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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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I think this is an XY problem.
People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.
The root problem (in my opinion) is that we need to share critical information to the masses, but the masses introduce "tyranny of the majority". It's a really tricky problem to figure out, and I really really really want mathematicians working on this.
If you live in the states, the Electoral College exists because they were looking for a practical solution to this problem. Considering the outcomes, it did not work - but there is no shame in this, as I think this is actually a really hard problem to solve.
The only known solution is to not share information to the masses (a.k.a keeping the normies out). In essence, this is what the old internet was - and a large part of what made it great. But this is not correct as it does not meet the criteria of the problem. Nor does it translate well, since your neighbors are apart of the masses.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share. If you do math for a living, please gather your friends and make an open-thesis about this.
EDIT
After some discussion in the comments, I have a general hypothesis:
People must be able to distinguish the resource they are accessing - highly recommended this process be easy. This provides consistent "edges".
Looking at "tyranny of the majority" from a different perspective, one answer is to standardize how people communicate. This means no closed ecosystems nor convoluted protocols. This provides "standard weight" while preventing "infinite weight".
This eliminates every platform I know of. Servers should not be given any tools to prevent incoming nor outgoing data. People should handle moderation individually - sane UI can of course be made available (BlueSky block filters could be inspiration?). Blocking should only be handled by the "nodes", this also prevents "infinite weight".
I find it really funny that this conclusion kind of alludes to the early internet in a lot of ways. Maybe it wasn't the internet-forums, but the internet itself that has changed.
I would have thought this is already a solved problem.
If you model social networks like a graph, then you can measure certain properties. One property that's very important for social networks is the "small world index". The small world index is a ratio of (how many of your friends know about each other(clustering coefficient))/(how many people on average to connect with anyone in the world (average path length)). Basically, in tribal communities, it used to be that everyone knew one another, AND if you really needed to send a message to another community then it would take only a few intermediate people. The former gives you a sense of safety, and the latter gives you the sense of being able to change the world.
With the advent of social media and other things, the small world index has gone way down. The amount of your friends that your friends know on average is gone down, aka, everyone is very fragmented and the clustering index has gone down. This number has gone down faster than the average path length, because the average path length was surprisingly low to begin with. The net effect is that people feel less like they are part of a community.
Social networks always try to tune their algorithms to encourage interactions to raise the small world index in this direction, but it's very hard. For one, only few percent of users actually generate any content, the rest are lurkers. You can't have a high clustering if your "potential friends" never talk to each other, if you can call them that.
Another reason is that enabling small worlds inside social networks is sometimes at odds with revenue generation. In general, consuming content/having para-social interactions online is much easier than before the modern social networks. Thus, people have gotten much more picky with their time and interactions, and now the type of content that people expect to see online now must be of the highest quality. High quality content is easier to monetize, but it's also harder to create. So this puts an artificial floor on who creates content (only people who are in it for the money), and thus we have fewer people who spread/share ideas. This decreases the clustering coefficient. Thus, paid social networks are against small worlds.
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This is interesting perspective.
If I'm interpreting what your saying correctly, this becomes an alternation of the "Traveling Salesman Problem" - where people are the nodes, sending information is the destination, and medium of communication is the weight. The goal being finding the shortest path for two-way communication (go to destination and return).
If this is the case, "tyranny of majority" is indeed a very difficult problem to solve. This phenomena causes the weights of the graph to become change based on the number of surrounding nodes. Higher when less nodes (i.e Lemmy) and lower when more nodes (i.e Reddit).
To go even further, companies are manipulating their weights (creating closed ecosystems, etc) to make is so two-way communication is only viable within their bubble (think an edge of infinite weight). And it would also mean that it truly is unreasonable to expect laymen to "memorize the graph" (know a forum for everything) - it indeed would be just easier to know a subsection (i.e Reddit, Facebook, etc)
I'm just spitballing here, but a lot to interpret if true.
Interesting response!
Yes, the node, edges, travelling salesman, those are my definitions as well.
The only difference is that I've always thought about this is with an undirected graph. That models conventional friendships pretty well, but now that I'm thinking about it, it's probably not a good way to model modern "relationships". Either way, with two nodes it's no longer a travelling salesman, as it becomes a much easier problem to solve.
I would argue that the tyranny of the majority unlikely to not be solved with the current form of social networks. I'm not sure if I have time to write out my argument, but it stems from the fact that the most popular people in the world have very uni-directional relationships with most people; everyone knows of Mr. Beast, very few know Mr. Beast.
Yeah the uni-directional relationships are also significant. It also happens to translate well; if Mr.Beast goes to randomcorp.com he is almost guaranteed to pull more people over than if SchmoeJoe went. Those people in turn would cause the website to be a more attractive option (less weight on the edge).
That would mean that there even is nuance within tyranny, which is funny to think about.
There's also the possibility of cycles! What a fun rabbit-hole. Definitely worth a thesis paper or large-scale open discussion.
P.S. Also agreed that with a "limit" it is not TSP, and is much simpler. It evolves into TSP only when you think about a message originating from a source and making it to everyone - with the same effect for responses.