Comment by spartanatreyu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spartanatreyu | Hacker News Reader

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Slight disagree.

"More boring" is a defence against spammers, but not the only the one.

There's also: "Take commercial incentives of the running company out of the picture."

The most prominent example of that is Mastodon. It's software is opensourced, and it's most popular server instance: https://mastodon.social is run by a gGmbH non-profit. (It's hosting company runs it as a non-profit charity for the social good)

Since it's developed in the open without financial incentives muddying up the experience, no advertisements are added and there aren't any algorithmic rankings to be gamed.

And since it's also based on open source, it's easy to share content from other server instances (it's all ActivityPub protocol underneath), and it's also easy to block (defederate) server instances with trolls and other problematic users.

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It's like how twitter was at the start, but better.

If you want to try it out, you can make an account on any server then follow some developers in your languages/libraries/tooling of your choice.

You'll also see what those maintainers are discussing in the open and get an idea of how your languages/libraries/tools are going to evolve in the next version, or even participate in their evolution.

Another important factor, imo, is size. Quality on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, HN, Mastodon is inversely proportional to their size. If a platform gets big enough, regardless of its motives or polish, there will be more incentive to game it.

Platforms like HN and Mastodon are great because they are small. They cater more towards a smaller, more technical community, which it isn't worth it to game with spam or whatnot because they're small and more aware of this kind of manipulation. Smaller "gems" in bigger platforms (think a small, old subreddit) can be good for the same reason.

I guess this advocates more for the small web, which I'm all for, but there's less money in that. I wonder what could practically what incentives could make the web smaller and more useful.

HN is not small and hasn't been for many years. Your comment is item (comment or story) number 39 million 425 thousand 162.

Twitter gets 500 million new tweets every day.

HN has 39 million comments after 17 years.

HN is small.

I wonder how many non-spam human-written tweets every day.

About 42.

Well, quality over quantity.

Yeah, it's not some ten-person forum buried in the annals of the old Internet, HN is popular enough, but does a random person sitting in a Boston cafe know what HN is? Probably not, but they sure know what Twitter is.

I don't see Mastodon getting worse by getting larger.

You only see who you follow, and there's no like/karma/upvotes algorithm.

Everything is sorted chronologically, and if anyone tries to "game" that by posting too much, they'd get unfollowed and/or banned.

Mastodon is a nurtured cultivated twitter.

Personally I follow the CSS/JS/TS community (for work), the gamedev community (for fun), and the space community (for passion)

Oh, I don't mean that scale is the only factor. Clearly, the structure of Mastodon is way better than the structure of Twitter. But, I'd bet that if Mastodon was as big as Twitter, if it was that juicy of a target, it would have way more spam than it does today.

I both agree and disagree, in that; - the amount of spam on Mastodon will surely increase in amount proportional to the size of it's network. And - Mastodon users won't usually see that new spam by the dynamics of the current system because we're only shown content from sources we explicitly follow.

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