[HN Gopher] The End of Social Media
___________________________________________________________________
The End of Social Media
Author : miikavonbell
Score : 108 points
Date : 2021-08-20 13:24 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (miikavonbell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (miikavonbell.com)
| [deleted]
| ramesh31 wrote:
| YouTube is the only "social network" that I can defend. I
| honestly think it's the very best thing to ever come out of the
| Web. The key to it though is using it without a Google login and
| with cookies disabled. This gives you the default algorithm free
| experience and forces you to engage your brain to _think_ about
| what you want to see, rather than being spoon fed down a rabbit
| hole.
| ebiester wrote:
| If you want to see it with this lens, then look at "trending."
| I don't tend to have an issue with the algorithm - I like that
| I get amateur science, humor, and puzzles.
|
| I don't use it to watch political content, so I don't get much
| of it.
| criticaltinker wrote:
| Being logged out and having cookies disabled definitely helps,
| but in my experience it's almost not enough.
|
| I need to access Youtube from a completely different IP
| address, with a different user agent and browser window size to
| get rid of certain themes and suggestions that magically appear
| on the front page. Browser fingerprinting is responsible for
| this adversarial dynamic I find myself in.
| asdff wrote:
| Before youtube you still had video sharing services online.
| Youtube was one of like a dozen popular video sites before it
| started consuming the market like a black hole, or Standard
| Oil.
| mbg721 wrote:
| I had done this in a new browser because my work once used it
| to stream a meeting, and I was shocked how tabloid-trashy the
| default front-page suggestions were. I can't believe that's
| what a plurality of people would want without the algorithms.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I can believe the tabloid trash is what people want: I've
| seen supermarket checkout aisles and daytime TV, the depths
| of the lowest common denominator have been plumbed before and
| it seems reasonable that youtube would arrive at much the
| same place. I can understand occasionally wanting to check
| the popular content for neat trends that you missed out on,
| but the idea of seeking out the pop / tabloid experience as
| your main interaction mechanism is foreign and slightly
| revolting to me. It's not an escape from the algorithm, it's
| just another side of the algorithm, and not the best one.
|
| IMO the curated youtube experience is far better. Yes, it
| recommends similar content and will push you down a
| rabbithole if you let it, but that's what recommender systems
| do. The flipside of discovering good content from good
| choices is discovering bad content from bad choices, and I
| don't think those can be automatically separated. On occasion
| you have to actively and firmly tell the algorithm "no" in
| the form of "don't recommend this channel," but once you do
| it respects your decision. A tiny bit of curation goes a long
| way, and if if I didn't let youtube work with me to figure
| out what I liked I imagine I would wind up doing the same
| thing but worse by keeping a list of interesting channels
| that I periodically checked.
| krapp wrote:
| In my experience, Youtube only works as a curated experience,
| which means being logged into an account, having
| subscriptions, an active search history, etc.
| mod50ack wrote:
| I just use it to watch my subscriptions and things I
| specifically search for. With an adblocker so I can tolerate
| it, and sponsorblock for good measure. On Android I use NewPipe
| + sponsorblock.
|
| I'm not addicted to YouTube. I don't spend that much time on
| it. It's not my go-to source when I go online. Maybe I'm in the
| minority, but when you treat it only as a video hosting service
| where you can follow specific feeds, I don't think it's really
| problematic.
| volume wrote:
| one middle ground I have taken for Youtube is to periodically
| delete my watch history. I am naturally curious so then when I
| watch a new niche I welcome Youtube's flood of new content.
| goatkey wrote:
| This may be an unpopular opinion, but I really enjoy YouTube
| Premium. It's nice to have the option to pay for an ad free
| experience, which is particularly useful on iOS mobile as
| uBlock origin doesn't work. Having the ability to easily
| download videos for offline viewing and turn off auto play
| (which I think is also available without premium) is nice, too.
|
| I am sure they are still hoovering up all my data but I hope
| they at least heed the signal that some people will pay for ad-
| free alternatives!
