> It's a single list that everyone sees. No personalization, meaningful customization, recommendations, or notifications. I'm not sure how it can be considered "intentionally addictive."
It doesn't need to be personalized to be addictive, in the same way that tobacco is addictive without personalization.
I didn't say it was a necessary condition, I'm saying that those are the typical ways in which social media sites are designed to be addictive, and this site lacks all of them, so I'm wondering how it can be said to be intentionally designed to be addictive.
Yes, and it is addicting as any of the others. I quit Twitter and Bluesky a while ago, locked myself out of my Reddit account, but HN is one of the hardest that I found to rid of.
To me there were two ways of using social media: #1 interacting with people I know about things in my life and #2 interacting with third-party content and then people I don't really know.
To me Facebook, Instagram and Twitter went completely downhill when it became about #2 for me and my social circle. Twitter was the first, followed by Facebook and then Instagram. I just deleted them in that order. To me they became divisive, angry, political, it made following certain friends impossible, it made people addicted to it, it generated influencers, it made certain friends behave strangely IRL (communicating via meme language only).
HN is definitely #2, but way less political due to moderation.
I like the fact that there's less politics - I know that many people might call it censorship or something, but I feel like it does do somewhat to reduce doomscrolling, as it is one of the topics that people are deeply invested about. Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism (low-effort social conservatism, kneejerk reactions to technology, toxic startup grindset positivity), that I still tend to get sniped by.
For interacting with the people I know, I try to collect Signal/Discord contacts for those who I find valuable enough to talk at a future point, with the end goal of moving all contacts I know to Mikoto Platforms (a messaging platform that I am building).
I wonder if we can even call what happens here with politics "censorship". Apart from things that get flagged, political articles, or anything that causes flamewars, are still there if people want to keep posting/replying... they just get dropped out of the homepage. So it's really anti-doomscrolling. And the exact opposite of what Facebook/Twitter/Instagram do!
> Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism that I still tend to get sniped by.
> they just get dropped out of the homepage. So it's really anti-doomscrolling
Can those two sentences really live together? I mean, if you go hunting down content and more importantly discussions outside the homepage, isn't that some flavor of doomscrolling?
I have an E-3 visa sponsored by my company. I know that it doesn't have a direct path to green card; so anything that I should be doing now at this point for permanent residency?
Underlying status has no bearing on green card options. Those in E-3 status can pursue green cards. The issues, which can be managed, involve traveling on an E-3 visa when in the green card process, extending E-3 status when in the green card process, and renewing an E-3 visa when in the green card process. But our clients sponsor E-3 Australians all the time.
Bsky does not fix any of the core problems with Twitter. It's still fundamentally a "town square" with algorithmic feeds that keep you engaged. It actively tries to transplant the culture of Twitter to itself, which is something that I don't wish to deal with at all.
It presents itself as a "town square" but because the platform has such strong behaviour in severing interactions between accounts, in practice it consists lots of isolated silos of users echoing the same views to each other ad infinitum.
A forum like HN is much more of a town square because pretty much everyone sees the same content in every set of comments, with just one toggle ("showdead") to modify that.
I've had a particularly bad breakup with my ex-girlfriend who I met on Twitter (I was the one responsible for the falling out), and I had to delete my Twitter account for two reasons:
1. The open, "town-square" nature of Twitter meant that it was easy to run into each other again, and she was feeling uncomfortable sharing space with me.
2. This was taking a huge toll on my mental health at the time, because just being on Twitter (or any of the many Twitter clones, for that matter) was reminding me of my relationship with her, just because of how the algorithm worked.
I still think Twitter provided value for me as a startup founder, for marketing and networking purposes. But It wasn't really matter of if it provided value or not; Twitter was driving me to death in the most literal sense of the word possible. To choose life, I chose to leave Twitter.
As someone whose startup builds social platforms, I am extremely turned off by the idea of "public square" models for the internet, after these incidents. We shouldn't aim to get everyone into a single feed, where you are given a curated feed, designed to engage you for as long as possible for the whims of advertisers, as opposed to the utility of the users.
We did block each other mutually, but the world is a small place, and the algorithm works to ensure that the world is a small place, as you're usually only one or two degrees of separation away.
It doesn't need to be personalized to be addictive, in the same way that tobacco is addictive without personalization.