
The Rise and Fall of ‘Boring Dystopia,’ an Anti-Facebook Facebook Group - DanBC
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-rise-and-fall-of-boring-dystopia-the-anti-facebook-facebook-group
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harryf
> The alternative to closing it was endless policing by him and Rumi Josephs,
> an artist who served as Boring Dystopia’s second admin. “It didn’t work at
> that scale

This is my biggest beef with all popular social media platforms today. They've
invested vast effort in making themselves addictive but almost zero on making
them efficient for users at scale.

Take OSS for example - any moderately successful project will start attracting
so much noise the project will typically end up consuming all the waking and
some of the sleeping hours of the founders, largely through communication and
managing a growing team.

IMO this is the stuff we need to figure out how to scale effectively on social
platforms instead of investing all out efforts into ever-more-toxic clickbait

~~~
superuser2
> investing all out efforts into ever-more-toxic clickbait.

Toxic clickbait is an investment with a substantial and proven return. What is
the revenue model for effectively scaling communities? Users will presumably
demand it for free and be averse to advertising.

~~~
jarcane
And there we have it, a Christmas miracle: The most Hacker News comment there
ever was.

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kazagistar
This is a common theme. I drink starbucks, but they donate to charity so it's
cool. I work at a wall street firm, but I meditate and do yoga, so it's cool.
I read facebook, but I an in groups that point out the banality of modern
existence, so it's cool. We focus on irony, instead of putting in the real
work and sacrifices to make meaningful change.

~~~
RodericDay
Have you ever seen a talk by Slavoj Zizek?

~~~
Estragon
I have. He's a fraud.

~~~
RodericDay
Nah he's alright. I have my issues with him but he really is good at
discussing and digging into the issues with what GP is getting at with his
post.

~~~
Estragon
He lies. Check out his dispute with Chomsky.

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garry
This is a good time to pause and think about how much work dang puts into HN.
By default all online communities open to anyone on the Internet become
cesspools. Writing software is probably the only way you could consistently
fight this battle.

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untilHellbanned
> Which is surprisingly hard, because there’s this mixture of Silicon Valley
> ideology, PR and advertising which distracts us from our own aesthetic
> poverty, and the reality of what we have. Which is just all these crap
> robots…

Best part.

~~~
ohthehugemanate
Right! The artists own anti-capitalist ideological explanation for it is
adorable... but the core issue he's highlighting is real, and important.

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ablation
That's an awful lot of Vice-y words about a Facebook group.

~~~
Grue3
Couldn't finish it because of the pretentious writing style. Maybe if the
author had bothered to explain why this group was any different from the
others. From the description it sounded like
[https://www.reddit.com/r/abandonedporn](https://www.reddit.com/r/abandonedporn)
reposts.

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dawnbreez
The reasons given for Boring Dystopia are the reasons I hardly ever use social
media at all; it's been built into an elaborate attention trap by the very
people that use it. Essentially, it's a very boring Matrix made by humans.