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Your opinion may be unpopular, but I appreciate the
| perspective you bring to the table.
|
| I do think there is merit to the idea of market segmentation
| and value offerings in different ways:
|
| 1 - Eyeballs : Give us attention in exchange for browsing
|
| 2 - Premium : Pay us, and we will omit all ads
|
| 3 - VendorCosted: Vendor pays, and we omit all ads from
| certain content
| optimalsolver wrote:
| >YouTube is the only "social network" that I can defend.
|
| What about Hacker News?
| gpsx wrote:
| I don't think anyone likes advertising, but that does bankroll
| the internet. There are some great content providers on youtube
| who do that full time and make a living from it. Even many basic
| sites owe their existence to advertising because running a server
| is not free. But the joke in on the advertisers. Internet
| advertising doesn't work, or at least that is what I have read.
|
| If we hadn't had advertising but instead came up with some
| micropayment formalism, I bet the internet never would have
| developed to be what it is today, even for today's content that
| is not ad driven.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't know if it's actually a plausible outcome, but take
| advertising out of the equation and you probably end up with a
| significantly more limited Internet that's mostly accessed from
| institutional accounts (as was originally the case) and by
| individuals who are fine with a fairly expensive subscription
| fee.
|
| ADDED: I do tend to think the commercialization of the Internet
| with advertising was probably inevitable, but someone could
| probably construct at least a vaguely plausible narrative
| around a less commercialized post-NSFNET world.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| Social media isn't over, just as trash TV, and entertainment
| parading as news isn't over.
| marto1 wrote:
| It's also incredibly potent for spreading propaganda. I doubt
| any of the big players want to give any of that power just yet
| :-)
| [deleted]
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| I don't fully understand the point of the article, but there's my
| take anyway. ;-)
|
| I pay for YouTube Premium so I don't get any ads on YouTube. And
| I don't really care about the (crappy) algorithm because I only
| watch what I subscribe to.
|
| I hope Twitter's utility will similarly increase as they pivot to
| (a) premium paid services, and (b) open protocols via BlueSky.
|
| Glass is a new social media photography app for iOS that feels a
| lot like early Instagram, but it's a paid service with no ads.
|
| So yeah, perhaps it's the end of social media as we knew it...but
| that's fine because new and existing services will adapt to
| provide people premium experiences (for a fee of course).
|
| Remember, we are the internet. If we don't like what it is, we
| can build something better.
| joghues wrote:
| It's just that people are making the most out of social media.
| Others have decided to make a hustle out of it, and it's not a
| bad thing as it allows other people to have money to put food on
| their table.
| LOOKOUT wrote:
| One of the best features of a jailbroken iPhone is the ability to
| hide all ads on YouTube / Spotify / Instagram / Twitter / TikTok.
|
| I feel impervious to social media advertising & you can too if
| you just go through the effort.
| asdff wrote:
| Is there an untethered jailbreak these days?
| LOOKOUT wrote:
| jailbreaks are currently described as semi-tethered.
|
| meaning a jailbreak app must be ran after a phone has booted.
| your phone stays jailbroken as long as it does not power
| down.
|
| it is functionally untethered. as the app that jailbreaks the
| phone persists through reboots.
|
| there are firmware restrictions where these methods work
| however.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| "The end of social media" is quite a lofty statement, bearing in
| mind that facebook, twitter, ect... are social media, but social
| media isnt facebook, twitter.
|
| It'd be like if there were some massive drama involving Netflix
| and YouTube. You wouldnt call it the end of streaming, or web
| based video. There'd be a massive shift in the market certainly,
| and I think eventually social media will look completely
| different to how it looks now, but thats not the end.
|
| It might sound like I'm arguing over semantics but I'd disagree.
| lsalvatore wrote:
| Most instagram ads are more entertaining and insightful than this
| article. Advertising is actually about educating the consumer for
| many products, and I think we're moving more toward personal ads
| that don't feel like ads. Sometimes you come across an ad that
| helps you or even changes your life. Things like new games, books
| or ideas. This article has nothing to do with the end of social
| media.
| nicce wrote:
| > Advertising is actually about educating the consumer for many
| products, and I think we're moving more toward personal ads
| that don't feel like ads.
|
| They try to make consumer to buy the product in all means.
| Which means, that this education is often very far away from
| facts in the most of the cases.
