Good rundown. Facebook real value is serving as PR for the masses -- blasting out info about something important in your life or the life of your family in an efficient way. My kid won swimming regionals. Grandma died. We survived the storm. Etc. Nothing beats it.
Unrelated to the communities you’re active in, but I’ve observed novelists and other nonjournalist writers in the past couple of years increasingly migrate into the dark, unindexed spaces like Discord and Slack. An occasional guru shows up on other networks (Substack, YouTube) to recruit and pied piper a new batch. Tumblr’s trying a new community thing, which will be an entertaining dumpster train fire to look at once in a while out of morbid curiosity. I prefer Substack simply because (other than audio books) I loathe audio and video content—even at 2x speed, it takes too long to absorb all the nothing most of it contains that I could scan as text in a tenth of the time. There are less a handful of video or audio content producers that I trust to even bother subscribing to. YouTube is the best for ambient background noise to medicate my ADD most of the day, though. Much easier to train its algorithm to reliably show me what I want.
lol Tumblr is over, dark social like Discord is not new we've had since the IRC days, it's something else bc not public. Substack is indeed very cool community
Everything is over the day before it’s born. 🤷♂️ Yes, dark communities have been around since I first dialed into a BBS in the 1980-something. It’s notable because they’re groups who worked very hard to create public spaces for a decade or more and seem to be abandoning the effort. Authors aren’t the only ones fleeing for echo chambers. I’m glad of Substack for the opportunity to support small, indie creators while it lasts.
I'm surprised at your take on Beehiiv. It's actively hostile to building a reader community in the comments. There are no notifications, and no comment threading. My daily email shows up about about a 80% of the time, and it's not just me. One paid newsletter than I follow on Beehiiv is moving (to Ghost I think) as soon as we are in the offseason for baseball. It really feels liked a half-baked product that never got out of beta.
I have really good success running ads through them and also know people who run successful newsletters there. It is *probably* biased to more business oriented content for these reasons. Nothing wrong with this lots of business bloggers. For more philosophy-oriented stuff Substack is definitely a better home. I am a fan of both and like all their leadership.
Your hot take on Wikipedia is weak. You can't recommend "doing your own research" while ALSO recommending asking AI as your first point of call (which famously hallucinates like crazy, especially with historical topics and specific details). You're also way overstating the drama of Wikipedia moderation. The vast majority of articles are non-controversial. It's like you cherry picked a few headline-grabbing articles and then decided every page is front-row centre for the culture wars. Not everything is dramatic.
Wikipedia is fundamentally one of the biggest triumph of human collaboration. A free, endless encyclopedia that generally improves every day thanks to thousands of contributors. Of course it's imperfect, but there is literally nothing like it with the depth of content, available for free. Should it be the last word on every topic? Of course not. But it also doesn't try to be. For depth in analysis for any topic, there are other places.
AI isn't always correct either you definitely have to ask it for citations and then read those citations to understand if it's right. IDK I've seen enough Wikipedia entries that were completely wrong it's lost trust for me here. I think it's a nice idea in theory and in practice just doesn't work.
What does "work" mean here? Do you have specific examples of completely wrong wikipedia articles? Or did you see some specific articles around political topics that you disagree with and then conclude the whole thing is a waste. All i'm saying is it really seems you're stuck in a confirmation/recency bias loop.
Where do you think AI was trained on? Wikipedia was a major source for all the major LLMs because it's publicly accessible!
Yeah look there's lots of examples here of Wikipedia bias. And remember this is a participation inequality ecosystem where a tiny % of editors contribute most of the content.
So yeah certain things are probably fine but a lot of the stuff you might wish to actually reference it for are no better than opinion pieces.
Basically a bunch of forum nerds trying to piece together the world and the reference material is frequently also biased. If you can mentally factor this in and perhaps read past some of the silly points it does have some utility.
