there are some alternatives but nothing as known as Goodreads as far as I can tell.
My issue is that they don’t have good recommendations. And they shut down their api and don’t share their data with users who want to calculate their own recommendations.
Their UI is fine. Their ratings are as good as any other ratings.
I would hate a “modern” Goodreads and am glad Amazon bought it and abandoned it rather than Meta who tried to make book readers live stream their reading or whatever stupid stuff they’d try.
There's other places to get recommendations. This site has had some great book recommendation threads. Then there's lots of great threads on various subreddits.
Totally agree. I have a list of to-read books that will last more than my lifetime and I keep adding to it - with stuff I know I want to read. What possible value would recommendations be for me?
I have found that I learn a lot about the books I've read from other reader's reviews, which I tend to read after I've read a book and not before.
I entirely agree, and that is how I use it as well. Really it is just a log of the books I've read and my progress against my annual challenge. I appreciate that I can see the opinions of others, and I ignore 100% of their recommendations.
Agreed, the only "social" aspect of it that I use is when people insist on getting me gifts I tell them books are always a good option and point them to my goodreads to see what I've already read, and get an idea of what I like.
Not exactly what you want, but i would recommend checking this (https://recommendmeabook.com/) one out. It give you first page to read without revealing book name or author name.
If anyone is looking for a better alternative, I can highly recommend Library Thing (https://www.librarything.com). It connects with various library databases around the world for metadata and the forum discussions can yield great recommendations.
The only downside is that it is a bit dated in its UI.
I also use LibraryThing, and I switched over when GoodReads was acquired by Amazon. I love LibraryThing, and they do monthly giveaways of new books by indie authors. I try to recommend it to everyone I know, so thanks for plugging it in this thread.
I’ve used LT since 2006. I like its interface which presents a lot of information on one page instead of lots of white space. And I like its features, groups, discussions etc. Though my use has dropped off now.
I have both LibraryThing and Goodreads and usually use the latter because the integration with Kindle makes it easier to keep my library updated. There isn't much difference between them if don't use the social features of Goodreads.
Agreed. I use it in the same way and it allows discovery of "similar" books. I love it for that. I comment occasionally on the author's I follow. For example, Boris does a lot of reading and review of horror genre books, so I comment on his reviews letting him know if his review helped me to get the book in question or not. That way he knows "someone" is reading his reviews. That's about the extent.
It's used for sea-lion ideological attacks against authors and works, a specific outcome of the general review-spam issue.
The data is terrible and badly governed. There was a recent thread here, I believe, about an author who couldn't get AI-written books out of her name because they simply won't correct their data.
> There was a recent thread here, I believe, about an author who couldn't get AI-written books out of her name because they simply won't correct their data.
Because of the kindle integration. That's it. It's too frictionless that when you finish a book on kindle, you press 1 button to rate it and it updates the book on your shelves to read, adds your rating, and then will set the next book you start as 'currently reading'.
IMO this is an insurmountable moat for any service that would try to challenge it.
This is 100% the correct answer. I've spent a lot of time brainstorming ways to take on Goodreads, and this is the moat that I can never seem to cross.
I read a ton of books, but I’ve never used Goodreads. What is it about Goodreads that makes people want to use it? If you can identify why you want to use it, then you might have identified why you can’t quit it. For me, it is like smoking. I never started smoking, so I don’t need to quit it and feel no desire to start (or start again for those who did quit in the past and are tempted to start again).
Goodreads scratches an itch in my stupid monkey brain by tracking everything I've read. I gain some satisfaction/sense of accomplishment looking back at stuff I've read. I should probably find a better way to track my reading
That, and I also get value out of tracking books I might want to read.
Whenever a book references another book I may want to read later, or there is a HN comment recommending a book which sounds interesting, I'll add it to my "to-read" list. Then when I finish my current book, I can sort this list by average rating to decide where to go next.
> What is it about Goodreads that makes people want to use it?