| markbnj wrote:
| >> Some time ago I tried to find information about Crocodiles,
| the animals. Instead, I got results about Crocs shoes and zero
| information about the actual crocodiles.
|
| I just entered 'crocodile' into Google search while signed into
| my normal private account, and got a ton of useful information
| about crocodiles. Shoes were nowhere to be found in the first 30
| or 40 results that I scanned. I don't know if the OP is using a
| different search engine that is more blatant about ads.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| the OP probably searched for 'Crocs'. Even DDG floods the front
| page with the footwear. I'm not sure this is a great example.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > the OP probably searched for 'Crocs'
|
| Why would you do that when searching for crocodiles?
| ghaff wrote:
| Because it's shorter and is a common term for crocodiles in
| various places where they're common.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Not sure it's reasonable to search an international
| search engine with a regional slang and then complain
| when it doesn't recognise it.
| criddell wrote:
| It is when that search engine has been telling you for
| 20+ years to let them collect all your data because in
| exchange you get personalized search results.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't disagree. As soon as I started typing I would
| realize that crocs would probably turn up the shoe.
| However, to the degree that people routinely use
| regionalisms, it's easy to see why they might use them
| reflexively. Of course, it's also easy to see why a
| search engine might not return the results they expect.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| it's also the exact name of a famous brand of footwear
| Gunax wrote:
| This might be a bad example, since crocs and crocodiles are
| different words. But in some regions, 'croc' is used much more
| often than 'crocodile' in the same way that Americans say
| 'sitcom' much more often than 'situational comedy'. Even though
| it's an abbreviation, it's eclipsed the full word in frequency.
|
| But I think the author's general point isn't about the
| information being unavailable (even if croc was the whole word,
| you can just write 'croc animal') but about the internet being
| engineered as a distraction machine. He didn't set out to look
| for shoes--but once they were presented, suddenly he found
| himself shoe shopping _despite having no internet in purchasing
| shoes_.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| Is there anywhere in the English-speaking world where people
| say "situational comedy" instead of "sitcom"? I don't think
| I've ever heard anyone say "situational comedy" once in my
| life, unless they were answering the question "what is sitcom
| short for?"
| Kye wrote:
| Useful data:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=
| s...
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sitcom%2C+sit
| u...
|
| It looks like sitcom ran in parallel below situation comedy
| from the start, then sitcom took over with the boom in the
| 1980s. Situation comedy never went away, but it never came
| close once they diverged.
| markbnj wrote:
| Fair enough, and yeah searching for 'crocs' unsurprisingly
| returns a boatload of shoe results. This is a broader issue I
| think, in that coming up with good search terms that are
| likely to return the results you need is a bit of a skill.
| duxup wrote:
| I searched Crocodiles on YouTube, lots of good quality results
| that I saw.
| sillycross wrote:
| I completely agree with the author's rants on machine learning
| algorithm.
|
| > consuming content through internet has become more and more
| manipulative.
|
| This is 100% true. With those ML-based "personalized" info feed,
| users keep getting pushed biased information that _matches their
| prejudice_ and is not a reflection of the true picture.
|
| I'm actually dubious that what fraction of the pro-Trump
| conspiracy theorists had developed their conspiracy views "thanks
| to" Facebook et al's ML-based info suggestion algorithms.
| thickened wrote:
| Miika-
|
| This article is a dog whistle for right-wing behaviour and is
| quite frankly problematic, starting with this quip in the first
| paragraph which sets the stage: "[...] instead of letting
| algorithms and machine learning decide what is good for you."
|
| We've spent a good twenty years now, and longer really, building
| the infrastructure to ensure that when it comes to the World Wide
| Web, FAAMNG+ companies - not just restricted to US-centric ones
| but globally really - can make sure that the things you see, and
| the way the algorithms work, are done in a way that is good for
| you.
|
| I used to be against mass surveillance, logging everything, but
| seeing this kind of an article in 2021 sends shivers up my spine.
| I'm quite worried. Is this what we should look into next?
| claytongulick wrote:
| > This article is a dog whistle for right-wing behaviour and is
| quite frankly problematic
|
| Every time I see a sentence like this, I interpret it as the
| first step of an attempt to reduce speech.
