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I use Blind sometimes to check the TC of a company. Most of the posts/comments there are either stupid, sexist, racist, or all of them. But it does feel like most of them are real. Blind requires verification by company email for posting, which I guess eliminates most of the bots.

by TFNA12 hours ago|

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> People crave human interaction with like minded individuals

I don’t think they crave it enough to make a difference. Even before AI slop, Reddit had made successive changes that led to much less of a feeling of interaction with real, authentic humans who could become your buddies. The UI de-emphasized usernames and hid the sidebars where subreddits could have their own distinct community atmosphere. I hear that now on comment threads, Reddit will even hide a decent number of posts from other users, so that a poster may well be talking into the void.

It is on old-school fora that one can get a sense of actual interaction: with avatars and other personalized touches it’s easy to gradually learn who is who, and there is a culture of longform text where you can actually get a sense of other people’s personalities. But how many people under the age of 35 or 40 are joining those fora that survive? Give people a choice, and it turns out they prefer the dopamine hits of engagement-maximizing commercial platforms, and the smartphone as the default (or sole) interface to the internet with all the death of nuance that spells.

by alaudet10 hours ago|

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Some definitely enjoy the dopamine hits and get addicted to the doom scrolling. Maybe I am just too old to understand it and the internet is passing me by. Some of us still like conversations like this. Real conversation in a respectful manner even when we question each others viewpoints. The old internet is still there in some places and I'll continue hanging out there as long as it does. While I have great friends in real life, not that many of them are old tech nerds, so the internet is really the only place to talk to like minded people.

by danaris4 hours ago|

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> whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful

The problem is, there is fundamentally no way to scale this.

The only way to give authentic human interaction with like-minded individuals is to connect real humans to other real humans who share interests. And as we've already seen over the first few ages of the Internet, once such a community scales past a certain size, it a) ceases to be a place where people can come to chat, discuss, and hang out with their interest-sharing friends, because there are just too many people for one person to know, and b) becomes a target for profit-minded interests who will cheerfully eviscerate any authenticity and connection the community brought if it will make them a small profit before the community crumbles and collapses.

So anyone trying to "give authentic online experiences" as a business model is going to have to accept that they are going to be, at best, a small, modestly profitable company. And given the state of things today, I very much doubt that this is in the cards.