from Hacker News

The internet's “town square” is dead

by Ariarule on 7/9/23, 3:35 PM with 192 comments

by medler on 7/9/23, 4:28 PM
> If the original Twitter crew had been about 30% less overtly willing to censor news, language, people, or ideas they didn’t like, Musk probably wouldn’t have bought the company, and the blues would still be in control of Twitter
The author makes the same mistake Elon made when he bought Twitter, namely, thinking that Twitter management was hellbent on pushing leftist propaganda, when really they were apolitical operators trying to make as much money as possible. And their masterstroke was convincing someone to overpay for their company by an enormous amount.
by mrtksn on 7/9/23, 4:22 PM
The whole feed based "internet town square" concept is flawed, if anyone have seen an actual European town square you would have noticed that it's nothing like Twitter or similar. In a good town square, you have people minding their own business and the public activities are actually curated(a few agendas that fit in the physical location) and people visit those if they they are interested in.
People don't actually participate in 100 different activities all the time and they are very annoyed if someone is trying to grab their attention.
Also, although there are all kind of people at the town square, those who scream "if evolution is real why the monkey in the forest don't become human" are nuisance for those who already went through the evolution theory and know why monkeys are not becoming human still.
Therefore, the whole concept of discovering different kind of people and being exposed to different ideas is not analogous to a feed with christian fundamentalist and atheists screaming to each other because people have different knowledge levels and some are more up to speed than the others on different topics.
A true town square are the forums where you can actually browse topics and participate in those who are at your level. Reddit is a closer analogy to a town square than Twitter.
by chasing on 7/9/23, 4:25 PM
You have to “control speech” to be able to have a community that doesn’t devolve into toxicity. All healthy communities do it, either implicitly or explicitly. Including Hacker News, which actually has a really good community as a result! Healthy communities are easier to destroy than create. They need protection. It’s not a political thing.
by chasing on 7/9/23, 4:27 PM
Also, the idea that Twitter (or any individual social network) is somehow The Public Town Square is flawed from the start. Such a thing doesn’t exist. There are online communities of varying sizes that have different sets of rules that their members (explicitly or implicitly) agree to adhere to. Calling Twitter (or Threads) a “town square” is marketing or corporate fantasy as much as anything. Most people don’t use these services or even really care about them.
(I think of these services more like bars: They’re public places where people go to cavort and socialize, but there’s an expectation of what behaviors are acceptable and an owner, bartender, and bouncer willing to make sure those rules are adhered to. Don’t like it? Find another bar. There are tons.)
by seydor on 7/9/23, 3:54 PM
The internet IS the town square. Social clubs are like VIP (or more pedestrian) popular pubs
by nickjj on 7/9/23, 4:02 PM
In my mind IRC fills the role of a town square. There's channels with dozens to hundreds of people gathered to chat about 1 specific topic in a mostly unmoderated way (within reason).
by Nursie on 7/9/23, 4:12 PM
> ”I think Zuckerberg’s so-far successful introduction of its competitor, Threads, which rapidly feels like the other global town square, presages one of the last gasps of the united internet”
Twitter was never “the united internet. It’s been a collection of noisy, fractious groups constituting a minority of internet users
by afavour on 7/9/23, 4:00 PM
People will say “good riddance, Twitter was always trash”. Personally I disagree (I’ve been happily using it for years, I just don’t get involved in political shitfights) but even if it is true I will think it’s a notable lesson.
Scaling human interaction up to internet size just doesn’t seem to work. Reddit just about held it together but only because it functioned as a collection of mini communities you could dip in and out of. Almost all larger communities have always been a mess.
I’m not totally sure what the lesson is here but I am very curious where we’ll be in fifty years time. I hope somewhere good, I fear not.
by pityJuke on 7/9/23, 3:59 PM