|
| Step 1: Identify 'problematic' content.
|
| Step 2: Create rules to limit the distribution of 'problematic'
| content.
|
| Step 3: Broaden the definition of 'problematic' content to
| include anything that disagrees with a specific point of view.
|
| Step 4: Dystopian hell straight from Orwell.
|
| > can make sure that the things you see, and the way the
| algorithms work, are done in a way that is good for you.
|
| Is this a 'woosh' moment? Is this intended to be satire?
|
| > I used to be against mass surveillance, logging everything
|
| > Is this what we should look into next?
|
| If this is satire, can you please clarify?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think anyone on the Left wants to give the Right
| ownership of the idea that algorithmic advertisements and
| social media are mostly bad.
|
| > We've spent a good twenty years now, and longer really,
| building the infrastructure to ensure that when it comes to the
| World Wide Web, FAAMNG+ companies - not just restricted to US-
| centric ones but globally really - can make sure that the
| things you see, and the way the algorithms work, are done in a
| way that is good for you.
|
| Wait, maybe I'm being hit by Poe's law here -- is your post
| actually sarcasm?
| donretag wrote:
| Here is my take: content creators are the problem.
|
| When Friendster, MySpace,Facebook, et al started, it was about
| connecting friends online. People that already had a connection.
| When you shared something, you wanted to share something personal
| with friends. YouTube was about sharing your home videos. Not for
| money, but for actually sharing. What a strange concept!
|
| Then people noticed you can monetize their content. No longer was
| it about sharing with friends, but creating for profit.
|
| Social networks, as they were envisioned, are a great concept. As
| a method for distributing content to be monetized, not so much.
| ridethebike wrote:
| Nothing bad with creating fun stuff for profit.
|
| And over the last decade youtube creators has been providing
| content with quality way superior compared to what more
| traditional entertainment industry has been producing (mainly
| marvel junk food, low effort remakes and SNL)
| [deleted]
| FooHentai wrote:
| >Nothing bad with creating fun stuff for profit.
|
| I think that's an oversimplification of the issue. OPs main
| point (as I read it) was that once a profit motive became
| dominant, it pushed out enthusiast/passion-motivated content
| creators, and as a result the output is distorted towards
| that which is profitable.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Maybe at one point social networks were actually social
| networks, but that isn't what they are any more. They're
| poorly-moderated, poorly-curated entertainment distribution
| platforms. People who own data centers and URLs figured out you
| can cut out the middlemen of studios, editors, publishers, et
| al, and the quality of content may go way down, but the
| quantity will go way up and cost to produce will go way down,
| in many cases to zero if you just let arbitrary users create
| your content for you, and engagement was never correlated with
| quality anyway.
|
| The fact that consumers as well as creators need permanent
| accounts in order to use the platform enabled a level of
| tracking that normal studios and publishers could never have
| dreamed of. Warners could never put activity loggers into their
| viewer's eyeballs to figure out the exact rate at which the
| content of frame N leads them to continue watching at frame N +
| n. They had to rely on some level of positive word of mouth and
| positive reviews. They needed to leave some lasting impression
| that after their viewers spent a few minutes going home and
| thinking about it, they still thought the content was worth
| recommending.
|
| That is all gone now.
| naravara wrote:
| > and engagement was never correlated with quality anyway.
|
| Well it's a different style of engagement and a different
| standard for "quality" from what we colloquially think of
| those terms to mean. Traditional media needed you to engage
| with the media. Social media needs you to engage with the
| comment section associated with the media. The qualities the
| system is optimizing for, then, isn't the stuff we typically
| consider to be good for that medium. Instead it's the stuff
| that's good for making people talk about it.
|
| This is almost certainly to blame for things always
| gravitating towards largely subjective evaluations of where
| something falls on some axis for a highly charged metric. Is
| this racist or not racist? Queer friendly or unfriendly?
| Liberal of conservative? Arguing about how to 'keep score'
| with which boxes any specific bit of media gets is a good way
| to say something about something topical that keeps people
| engaged and arguing.
