2026-06-09
Why were cypherpunks and extropians better than today's social media?
Disclaimer
- Thinking aloud, may not endorse after a lot of thought
Main
- Why were cypherpunks and extropians mailing list better experiences than to today's twitter, substack, hackernews, lesswrong, etc? Some guesses:
- No dislike or like button. You could disengage from bad content but you couldn't dunk on it as easily. You had to actually read content first, to decide if it was good or bad.
- Members did not have huge networth (capital) or social media following (attention) so there was less instrumental reason to write posts. Curiosity hence became the driver of a higher fraction of posts.
- Small group not large group.
- Software for the forum was not trivial to use. Even today, github issue threads are higher quality than hackernews threads which in turn are higher quality than discord or reddit or similar. Cypherpunks went further than this, and explicitly had a motto "cypherpunks write code." Not only did this gatekeep the discussion to software developers, but it also ensured their ideas could make more contact with reality.
- Forum moderators and web hosts had not yet become targets for all sorts of political fuckery. Forum commentors had not yet become targets for all sorts of political fuckery.
- They were the only good forums for their topic, and did not face competition from other forums. Today it is trivial to spawn a low effort discord or reddit, to compete with an existing forum.
- There did not exist as many Big Tech companies to occupy the time of the world's best software developers with either pointless busywork or money-making. These people felt they had more free time to chitchat on a forum.
- Both projects were significantly more naive about the downsides of the new projects they were attempting. There are still True Believers of bitcoin and the singularity today, but also many more people who notice downsides.
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