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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People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.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 don't think this is a maths problem. It's a social problem. Monkey brain combined with internet communications is still not a solved problem.
I think part of this is figuring out the values you want to express in the format of any given service (Marshal McLuhan style). You need to figure out what it is you're trying to build for, and then build systems and tools that optimise towards that. (Corporate social media is failing because it's only optimised towards profit, and that approach eats itself in the long run).
I posted an issue for mastodon on this recently. I think Lemmy should be asking the same questions.
First off, agreed that monkey brain + internet = unsolved.
Second, I think that this overall is a math problem and what you're describing is metadata. Before I continue, there are many ways to solve and interpret problems - this is just how I see it.
If you think about this as a graph, it makes a lot more sense as a math problem. People want to communicate and the message has to reach each of them once through the shortest route. In essence, this becomes the "Traveling Salesman Problem".
Next, imagine the distance between points on the graph become longer (when people group together) and shorter (when people split apart) - we now have described tyranny of the majority.
What you are describing (from my perspective) is the cost of going from one part of the graph to the other. This indeed is a very important part of the problem and directly relates to the tyranny, but does not solve it. Instead to solve this problem, we would have to find a way to standardize the distance between any two points in the graph (i.e it cannot take more than 30 feet to reach any given destination).
I cannot begin to describe how difficult this would be, but my brain is telling me it's solvable.
The comments (and your github post) helped me think about this a bit deeper. This is why discussion is helpful.
I have a maths major, and think in networks, same as you. I agree that that's a good start to thinking about the problem. It's basically similar approach to Jay Forrester's World model, that used system dynamics to model the global economy.
But what you're doing is building a model, and then proposing using it to make decisions about how to run the world. This would be sensible, except that any model is necessarily a simplification of the real world, and that simplification process is subjective. What you value and care about and think is important defines what you put in the model, and also what you optimise for, and how you interpret the outputs. So your decisions ultimately end up being subjective too.
There are other issues too, such as the fact that any dynamic model like this exhibits complexity, which makes it analytically unsolveable; and chaos, which means numerical predictions will suffer from unpredictability due to the Butterfly effect, and the Hawkmoth effect.
If you want to get a deeper understanding of this stuff, systems thinking is where you need to head. I would recommend this paper as an excellent introduction to the field as a whole: https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.54120%2Fjost.000051 (Open access, about 50 pages)
For the first wave/system dynamics approach, this article is worth a read too (IMO it presents far to simple a picture though): https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/