|
| Even in the days of the old blogosphere it was well known
| that you needed to have a comments section to get the page
| views. You can only crank out so many articles as an
| individual. But you can make your site "stickier" and
| encourage people to keep clicking the bookmark for it if you
| can get them engaged with talking about your article. It's
| not surprise that the most noxious elements of the modern
| Internet were more-or-less born on Reddit and Tumblr. These
| were two sites that basically thrived on creating selective
| pressure for this sort of content.
| cvwright wrote:
| I want the original version back. 2000's Facebook was
| actually pretty great while it lasted.
| asdff wrote:
| For the last paragraph it wasn't quite that simple, Nielson
| Media Research was aggregating audience statistics for market
| analysis since the radio days before TV.
| simmanian wrote:
| I feel it's not useful to separate out the content creators
| from the network itself. Most of the "bad" things we see in
| today's social media are byproducts of how these networks
| behave as a whole. Put differently, how Youtube functions today
| is the result of the interactions between Youtube's algorithm
| to maximize profit for Google, content creators' drive to get
| more views, and consumers' desire to find more addicting
| things. You change one piece of the network and the network
| will behave very differently.
|
| I find this to be very hopeful, because it means we can design
| and form networks that elevate people, not lower them into
| mindless zombie states.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Yet monetization enabled great content creators to generate
| something with a high production value or live their dream by
| earning money while doing the things they love. Veratasium or
| VSauce, for example, are a great channels, but they would've
| never gotten where they are now if they wouldn't have been able
| to earn money with it.
|
| A similar topic comes up in music all the time, too: People
| accuse their favorite band of changing their style in order to
| get mainstream appeal and, therefore, more money. Which is
| definitely true to some extend, but I don't think this makes
| paying musicians a bad thing in general. And it's the same
| thing with content creators on the internet.
| el-salvador wrote:
| I've noticed that before IG and Tiktok influencers become
| popular, their content is more authentic / less cookie-
| cutter. Also their followers leave better comments (they are
| only followed by those who genuinely like them).
| scollet wrote:
| Practically, it's an advertising apparatus. Creators probably
| fit a normal distribution for mass appeal, so your ire might be
| better directed at advertisers who enable and curate primarily
| profit-driven content.
|
| Nothing wrong with making a few bucks off of your craft.
| milkytron wrote:
| > content creators are the problem.
|
| > you can monetize their content.
|
| Wouldn't that put the blame on the monetization of social
| media? Content creators are trying to make money, social media
| companies determine what kind of content is relevant and worthy
| of views, thus which content deserves the money. Content
| creators seem to be at the mercy of providing content that will
| be recommended.
|
| I view it as a sort of "don't hate the player, hate the game."
| And the social media companies determine the rules of the game.
| bluGill wrote:
| Facebook became much more useful to me when I realized this,
| and left all groups and the like behind. Facebook was always a
| terrible forum interface since they didn't show me everything.
| Now all they have is my friends list, so I see more pictures of
| my friend's kid riding a horse, or vacation pictures from
| Montana - exactly what I want facebook to show me.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| I'm not sure how to phrase this without sounding rude, but what
| is this saying that adds insight to what I've been reading on
| places like HN for a decade?
|
| Is it true that people are getting dumber? Big claim, no
| evidence. Do paragraphs exist? I'm looking for solution. Saying
| nobody knows what the future looks like ain't it.
| criticaltinker wrote:
| This book [1] argues that average IQ has been significantly
| increasing over the past century, and supports the claim with a
| wide variety of evidence.
|
| However the author also posits that whether _intelligence_ is
| increasing is still controversial and difficult to prove
| conclusively.
|
| [1] Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First
| Century https://books.google.com/books?id=Z_-ykOVpRccC
| asdff wrote:
| I wonder how well we are able to maintain focus relative to
| years past, what with the mental damage of consuming content
| in thirty second or so intervals for long chunks of time for
| years and years. My internet addiction as a teenager 15 years
| ago was bad enough, if I grew up with fast paced junk like
| TikTok I feel like I would probably develop ADD just from the
| rewiring process that happens while growing up coupled with
| these short spurts of junk food tier content meant to engage
| you for as long as possible. Hopefully in another 20 years
| people see social media like a cigarette but for mental
| health.
