alt Hacker NewsHow we lost communication to entertainment
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I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight:
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
>Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive.
>That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform.
Easily the best post on HN so far this year 2025, thanks.
Very messy situations that we're at the moment for our communications platform but sadly it's true.
> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly."
There's nothing I can add to this.
The author makes some solid points, and I don't love Uber the company, but I can't accept the notion that ridesharing is a shittier experience than taking taxis.
Only someone who willfully forgets how terrible taxis are could say that.
> We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0."
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators.
Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult.
The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.
It took me a long time to notice that the word in the title is “massage”, and not “message”, in Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage (An inventory of effects): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
Links to various editions: https://www.biblio.com/the-medium-is-the-massage-by-marshall...
Also of interest, notes about the observer being the observed in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things — https://www.biblio.com/9780060916091 — and The First and Last Freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom
This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint.
Dansup has built a photo-sharing app on top of ActivityPub, and we humans are a lost cause because the app doesn't also do text-only messages?
Is that the gist of it?
Text and chat (and the voice forms) are alive and well for communication.
Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.
That's not communication being lost, it's media.
Resonates for me. I consume a bunch of content daily, but it's RSS mostly. Gemini, too. None of it is Facebook et al. I am in groups with friends and family on Signal and on Discord, and in email.
It feels more boring, for sure, but it is vastly more satisfyingly "human", if I can describe it that way.
Yes, I'm over 50.
Social Media fills the same role that Alcohol used to. As far as debilitating addictions go, it does seem to be a small improvement though. Driving afterwards isn’t a problem, for example.
Economics. Entertainment and monetizing eyeballs is much more lucrative than charging for communication services.
Soooo, when my email client is text-only and doesn't show me the attachments from the multi-part, it's "actively destroying the Fediverse" ? Ploum doesn't make any sense here. A "platform" such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube etc. (Do not mistake with "client", there's multiple Peertube "clients" or "frontends" for instance) using ActivityPub shouldn't have to implement and provide the user with the whole spec, otherwise just make the "ActivityPub" platform, implement everything there why even bother making other platforms?
> Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore.
I get what is being said, but i disagree with the framing. The "brainwashing" happened in two stages, and the first stage is perfectly logical.
Most people don't want just 1 identity, and they want separate spaces for being different.
If you're already OK with having two accounts on BBS, what is 1 or 2 accounts more for thefacebook.com?
I wonder if the author is aware of Neil Postman's work, especially "Amusing ourselves to death". It seems very relevant to this article.
>Communication networks are not profitable.
Ma Bell tells me they may not have considered all possible angles on this matter.
"All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected."
This isn't true. You can still meet in person or make a phone call.
As for news media... They tend to be at the beck and call of whoever owns them. Most of them use the same press agencies but promote political binaries to the exclusion of other viewpoints.
I think the desire to not centralize identity has more to do with it than anything. We present different facets to different communities. The pseudo-indelible nature of internet commentary means saying something to anyone potentially means saying it to everyone, in any context.
That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.
What resonated for me is the framing shift: not "centralized vs decentralized," but communication vs consumption
Reading through this thread, I can't help but think that Stanley Elkin got everything right when he wrote George Mills. The blurbs and reviews of George Mills often reduce it to being about the failures of the 99%, but I think it is more about why the 1% succeeds and the answer is fairly simple, because the 99% wants the 1% to succeed, it absolves them of all culpability. This is modern (contemporary) life, absolution. George Mills seems to only increase in relevance as far as I can see, but it only recedes in relevance in the eyes of the public because it offers no scapegoats.
This time it is different, right? The first George Mills was correct in believing that, but we don't live in his times.
IMHO communication is entertainment sometimes. Most of the “communication” we do day to day, like small talks to colleagues, or tweeting some posts, in my opinion, is just a way to relax and have fun, like patting each other electronically.
> Communication networks are not profitable.
Lost me on that one. Communication networks provide significant value and can be quite profitable. That's a whole industry.
The book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman seems really relevant here. The thesis is that different modes of information are best suited to different tasks. Postman argues that television is best suited for entertainment. So the programs that do well on TV will naturally tend to be entertainment.
That book was written in 1985, but the core observations are also applicable to modern cellphones (which have become, for the majority of users, entertainment devices).
Postman then talks about how our communication systems have degraded as a result of entertainment being the strength of our current modes.
Fantastic read.
> I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology
Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives?
Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period.
Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?
I don't get the hangup on having multiple accounts. The point of AP is that you can read any kind post, not create any kind of post.
There is a truth to consumption over communication, but that is in the destruction of third spaces and the increasing difficulty in making friends. The fediverse is a force against that in my view, even if it has some of the creature comforts of regular social media.
Ploum is one of the people getting me into blogging 12 or so years ago. I'm so glad to see it popup again here, it's like a big piece of nostalgia. And the piece is current. Thanks Ploum!
Communication was mostly lost before the rise of social media—assuming we ever had anything more than isolated pockets of actual communication, which I am not convinced we have. Literature has been exploring this for a good many decades, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a good example and even shows how our relation to it has changed in the 80 odd years since its release; these days when it comes up the interpretation/discussion about it is more often than not, about social causes, which is depressingly ironic, it is using the novel in the same way the characters of the novel use Singer.
> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly."
