
The Internet I Knew (2014) - luu
https://flowerhack.dreamwidth.org/3230.html
======
agentultra
I recall being a bit confused about the terms, "social web," and "social
network" when they were beginning to be bandied about to discuss Flickr and
Facebook et al. The Internet was already a social network. You had irc, nntp,
http, ftp, etc etc... communication protocols. For communicating with other
humans.

The only thing Facebook did, in my experience, was make the web _anti-social_.
I distinctly recall when my group of friends had stopped calling around each
week to figure out what we were going to do on the weekend. I was calling
people to find out what they were up to... and I got that condescending call
to action, _just get on Facebook_.

So I did. I tried it for about a year or two. And it didn't make the web any
better or more social for me. It would recommend events to attend and I'd
go... but people would just be in their cliques not talking to anyone outside
of their groups. Even learning about upcoming concerts and events required a
Facebook account. People stopped calling and hanging out. It was all very
passive: like, like, comment, meme, har, har.

So I closed down my Facebook account and haven't used it since 2009 or so. The
"social web" has only become more anti-social.

Most of these web services made quite a lot of interesting innovations and
such but I can't help but wonder what the web would've been like if we'd
stayed true to its roots and improved the protocols and infrastructure instead
of centralizing everything behind walled gardens.

~~~
lyra_comms
It's absolutely hearbreaking to see the independence, critical thinking and
self-determination that Western society has been building up since the
Enlightenment, weakening under the forces of big data and targeted
advertising.

Communication should be open, profit should not be involved in discourse, and
advertising should not corrode conversation.

Viva la revolucion!

www.hellolyra.com/introduction

~~~
ukulele
> advertising should not corrode conversation.

You really followed this with a link to your website?

~~~
inimino
You really can't see the difference between the kind of advertising this guy
is complaining about and a link to a personal website / manifesto complaining
about advertising? Really?

~~~
wehere111
lol that's not a personal website...

------
waytogo
OT: I don't get social networks.

Till today, I don't see any value in real name social networks like Facebook.
They should present content I want but they don't, they show upvoted content
from my connections which is wrong from a consumer and entertainment
perspective.

My friends like or share mostly content of people because those people are
kind of high-profile in their circles. Not because they post good content. The
typical example, we all know, is some boring dude working at a VC that just
raised a new fund who hourly posts really crappy content on FB and gets
hundreds of likes every single time. Now, guess why. This happens _all the
time_ , everyday, every minute, just go to your FB feed right now and check
how many of those high-status animals post again and again some random content
which is liked and shared by too many likers.

So, the status of my connections determine which (lousy) content I have to
see? No thanks and this is why I prefer interest-driven platforms such as HN.

~~~
nerdponx
Unfortunately, you missed out on the brief time in history when they did
exactly what you were asking for.

MySpace had no likes and no algorithm to filter your activity. Neither did
Facebook for several years, nor did LiveJournal (and all the other social
blogging platforms), or even Instagram at first.

~~~
waytogo
> they did exactly what you were asking for

No, MySpace and Facebook didn't what I was asking for because they didn't have
any feed then.

With MySpace and Facebook in its early days, I could just stalk profiles and
both didn't serve me any content based on my interest. On MySpace I could
browse through some music genres but this is not my understanding of an
interest-driven site.

~~~
yoz-y
Twitter has had a feed from the beginning and served you content you wanted,
as long as you subscribed to the right people. It still does, as long as you
only follow a few people.

~~~
waytogo
The grandparent post was about FB and MySpace, not Twitter.

However, Twitter is a different beast. They got better over time because
Twitter evolved from a friends network to kind of a interest-driven network.
At the beginning people were following friends and then you had the same
dissatisfying outcome like with FB (nobody wants to unfollow a crap-posting
friend and muting wasn't available then). But nowadays you rather follow
people on Twitter based on interest or because you share the same industry,
etc.

