Hacker News Reader

Or the site being infested with bots and generally getting slowly shittier?

Reddit feels like it's been on the way out since the API fiasco. Lots of users jumped ship and have been replaced with engagement bots.

Bluesky is small and lame.

Mastodon/Lemmy are fragmented fiefdoms.

X/Twitter is full of dark patterns, bots, and invasive of privacy.

Basically everything sucks.

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Social media is dying if you only include the subset of it that is at least somewhat social. That has been dying for a long time for many reasons like toxicity, rage bait, lynch mobs, spam, bots, and platform enshittification.

But those aren’t the biggest things that killed it. The biggest thing was losing the attention war to doom scrolling. That’s where everyone is now, at least online. They are scrolling.

TikTok, YouTube (esp shorts but increasingly all of it), Instagram, and so on.

Agreed. The linked article touches on that fwiw.

Hacker news is still pretty great imo. It's kinda a social too.

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