| moate wrote:
| Adult with ADHD here: You would not develop ADD from media.
| That's not how this works. The fact that devs have found
| ways to design sites that mimic patterns for addiction
| doesn't mean it's the people. It's the things. If you
| suddenly found yourself removed from the stimuli, you'd be
| fine, no longer the exposure period. I will not.
|
| Since our jumping off point was "people are getting
| dumber"(they aren't) I just want to point out people aren't
| also developing ADHD, they just have more things vying for
| their neurtypical brain's attention.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| While it's pretty tough to even measure intelligence,
| nutrition and general health have improved dramatically, so
| that's likely to have spill-over into cognitive improvements
| as well.
| xcfvbnkhnkjq wrote:
| >Is it true that people are getting dumber? Big claim, no
| evidence. Do paragraphs exist? I'm looking for solution.
|
| Are the grammar issues intentional?
| moate wrote:
| The "people are getting dumber" argument really rubbed me the
| wrong way as well. It's glib and pithy and people love to make
| this claim when talking about things they don't like about
| society.
|
| "I dislike ads and only stupid idiot babies would tolerate
| platforms with ads, therefore everyone using the majority of
| websites is an idiot" is such lazy thinking. IDK, I'm a huge
| fan of social sciences which means I might as well be the devil
| to many engineers/HN posters.
| b1d3nb3h1d3n wrote:
| Most of social media is just liberal bots pushing their liberal
| agenda.
|
| Someone once mentioned that something like only 8% of twitter are
| actual real users. The rest are just bots.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I think an anonymous "dislike" button could go a long way in
| improving social media.
| [deleted]
| fsiefken wrote:
| for a long while i was thinking my comments on facebook would
| raise the quality of interaction, but with the onslaught of
| disinformation my thoughtful and respectful comments (or so I
| think) seem to be futile and just fodder for the facebook network
| and the attention economy.
|
| So I wrote a goodbye note on instagram and facebook, felt
| confirmation by reading Jaron Lanier. Got a new domain and
| configured jekyll.
|
| Now I can blog and write my 'digital garden' notes on my own
| island and share it with a smaller circle of people outside of
| the regular social media which artificially disciplines my
| thoughts, responses and behavior like the panopticon (michel
| foucault). I'll keep an eye on facebook groups, will schedule
| some script to rss-ify some feeds from 'facebook friends' but
| that's it.
| duxup wrote:
| Problems I see:
|
| - Most content produced by people on social media is not good and
| you probably don't want to see it. Serendipity of a bunch of
| crappy content "I had a bad day nobody ask me about it" is not
| something you want, but it is serendipity.
|
| - Social media isn't where you go to get info on Crocodiles, not
| sure how that would even work? That's Wikipedia. ... or if we're
| talking social media, YouTube (I searched YouTube and got a lot
| of legitimate results).
| input_sh wrote:
| > and you probably don't want to see it.
|
| Hard disagree. I want to see everything from everyone I follow
| in a specific newest-to-oldest order. I also don't want to see
| other shit in my feed (X liked Y, who to follow, whatever), but
| I'm fine with having it outside of the main feed (be it a
| sidebar or a click away).
|
| I also want to "tag" my follows into lists (family, close
| friends, topic X, topic Y), allowing me to filter through the
| timeline.
|
| Currently only Twitter and Mastodon allow me this use case, and
| that's what I use on a semi-regular basis. Everything that
| deviates from that (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube's home feed)
| also loses me as a regular visitor with zero exceptions.
|
| But the reason everything deviates from that eventually is
| clickthrough rate on ads. If my timeline is confusing enough,
| I'm more likely to click on ads.
| briffle wrote:
| Exactly this. I WANT to see all those pictures friends and
| family are posting of their kids going back to school, or of
| their dog doing whatever. That is the point of social media,
| to someone keep in touch with the goings-on of family that
| lives far away. I actually like to read their personal
| opinions and thoughts they write on things, even when I
| disagree with them. (its interesting to see things from
| others point of view) But I wish I could just block everthing
| that someone 're-shares' since lately, its no different than
| the huge email chains your great aunt used to foward in ALL
| CAPS about how if you forward this to 10 people Bill Gates is
| going to send you money....