------
nimbius
call me nostalgic, but i refuse to let go of that internet. There are plenty
of alternatives that dont get a multi billion dollar TV ad blitz, and theyre
worth checking out

[https://freenode.net](https://freenode.net) for a classic IRC experience,
free of charge. [https://mastodon.social/about](https://mastodon.social/about)
for a distributed open source twitter-like experience
[https://diasporafoundation.org/](https://diasporafoundation.org/) for an
alternative to facebook that respects your privacy.

~~~
dijit
I maintain to this day a personal IRC network. Many of us have been “together”
for over a decade. In fact I just tried to advocate self-hosted communities at
CCC. So I’m also stuck in the past and refuse to let the internet go. But I
have two points I’d like to mention.

1) Forums are dead for almost all but the biggest communities that surround a
product of some kind. Social forums are simply dead.

2) As an IRC-user mentioned at the CCC. Facebook is the new telephone number.
It’s significantly easier to ask for a Facebook friend request than a phone
number and that edge will keep Facebook relevant even if we saw a rise in
self-hosted or segmented interest driven communities.

~~~
pault
Spam is the reason Facebook is currently the easiest way to get in touch with
someone. Otherwise you could just put your email address in a publicly
searchable database. It seems like we need a service that provides the
verification and permission based communication model of Facebook but without
the public feeds, virtue signaling, and political garbage.

~~~
Goladus
Spam drove people to Facebook even in the early days. When Facebook first came
out, spam filtering was far less effective than it is today. Also, for
whatever reason, people trusted Facebook and would post private things there
that they wouldn't post on pseudonymous forums.

------
archagon
Hear, hear! My friend group in high school had its own Proboards forum and we
spent so much of our free time on there. (And we weren't the only ones,
either.) I'd say the split was 60-40 male/female. We talked about
everything—political topics, gaming, arts and crafts, literature—and I owe
much of my development as a kid to those conversations. It makes me sad that
those kinds of half-online, half-offline communities don't seem to be around
much anymore. It felt like we owned our own little plot of online land, tended
to it, inhabited it. It was nothing like renting some page space on Facebook
or standing on a Twitter soapbox.

After reading the delightful chapter on Community Memory in "Hackers: Heroes
of the Computer Revolution", I've been thinking of ways to get back to this
local, more intimate style of online conversation. It seems that with the
centralized nature of the web, an abundance of resources leads to the
formation of a limited few communication hubs to which everyone gravitates.
How easy would it be to create some sort of mesh network hub or beacon that
would only let people in a local area connect to each other and create their
own decentralized forums or databases? Thinking back on my high school forum
experiences, the success of things like Nextdoor, local community events such
as UC Bekeley's Anoncon, and even things like Geocaching, I think this could
be an incredible paradigm shift for those who are tired of the overwhelming
numbers and impersonality of today's "social" web.

It's only the spark of an idea, but few things excite me more than the social
possibilities of a publicly-accessible network firmly and intrinsically rooted
in a particular physical area!

------
jesperlang
I think a more fair view of the term social media should be as a marketing
term? When these tech giants were growing they needed a name to refer to them
as a whole, but that name reflected what they _wanted_ those services to be
viewed as, not the _effects_ they came to have. We see this everywhere in how
labelling of things appeal to some of our inner desires -- in this case the
need of social interactions -- and not necessarily accurately describing their
effects.

I think the main reason these services exist at all is not to create social
mediums but to tap into the flows of human communication for profit. And,
since their version of communication is, in the true social aspect, an
incredibly crippling one compared to the rich, immersive experience of more
old ways of interacting -- no wonder we can be left with a deeply
dissatisfying feeling when use social media services.

------
isostatic
And 10 years earlier we had irc and usenet.

But be under no illusions - I ran a Star Trek site in the late 90s that had
adverts on, every month or so I'd get a cheque trough the post. In dollars. My
bank were somewhat confused about how to cash foreign currency cheques into a
child account.

~~~
Semaphor
I ran a forum with a decent amount of users as a kid some 15 years ago. We had
no ads but once a year when the bills came through we'd have a donation drive
to cover the hosting fees and sometimes upgrade our (paid) forum software. Was
always weird when people sent letters with cash from all over the DACH area to
me ;)

~~~
marklyon
I had a similar experience with my BBS. We did UUCP with some rather remote
nodes and I had 11 incoming lines (the maximum BellSouth would install in a
residence) so the bills were not trivial. Each month I’d post the prior
month’s bill total and small checks and envelopes of cash would show up in my
post office box soon after. It never made a wild profit, but there were only a
couple of months where we couldn’t cover the bills.

------
darrmit
One of the biggest differences in my mind between the Internet described in
the article and the social networks of today (at least for me) is the forums
and IRC channels I frequented were filled with people who genuinely enjoyed
talking to one another and even cared for one another. I still have friends 15
years later that I’ve never met and so many great memories. I can’t say the
same for FB or Twitter.

And the “heart of a sysadmin” statement hit so close to home.

