
Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease' - whalabi
https://www.businessinsider.com/linus-torvalds-says-twitter-facebook-instagram-a-disease-2019-4
======
trpc
Social media ruined the internet forever, even less than a decade ago there
were websites, forums of all sorts and for all kinds of interests, now the
internet for most people is just these social websites/apps which
intentionally lock users inside their services as long as possible to make
more money from advertising and promoted posts. Unfortunately unless something
big happens to fix this issue, the internet is lost forever.

~~~
BFLpL0QNek
I really miss forums.

Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to
find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users
spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard
to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down
ranked in Google in favor retail sites.

A few of the communities I am interested in such as outdoors, adventure
motorcycling have moved to google groups. It's frustrating as the content
isn't publicly searchable so you can not discover it, it's also frustrating
posts are displayed algorithmically so it may pop up in your feed, you
navigate away to another page then are unable to find the post again.

Facebook has been great in it's trivial to create communities but it's
terrible in the sense content is only surfaced based on some algorithmic value
biased around display adds.

~~~
dragontamer
Frankly... forums are dying because of Discord. Maybe Google-docs (which is
emerging as a highly-curated, invite-only chat-platform for the younger
generation).

Kids these days go to Discord and/or Google Docs for serious conversation. If
you have an adult community, they may still use forums, but its more or less
seen as a dated and ancient Web 1.0 sort of thing.

Google-docs fits all the requirements. No major school bans google-docs. It
allows real-time communication, collaboration, and holds a repository of data.
Its semi-private, scales to large numbers of users, and moderation is
decentralized (controlled by the owner of the Google Doc).

~~~
adnfo883kkd
I'm not really disagreeing with you about discord and google docs being
popular but something strikes me about it.

(1) because they're both centrally controlled, which leads to some of the same
problems (2) google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some
level, but points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting
something where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various
group chats?) (3) I don't think google docs or discord are quite the same as
twitter etc. in the sense that they serve a different function (group chat)...
maybe discord has some similarities but it seems to serve a different
function.

which leads me to:

How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-
facing communication?

I've always felt that centralization (as opposed to federation or
decentralization) is a bad thing (or at least, less desirable, network math be
damned), and think that some old-school things are underrated (e.g., IRC). At
the same time, there's been a common thread for years of people wanting to
communicate over the internet without the technical hassle. webpage without
learning networking and programming -> MySpace/Facebook... rss without
learning networking and programming -> twitter... forums without learning
forum software and dealing with name registries etc. -> reddit ...

I've toyed around with mastodon and have been struck by how much it has the
feel of a lot of the old web, but it seems like it needs more critical mass to
take off like something like email.

~~~
dragontamer
> google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some level, but
> points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting something
> where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various group
> chats?)

Google Docs for chat is no different than Wikipedia for discussion. The
"Talk:" pages are group owned and visible to everyone. Google Docs has a
realtime element, but otherwise works as a realtime wiki.

Plenty of internet discussion took place on the Wikis of old, not just
Wikipedia but the original c2 WikiWikiWeb.

> How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus
> private-facing communication?

This is tangential. People don't visit "vBulletin", they visit SomethingAwful.
If you have a decentralized protocol (like vBulletin, PhpBB, Masteodon, or
whatever), the laypeople generally don't care about that technological detail.

The typical web-user will be visiting "SomethingAwful", or "Digg". The webpage
itself is associated with a community: a set of moderators.

Wikipedia and Wikia use similar software, but their communities are completely
different. Federalized vs Centralized is a blip in the radar, its about
policy, contributors and community.

------
random878
I agree with him 100%. I also feel like this cancer has spread beyond social
media. The internet as a whole feels rotten.

I grew up with the internet, so it felt natural to adopt things like social
media (early days of FB), cloud storage, YouTube, etc etc. They just seemed to
work their way into my life, aided by the adoption of smartphones (essentially
a pocket computer).

Today, I've become a Free Software and Privacy advocate. I use
libreboot+Debian, have a dumbphone, no social media, and aggressively restrict
usage of services like Google et al.

But I feel this isn't going far enough. The real toxic element is the 90% of
the internet which is not designed to bring any positivity or enrichment to my
life. I recently made the decision to make my main workstation air-gap/offline
and it was the best decision ever. My laptop will be my internet connected
machine and I'll probably set-up some sort of whitelist on it. I also find it
easier to physically isolate a laptop (e.g. put it in a drawer) outside of
work hours and thereby regulate outside intrusion into my personal life.