I dive deep into a number of long-running series. Cosmere/Sanderverse, Star Wars, Dresden Files as examples. Once you step away from a series/topic for a bit, it's hard to walk back and see "What did I read? What's next?" - especially when you're doing it via (multiple) libraries.
GoodReads is the best I've found for tracking so far. I also have a private-notebook for some series - but goodreads is just easier. If you feel negative value in a feature (following authors/communities seems like line noise?) - just don't use That feature. I have ~300 books on my 'Read' shelf - That's valuable information moving forward I use when deciding What's Next.
I use it purely for the Groups. In particular, one group called "The Evolution of Sci Fi" which I've been a member of for some years now. They have a monthly read which I rarely have time to acquire and get through, but have sometimes read recently enough to contribute. Plus various interesting discussions about sci fi past and present.
Goodreads lets me get a list of books I've read, share recommendations with my retired father, and once in a blue moon it makes a good recommendation to me. My biggest issue with books is discoverability. That being said, I must report two or three spammers a day.
I have a modest library, and I used to use it to track things I want to read, but that has been replaced by the "save for later" button in amazon's store.
I've used it but I forget it exists. I wish smoking was like that! I'm not sure what the addictive element is meant to be.
The reviews are poor enough to just be a waste of time I regret looking at. I mostly read non-fiction history, science, health, politics and something I have only noticed recently is that so many Amazon and GR reviews are just political takes - using the review section to advance or attack some position instead of actually discussing the book. Pretty tiresome.
I think I remember every single book I have read that's worth reading, and that list is in the hundreds. Not because my memory is so good, but how do you forget if you actually thoroughly enjoyed it / got something out of it?
edit: I don't have a goodreads acct and don't fully remember what it is, but I think the value there is finding people who like books you like, especially less famous ones, and then finding what else is on their list.
It’s easier than keeping my own cloud doc and looking up titles and authors.
That’s it. I like a list of all books I’ve read and if I liked them. And I like a list of books I want to read.
I’m happy that I can see what my friends read, but that’s not a determining factor of using the site. And way less since no one I know uses facebook any more.
I use it (sparingly) for tracking which books I've read/want to read, getting recommendations and seeing what people say about certain books as (partial) information to check if they're worth the time
this is awesome! As soon as I saw this thread pop up, I thought, "this could be a fediverse app..."
It speaks to the value of fediverse that so many services are becoming fedi-ized. Not just Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, blogs, 4chan, reddit, but even GoodReads.
I have been using Bookwyrm for my personal reading list. Would recommend! Easy to set up.
I hear there are some issues with its licensing. They seem to use some sort of 'anti-capitalist' license which is non-OSI. But I think that its ok, we need to start experimenting again, and clearly the OSI model isn't working.
Do you recommend the instance you are on? I am looking to join, but the English speaking instance list was smallish, and I was having trouble choosing.
Readit News
The two big social media apps I use are HN and Youtube. (Reddit used to be up there but a lot less now because I don't get recommended anything good. They really upped their reliance on the "algorithm" so after I clicked a "drama" link once my recommendations got destroyed with trash.)
HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time. Youtube is either very high value content or very low value content. No in between. Sometimes I find myself getting recommended garbage and I click into it and get mind trapped for a few minutes but catch myself and get myself out of it. I don't want to have to navigate these "dopamine traps" every time I want to watch an interesting lecture or video on a topic I actually care about.
edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless but I still click in a semi autonomous way.
And one wrong click and you're inundated with garbage. Same for all social media really. At least hn doesn't have a per user "feed" (yet).
One thing I've noticed about goodreads is there are two distinct types of users. One type gives thoughtful reviews that are all text. The other type give shallow vapid reviews replete with emojis and memes and usually end with "didn't finish the book".