| nicce wrote:
| At least Instagram algorithm is going towards direction
| where this is not possible. It might hide content from
| persons which you have followed, if you haven't liked or
| reacted their posts in the past. It wants to show the most
| appealing content.
| asdff wrote:
| RSS works well for this. I follow youtube channels and other
| media on RSS and its chronological, all in one place, and I
| can group or filter them however I like.
| input_sh wrote:
| I'm gonna be honest, I do use RSS, but I dread it due to a)
| not every website supporting it, b) random sites having
| feeds that are way too noisy, c) liking one category of
| posts or one author and failing to extract those posts
| only, or d) random people I like publishing on multiple
| websites.
|
| Now I can get around it with a ton of effort, but it will
| break sooner or later, which is why why I find
| Twitter/Mastodon lists far more useful and flexible.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| Social media - at least, Twitter, but a couple of other sites
| before that - is still the go to source for breaking news.
|
| It can take tens of minutes to hours for major news sites to
| report on a breaking event (e.g., the fall of Kabul).
| Meanwhile, you can get detailed - albiet in some cases very
| innacurate - information within minutes of it happening simply
| by watching for Tweets from people on the ground.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > albiet in some cases very innacurate
|
| I would correct to most cases. Or that the information you
| get is without sufficient context to be of use.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| Actually, I've found that they tend to be fairly accurate
| at reporting 'what' is happening - it's hard for several
| people at the same time to post unique, fake videos of
| people driving around with guns while others are posting
| corroborating textual accounts.
|
| The 'why' part is a completely different matter. If there's
| any interpretation or time difference between the event and
| the post, scepticism is absolutely warranted.
| bryan_w wrote:
| It's not that hard if you use "residential proxies"
| mikeg8 wrote:
| But do we really _need_ to know breaking news, instantly? It
| becomes addicting; it especially was for me during the last
| administration. I'm completely fine finding out a few hours
| later about a breaking news story that doesn't have a
| material effect on my immediate safety (ie wild fires). If
| Twitter's biggest justification is that it lets you stay up
| to speed on news in real-time, I'd still agree we are better
| off without it, from a mental health perspective.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| > do we really need to know breaking news, instantly?
|
| There are good reasons, although I share your general
| concern. E.g., if you believe that you may be affected by
| an event, or if it's important/relevant enough that others
| will start to frame how it's perceived, it's generally good
| to find out about it as it's happening.
|
| On the other hand, the vast majority of trending events
| aren't worth being concerned about for most people.
| bluGill wrote:
| If I need to know as it is happening there should be
| sirens going off outside in my town to alert me to that.
| Everything else can wait.
| nicce wrote:
| Plenty of these "breaking news" are also heavily
| missleading. Causing side effects and heavy opinions,
| regardless if truth comes later. It is too late then.
| [deleted]
| animanoir wrote:
| I believe blogging will have a Renaissance since it has all the
| benefits from "social networks" but excluding the ads, the
| unnecessary "likes", and focus on the fundamentals which are
| sharing and discussing, just like forums, but blogs will be about
| individuals mainly.
| moate wrote:
| IDK what blogs you're reading, but many of those sites are a
| confederation of ads with small islands of content interspersed
| between.
|
| Many bloggers are trying to do it as a way to gain income at
| this point, and the ads are either all over the site or
| inserted directly into the "content".
| animanoir wrote:
| Well, like mine, which is completely about me and my thoughts
| with zero ads, and I share and discuss whatever I want
| https://safetyinsolitude.blogspot.com/ This is what I send to
| people if they want to know my digital self.
|
| So yeah, mentality needs to change to stop seeking revenue
| out of everything...
| moate wrote:
| The issue is that some people want to blog for a living
| (and there's nothing wrong with that IMO) which leads the
| platforms to optimize for that. I don't think enough people
| are willing to spin up their own self-hosted blogs just to
| throw their thoughts into the aether. Not when _points to
| what the internet has become_ exists and they can get the
| engagement /dopamine they want elsewhere.