I'm also very sympathetic to the concerns about not triggering the mass bovine
herd of professional offense-takers. I work as a Doctor so it's a constant
effort to police my opinions and actions on a daily basis. The internet used
to be a refuge where I could do daft things like engage in a flame war on a
random forum about a random obscure hobby. Today, the risk of inadvertently
triggering someone and having it cross into my real life removes any incentive
to participate. Even HN feels like that. I've lost count of the number of
replies I've typed out, only to delete without posting. I just think there's
no point. It's not fun anymore.

I'll probably give up HN soon. It's the last of anything resembling social
media that I use. I strongly dislike the inability to completely delete an
account and past posts. It's not like I post controversial stuff, but I've
grown uncomfortable about leaving any trace online.

~~~
parski
Out of curiosity: what do you do with your disconnected workstation?

------
mc32
He’s right. The problem is the incentive for “popularity” running amok.

If Linus’s angry emails are on a distribution list, the exposure is minimal
and the damage is contained.

His same excess in social media is reproduced and exploited for various
reasons, positive and negative and overflows into unrelated circles where
unrelated people have input into something containment would prevent them from
being exposed.

This state of total diffusion without commensurate dilution is the problem.
Everyone is a perpetrator and everyone is a victim.

An analogue in biology might be tumors. The individual cells might not be bad
but them running unstopped can have negative consequences.

Social media needs to attenuate virality. But that’s at odds with their
current economic model. So in the meantime they implement useless ineffectual
bandaids they know don’t address the problem head on but gives them a
plausible “we’re trying” or “shikata ga nai” 仕方がない

~~~
ghaff
>If Linus’s angry emails are on a distribution list, the exposure is minimal
and the damage is contained.

Perhaps. Another way to say the same thing however is something along the
lines of the following. If you behave... poorly within a relatively narrow
community, given sufficient authority you can just get away with it. Maybe you
drive people away but it's all pretty invisible to the broader world and those
that remain just put up with it because that's the way things are.

Perhaps that's deemed acceptable.Perhaps not. But just because things happen
behind relatively closed doors doesn't make them right.

~~~
mc32
I get your point. He acted badly and I think social media has dulled his
appetite for that, however, his peccadilloes are not the main point. It’s the
greater idiocy that current social media fosters which is a multiple orders of
magnitude a bigger problem than these provincial disputes ever were.

Let’s take people who are against childhood vaccinations. Their unfounded
beliefs would remain contained and would not proliferate beyond their circles
vs everyone gets exposed and people who’d never think of this anti scientific
position become convinced this position kinda somehow makes sense.

~~~
ghaff
And I don't disagree with that. There's a whole outrage culture that social
media certainly contributes to (as does click-driven "journalism"). Every
intemperate or ill-advised--or seen as inappropriate by some segment of the
internet--remark gets endlessly repeated and amplified.

------
tim333
The actual Linus quote (not in the article):

Bob: If you had to fix one thing about the networked world, what would it be?

Linus: Nothing technical. But, I absolutely detest modern "social
media"—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad
behavior.

I think part of it is something that email shares too, and that I've said
before: "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle". When you're not
talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues,
it's easy to miss humor and sarcasm, but it's also very easy to overlook the
reaction of the recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might
not happen as easily with face-to-face interaction.

But email still works. You still have to put in the effort to write it, and
there's generally some actual content (technical or otherwise). The whole
"liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no
quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control,
with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to
generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage.

Add in anonymity, and it's just disgusting. When you don't even put your real
name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn't
help.

I'm actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some
people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that
protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that's
wrong. Anonymity is important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot
prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't
be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it.

Oh well. Rant over. I'm not on any social media (I tried G+ for a while,
because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously
never went anywhere), but it still annoys me.

~~~
vbuwivbiu
"On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle"

nail on head

------
newsgremlin
He's right, and nothing on these sites feels 'real'. Not even the people you
know in real life project themselves as they are, and if they do it's only the
happy side of their life that people see which is certainly not healthy to see
every day for anyone's mental health or realistic perceptions and expectations
of life. Anything different from that people tend to stay clear from, almost
to distance their relation to a particular person.

Couple that with being bombarded by obvious and not so obvious advertisements
through promoted content, viral marketing campaigns, promoters and creators
that act (emphasis on act) and galvanize certain lifestyles that appeals to
individual wants and needs at a unrealistic level.

Just like the old medium of television, everything is manufactured to look a
certain way, and consciousness of looks still persists.

------
jinushaun
I can’t help but feel like history will look back at this time period and ask
themselves: what the fuck were they thinking? A whole generation of smart
engineers optimizing addiction.