As well as with their parent Google. Did you know the minus sign is meaningless in the search now? Man, Google search is so useless now I'd actually pay a monthly fee (up to $10) for them to give me a bloody regex based search.
youtube is for long-shot the best discovery(maybe tiktok) is not uncommon now that you get high quality videos for channel whith sigle video and dont show trash content from known creators,the new problem is maybe that the high quality content require high quality teams means more money and more pressure to monetize but youtube video quality is leagues ahead from what it was 10 years ago, now you have science, philosophy, history content than produce consistent research by various people content, such as Asianometry.
use instagram reel or twitter and most content is trash, the latter rquiring you to follow the correct people, thats virality. discovery is hard that why you use more netlfix than hbomax, tiktok than instagram
I am reminded of Pandora stations that eventually loop and play the same 15 songs over and over again. Same problem today in other systems, though.
But it turns out that for more general search terms youtube will simply not show lots of high view count videos, and which ones specifically can change with each search. (It does always does show a large amount of music videos, Indian media, disturbingly repetitive gaming/meme stuff, children's videos, etc...)
So even a ranked list of which video has the most views apparently is algorithmic to some extent.
Learn to recognize signals for slop. Slick well-produced video channels with multiple people working for them will tend to become slop even if they don't start that way; having a cameraman/producer/editor on payroll pressures a channel to perform well to pay for those people, so such channels will tend to pump out shallow content to keep revenue steady if not growing. As soon as a one-man channel hires a cameraman, that's usually a good time to tap out. Particularly if the host is chummy friends with the cameraman; the pressure to perform by compromising quality will be greater when the channel creator is paying his friends to help. This is why I had to stop watching NileBlue; as soon as he got a chummy cameraman his video quality took a steep nose dive with sensational gimmicks taking precedence over substance.
When you go in "fresh", the world is your oyster for approximately three videos, maybe four, then the algorithm has completely made it useless. So, I either go through a link to a creator and see what they've been up to lately or I go to a fresh YT homepage and search for what I'm looking for. The first search is probably still heavily curated, but it seems to give me more interesting options. When I find a video I like, I go to the creators page and add the link to my home page.
I don't log in mainly for privacy reasons, but it also causes me to only be able to search my particular bubble, pretty much. Going in from the outside gives me much better results, at least before I've watched too many videos in a chain. I'm a patron on patreon for a few my favorite creators, which I generally swap around every now and then for those who have Patreon accounts. I don't think I've ever bought anything from a creator's sponsor. It weirds me out that randos on the internet are now expected to be commercial shills and personal brand curators as well as video creators.
So many times I remember to have seen a video about something and I just can't find it even with the right keywords. If I'm lucky I find it on...bing search filtered by videos.
I also find that keeping up with the news on the regular basis is a waste of time and it's mostly regurgitations of the same, but when I tried cutting it completely, I find that in a couple of months I am completely out of the loop and it takes quite some time to catch up.
This is not a useful example, but it's a funny one. I was out of the country and away from tech for 3 months and when I opened my door on returning to the US, the delivery guy was a teenager, and says "Man, you have so many good Pokemon in your yard!". I had NO idea what he was talking about and said "Oh, cool". Found out Pokemon Go was a thing a few weeks later.
Does HN meet the definition of "social media"? Yes it does, but is it the same kind of social media as these others? I don't think so. I don't see many negatives of sites like HN. Even Reddit could be a nice experience if certain things were tweaked there (atrocious user interface, showing up/down votes next to posts, showing account age, probably a better algorithm etc)
I don't either -- HN is the same category as Reddit which is much worse to me.
>Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section
There are plenty of people taking things personally here, all the time, and if you stick around you'll notice that a good number of them either use their real names as a handle or have it in their profile. And there are "celebrities" here just like there are on Reddit, except here it's usually tied to some high-ranking position at a company. For instance, the CEO of Matrix has many comments under the username Arathorn in almost every single post about Matrix.