Yeah sure, but also whatever is on TikTok there's a higher quality version of it on YouTube presented w/a better user experience, nicer video quality/pro editing not on a phone. Also not a CCP psyop. I also don't really care about lowfi vlogs personally but to each their own
Yep, we shall agree to disagree. I think a lot of people see YT as more work, so they wouldn’t necessarily start at YT channel, but they might post their unique innovation or problem solving method to TikTok. Or perhaps it’s just that the TT search engine works better than YT, but I find TT useful as a search engine especially. And I like the Omegle aspect also.
And competes with X for live takes on current events, such as people live-streaming hurricanes, war, or life in refugee camps to their TikTok’s. For whatever reason, TikTok also works way better in low-bandwidth locations than YT or IG. Not sure how, but they’ve nailed bad internet streaming.
Eh I mostly don't really care about random people's cell phone videos (frequently fake too). My Twitter network surfaces the important stuff anyway so don't need that spyware app on my device.
If you didn’t have access to high-speed internet, you’d def feel differently. And I wasn’t abroad. I was in rural Appalachia for a month on the edge of the quiet zone. Was crazy how TikTok still worked when nothing else did.
🫤 a lot of folks never signed up for that quiet zone and their families have just lived there for generations. Was the worst when VA mandated virtual school during pandemic, not caring that much of western VA has terrible internet. Lol don’t get me up on my Appalachians deserve internet soapbox.
I’ve been trying to figure out the Substack/ Beehiiv dynamic. Thanks for your reasonable, logical weigh-in.
I have to say, Its really annoying having to scroll past ads at the top that are longer than an entire newsletter should be in Beehiiv emails.
I get the reasoning behind Twitter. I’m just dad at what it’s become. I was just wondering how Jack Dorsey feels about the shot show it’s become and his role in enabling it be selling to that South African Nazi PoS.
It may be true or not, but I’m told Pinterest is attracting more B2B activity.
All in all, thanks for your reviews. I agree 100%.
Substack needs to focus on writing and stay away from the video slop that it has been trying to spread as of late.
They're experimenting with stuff it's fine, as long as they remember to always promote the meaty long form ideas to users as priority
Good rundown. Facebook real value is serving as PR for the masses -- blasting out info about something important in your life or the life of your family in an efficient way. My kid won swimming regionals. Grandma died. We survived the storm. Etc. Nothing beats it.
Unrelated to the communities you’re active in, but I’ve observed novelists and other nonjournalist writers in the past couple of years increasingly migrate into the dark, unindexed spaces like Discord and Slack. An occasional guru shows up on other networks (Substack, YouTube) to recruit and pied piper a new batch. Tumblr’s trying a new community thing, which will be an entertaining dumpster train fire to look at once in a while out of morbid curiosity. I prefer Substack simply because (other than audio books) I loathe audio and video content—even at 2x speed, it takes too long to absorb all the nothing most of it contains that I could scan as text in a tenth of the time. There are less a handful of video or audio content producers that I trust to even bother subscribing to. YouTube is the best for ambient background noise to medicate my ADD most of the day, though. Much easier to train its algorithm to reliably show me what I want.
lol Tumblr is over, dark social like Discord is not new we've had since the IRC days, it's something else bc not public. Substack is indeed very cool community
Everything is over the day before it’s born. 🤷♂️ Yes, dark communities have been around since I first dialed into a BBS in the 1980-something. It’s notable because they’re groups who worked very hard to create public spaces for a decade or more and seem to be abandoning the effort. Authors aren’t the only ones fleeing for echo chambers. I’m glad of Substack for the opportunity to support small, indie creators while it lasts.
I'm surprised at your take on Beehiiv. It's actively hostile to building a reader community in the comments. There are no notifications, and no comment threading. My daily email shows up about about a 80% of the time, and it's not just me. One paid newsletter than I follow on Beehiiv is moving (to Ghost I think) as soon as we are in the offseason for baseball. It really feels liked a half-baked product that never got out of beta.
I have really good success running ads through them and also know people who run successful newsletters there. It is *probably* biased to more business oriented content for these reasons. Nothing wrong with this lots of business bloggers. For more philosophy-oriented stuff Substack is definitely a better home. I am a fan of both and like all their leadership.
