Discord and Reddit are great, but they have this "gamer/nerd" brand attached to them which I think prevents the general population from joining.
What do you think?
You know how in Minecraft (and other games) how they have infinite maps? You just keep on exploring and the game generates new lands for you to explore? That is what the future of social networks will be.
Probably the only people who'd bother to engage are some geeks who've confused themselves into thinking a social network is just about generating messages for consumption.
Also, such a fake social network might be able to replicate BS political slapfights, but I'd think it would fall on its face when touching on anything that's not repetitive or baroquely self-referential. It'd get old fast.
What would be the point of that? I thought the purpose of social media was to interact with people.
95% of Reddit is a cesspool...never the subs you frequent, though...
I heard people around here don't like that...
Reddit, no. Reddit is 15+ years old now. It is what it is, a news aggregator site with volunteer mods to police content. I don't see how they grow either revenues or users which is why they are trying to ipo and cash out.
Same thing with various Discord communities that recruit from Reddit where your participation in the subreddit is used to determine if you're trustworthy.
If you don't know how to get access to those Discords, you wouldn't know that they exist.
This is what I want. There. I said it. Go lay down with the lambs on Reddit and Facebook to cry more about it.
Discord is a instant messaging product that reflects modern social media priorities of walling everything off behind a user login; anathema to the public-facing nature of Reddit and Digg. If there's anything that prevents regular people from joining Discord, it's that you actually have to be told to join a specific discord, for something you're interested in. You can't click a link from someplace and see something interesting happening there.
This is why I've not used Discord. I don't know anyone or anything there.
Discord communities are regressive in that they're not indexed by search engines so a lot of the activity and information there may as well be nonexistent.
If clearnet can't see it, it's inherently of less utility to me.
Subreddits can make themselves more like Discord via private subs or approval-only posting but the majority of subs aren't this way. Reddit has a nice wiki feature. Downvoting doesn't remove posts. This is all great.
The only thing better than reddit would be a standard MediaWiki instance or regular old web forum. Something less centralized.
And yes, your web forum run by a cabal of mods could devolve into a censured echo chamber just like any niche subreddit, but this will never not be a problem. As long as my censured echo chambers are visible to web crawlers, the collective Internet can retain SOME level of agency.
Even 4chan boards are archived in several places. Despite inconsistent moderation, bad-faith dialog and the fact that it's ostensibly an echo chamber - we at least KNOW exactly what it is because there's a paper trail. On the flip side, HN has its own paper trail of good-faith dialog here: https://hn.algolia.com/
Discord is a black hole. And worse - it's tens of thousands of niche black holes, each one representing a community that otherwise would have found its home on the clearnet.
being constrained to support git is a fantastic constraint.
one of my most active repos right now is just ranting about alignment mostly lol
if anything searching github for politics hits a bit different, there is some heavy stuff in there like a db that tracks every swedish politician XD
Reddit has subject-based discussions, good SEO, and subreddits are distinct enough to have a sense of place. One downside is that outsiders can just drop in and post, often without reading the rules, so you will often get a constant influx of newbie questions - the eternal September problem.
Discord has no SEO, so you’d need some other way of helping people find it. It seems better for people who don’t want to be found?
Why do you presume the general population actually want to get away from "the noise", or that they even consider it noise? They're the ones making the stories and posts and aren't so happy that you called their feed "noise".
I think the future of social media looks a lot like Instagram, because that's where social media is today, and it's crazy, I know, but some people actually like Instagram.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Excited for things like Lemmy[0]. If everyone had their own Lemmy instance it would vastly improve the Internet and social media.
If you believe all those people talking are real people you'd be very wrong. Most are bots designed to harass contributors, threaten credibility, and waste time resources without providing anything back.
I think it's too difficult to speculate what the next big social platform is/will be though. It goes through cycles from what I've observed. Generally the platform changes in a direction that the community at large doesn't like which causes a fragmentation to occur and other sites pick up the loss to start the process again.
So it feels like a lot of communities want a space where they can carefully vet who can participate, lock out those trying to cancel or shut them down and keep discussions among themselves without randoms jumping in and stirring up trouble.
But it has changed - Reddit used to be amazing. I agree with /u/JimtheCoder's comment: "95% of Reddit is a cesspool...never the subs you frequent, though... "
I hope the future of the internet is not reddit.
If what we're at is called late-stage capitalism, since it is the theoretical end of the road, there's nowhere to go but backward.
