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Comment by b00ty4breakfast | Hacker News Reader

That's been my personal experience with Mastodon and other "fediverse" projects; they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.

I'm sure there are "nice" instances out there, but I gave up after trying 2-3 and having flashbacks to regular twitter from 7-8 years ago. No thanks

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> they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture.

That's just human culture, or more accurately, human nature. If you gather a bunch of anonymous strangers online in one place and let them run free, they'll likely make a mess of things.

Perhaps it's an unpopular opinion here, but I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.

> I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.

Why are you here there?

Seriously curious. Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.

I share the same sentiment about the HN community, but there are still a lot of interesting articles posted here that are fun to read

> Why are you here

I agree with, uh, assbuttbuttass: "there are still a lot of interesting articles posted here".

As for commenting, it's just a matter of too much time on my hands, temptation, and bad habit.

> Promise not to criticize you or even respond to what you say.

You can respond, anyway. ;-)

> You can respond, anyway. ;-)

Well, since you asked ;-)

I'd agree with you, more or less. I don't find it horrendous necessarily. But I find the focus to be far more on the articles than the conversation. Most of my comments are just me screaming into the void.

Its a different business model though, HN isn't trying to increase your session time as much as possible. I find the UI to actually discourage conversation and interaction.

Its a decent feed for articles.

The culture is fucking terrible

Personally, I came here for the articles. And then like @tqbf, I discovered I had a debilitating case of "someone is wrong on the Internet" syndrome. I'm mostly better, but now I come back for the articles, and post because this is, whether I like it or not, a commons for a community that I'm part of. So occasionally I still get sucked in if only to providing a contrasting voice to some of the grossly unempathetic stuff I see here.

I don’t believe it’s necessarily human nature. But it’s definitely human culture.

I think if a certain contexts encourages a certain behavior, that's not something essential to humanity. if a group of fur trappers has to resort to eating Jean-Luc because they're trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, I wouldn't say that cannibalism is "human nature". I similarly, wouldn't say that the behavior engendered by modern social media is so essential as to be labeled part of our nature ( maybe we could say the adaptability of human behavior to environment and circumstance is inherent, but that's a different kettle of fish).

I don't find this analogy enlightening. Only a few people are ever trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, so of course it doesn't tell us much about humanity.

Whereas millions of people participate in online forums every single day, and not because they're desperate, in danger of death or the like.

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