Your hot take on Wikipedia is weak. You can't recommend "doing your own research" while ALSO recommending asking AI as your first point of call (which famously hallucinates like crazy, especially with historical topics and specific details). You're also way overstating the drama of Wikipedia moderation. The vast majority of articles are non-controversial. It's like you cherry picked a few headline-grabbing articles and then decided every page is front-row centre for the culture wars. Not everything is dramatic.
Wikipedia is fundamentally one of the biggest triumph of human collaboration. A free, endless encyclopedia that generally improves every day thanks to thousands of contributors. Of course it's imperfect, but there is literally nothing like it with the depth of content, available for free. Should it be the last word on every topic? Of course not. But it also doesn't try to be. For depth in analysis for any topic, there are other places.
AI isn't always correct either you definitely have to ask it for citations and then read those citations to understand if it's right. IDK I've seen enough Wikipedia entries that were completely wrong it's lost trust for me here. I think it's a nice idea in theory and in practice just doesn't work.
What does "work" mean here? Do you have specific examples of completely wrong wikipedia articles? Or did you see some specific articles around political topics that you disagree with and then conclude the whole thing is a waste. All i'm saying is it really seems you're stuck in a confirmation/recency bias loop.
Where do you think AI was trained on? Wikipedia was a major source for all the major LLMs because it's publicly accessible!
Yeah look there's lots of examples here of Wikipedia bias. And remember this is a participation inequality ecosystem where a tiny % of editors contribute most of the content.
Few stories (of many)
https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-war-uk-grooming-gangs-a-moral-panic?f=home
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically-biased
https://wikipedia20.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/u5vsaip5/release/8
So yeah certain things are probably fine but a lot of the stuff you might wish to actually reference it for are no better than opinion pieces.
Basically a bunch of forum nerds trying to piece together the world and the reference material is frequently also biased. If you can mentally factor this in and perhaps read past some of the silly points it does have some utility.
Disagree on TikTok. It competes with Reddit in terms of solving weird, highly niche problems.
Yeah sure, but also whatever is on TikTok there's a higher quality version of it on YouTube presented w/a better user experience, nicer video quality/pro editing not on a phone. Also not a CCP psyop. I also don't really care about lowfi vlogs personally but to each their own
Yep, we shall agree to disagree. I think a lot of people see YT as more work, so they wouldn’t necessarily start at YT channel, but they might post their unique innovation or problem solving method to TikTok. Or perhaps it’s just that the TT search engine works better than YT, but I find TT useful as a search engine especially. And I like the Omegle aspect also.
And competes with X for live takes on current events, such as people live-streaming hurricanes, war, or life in refugee camps to their TikTok’s. For whatever reason, TikTok also works way better in low-bandwidth locations than YT or IG. Not sure how, but they’ve nailed bad internet streaming.
Eh I mostly don't really care about random people's cell phone videos (frequently fake too). My Twitter network surfaces the important stuff anyway so don't need that spyware app on my device.
If you didn’t have access to high-speed internet, you’d def feel differently. And I wasn’t abroad. I was in rural Appalachia for a month on the edge of the quiet zone. Was crazy how TikTok still worked when nothing else did.
people there should just not even use their phones and be present real-time though :)
🫤 a lot of folks never signed up for that quiet zone and their families have just lived there for generations. Was the worst when VA mandated virtual school during pandemic, not caring that much of western VA has terrible internet. Lol don’t get me up on my Appalachians deserve internet soapbox.
Starlink fixes this
I’ve been trying to figure out the Substack/ Beehiiv dynamic. Thanks for your reasonable, logical weigh-in.
I have to say, Its really annoying having to scroll past ads at the top that are longer than an entire newsletter should be in Beehiiv emails.
I get the reasoning behind Twitter. I’m just dad at what it’s become. I was just wondering how Jack Dorsey feels about the shot show it’s become and his role in enabling it be selling to that South African Nazi PoS.
It may be true or not, but I’m told Pinterest is attracting more B2B activity.
All in all, thanks for your reviews. I agree 100%.