>I don't see many negatives of sites like HN
Tree-style nearly-endless commentary combined with an algorithmic ranking of "top" stories that may have a big payoff if I just press refresh one more time turns out to be way, way more addictive than "traditional" social media, at least for me. Twitter never hooked me, and I kicked Facebook a decade ago, but even after forcing myself to use a privacy frontend for Reddit and never, ever logging in, I'm still addicted. I spend hours a day scrolling, and resolve to quit, and then go back.
I do the same thing here. It's so bad that I consider HN and Reddit to be as addictive as video poker.
I feel if we include things like HN as social media then we need to include Newsgroups/BBS, Forums of the late 90s, etc. and literally every site online where a person can post a comment.
Perhaps technically they are all social media but to me when someone says 'social media' I think of the never ending feed of content that is manipulated to keep you coming back like a drug along with notifications about every "like" or comment or retweet (or whatever we call them now), etc.
- User-submitted content
- Individualized experience based on algorithmic curation, follows/subscriptions, or both
- Ability to directly interact with other users, whether publishing to some kind of profile or "wall" of theirs or sending direct messages
- Users have some kind of durable persona (at minimum a human-readable, memorable account name, but usually a multimedia profile of some sort)
Hacker News mostly has none of these things. A very small proportion of top-level content is user-created and there is algorithmic curation, but not individualized. This is really more of a newspaper without writers or editors. The stories come from other platforms instead and every reader's letter gets published automatically.
Reddit isn't social media, either. It's a discussion board. There has to be something that made MySpace and Facebook different from phpBB and Usenet or why'd we come up with a new word at all? People seem to be using "social media" as a general derogatory name for any potentially addictive, high-noise, low-signal time sink that encourages mindless consumption of undifferentiated "content" and creates bad incentives to creators of such content to abandon truth and artistic integrity in favor of flashy gimmicks and trend surfing.
But that describes virtually all of pop culture.
A lot of the main subs you see on the homepage are not explicitly political subs, but they end up having almost nothing but political content (/r/whitepeopletwitter, /r/facepalm, /r/therewasanattempt) and Reddit seems to ignore me when I block subreddits. So, even though I WAS a reddit addict for 10 years, they changed the formula and now I'm just not hooked anymore. Thanks Reddit!
Reddit is so much nicer with all of the toxic crap filtered out.
I don't much care for the upvotes (nor the occasional down) but the responses are not always worthless. In fact a count of responses (in total or since last visit) would be more useful to me in the top right of the page where the vote count currently sits.
Someone might be correcting or refining what I've said in a way the I'll find useful, or someone could be asking for clarity on what I've said which, assuming I have time to respond back, might be useful to others too, or might highlight that I'm not as sure as I thought I was originally which again may help my understanding.
This isn't true elsewhere of course, HN is one of the few places online, other than private groups, where responses have a reasonable chance of being useful.
Say, if I want to read grimdark fantasy novels, and I've already read all of Joe Abercrombie and Mark Larwence books and didn't like Glenn Cook, good luck getting anything else out of the algorithms. There's no discovery, just regurgitation of whatever has been blessed by the masses.
And that's when things aren't manipulated. Take any popular category and it's all gamified. Someone is manipulating the most recent book to the top of the "best of all times" list, even recent self published crap gets into the top recommendations for popular categories. It's all manipulated garbage and Amazon doesn't seem to have any interest in changing it since it gets them sells or Kindle Unlimited subscriptions for that self publisher.
I've fallen back on critics and awards to curate my read lists. It's not as specific, but looking back on what I've enjoyed reading most recently, almost all of them have been awarded a hugo award. So now I just go through the award winner lists and pick something that looks interesting. I recently discovered the Imperial Radch series this way and really enjoyed it.
Is it though? Don't you think maybe the billion of social media users around the world are getting some value out of it? It's a pretty shallow take.
Wonder how we could make it more effective. I’d love a keyword filter. Or an algorithm I can train myself to teach it what I like and don’t like. ChatGPT summaries of the comments to filter the wheat from the chaff would be helpful too.