~~~
styfle
In 2005, I used to be in a Battlefield 2 online community with game servers,
SMF Forums, and ventrilo for VOIP. I used to play pretty regularly, but when
not playing we would all talk and learn from each other. There were maybe 30
people at most from age 15 to 50 years old.

The way we sustained the servers was everyone pitching in to pay maybe $5 to
$15 per month.

Moderation and Adminstratuon was volunteer based and people who donated had
priority.

We eventually became some of the most popular BF2 servers and it made for
interesting social interaction when the admins had to come together to make a
decision if someone was cheating or just really good.

I’m sure communities like that still exist but I haven’t played many online
games since then. Those were the days :)

------
nerdponx
The difference is who owns and pays for what. Running a centralized
application for more than a few people on donations and goodwill is a
challenge.

This is why I am a huge fan of distributed and federated networks. The idea of
you and your buddies being able to split a dream host subscription, but
instead of being locked into your own forum hangout, you can interact with a
whole global network of fellow self posters and VPS renters. We are in the
early days of high-quality federated interaction for non-nerds, but we will
get there.

~~~
lyra_comms
An open conversation service needs to be open to all, not just people with
tech skills; we need to prevent large numbers of people feeling locked out of
discourse, or left behind.

Also, many of the distributed/federated services we've looked at have rapidly
devolved into niche communities often centred around sexual content. These two
reasons lead us to think that a centralised service is more open and
approachable.

~~~
slipstream-
With regards to mastodon, there's at least one hosting service specifically
for it already ([https://masto.host](https://masto.host)), and people who
don't know that much about the Linux command line/etc have set up their own
instances using it.

~~~
lyra_comms
I know it's hard to see it this way when one is into tech, but many of my non-
tech friends (artists, philosophers, retail...) would balk at this.

We believe using a communication tool needs to be as easy as entering a URL
and logging in - friendly, familiar, no new terminology.

~~~
__s
Sorry, but that doesn't fly in a technocracy. Oh well, just bow before the
Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple overlords

~~~
lyra_comms
We bow only to the Hypnotoad.

------
z3t4
Facebook killed most of the old social communities. The big ones where very
lucrative basically swimming in cash, they where only replaced by a bigger
fish. The non profit forums and IRC channels are still alive. What worries me
though is that so many people use smartphones instead of work-station
computers. With a smartphone you are mostly a consumer/by-stander. While on a
work-station you are actively taking part by both producing and consuming.
There are a lot of really high quality content produced by professionals for
profit. But _the best_ content and Internet culture is still made by
"ordinary" people for the love of sharing. I hope the good content is not
buried by monetized content. There should be more "Hacker News" and less
Google and Facebook ads.

~~~
r3bl
And you've just described how Instagram and Snapchat took off. You don't need
a work-station to post the content. All you need is a camera and a couple of
seconds of your life and you're contributing _something_.

Sure, that content might be crappy photo of your breakfast or a short video of
you puking rainbow, but it's a content that regular people submitted with
little or no effort simply because they had a phone with a camera that they
spend most of their time on the Internet on, not a laptop or a desktop.

~~~
z3t4
Uploading photos is not that impressive. You've been able to do that on a PC
from the 90's. While it has been interesting to see the 90's repeat itself on
the phones, the smartphone's hardware have already surpassed, and there's
really no excuse to have such a limited io-interface. The problem is the big
players are just fine with their users being just consumers. One step in the
right direction is the note (pen/stylus input) devices that give much better
precision then using your thumbs, which makes it possible to take advantage of
all that screen resolution. What we'll see next is an extra fold-able screen
that will give more screen real estate. And general purpose hardware buttons
on the sides and back, that apps can use for special functionality. And better
voice processing using camera plus mic, so you can talk to the phone.

------
en-us
You don't _have_ to use corporate sites like Facebook and Pinterest. Check out
scuttlebutt.nz for a serverless alternative, or Mastodon for one where anybody
can host a server. Or just stick to forums and IRC.

