It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes. Case in point, the continuous wars. It was foolish of humans on the early Internet to perceive ideas of forming large scale communities (business and ego motivations did that). If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
Humans thrive in small scale and close knit communities. Unfortunately, Internet was not built for such ideas. It will take a while for the original intent of the social media to die out. First, the ego will have to subside. Then, the business motivations would need to shift to something other than profiting off the human communication (did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines? Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail? No). When the humanity reaches such proportion of correction for the sake of Internet, we might come back to our senses.
>It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes.
This is the noble savage myth of the internet. Humans do fine in large groups, as evidenced by the fact that I assume nobody posting here currently lives in a tribe of 150 people. If scaling wasn't in our nature we'd probably do less of it. It's precisely one of the few things unique to our nature. As Stafford Beer said, the purpose of a system is what it does.
The problem on the internet isn't the scale, it's that social networks aren't actually social, they're just networks. What makes large groups of people successful is a social contract, common rules, values and narratives, myths. Every "social" media platform is just a glorified train station. It's not social media, just media. To this day I haven't seen one online community that say, has given itself a constitution and a form of governance.
There's two ways to solve this, none of them are reverting to some sort of paleo-internet. The first is to reappropriate the internet back into existing structures, which is happening in a lot of places as nations start to enforce existing borders and the internet just becomes part of the existing social infrastructure, another interesting one would be internet-native states, network states is a term thrown around, by somewhat cringy business gurus unfortunately.
Here is more akin to a forum (or gathering in a physical sense) than a community. I only know a few usernames and that's because I've heard of the person behind each. The only central theme behind all my interactions is finding a post interesting, then reply to a comment once I've got something to say. I'm not interested in any individual, only on the discussion. Social media wants you to care, and care about a lot of things that are mostly irrelevant to your life.
So you missed one more: religion. If you were going to reappropriate the internet into existing - I take it that you mean, human - structure, then you might as well add religion here too. There have been no other factors beyond religion and national geographies, that have bound humans at a larger scale. IMHO, this is/was not the original intent when DARPA unleashed Internet beyond it's laboratory. Sure, we can reappropriate as we move along. But there is no precedence of a promised land here. The nation-states and/or religions have been at wars since the beginning of time. What's there to prove that a technology like Internet (throw AI of the future into it) would make things better for human nature to adopt. Just because we can scale does not mean that we may be scaling to something better.
The "continuous wars" is a weird comment. Unless you mean internet flame wars, because if "globalization" subsides real wars will happen more often. We kind of see it already as more and more people start leaning right heavily.
Small communities breed radicalization.
They can have a positive impact, but only if you can choose one from a global network of said communities as an adult and you don't treat it very seriously (you leave when it becomes toxic).
As a person born in a small village community... let's say I don't miss a single fucking thing.
I think you can put the point to even the least tech savvy that the group chat is maybe the best iteration of the social internet. Because the groups are small, self moderated and independent. I guess the irony is that it relies on tech is/was provided by mobile phones already. Maybe all the more important that we don't allow texting to be wholly absorbed or replaced by closed messaging apps.
This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?
The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
You only need two friends and a chat server to have a community. I've been running one for my friends, like a self hosted discord, for almost ten years. It is by far my most valuable online space. There's maybe a dozen users. Whatever. It's great.
The difference is that the communities like that mostly aren’t discoverable anymore like Usenet, web forums and mailing lists used to be, and their contents is hidden behind closed walls.
They don't need to be. Web forums and mailing list are useful when you want to form a larger community with a central idea or project. A chat group is mostly an online hangout place, kinda an equivalent of a favorite bar or a reading club.
What I don't like is when people wants to use a chat group where a forum would have been more useful.
I'm on a couple of email lists that have a similar vibe. A dozen or two active participants. No ads, no giant corporation trying to push engagement or steer the narrative. You just have to ignore the occasional FOMO feelings and understand that no, trying to find "community" in a sea of 10,000,000 users on a giant social network is not how we are wired.
I don't mean to advocate for Discord (they sure don't need it!) but if the requirement is to host an exclusive space for a dozen people, Discord does that.. you just make a "server"/guild and only invite trusted friends.
This doesn't solve any of the other problems (what happens when Discord enshittifies? Is it acceptable that Discord updates basically every single day? Is it OK that they constantly advertise video games in the form of little notifications saying "stream 30 minutes of _____ to a friend and unlock an avatar for your profile!"?) but it does seem to solve the 'how do I have a platform for my friends and I to talk" one.
