I didn’t read it yet but wanted to share that according to Graeber, the rise of social media (and podcasts btw) came with what he calls “Bullshit Jobs” (in the book of that name). Before that, browsing the web was a much more active process, you searched for forums, clicked on a topic you are interested in or went on websites and clicked through them, always deciding what to click on.

With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions. That’s something you can do at work when you have some free time and something might come in. It’s not anymore “I want to know XYZ” but “Let’s see what’s new” if that makes sense.

Just a story. I’m always a little sad or nostalgic when I think about this.

I used to hang out at newschoolers.com. It was a North American skiing community. Every night it was busy, and Fridays/weekends especially busy. Discord type of busy, not reddit/lemmy. You could buy/sell equipment reliably. Teton Gravity Research was the unofficial sister site for old people and newschoolers was for park rats. It was thick in culture. People left because of Facebook, ads were introduced to finance servers, new unwanted and badly implemented features were added to attract/retain, the original user base graduated high school, got jobs, and stopped visiting. It was sad. Everyone could feel it dying but there’s nothing you could do, communities are organic and they evolve and go extinct. I remember when an unpopular but industry connected member (eheath - he’s still there! wow. I’m sure he’s a good guy.) was made into a mod people were upset, and he proceeded to be a douche. Lots of things started to go bad, and eventually you just leave because it’s not fun anymore. It was years before I started going to reddit, and I always hated it. Lemmy is better. There is a bit of a forum vibe, though I still have a lot of trouble recognizing names.

https://www.newschoolers.com/forum/2/Non-Ski-Gabber

• A feature that was always there and was great was the member list on the side - you could log in and see if your friends were online. Lemmy should think about doing that. We can see the mods, which is a reddit feature, but I’d rather see online members. You get to recognize people that way.

Aren’t we technically on a forum now? I always viewed reddit as a forum as well.

I absolutely want people to pick other solutions than reddit and zuckerfuck, but I’m not sure Lemmy is the solution either.

The large Instances already overdo the moderation, cracking down on specific words, or people not agreeing with gender issues or vaccination issues. Just a few examples.

And no, you can’t just join another instance because the ones without similar moderation rules are defederated from Lemmy.world, which acts as the center hub of content. So in practice, any Lemmy experience without Lemmy.world is a poor one, filled with tankies and insane things. That’s not what anyone intelligent wants.

I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes. It was fine to not agree. That’s why the discussions were interesting. There was no downvotes. No popularity contests. No karma points (or ok, some forums actually had user levels based on how much they posted, but nobody cared I think).

If you want to build a proper discussion forum, it needs to allow for actual discussions and actual emotions, heated debates, insults sometimes.

At least that’s the way I see it. Or you will just have memes and pointless things scrolling by.