|
| That's not to say your prediction is wrong, just feels
| extremely unlikely, barring some massive regulatory
| upheaval changing the internet's current paradigm.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| I think OPs original point was more of a circa-2005 blog,
| which would be nice. But your point is equally as valid. Try
| searching for a recipe for your favorite dish - the first two
| pages are blog posts each filled with incessant chatter about
| how the dish makes them feel. You have to scroll to the very
| bottom just to get the actual recipe.
| moate wrote:
| The Livejournal era has passed. You can't go back to that
| on a platform because platforms will continue to be for
| profit and nobody is going to pay for you to host their
| blog so you need ads to make the business viable.
|
| The other option is everyone spinning up and hosting their
| own sites, which will not happen because Helen the mommy
| blogger has 2 kids to deal with and photos to edit and
| content to write so she does not also want to learn how to
| set up hosting and write HTML.
|
| I'd like for certain things to "go back to the way they
| were" but that's just not how it works usually.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| I'm skeptical. Blogs are difficult for subject matter experts
| (people skilled in a domain, and not necessarily skilled at
| making money off of the web) to monetize.
| marcofiset wrote:
| Not everyone is using social media to make money.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Not everyone wants to monetize in the first place.
| asdff wrote:
| The issue is that its not 2005 anymore. An organic blog that
| doesn't play the SEO game will just be buried by the millions
| of junk websites that play that game, and won't get traction
| like they did in the era where searching for a topic on the
| internet brought up relevent nonspam results.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is a bug in search engines though, not in blogs.
| asdff wrote:
| It's the way the internet is now, though, and it makes it
| so that is harder for average people to find and read and
| write blogs than it was years ago. In other words, it's
| tough going back to horses when all the stables in the city
| are gas stations now.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| "New technology, this kind or any other kind, is a kind of
| Faustian bargain. It always gives us something important, but it
| also takes away something that's important. That's been true of
| the alphabet, the printing press, and telegraphy right up to the
| computer."
|
| Neil Postman on Cyberspace, 1995
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49rcVQ1vFAY
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This is a junk article. Why is it even on the front page?
|
| 60 years ago, before even the ARPANET, there was Newton Minow
| giving a speech [1] about how TV was garbage (the "vast
| wasteland" speech). If you want to read something timeless, read
| that instead.
|
| [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/09/the-vast-
| wast...
| pphysch wrote:
| Ironically, instead of linking to Minow's speech, you link to
| another "junk article" that reads like an ad for Harvard ("Hey
| look, this famous guy's daughter works at Harvard. Here are
| some random related facts." --the Harvard Gazette).
|
| The mind boggles.
| lofties wrote:
| The full speech[1] for those interested.
|
| [1] https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm
| asdff wrote:
| I was expecting a lot more damning points about TV but this
| legitimately reads like the man is a luddite rather than
| someone thinking about maybe the value of deep thinking.
| His cited evils on TV: "You will see a procession of game
| shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable
| families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism,
| murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes,
| gangsters, more violence, and cartoons." Yet in the
| paragraph above he gives the newspaper as well as the
| theater a pass, when you can see many of these tropes
| outlined in this quote from just Shakespeare.
|
| Old Old media also was a "vast wasteland" of sponsored
| radio programs, poorly written syndicated stories meant to
| engage readers to see other advertisements in newspapers
| (literally the social media model), and billboards adorning
| theaters and most aspects of public life, even more than
| today. I was hoping he would get into something about
| devoting ones efforts towards improvements, personal or
| otherwise, rather than endless consumption that leaves you
| in the same place as beforehand, but that wasn't really his
| mark and probably not even in his capitalist head given the
| opining about 'tyrannical communism'.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You're right, I should have found the actual speech, but
| fortunately someone else did.
| olah_1 wrote:
| This reads like an advertisement for peer to peer apps like
| Manyverse[1], Iris[2], or Capsule[3].
|
| He mentions mirror.xyz in the footnotes, but I can't figure out
| what that is. One of those annoyingly exclusive projects like
| Clubhouse. The fact that not letting people in was a "feature"
| really just turned me off. Sour grapes, but oh well.
|
| [1]: https://www.manyver.se/
|
| [2]: https://iris.to
|
| [3]: https://capsule.social/
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