>The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
It also takes a culture. The small community needs to have a culture that empowers them to exlude the enlargement of the community and to prevent those wanting to open it to those not fit for it get to dictate terms...
The entire point of the internet is connecting small communities into one large community - this allows the sharing of information at literal light speed across huge distances.
> If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
How would they have done anything differently? The social part of the internet also started out as (very) small communities. They still exist, too, but are relatively niche and certainly less active then they were before.
In around 2015 or so, prior to social media, etc, there used to be a mainframe forum or two (perhaps they still exist) where a whole bunch of newbies from India used to hang out, to learn and grow their mainframe skills. It is the same time when there were stories floating around of mainframe veterans being let go. People have short term memory issues.
This is such a great quote for everyone! No matter the age. No matter what one wants to do.
> “I’m not able to learn mathematics easily,” Talagrand tells ... “I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things. Really, really well, in complete detail. And that turned out to be a successful approach.”
Just imagine. You may be super smart who gets things easily and right away. Or, you may be average. Using this philosophy in life, one can excel further.
I had a college friend that's super slow to learn. He would always get behind on classes and would not even get passing grades most of the time.
But! When he finally learned something new, he would never forget it. He would remember it in details, both the whys and the hows. I've always admired his skill.
I’m like this. I barely graduated school and failed out of college in the first year with a GPA whose square root was higher than the actual GPA. I had always been placed in accelerated classes only to be kicked out once I fell behind. I needed time to understand things, but in all modesty once I understand something I seem to understand it better than everyone around me. Until then though my mind is blank and I literally can’t force myself to do anything on the subject. I just stumble and can’t remember anything when asked. Some subjects are faster than others but some took a year or longer to understand. When mathematically inclined friends took algebra they flew through it and graduated high school completing calculus B AP with a 5, but it took me a year of failing it and being tracked before I finally clicked. But once I understood it other math courses were a breeze largely because my algebra understanding was beyond everyone else’s. But I was tracked and getting off the track in math is almost impossible. I likewise had challenges in geometry and trig until I “got it,” all of which meant when I finally hit calculus and got the concepts of differentiation and integration I took off like a rocket and never looked back.
After failing out of college I went out to the valley and was very successful. I went back to college in my late 20’s using a loop hole to transfer into a top CS school. I knew myself better now and studied all the time knowing I wasn’t stupid just learned differently. On things that weren’t yet clicking I would relentlessly keep studying it and practicing and trying until it did. I graduated highest in my class at a top public engineering program - which gives gentleman F’s to 70% of original freshmen unlike private schools.
My daughter is the same way, so I found a private school that is very careful about differentiating learners and letting them move their own pace. I was suicidally depressed about public education growing up as it ground me down for being different. She is thriving at the stages I fell off the rails.
I am a similar learner, though not quite the same. Mostly for me it’s a focus thing. If I’m focused in, I learn very quickly, but if not, I fall behind hopelessly. College lectures were next to impossible for me, as I had such a hard time focusing, ended up in academic probation and managed to turn it around enough to graduate.
Years later, I went back and got my MS online. That was incredible. Recorded lectures meant I could pause and rewind when I lost focus. I really enjoyed my classes because now the most stressful part of it was no longer an issue.
It’s incredible our entire public school system is based on the assumption every student learns things in the same way at the same rate.
But how can it scale if it doesn’t assume that? It really has to cater to some statistical center of gravity and at some point cut off the outliers. Otherwise you need to pay for a private education because essentially you’re asking for custom tailored schooling. The fact that my parents couldn’t afford private schooling is no one’s fault - I don’t blame the public school system for things being the way things are honestly despite the level of abject misery I felt in it. In fact I’m a huge fan of it - I learned more than I would have without it and value the fact that everyone no matter how poor gets access to it.
Some public schools try to do differentiation but it’s really expensive and impractical at scale. The quality of teacher, resources, and teacher training required if very high. I think every effort to try is worth doing, but the more you try without increasing the amount of funding, training, and selectivity in teacher hiring (which is impractical given the scarcity of high quality teachers relative to the population size) the worse you do for everyone.
I don’t agree vouchers and school choice helps this fwiw. The issues don’t go away by diffusing administration of schools to more organizations, you just end up spending a lot more tax payer money on a lot more administrative staff at a lot more schools with a lot less focus on that center of mass outcome.
The reality is despite how intolerable my childhood was I found my way - and I know many who do. People are resilient and overcome adversity all the time in many shapes.
