Internet culture is mostly awful, yet for some reason people here want to make more of it.

What’s the better thing after this repetitive world of profiles and badges and followers and gifs and algos and exhortations to touch grass?

Crypto doesn’t fix this btw.

I think flatter social hierarchies like forums, image boards, discord servers, etc are the backbone of meaningful internet culture.

Public social graphs create status create ego create “attention economies” which algorithms reward in a vicious cycle.

father, husband, css booster, ux engineer, silently defining variables as /sdv sdv.wtf

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

Currently: WhatsABI

One fix could be to hide the metrics that social media has popularized: follows, likes, and reblog/tweet/cast/etc

Then just distill it down to one metric: replies

I think that's right, *public* internet culture is basically the equivalent of celebrity culture (where everyone gets to pretend to be a micro-celebrity) right down to the gossip rags, envy, etc.

Dunno if there's a way to "fix" public internet culture, but private communities don't have to suffer this way.