~~~
smt88
Smart engineers are optimizing addiction, burning fossil fuels, and many other
social ills. But those pursuits make a lot of money, and absent regulation,
the labor market will be attracted toward them.

The future you're talking about will have to be regulated much more (at, at
least, differently) than the present. I doubt it could even be capitalist --
which, to be clear, I see as a good thing.

~~~
ihm
This is about what capital funds, not the labor market. Given how unorganized
it is, workers mostly just have to work on whatever projects get funded.

------
bovermyer
I feel like he's right, but there's much more to understand here.

The broadcast of oversimplified messages through a human network that reacts
strongly to those messages, and thus boosts the signal of those messages
further, is something that bears careful consideration.

~~~
mc32
Some of this behavior could be mitigated. Remove likes and resharing. Ban the
incentives (economic, internet points, attenuate diffusion with distance from
__*caster), etc. in other words, semi-anonymize the author, take away virality
and remove the economics (likes, views, etc., which incentivize virality).

~~~
pferde
Just for clarification - did you really mean "virility", or was it supposed to
be "virality"? :)

~~~
mc32
My mistake virality in both cases, although virility in some sense could also
make sense.

------
jamesholden
Is it just me, or does the article kind of suck? It starts with discussing who
he is, and then his opinion, and the spends the next half of the article
talking about what kind of person he is and how this is 'ironic' coming from
_him_ of all people.

Just seems weird that they give his opinion, and then we get someone else's
opinion on HIM. That doesn't seem very unbiased. Maybe I am overthinking it.

~~~
rchaud
It's Business Insider, it's the TMZ or Uproxx of "business news". Every once
in a while they'll have original content (i.e. sourced from their editorial
team), but for the most part it's a content mill of copy-pasted content with a
few rushed sentences from an overworked copy writer.

------
skilled
The problem is actually far deeper than just social media being mindless. The
Internet as such has become a Big Bank, where anyone (and anywhere!) can put
in time investment and withdraw money.

Well, you could argue that people _work_ on the Internet. It's not a bad
argument, but the problem is much deeper than this.

Every single major social network is now being used as a storefront where you
can promote and advertise your personal brand and/or product. I follow a fair
amount of people in Web Design and Web Dev, and over the years, many have
completely annihilated any emotional connection with their audience and
instead run their pages as an established brand.

Look at what happened to Quora, a site that had an incredibly promising start
and I personally enjoyed writing hundreds of answers. I enjoyed it because it
felt like my answers are being heard, valued, and acted upon.

These days, Quora is a hellhole, a dreadful dump of marketing garbage where
people are ready to get their pitchforks whenever someone tries to one-up
their "best answer".

Instagram? Holy crap! Instagram is an absolute marketing godsend. Though, some
would argue it's not exactly the most appealing type of marketing. The history
books of the future will be like the pornography magazines of today. If this
trend continues, then this is certain.

~~~
Juliate
> and over the years, many have completely annihilated any emotional
> connection with their audience and instead run their pages as an established
> brand.

This, so much this.

~~~
rchaud
True, browsing the web for fun these days seems increasingly burdensome as I
feel that a good chunk of what I read lacks personality and feels extremely
scripted.

The solution to that is not "make it easier to publish online", as Big Tech
will always claim. One way may be to start curating your own list of
interesting voices, and consume their content deliberately, instead of having
it be passively fed to you (including their likes and RTs, which I personally
don't like seeing) via the Feed.

------
apexalpha
Ah yes the weekly nostalgia thread. Have we all considered that our beautiful
time on forums, IRC and RSS were also the time when 99% of the people who are
now online simply weren't?

The internet of the old days isn't gone. (Look at this website!). It's just
that we are a minority because FB, Instagram and YouTube brought 2 billion
more people online.

~~~
craftyguy
> Have we all considered that our beautiful time on forums, IRC and RSS were
> also the time when 99% of the people who are now online simply weren't?