Personally I'd love to put in the names of some American cult of personality figures - Musk, Trump, the Kardashians etc.
Ideally it would filter out all posts and comment trees on HN or reddit that are about these people and a handful of other topics. Even if it only worked on those two sites it would be a huge improvement to the internet for me.
Dead Comment
I don't understand what is missing? Old-school UI? Come on, this is not Twitter, you are not supposed to be hooked to it 24/7. I spend 10-15 minutes on this website once a month, I can live with old-school. Ratings not realistic? This is a joke compared to Amazon. There are authors on the website? All the better, I can connect with the author (actually sounds amazing to me!). Lack of content moderation, although I didn't encounter any serious issues myself, is a problem I agree with if this is the case.
Anyway, maybe the fact that there is no popular alternative speaks for itself. I know there are some alternatives but nothing as known as Goodreads as far as I can tell.
Their UI is fine. Their ratings are as good as any other ratings.
I would hate a “modern” Goodreads and am glad Amazon bought it and abandoned it rather than Meta who tried to make book readers live stream their reading or whatever stupid stuff they’d try.
I have found that I learn a lot about the books I've read from other reader's reviews, which I tend to read after I've read a book and not before.
The UI is adequate. Who cares?
I don't want or need it to do more.
The site tracks multiple literary awards: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/books.asp
The site tracks books by nominations and awards: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_top_noms.asp
The site tracks top book recommendations by literary critics: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists.asp
And finally, most read books. https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_top_reads.asp (I hate that most sites don't allow me to sort not by rating, but by votes cast, or by review count)
The only downside is that it is a bit dated in its UI.
Here's my profile, if anyone wants to be book-nerd friends: https://www.librarything.com/profile/awesame
Why do people care about any social functions on it?
And the UI was always bloated and clunky.
The data is terrible and badly governed. There was a recent thread here, I believe, about an author who couldn't get AI-written books out of her name because they simply won't correct their data.
Worse, those books were being sold on Amazon!
https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-pirated...
IMO this is an insurmountable moat for any service that would try to challenge it.
I recently came across it in a youtube video but haven't used it myself.
Edit: video I came across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PFFJlyiv28
Whenever a book references another book I may want to read later, or there is a HN comment recommending a book which sounds interesting, I'll add it to my "to-read" list. Then when I finish my current book, I can sort this list by average rating to decide where to go next.
I dive deep into a number of long-running series. Cosmere/Sanderverse, Star Wars, Dresden Files as examples. Once you step away from a series/topic for a bit, it's hard to walk back and see "What did I read? What's next?" - especially when you're doing it via (multiple) libraries.
GoodReads is the best I've found for tracking so far. I also have a private-notebook for some series - but goodreads is just easier. If you feel negative value in a feature (following authors/communities seems like line noise?) - just don't use That feature. I have ~300 books on my 'Read' shelf - That's valuable information moving forward I use when deciding What's Next.
The reviews are poor enough to just be a waste of time I regret looking at. I mostly read non-fiction history, science, health, politics and something I have only noticed recently is that so many Amazon and GR reviews are just political takes - using the review section to advance or attack some position instead of actually discussing the book. Pretty tiresome.
edit: I don't have a goodreads acct and don't fully remember what it is, but I think the value there is finding people who like books you like, especially less famous ones, and then finding what else is on their list.
It’s easier than keeping my own cloud doc and looking up titles and authors.
That’s it. I like a list of all books I’ve read and if I liked them. And I like a list of books I want to read.
I’m happy that I can see what my friends read, but that’s not a determining factor of using the site. And way less since no one I know uses facebook any more.
It speaks to the value of fediverse that so many services are becoming fedi-ized. Not just Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, blogs, 4chan, reddit, but even GoodReads.
Thank you for sharing this link!
I hear there are some issues with its licensing. They seem to use some sort of 'anti-capitalist' license which is non-OSI. But I think that its ok, we need to start experimenting again, and clearly the OSI model isn't working.