I must admit I've indulged in constrained writing when I was a teenager with the same purpose: circumventing spontaneous layout errors in Word when writing a paper for school, feeling a non-negligible amount of anxiety due to the deadline being around the corner. Terrifying.
Look, we should make a concerted effort—a huge one, I know—to strip away all that is potentially of value in X, and through pulling and separating it from the whole, establishing dignified alternatives to every single one of them.
Here's what X does "well":
- Witness media/citizen journalism.
- Text publishing (narrowed down to short-form and very opinion-based, but still).
- Link sharing (there are TONS of links to great pieces of media; the vast majority of posts containing links to pirated content are never removed).
- Self-promotion (art, video games, software, etc.).
Now, imagine all of these facets turned into dignified, decentralized, and uncensorable platforms or protocols. It might sound like wishful thinking or some kind of utopian aspiration, but I really think we're fighting a battle for Internet freedom RIGHT NOW. What we do in the next two to five years will establish how much of it we'll get to keep in the long term, because there might be no turning back.
Small pushback here: it (and bluesky too) is absolutely atrocious for art, at least as a consumer. Once in a while I stumble upon an artist who only posts their drawings on twitter/bsky, and it’s pretty much impossible to browse their historical works because the „media” tab is just an infinite scroll without any organization; and that’s assuming they don’t also post 10 photos of their cat or other life updates in between their art.
It’s obviously still popular for posting art for many other reasons (I just dislike putting „X”, „art” and „does well” in the same sentence). So IMO the replacements - and lots of these use cases already gave replacements! - struggle simply because of network effects, not their inherent quality.
Wait. Is it not against the HN guidelines to regularly submit links to your own sites? Isn't that considered self-promotion and, thus, against the rules? I've got nothing against the author, personally, as I'd do the same, but seeing his submission page, I'd like to know how normal getting in trouble is for this practice or if the guidelines are enforced at all in this sense.
emailing hn@ycombinator.com is possibly a better way to raise a question about moderation like this fyi. mods may not see this comment but they probably will see a direct email.
theyre probably the only ones who can answer your question / nudge you in a direction of understanding appropriately.
No, I don't think it is. I didn't want to reach the mods necessarily. I wanted to check what the picture was regarding the general opinion on this kind of practices, hopefully with personal experiences from regular users rather than, potentially, getting some kind of formal statement that is further from what the actual moderation activity is like, either coming from moderators themselves or from users flagging or downvoting content.
>Powerful LLMs will be deployed at global scale in the next few years, and will dominate the Internet, and increasingly, ordinary life.
This kind of judgements or predictions trying to pass as imminent and unavoidable truths about the future are disgusting. They always feel like a means of propping up a certain status quo or ideology that favors the business of the people behind these foreboding statements.
Ads have destroyed our culture. Just look at the fundamental change YouTube underwent in 2012 when they made all users eligible for monetization. It turned it into junk/infomercial TV.
I don’t disagree with you at all, but it’s not like we didn’t have alternatives. We could’ve just paid for the content, directly subsidising the creators we like.
>We could’ve just paid for the content, directly subsidising the creators we like.
That wasn't an option. And if it had been, they would've rolled out monetization through ads anyway. If you believe otherwise, there's too much we disagree on to sum it up here.
It wasn't an option because people weren't willing to pay. A bit tautological, I know, but it simply wasn't a viable way to fund content. Think how many people use google versus paying for kagi.
There was literally no mechanism, there were no YouTube memberships, there was no Patreon. You could maybe donate to a PayPal link as a one time transaction.
>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline
Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.
Hmm... To my mind, the best way to commercialize software is the old way: pay for the binaries of every major version. This, of course, bars the option of using the software online, and makes pirating it easier, but I think it's the most fair.
>I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.
That was a critical turning point, to be sure. But what came about with the conjunction of social media and the smartphone around 2010 was a much more impactful one, as it made the Internet undergo extremely essential changes, not just a qualitative (and quantitative) modification of its userbase. The Internet became the media outlet for hypercommercialism and late-stage capitalism, basically, and all the societal changes we've seen since are byproducts of that paradigm shift.