Looking at the vast majority of content on facebook, twitter, instawhatever,
reddit, HN, etc I don't consider that to be a bad thing.

------
kikoreis
I keep thinking that the simple but fatal decision to mess with the timeline
is the deepest sin of social media. If the timeline is purely chronological
then there is a much higher barrier to create biases. Social media business
models have to respect that or it goes toxic.

The rest of social media's problems have mostly to do with it being a
cacophony, which you get with any large and horizontally organized group.
Loudest speaker wins, shock replicates faster, etc.

------
fb03
I believe he's right. The whole system is game-ified to maximize time spent.
You get nothing but small carefully timed dopamine hits that keep you hooked
and your productivity/life balance goes out of the window.

------
netwanderer3
Facebook's basic concept is not bad. It's precisely their business model
relying on advertising as the main source for revenue that is causing all
sorts of interest conflicts.

Due to the nature of this business model, Facebook no longer serves its users,
instead the platform has been tailored and customized in every possible way to
exploit their users for its own profits, by selling their personal
data/information to the highest private bidders, very often done behind the
scene without much public awareness.

Having said that, the frequency of bad news about Facebook that seemingly
keeps popping up every day is suspiciously abnormal. There must be an external
force that is being dedicated to digging all the shit up at Facebook right
now. You literally cannot go through a day without seeing new scandals from
them on your news feed. An organization with security measures like Facebook's
is incapable of leaking bad news at such rates by itself.

Don't want to mention their names here, but are these retaliation actions
coming from those who had been previously wrong by Facebook?

------
rchaud
> "The whole 'liking' and 'sharing' model is just garbage. There is no effort
> and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality
> control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things
> designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage," he
> said.

This is the crux of the issue IMO. Once it was possible to gain "fame" via
Twitter/FB/IG, it was game over. People become incentivized to maximize their
likes and followers instead of having conversations. A big following can get
you anything from a distribution deal with a fly-by-night supplements company,
all the way to a book deal and appearances on Oprah or Comedy Central.

On old-school forums/message boards, you had a community based on a specific
shared interest, so people weren't completely anonymous strangers and weren't
posting to lobby for attention among the broader community.

------
gargs
The one thing that the Internet changed in a very negative manner that
ultimately brought us here is -- the expectation that everything is/has to be
free. No one wants to pay for anything anymore; people don't want to pay for
information; paying for correspondence is just a terrible idea; and so on.

You could control who you interact with, only so far. When no one you know
reads the newspaper, while depending on 'social media' for all their opinions,
you're going to run into a lot of noise. There's just no escaping it, unless
you use this same social media landscape to join some nice new group of
intellectuals that actually meets offline.

We just need to start paying for things.

~~~
orev
You can’t blame that on the Internet. TV and radio have been mostly free and
ad-supported, and there are/were many free newspapers also supported by ads. I
think it’s more accurate to say that people in general prefer their media
consumption to be free.

Yes, there are some exceptions like cinema, HBO, etc.

------
Anthony-G
This article is based on a recent Linux Journal interview and I found it more
enlightening to read the actual source material – submitted yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19559970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19559970)

------
anbop
Linus doesn’t have any uniquely informed point of view here. Internet giants
are much more like media companies than technology companies in the way they
interact with society. Linus’ opinion is like a famous actor’s opinion on
climate change: not necessarily wrong, but not really newsworthy.

------
canidiarus
He neglected to mention usenet, where he made his original announcement about
his hobby OS. The Usenet alt groups were one of the first examples of what's
seen in FB/TWT/IG today. What's changed is who has access and the methods of
access - everyone and everywhere.

------
bregma
Bring back the good old days before the eternal September began. I liked the
internet then.

------
TheSoftwareGuy
I wonder what he thought made Google+ "less mindless" than the other
platforms.

