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Comment by fatdog | Hacker News Reader

Authorities of all sorts love the bully narrative because it legitimizes their demands for compliance. Social media is undermining to them because people don't want to be supervised.

The real reason social media sites die without moderation is not because it alienates people who take bullying, it is that when there is no way to become a moderator, people seek status and power elsewhere. Reddit survives because it is a status pyramid scheme. HN survives because of similar aspiration to be seen as that smart person in front of a VC audience, a kind of Enders Game fantasy.

Facebook and Twitter are waning not because of trolls, but because they have signaled a nannying supervisory role that reduces overall user optionality, and takes away the thing that drew people in in the first place: Hope.

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If any of what you claim is true, I am an idiot and you are a genius.

>when there is no way to become a moderator, people seek status and power elsewhere

This is such an odd way to look at the world, I would need quite a bit more explanation. Not everyone is ambitious and competitive.

>HN survives because of similar aspiration to be seen as that smart person in front of a VC audience

Many of us (you included) participate here without any connection to our 'real' identities.

>Facebook and Twitter are waning not because of trolls, but because they have signaled a nannying supervisory role

I haven't seen this study, and my own anecdotal evidence says the novelty is wearing off.

I regret to say I might have some bad news for you.

However, not everyone is ambitious and competitive, but not everyone uses social media. They do seek a sense of approval (or attention), even if it is defracted via a pseudonym. Most social studies are irreproducible bunk anyway.

Our 'real' identities are but a hash away, where you give me a place to contact you and tell you the contents of this sha1 sum: b967696ff8376ccd0feb6170b469e23588d702bd . If you wanted to get fancy, we could start by agreeing on a modulus and a base....

I don't really see Facebook waning, but it did effectively disprove that removing anonymity reduces bullying. I maintain a minimal presence there and most of the time report mobbing and harassment and I've never had anything removed. If you want your post removed, say something minimally racist. If you want impunity, post the address of somebody that shot an animal, inviting people to "get them."

I don't think Facebook is waning.

read reports of rate of user growth slowing down, teenagers switching to other platforms, and my own view that it is a millennial demographic phenomenon, like a pop genre.

They can make more money, but imho it will be through value added services on their graph and service diversification, not on user growth against todays advertising model.

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