> The “town square” analogy for social media is another one of those crap ones that somehow got traction. No one actually wants a town square. They want a cafe at the edge of the town square where they can chat to their mates and watch the world go by. They don’t want some bloke with an amplifier in the middle of the square screaming about how Jesus saves. [1]
A take that I'm pretty agreeable to.
[1]: https://mastodon.xyz/@ianbetteridge@writing.exchange/1106775...
by Timber-6539 on 7/9/23, 4:36 PM
Last time I checked, the town square is where a majority of the netizen congregate to throw around ideas. Not some place a journalist conjures up in his mind.
by foul on 7/10/23, 7:20 AM
The internet's town square will not exist no more because quasi-normal people will divide themselves by their usage of some brand of microblog thing? What a stupid take.
A great portion of thought diversity got out of Twitter (be it for quitting or reduced usage or using it thinking of the optics) between 2015 and 2017, and hasn't been regained at all during the Tumblr porn ban.
I instead infer that, for that same reason, the Internet's global flamewar arena is dead for now.
by anotherhue on 7/9/23, 3:51 PM
I assume this is about USENET
by Pannoniae on 7/9/23, 3:59 PM
Social media should be regulated like utilities. They are the "public square" now in all but name - they should be regulated the same way, with free speech enshrined in law just as in public spaces.
Their defence is always "we are private companies so we do whatever they want" - which wouldn't fly if they were a water company refusing service arbitrarily.
by andsoitis on 7/9/23, 4:04 PM
> a single overarching internet is impossible
I don't understand how the author concludes this from their analysis of social media sites.
by t0bia_s on 7/10/23, 7:12 AM
Trust cannot be bought or ordered. With oppressing behaviour of centralised power, naturally we'll go back to decentralised, local way of communication.
We just need to reuse town squares we have in real life.
by DarkmSparks on 7/9/23, 4:31 PM
everyone knows the world was always run from the shady confines of the backrooms of the gentlemans club, speakeasy, bar or bonded warehouse.
not and never the town square.
Threads is no more interesting or useful than twitter was afaict.
And anyway. all the half decent feeds went to telegram 2 years ago.
by kmeisthax on 7/9/23, 5:16 PM
Ugh. So many small things that are wrong here.
Mastodon isn't a single thing. It's many different town squares all trading their posts around. Gab is actually a part of it, despite what most instance operators want - if you REALLY want to be "on Mastodon" and "on Gab" at the same time, you can self-host and do that[0]. Truth Social isn't "on Mastodon" only because Trump's goons turned off federation and blatantly violated AGPL.
I suppose that both disproves and proves the original author's point. Technically speaking, Mastodon is still a "town square". But its users do not want that, because at scale, town squares become endless voids of shouting and toxicity. Even a decade ago on Twitter I was already unfollowing people and tailoring my timeline based on my political preferences. Pre-Musk Twitter's censorious behaviors were almost certainly a reflection of the users' own desires and not some kind of diktat sent down from on high onto an unwilling user base.
[0] I have no guarantee that you would want to stay on both at the same time.
by jscipione on 7/10/23, 12:51 PM
Internet, not internet. Democratic, not democratic. Yes the town square is dead, killed by Democrats and elites like Mark Zuckerberg, killed by Y mods, killed by lockdowns, US and EU government censorship. Without free speech there is no Republic, no freedom, I am a slave.
by c_crank on 7/9/23, 4:02 PM
The town square of the internet is failing at the same time that real life town squares are getting uglier. Food for thought.
by NX9mqsSv8 on 7/9/23, 4:32 PM
In forums for simulated user interaction, it’s important to recognize the conversations as inauthentic and censored. The ideas that are censored are deemed by the censors to be likely to prevail in a free marketplace of ideas and thus threatening. So, the censored ideas are the ones more likely to be true.
by glroyal on 7/9/23, 4:39 PM
Meta succeeded in cloning Twitter only because it picked up engineers who were let go after Musk acquired the company.
Dead weight, albeit dead weight who understood how Twitter works under the hood (the timeline data structure has confounded every would-be Twitter competitor until now, which is circumstantial but probable cause that the former engineers have transferred Twitter's fundamental trade secrets to Zuckerberg).