~~~
throwanem
No, you don't _have_ to. But if everyone you know does, then you have to make
a choice. I've had the same "just get on Facebook" experience as the article's
author, and it isn't just about "what are we doing this weekend?" It's about
human social behavior changing to fit the model implemented by Facebook,
because Facebook tries so hard, and so successfully, to be sticky, that
eventually everyone is on Facebook. If you're not, then once that's happened,
you're no longer part of "everyone", because Facebook's design very
successfully seeks to maximize the degree to which people prefer it as an
exclusive medium of social interaction, because that's the same as maximizing
its revenue stream. The people who run Facebook, and who build it, have by now
gotten very, very good at doing exactly that. And their userbase is such that,
whatever adverse effects their model of revenue maximization by social
behavior monopolization may have, it is by now having them on about one-third
of the entire human species. If we include all the other behemoths which use
similar models, the fraction of humanity affected grows markedly - half? More?

Yeah, I know, it sounds absurd and dystopian and like something you'd hear
from an ideologue of the RMS stripe. Well, I have my differences with RMS, and
we've had them out in public before now. And I'd have regarded the things I'm
saying as dismissively as anyone might, if I'd heard someone saying them a few
years ago. But that would've been a few years ago. Times change.

It was around the time I missed the second wedding, followed by the second
chance encounter with one of the parties thereto, and the second heartfelt
apology, and the second "but you should really get on Facebook", that I
started to really think something was up other than that everyone had just
quietly and comprehensively dropped me, over the space of a few months,
because I was just that unpleasant a person to have around. Sure, that was my
default assumption. But it would seem unlikely in that case for the apologies
to be so heartfelt, or indeed to occur at all; they needn't have, no more than
the entire conversations in which they occurred, if those who made them hadn't
chosen to engage when they saw me out and about. They could've quietly walked
the other way. Instead they hailed me and started conversations, in order to
apologize for having unintentionally snubbed me, and to warn me I'd better get
on Facebook if I didn't want more of the same.

So I had to think something else was up, something outside my own constant
suspicion that I exist in the world purely on sufferance and should not be too
surprised when that sufferance ceases - and I started looking around for what
it might be. What I found was other people who'd had the same kinds of
experiences that led me to start looking in the first place. People like the
author of this article, who'd also watched their social circles disintegrate
around them, and be reconstituted in a form which did no longer include them,
in order to make a lot of money for a dozen or so thousand people mostly in
California.

Now I've got no problem with people making a lot of money. This is America,
after all. And I don't think anyone who works for Facebook is evil, at least
not in any higher proportion than the population at large; you get a few
bastards in every hundred, sure, but there's no reason to imagine Facebook
uniquely concentrates them somehow. But none of that changes the fact that, in
the cause of building something that makes those people a lot of money, they
have produced a machine for the deliberate mass modification of human social
behavior, the like of which history has never yet seen.

I don't know. I feel like there's nothing unreasonable in thinking such a
situation has implications a bit beyond "well you don't _have_ to use it".
Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I really am the problem here, and Facebook
is just a bugaboo. Maybe that's true for everyone else with a story like mine,
too. But what if it isn't? Wouldn't that seem a little dystopian to you, there
being a website in a position to mediate your friendships? It seems a little
dystopian to _me_.

~~~
en-us
I understand where you're coming from, but ultimately it is your decision to
stay on Facebook. If you ever want to try something different then try
Scuttlebutt. All of your data there is stored in your own blockchain, and then
you exchange these blockchains with others. There is no central server or
identification authority.

The UI is very much in an alpha state but the SSB protocol is solid, so the
blockchain itself will outlive any particular UI version. It might actually be
able to scale without having a central authority run it, which gives a glimpse
of a future without Facebook.

~~~
throwanem
Every time I talk about this, people assume I'm on Facebook. Why is it that,
every time I talk about this, people assume I'm on Facebook? I talked about
this and you assumed I'm on Facebook, so you should be able to explain at
least one reason why, every time I talk about this, people assume I'm on
Facebook.

~~~
ohtwenty
Because everyone is. I quit Facebook for a year or two, trying to get people
to email or WhatsApp or whatever. didn't work. So I lived with people closer
to me reaching out to my SO through Facebook, or sending messages in another
way. I eventually made an account again because there were instances where an
alternative solution was too much of a pita. So I now check every other week,
respond to messages when I have time, and ignore the rest. I think I've posted
one thing in the past year.

Still trying to get people to contact me through WhatsApp or signal, which
works really well for the NL (>95% have wa), but not so much for international
friends. I mostly don't get the drive, the need to post mundane things on
there. I just can't get myself to believe anyone will care that I took a
picture of me eating lunch, or whatever.

------
jancsika
> Those "social networks" were small, and never made front-page news (or any
> news at all), and were more concerned with keeping to themselves than
> recruiting new members.

And I'm supposed to be convinced that those small forums weren't anti-social
in their own important ways?

