Thread

1. paulajohnson · 1790610990 · focus · HN ↗

   Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....

   1. nekusar · 1790612689 · focus · HN ↗

      The problem is for-profit corporate social media.

      Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.

      Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.

      Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.

      Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

      But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.

      Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?

      1. opan · 1790615440 · focus · HN ↗

         I agree with your post overall, but it's worth noting that most frontends for fedi are still based on Twitter, Instagram, etc. You get similar dark UX patterns like infinite scrolling in feeds or displaying like counts on posts. It's also hard to not copy these things now because they're so normalized. If you intentionally designed the frontend differently, people may just dismiss it as weird and different.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.