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posted by
martyb
on Monday January 21 2019, @02:42PM
from the Hard-to-be-social-without-a-network dept.
from the Hard-to-be-social-without-a-network dept.
It's been a long time coming but soon the wishful thinking social media site alternative Google+ is shutting down for good. Or for bad as the case may be for the hundreds of thousands of users who still call Google+ a home and who are severely lacking in options for a place to move to. There's always Facebook, but given the anti-Facebook culture prevalent in the G+ network over the years it won't be an option for many. While communities debate the move, admins of communities size up the prospect of migrating years of data to another platform. Google plans to execute the shutdown in April 2019.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 21 2019, @05:06PM (6 children)
I don't care if it's G+, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever else. Long read here about Swedish kids and Televerket, in the '80's. https://medium.com/s/love-hate/how-a-phone-glitch-sparked-a-teenage-riot-eb785c39bd01 [medium.com] To summarize the story, kids discovered how to use the state-run phone system to talk and hang out with each other. No rules, pretty much anything goes. They exploited a glitch in the system, and made friends with each other, and no one was making money off of them.
That is what "social media" is all about. All of these online offerings with their rules and SJW bullshit? Who needs them?
Just provide the connection, then get the hell out of the way. Some subjects may be unpopular, but in a nation of 350 million, there are probably thousands of people who want to discuss that particular subject. Let them find each other, and don't worry about stupid rules. I'm looking primarily at Twitter and Facebook - but there are other guilty parties out there.
That seems to be a good thing about Discord. The admin of any given chat room makes the rules - and if you don't like the rules, you can create your own chat. Tailor the rules to your liking, or just don't make any rules. Discord staff doesn't have much, if anything, to say about what goes in any chat.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @07:38PM (3 children)
BBS's should make a comeback! maybe we can just use ssh instead of telnet to keep it at least a little secure.
getting people to change their ways from emojis and pictures to actual writing might be hard though. but sometimes it requires effort to be social anonymously and without adults/capitalism getting in the way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @09:02AM
Well, emoji are perfectly fine Unicode (mostly anyway), and you can have both emoji and your BBS. I mean, you don't want US-ASCII only BBS, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @11:03AM
Move back to IRC?
Build in support for posting images?
Keep an auto history?
What more could you want?
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Tuesday January 22 2019, @08:08PM
As I posted last week, I've seriously been considering starting up a BBS over SSH. I'm just not sure if anyone other than me would use it and therefore worth the money to rent a VPS.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @11:08PM
And there is the connection. It's in the Internet wire we all have in houses. But it is not used as intended. The problem started by going from semi-decentralized network based partially on mutual knowledge (who is who / who can do what) to platform-dependent centralization when nobody knows nobody, and everyone can turn to spambot every moment. This introduced a need for censorship and ended with "censorocracy" in which people who have capability to make up their lives by censorship have more power.
"Social media" is NOT community. This is the main thing which is notoriously ignored.
The main objective of "Social media" is to create division for society. Samsung and Apple. Creators and remixers. Right-wing seeing leftists' plot in all things and left-wing which takes all things as offending. This is the objective. Divided will try to prove the other side and will buy more, and will not do one more thing.
This thing had to be fixed when XIX-century (or even XVIII-century) publishing model started to fall apart in 1990s. Since introduction of the Net there was no blessed publisher with holy decisions, licensing hegemony and protection money. The Internet gave an equal start, with its few megabytes in a shell account for own stuff licensed in own conditions. This started a community boom in 1990s, when everyone had a website. The problem noticed by publishers was that some people shared knowledge there without paying mafia.
A nicely described model: In late 1990s, some professor, (sorry, I don't remember the name but I know it was like "Dick" or "Pecker"?), shown these communities as made of creators ("digitariat"), distributors, compilers and remixers ("cogitariat") and consumers ("proletariat") - with no space used earlier by publishers. Everyone could be all of classes at the same time, depending on their interests, expertise and data processed. Many people devoted time and energy to share knowledge using the new media, on their own terms, which outed these publishers from distribution chain.
So it was needed to "burn" this energy used for creating and distributing using something other. And it is burned in all these "social media" things. This is outside of Internet's objective which is contacting people and sharing ideas, knowledge, information. "Social media" comes down to ad distribution system, made to keep an used absorbed by throwing usually useless information about other people, but with no intellectual gain to the "user" (?still user? or a newly created product?).
Discord misses the historic capability - to know something, you have to ask and ask forever. A nice alternative would be these open source platforms shown a few comments above, but servers are expensive and these platforms have a poor reach - I don't know any people from hobby forums who may have such account.
P.S. If you again try to find a plot here: No, there's no plot. It's an objective of optimization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @11:58AM
Thanks for the link. That article was awesome.
Reminds me of a BBS we had back in the day.