~~~
throwanem
Such as? It wasn't that you never brought new people in. It was that you
weren't operating under a perverse incentive to bring in as many new people as
you could.

~~~
jancsika
Such as being subject to the whims of random administrator/moderators and
whatever random set of principles they wished to apply to their users.

The most striking example I can remember was with _Rick and Morty_
creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to
publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for
the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that is no longer alive,
but it appears someone kept some of Dan's insults from that thread[1].

But that pales in comparison to more technically-oriented forums and mailing
lists where insidious forms of passive-aggression flourished. These include:

* making the new user feel stupid for failing to comprehend the poor documentation or poorly considered forum guidelines

* making the new user feel stupid for asking a question and failing to read a relevant footnote from a message posted three years ago with an unrelated message topic

* endlessly blathering on about top-posting, asking-about-asking, proper quoting, on-topic vs off-topic, reading-the-stickies, formats for uploading images/attachments, instead of making the software better so that humans don't have to deal with that bs. (The same way git makes it so that humans don't have to bicker about who gets repository permissions)

* telling a user they will be ignored, then mentioning in a meta-discussion about the forum who is ignoring whom

* other users rationalizing the behavior of trolls because those trolls were veteran members

* general lack of mentors to help new users (if the purpose of the forum was to be a sort of community)

There are of course exceptions. But I still remember the feeling of just
crossing my fingers in the hopes that my query about a technical topic
wouldn't trigger Socratic bombs from a forum's resident jerk.

Stack Overflow proves there's a way to at least a way to discover and _read_
relevant responses without that pain. I have no idea what the antidote to
Facebook/Google is. But pining for single-point-of-failure, buggy backends
serving up poor UIs with content that cannot easily bubble up to a wider
audience isn't going to help.

And forget the anti-social part-- you can't even technically achieve the
spirit of such forums today because sock puppets and Sybil have become so
sophisticated. Unless we confine ourselves to topics so ineffectual that
nobody on the internet would ever decide to hate us.

[1]
[http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes](http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes)

~~~
throwanem
Okay first of all I've seen _Rick and Morty_ and there is no way in the world
I'd spend one _millisecond_ I didn't have to around the people who create that
show. If I ran a bar in a Western and Dan Justiharmoroiland walked in, I'd go
for the shotgun. The show is occasionally funny and _constantly evidence that
the minds behind it are deadly toxic to everyone in their blast radius_. Like
Bill Hicks with a sack of crystal meth and a great big hard-on. So I'm not
sure how much Dan Harmon being Dan Harmon counts as an example, is what I'm
saying. That guy's going to ruin whoever he's around just by being who he is.

But this all misses the point. What we're talking about here isn't "content"
bubbling up to "audiences". It's people keeping in touch with one another, and
making themselves places to hang out on the Internet and arrange to hang out
off it. I mean, yeah, some people are going to be assholes. That's not really
a problem for technology to solve. "Don't hang out with assholes" is maybe not
that hard? But this isn't, like, Buffy or X-Files forums we're talking about
here. It's "hey, let's put up a thing so we can talk to each other". If anyone
can just sign up to join whatever you're thinking of, then whatever you're
thinking of isn't really what we're talking about here, because what we're
talking about here is more than anything like long-running group chats _avant
la lettre_ , using whatever technology happens to be available. _Using_
technology, shaping it to fit one's purpose, and not the other way around.
That's the distinction toward which we're struggling here, I think.

------
jaysonelliot
We had ad-free social networking in 1994, and 1984.

Usenet, IRC, BBSes, MUDs… heck, remember The Well?

The Internet has always had ways for people to get together and socialize.
Ello invented nothing.

~~~
nitrogen
BBSes sometimes had full screen ANSI art interstitial ads, too, though.

------
montrose
This description of the old days is actually a fairly accurate description of
HN now.

~~~
klez
On old forums (at least the ones I was part of) the community was usually
small, and you knew most users and what they thought.

Instead on hn most of the comments I see are from people I don't think I ever
read from before.