The (US) academic system is not set up to accommodate anyone, really. It's designed to get someone just below average through their standardized testing and not much more. If you don't fit that mold you're shit outta luck. You either suffer through it like "normal" people, or you find it utterly intolerable and fail or drop out.
Personally, I learn best backwards from everyone else. Building up very slowly from fundamentals and basically starting over with basic algebra every semester is actual hell. I need to see the goal concept fully formed and functional, and then work backwards to derive the fundamentals I'm missing.
Generally speaking, once I understand a concept I have it forever. I usually only need the briefest of refresher on mechanics and formulae as I use them. Spending the first month of calculus class going over 9th grade algebra is an unbelievable waste of my time.
My final attempt at college was a CS degree. I made it through one semester and did not even get to a single CS concept. It was at least a year and a half of bullshit prerequisites that I had to pay for. I dropped out when I had to write a presentation to the board of my hypothetical company on the benefits of upgrading their printers. I'm not kidding. I paid real money for this.
I've totally given up on the educational system. I don't fit into the cookie cutter ideal of the average idiot grinding out a degree. I just can't do it.
I think probably the ideal way for me to learn is to spend a lot of time one on one with a domain expert that can show me the final concept and work backwards with me to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. I don't want or need, nor can I tolerate spending time going over things I already know for the 30th time. I need to learn the things I don't know. School just doesn't work that way.
>Personally, I learn best backwards from everyone else. Building up very slowly from fundamentals and basically starting over with basic algebra every semester is actual hell. I need to see the goal concept fully formed and functional, and then work backwards to derive the fundamentals I'm missing.
Same, and at work too. I think it's because we think big picture and conceptually. Tell me the outline, and I'll seek out missing information and fill in puzzle pieces, until I can grok it. It's a slow process but learning from first principles I find absolutely boring and unengaging.
I found math in high school utterly meaningless, a set of drills and exercises to do again and again without explanation.
If you go to the gym and you want to do some exercises, you'll generally get a list and try to learn them correctly.
If math teachers taught sports, no one would ever do anything because they would never understand what the goal was. What's the end result? The complex end result should be made known so that we know why we're doing something.
With math it's, shut up and do your drills and if you don't you'll be punished with bad grades. See that guy in the corner with his head down and protractor? He loves it, be like him.
That's one area where I think LLMs will shine outside of the hype zone: they could boost a student's ability to make progress without supervision.
And I understand that there are great teachers out there and an LLM cannot replace that, but at the same time there are a lot of bad teachers wasting everybody's time.
Yup, I've actually gotten pretty decent results out of an LLM for subjects I'm already pretty familiar with. If we ever figure out the hallucination problem, LLMs could revolutionize education overnight.
I think that almost everyone would benefit enormously from having a focused and dedicated one-on-one tutor. Just imagine if you could call up the leading world expert in any field at any time to ask any question you could possibly have. We as a species would get so much more done.
At least that's what I want AI to be in the next decade or so. A tool to push humans to a much higher potential where we can solve our own problems more effectively. I'm afraid we'll skip that step, though and go straight to worshiping the AI that makes the most paperclips.
Anyway, I'm still experimenting off and on with local LLMs to get me closer to where I want to be. I'm not sure it's much faster to use an LLM and continually verify its output, but it does at least provide structure and guidance for my own self-teaching.
A bit reminiscent of John Carmack's method too; not only does he work for 10 hours a day (preferably uninterrupted) he also secretes himself away at some random location for a week at a time.
It's not the same, I know, but to remember things you have to establish and remember entire trains of thought. Not just remember individual milestones.
There's a story that an American football coach, after gathering the best players he could, would start each season just working on the fundamentals, saying you cannot do the simple easy you can't do complex.
One of his Hall of Fame players said that he woukd begin with "Gentlemen, this is a football"
This is true but players understood the goal - play better football.
With math it's what exactly?
If someone worked backwards from code on DAY 1 of high school math, I'd have been engaged... Instead it was mindless repetitive drills. Later as an advanced thing they'd ask you a real-world question: "Let's say you wanted to circumnavigate the Earth and you started here and had to blah blah". I think they should start and not end with that type of thing.
This is such a great quote for everyone! No matter the age. No matter what one wants to do.
> “I’m not able to learn mathematics easily,” Talagrand tells ... “I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things. Really, really well, in complete detail. And that turned out to be a successful approach.”
Just imagine. You may be super smart who gets things easily and right away. Or, you may be average. Using this philosophy in life, one can excel further.