~~~
HNthrow22
Tied to real identity - given the current state of the net one could make a
case that the S Korean system of requiring gov ID # for all online signups
would be an improvement, of course that opens the door to serious abuse but at
this point would it be the lesser of two evils?

~~~
AlexandrB
This is the exact opposite of correct. Old school forums were pseudonymous,
but managed to do OK on the moderation front because they were often
controlled by the community. Tying real world identity to sign-ins just paints
a big fat target on those that have the most to lose already, such as
minorities.

As an example, check out the myriad articles about Google users being outed as
trans when Google started integrating Google+ into everything:
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-
ha...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-hangouts-
faces-criticism-after-outing-trans-woman)

~~~
__s
Pseudonymous identity was identiy enough

~~~
Atheros
Everyone here is mixing up identification with reputation. Identification
isn't necessary; in fact it's a bad thing. But reputation within a community
is good and necessary.

------
nbabitskiy
It's a nice thing of Linus to say. I was thinking just yesterday, that in my
friend/relative circle, there are no one people listen to unsarcastically. If
we still had someone like Orwell or A.D. Sakharov, and they'd say something
like this, it would make a world of difference. I'm drastically losing the
battle against fb around me. We should get Joanne Rowling to speak up, if the
kids loving Harry Potter know, who's the author (my nieces definitely don't
though).

------
alexmingoia
Luckily the solution is simple: stop using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
RSS still works great. I got notified of this article that way. No ads, no
algorithms, and no censorship. I listen to people who respect me, the reader.

It’s pleasant here in the blogosphere. Come on back, door is always open.

------
stillbourne
Don't forget reddit. This is what reddit looked like when I joined:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20070206145523/http://reddit.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070206145523/http://reddit.com/)

Today you have to dig deep to find anything that is not vapid bullshit. The
Donald has leaked into other subreddits and the site has become a disgusting
cesspool. I feel like I'm the only person that thinks that the advent of memes
as means to communicate seems to have degraded discourse to a level of bite
sized concepts that eliminate complex analysis of any given topic. Have an
opinion of LGBT rights? Post a meme! Have a political opinion? Post a meme! If
you don't agree with my 6 word statement on a silly image I will be a complete
asshole to you in the comments section that exposes a market of ideas that has
devolved into racist diatribes and AnCap ideology.

------
matz1
These social media are not for everyone, for some one who are introvert or not
a people person or just simply don't like other people then yeah twitter, fb
etc are abomination.

Social media is also a tools, good or bad, its what you make of it.

~~~
loriverkutya
The problem is, it's not a tool for communication, but a tool for selling ads.
And it is bad for the average user. It makes people depressed.

~~~
matz1
Its tool for all kind of purpose. Certainly can be used for communication too
as well as selling ads. Even for selling ads it still have some good for some
user.

------
aboutruby
I think he puts Twitter there because he doesn't use it. If you follow the
right people it actually promotes intelligent discourse.

~~~
Lordarminius
Same with Instagram. I don't use it but I concede that it is useful to some
people as a platform for promoting businesses. FB on the other hand, deserves
to die in a fire.

~~~
Stubb
I've all but dropped off Facebook but made an Instagram account earlier this
year and am enjoying it. The photo-centric nature seems to eliminate 99% of
the toxicity of Facebook. I've subscribed to the accounts of friends,
architecture/design centers, Archillect, and accounts that post pictures of
owls and otters. None of this promotes deep thinking or meaningful discussion,
but it's a nice five-minute addition to my day. Plus it gives me a place to
post my own photography where friends and others will see it.

That said, I'm hardly a Facebook/Zuckerberg fan and will jump ship the moment
another platform becomes viable.

------
KasianFranks
Spot on. We saw this with BBSs vs Compuserve and then with AOL, MySpace,
Friendster etc.

------
peterwwillis
All these people complaining about social media, on a social network called
Hacker News...

Every platform you use to communicate with other humans is a social network,
they're not new. Slashdot was an early 'modern' social network, after regular
old forums, as was Usenet and the BBS. All these networks had very similar
properties to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - they just didn't have
pictures, and were restricted mostly to computer nerds.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is what happens when you open up these
services to the whole world, add media, make it easier to share, and more
addictive to use. The 'highest upvoted story' is a picture with a quote and a
lot of likes. Our old flame wars about text editors and OSes are now caustic
rants about vaccinations or politics. The only significant change is the
subject matter, and the number of people involved.

As a 'disease', FB, Twitter and Insta are just a more evolved form of
something that's always been here. They reflect and amplify humanity. You can
focus on the bad, or you can notice the good. But it's a mistake to think
these products are somehow uniquely different than everything else, or even
inherently bad. They're inherently human.

------
vbuwivbiu
he's right now how to do I stop ?

------
return0
i mean yeah, they are literally viral

------
0815test
> Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

Well, didn't someone at Microsoft call Linux "a cancer" once? I suppose
turnabout is fair play... well not exactly, but close enough! More like paying
it forward.