Also, here we don't officially have PMs or an official IRC channel, both of
which were major parts of the communities I remember (most of the stuff
actually happened on IRC, not on the forums).

~~~
Goladus
Even the visual design of HN (grey usernames in a smaller font) minimizes
identity in favor of the content.

Also, for whatever reason, convention seems to favor all-lowercase names.

------
keithpeter
OP mentions Paul Ford's tilde club [1], [2]. I really must get around to
putting up one of these locally soon - if only to learn about running a Web
server in the wild.

How would one go about that now?

[1] [https://medihttp://tilde.club/um.com/message/tilde-club-i-
ha...](https://medihttp://tilde.club/um.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-
drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf)

[2] [http://tilde.club/](http://tilde.club/) [infinite waiting list... suspect
dead]

~~~
veddox
> How would one go about that now?

If you know your way about Linux and the commandline, it's not that hard.
There's plenty of good tutorials out there for (almost) anything you would
want to do. Renting a small VPS is not particularly expensive either.

I did it this year and can only recommend it - I learnt a ton in the process
:-)

~~~
keithpeter
That's a plan, thanks

------
codingdave
> we had ad-free social networking in 2004.

We had ad-free online communities in 1994... you just used telnet instead of a
browser. We had BBSes in 1984. She is totally correct that online gathering
spaces of various kinds are not new. The labels change, the tech changes, the
scale changes... and that is why the ads came in. Because at some point we
jumped from individuals making small systems into businesses making money via
large systems.

------
fimdomeio
my faith is that there will be a revival for this internet just like vinyl. I
I dream it will be very based on physical location. Kind of a mix of mastodon
with localwiki.

~~~
throwanem
Optimizing for faddishness? Vinyl's been over for years.

~~~
r3bl
And yet, they just keep selling more and more of them, a year after year.

[https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/record-
sales-v...](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/record-sales-vinyl-
hits-25-year-high-and-outstrips-streaming)

[https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/01/vinyl-sales-
rose-26-i...](https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/01/vinyl-sales-
rose-26-in-2016-see-the-25-top-selling-releases/)

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2017/01/12/vinyl-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2017/01/12/vinyl-
is-officially-booming-the-new-billion-dollar-music-business/#81905e54054b)

[https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/04/vinyl-records-
sa...](https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/04/vinyl-records-sales-2017/)

[https://thevinylfactory.com/news/vinyl-
sales-q3-2017/](https://thevinylfactory.com/news/vinyl-sales-q3-2017/)

~~~
throwanem
Didn't say that selling vinyl was over. Every fad gets commercialized some
time after it's peaked. In a year or two, no one will remember.

~~~
r3bl
That "in a year or two" seems to be happening since 2007 for the Vinyl
industry:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_revival)

------
lyra_comms
Our team (mostly cognitive scientists and engineers) is nostalgic about the
past of online communication and concerned about its future. Our platform,
Lyra, provides support for effective conversations rather than social
networking and advertising. You can read our history of online convesation -
and more about our approach - here: www.hellolyra.com/introduction

~~~
nofilter
But why does all the free and open stuff look so bad. I mean seriously, Lyra
is in dire need for someone with a UX/UI background to join their team.

~~~
lyra_comms
As a nonprofit, we operate on grants and revenue alone, not investment.

We'd love to hear some specific feedback on what you think could be improved
about our UI :)

We also think we're not doing too badly compared to Reddit and Hacker News!

~~~
60654
Not the parent, but I have two specific suggestions about the on boarding
process.

One, please add a directory (feed?) of public conversations that can be viewed
without logging in. I want to see how the platform is used by other people and
whether that fits me - but if you ask me to create an account first, I'm going
to bounce.

Two, here on HN you say the team is mostly cog sci and engg people, which
sounds awesome and piques my curiosity about why you made this. But the web
site itself doesn't mention that, or anything about the people behind it.
Please add an 'about the team' page so that I can understand more about the
people who are inviting me to use their platform.

Hope this helps!

~~~
lyra_comms
Thanks, we will add a page about the team.

We have been thinking carefully about whether to include a public conversation
feed. Public communications are not Lyra's central use case, and as most
conversations are private at the moment, such a feed would be quite sparse.

As a nonprofit which is not funded by advertising, it is not our main goal to
support viewers without an account. There is no charge to sign up.