This has been my biggest beef with Facebook. I have an FB account, but never use it, anymore. By walking away from it, there are a number of folks with whom I can no longer communicate.
In some cases, that’s fine, but in a couple, I sincerely miss them.
I like the idea behind the fediverse, but find it too “fiddly” to use. That’s often an issue with things designed by engineers, for engineers.
There’s long been discussion of “One ID to Rule Them All,” but that brings in the inevitable (and completely valid) point of who arbitrates/controls the infrastructure for that ID (“and in the Darkness, Binds Them”).
The thing is, folks really want convenience. If it’s not provided as a benevolent resource, an opening is made available to less benevolent people. It’s going to happen, and all the hand-wringing in the world can’t stop human nature.
I feel that public discourse is particularly vulnerable to the medium. Who controls the medium, controls the discourse, and, as we’ve already seen, that can have serious consequences in the real world.
Not a new conundrum. Social Media has simply sprinkled Miracle Gro onto the problem.
I’m not sure there’s any real solution. I am thinking that today’s newer generation (“Alpha”?) is developing a “thick skin,” and maybe, is becoming resistant to people that manipulate communication. I’m fairly despondent about my generation. We seem to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the shysters.
The author’s ideological bent against Big Tech shows through most clearly in the passage on Uber:
> Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights
There are valid complaints about Uber, but most people consider it a materially better service than taxis most of the time. They vote that way with their wallets, long after VC subsidies ended, and often even when it costs _more_ than a taxi.
>A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post
and
>When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago,
I am confused.
> But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social!
Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up.
I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.
Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front.
For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)
But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).
This article makes me think of how defiant Discord has been against all of this, and how slowly I'm starting to succumb to many of the same forces, although much slowly than other platforms. It's a minor miracle they never got bought up/sold themselves.
Also reminds me of the Dark Forrest Yancy Strickler stuff.
This only makes sense if you only read the headline.
Social media is yet another strange game where the only winning move is not to play.
I found this a bit odd as I don't recall ever thinking of social media as about "sending messages", and only loosely would I say they're for "communication". They're mostly for one-way communication, which is essentially what entertainment is too, so it's not surprising that social media would feel like entertainment. When you make a post on Facebook you're not really "sending a message" to anyone in particular, you're just broadcasting it out to the network.
But this got me thinking about what I think a "message" really is. Maybe there's a Dunbar's number kind of thing here because I feel like there's some sort of limit on how many people I can send textual content to before it stops being a "message" and becomes more like an "announcement". Like I get emails, and some of those are messages because they come from individuals and are sent to me and perhaps a small set of other individuals. But some emails are more like announcements (or even "content"), and such quasi-messages have existed since before email went mainsteam (like holiday newsletters that people sent out with xmas cards).
It's true that many social media platforms have a messaging system that exists in parallel ("direct messages"), but that always seemed kind of separate from the core essence of the platform.
The closest you get to real "messages" in social networks is comments, but in my experience the degree to which those constitute "messages" or "communication" varies a lot from platform to platform and also from user to user. These days a large proportion of comments are just slightly more specific "reactions" like "That's so great!" or "Wow" or "Thanks for posting this". I don't often see genuine discussion happening in comments (although HN, if you consider it a social media site, is an exception to this).
There has been an evolution in this regard, but even back in the day I think it wasn't what I'd call "messaging". The earliest platform I can remember using that (in retrospect) I could call a social network was LiveJournal. But LJ was a blogging platform. You didn't post "messages" to other people, you posted, well, posts, and maybe people would comment on them or maybe they wouldn't. I would never have said that I dreamed of LJ becoming "email 2.0". And I'd say modern microblogging-type platforms (like Twitter) seem even more removed from email or "messaging".
I also don't see decentralization as really connected to this. To me the main advantage of decentralization is to eliminate single points of failure and guard against various sorts of rugpulls (like what eventually happened to LJ). But whether a platform fosters communication, messages, interaction, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty much independent of whether it's decentralized.
This isn't to say that I disagree that something's been lost in internet communication over the years. But to me that missing thing seems mostly to be a combination of attention and authenticity.
We've lost attention in the sense that now that people do everything with their phones, they consume and create content more diffusely, as opposed to having a division between "I'm sitting at my computer reading or writing" and "I'm doing something else". The small screens and balky input mechanisms of phones make this problem even worse for writing than it is for reading.
And we've lost authenticity in the sense that so many platforms have become contaminated with stuff that is in no sense communication from any human, not even one-way communication. Instead it's junk generated by corporations to sell products (perhaps with some intermediate steps of harvesting data, etc.). This has become much, much worse in the last few years with the rise of AI slop. It's harder and harder to find stuff on the web that actually represents the work of a human being expressing themselves in a personal way.
So yeah, we've lost something, but I wouldn't say we lost communication to entertainment. It's more like we lost the boundaries of the units of our communication so that we find ourselves in a constant blur of content, rather than a sequence of discrete units each of which we process and ponder independently.
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This is one of those articles that is too obsessed with amusing itself with its own pretentiousness to communicate anything interesting - which is ironic given the author seems thinks they prefer communications to entertainment.
Being born in 83, I experienced the shift from "serious local nightly news program" into the 24 hr cable news platforms as a loss of focused, serious journalism.
Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.
For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.