It's pretty basic: mdBook just emits a JSON file containing the entire search index. The rendered book's JS then fetches that index, and uses it to implement the search client-side. (So that the whole book — search index included — can be served statically.)
It usually finds what I'm looking for pretty easily, as long as I pick a good search term. It isn't the best search, though, and sometimes I'll just revert to `rg` in a CLI if it's in the way.
The things I think people in our org didn't like: some people really really want a WYSIWYG editor, some people don't want to have to deal with making a commit to update docs¹, some people didn't like that the ToC enforced a hierarchy (and wanted a more Wiki style thing²).
(¹I'm in the camp that docs should be reviewed through normal processes, though … I've seen a lot of instances otherwise of incorrect docs getting through, and/or just bad/nonsensical docs getting written. Our org's code review policy at the time most of the docs were written was "you should get a review, but a bot will auto-stamp it if you want to opt-out and then it's just on you", but nowadays we require review, but I don't feel like the reviews are rigorous.)
(²to me a ToC is a wiki superset: if you want wiki behavior … just create a single level in the ToC, and all docs are at the same level. Alphabetize them if you don't want to think about the order. We call this section "Misc" in our ToC, but we do break some other parts out into more full-fledged sections. mdBook enforces that docs must appear in the ToC, which I think is a good thing for discoverability.)
It's a same thing everywhere. Hard work makes you a go-to person (at whatever). The go-to person gets you into high visibility projects. You ultimately can bargain your promotion using both of these qualities.
There was a guy I knew at Google who just went around figuring out what everyone was doing on a specific problem, made a bug for each one, and wrote a slide deck where he implied he was responsible for the cumulative result of 30 other teams. He's an L7 now.
I really regret telling him what I was working on.
Promotion at big orgs tends to be more of a game than anything else. Higher ups like empire building, and promotions (having higher level direct reports) increases their stature while also freeing up headcount at the now-vacant lower level slot(s) to grow their empire.
It’s not about what you do at all, it’s just about how you play the game. Many (most?) cases of positioning oneself for promo just involve casting a bigger shadow on the wall by doing the exact same work closer to the flashlight.
At L5+, if you are not playing the game you have very little chance of promo (you will have to work harder than any L+1 around), so if you are largely just interested in building and not posturing, you should just switch companies and make a diagonal move (and then, perhaps, come back).
This is also why you can’t do anything too risky (regardless of the potential reward) at Google unless you are capable of dishing out promotions - this game is what matters to Googlers, and things that don’t help with the game are efficiently discarded.
Be humble grandpa! There were people who used to use Google Reader without any of its social network shenanigans. And of course, there were people who have been using RSS readers before Google Reader was even born. But, no RSS reader has ever reached the ceiling of common usage, which is not a bad deal.
In my circles, which admittedly may not be representative, RSS is/was a tool for people whose job it was in part to proactively ferret out a wide range of information and insights from obscure corners of the internet--so journalists, analysts, and the like. Which just doesn't describe a mainstream audience.
While it's satisfying to blame Google, the killing of Reader always seemed like a natural effect of RSS not being popular than its cause. It's not like there aren't other RSS alternatives. And, of course, social media does a pretty good job--for all its faults--of surfacing those various tidbits with or without RSS.
It was successful enough that a much smaller business than Google would have tried to keep it going, probably as a subscription service. But for Google it was a rounding error, and the code base needed a rewrite.
It seems hard to argue that it would have become more successful, given that its successors are pretty good but they’re small businesses.
Right. And the problem with rounding error businesses at large companies is that:
1. They're a distraction and
2. It's probably very career limiting to work on them.
Someone at IBM told me years ago that if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business they weren't interested. And Google walked away years ago from organizing the world's knowledge if advertising wasn't attached.
There is an argument to be made that these… micro services were a part of a bigger offering from Google. Maybe by itself Reader wasn’t a billion dollar business, but together with other niche features Reader attracted an influential and wealthy audience.
I don't think OP was referring to any social features beyond what RSS specified:
> In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff.
This is just "subscribe to people's blogs". That's still the ideal social media for me.
No, Google Reader had a social layer where you could add friends, see items that they recommended, and comment on them. It was really great, but it was ruined by the migration to Google+ before Reader was actually killed.
My friends and I loved Buzz and lamented its loss. We tried Google+, but it couldn't even really do what Buzz could do, and it certainly didn't have any other killer features, so it didn't take.
