[HN Gopher] Is this the end of social networking?
___________________________________________________________________
Is this the end of social networking?
Author : ZacnyLos
Score : 194 points
Date : 2022-08-11 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reb00ted.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (reb00ted.org)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Non sequitur: was social networking the evolution of reality
| television?
| renchap wrote:
| This is why we are building Notos[1], most of the photo sharing
| websites evolved in social networks (or died).
|
| We chose to not make our user's album public by default, where
| most competitors are doing so and benefit from the SEO involved,
| but we want to focus on sharing with family and friends, not the
| whole world.
|
| Now the elephant in the room is monetisation and getting people
| to pay for their usage, this is not easy but we firmly believe it
| can be done but probably not with a trajectory allowing you to
| raise VC money.
|
| [1] https://www.notos.co/
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You mean end of classic fb social networking. Social networking
| in general is going to be big always
| EGreg wrote:
| No kidding. Facebook had so much potential, when it was deployed
| in universities. But then it became a social network about
| everything. Zuck had a lot of potential when he was thinking
| about P2P file sharing site Wirehog, but Sean Parker "put a
| bullet in that thing" and VCs like Peter "competition is for
| losers, build a monopoly" Thiel shaped it into a money making
| machine that's less about being social and more about "eyeballs"
| and mindless cat meme videos. In the endgame, their algorithm
| selected for clickbait outrage that put peopl[e into echo
| chambers and tore our society apart.
|
| _Imagine what social networking could be!! The best days of
| social networking are still ahead. Now that the pretenders are
| leaving, we can actually start solving the problem. Social
| networking is dead. Long live what will emerge from the ashes. It
| might not be called social networking, but it will be, just
| better._
|
| It'll be called "Community". I don't have to imagine. We've been
| building the Community Operating System for 10 years. And it's
| available now. No, it's not Mastodon. It's Qbix :)
|
| https://qbix.com/platform
|
| https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
|
| Yes, it's open source and you can use it now. It's basically a
| Wordpress for Web 2.0 ... keep in mind that Wordpress powers 40%
| of the Web 1.0 web. We want to power 40% of the Web 2.0 social
| web.
|
| Back in 2014 my cofounder and I met with Tim Berners-Lee and his
| SOLID team. There was a movement underway to decentralize the
| web. Today, Jack Dorsey is trying to build "Web5" along the same
| lines but with Microsoft ION / Sidetree protocol, rather than
| SPARQL (@timbl's obsession) semantic data and JSON-LD.
|
| It's coming along. It's always been coming along. But it's open
| source so many people don't hear about it, until they do. MySQL
| took 8 years, NGiNX tooks 10 years but eventually they took over.
| Open source always does.
|
| Watch the video and feel free to spend some time on the weekend
| playing with it. https://qbix.com/platform/guide :)
| groffee wrote:
| Only web 2.0?! We're up to like web 5.0 now! /s
| csours wrote:
| Users of social media will learn how to deal with righteousness.
| Until we do, social media will suck big league.
|
| Social Media strongly encourages Hot Takes, because those get
| clicks. I found myself examining how I comment on reddit, and
| what people call "The Hivemind".
|
| You can't have nuanced discussions on social media, someone will
| infer what kind of asshole you exactly are, and that's the end of
| the discussion.
|
| Some poisoned phrases:
|
| Be Reasonable - "why can't you just be reasonable"
|
| Both Sides - "there are good people on both sides"
|
| Some Responsibility - "she bears some responsibility"
|
| Nuanced Discussion - "you can't have a nuanced discussion on
| social media"
|
| I'm sure there are some poisoned phrases you react instinctively
| to.
|
| I think weak arguments are good, actually. You don't need to move
| someone from the swamp to the mountain, you just need them to get
| on dry land.
|
| Now I'm sure someone has inferred exactly what kind of asshole I
| am, and they are correct. This is the kind of asshole I am. The
| kind that wants reasonable arguments to exist in the real world,
| even if I have to make them up.
| switchbak wrote:
| So what you're saying is ...? :)
|
| I have often wondered if we can turn gamification on its head,
| so we can optimize for engaging discussion instead of outrage?
| There's a lot less money in that, so it'll get way less
| attention, but I wonder if it's doable?
|
| Of course you're still playing in a game theoretic landscape,
| so it'll be taken advantage of for sure, but it might still be
| better than this local minima we're in.
|
| Something as simple as a like button leads to this cascade of
| odd behaviour. HN seems to do ok with its voting scheme. I'd
| love to see some folks dive deep in this area.
| bckr wrote:
| > so we can optimize for engaging discussion instead of
| outrage
|
| The way to do this might be to engage people, who are so
| interested, in email threads. But that doesn't drive dopamine
| cycles in the same way.
| csours wrote:
| I think authentic and engaging discussion requires a small
| audience. I'm reminded of an essay "Do things that don't
| scale"
| Minor49er wrote:
| Why is a small audience a requirement?
| csours wrote:
| People interpret nuance differently. As the audience size
| increases, contention about nuance interpretation
| increases to the point where that overwhelms the original
| conversation.
| sakex wrote:
| When I think about what social medias are left, I can only think
| about LinkedIn. Interestingly, there seem to have been a recent
| surge of interest for that platform (especially all the cringe
| worthy posts that started to pop up).
|
| After reading this article, I am starting to wonder if people
| didn't simply migrate to LinkedIn because of the degradation of
| Facebook's quality as a Social Network and as they still feel the
| need to share their lives, started sharing those cringe posts.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| LinkedIn as a whole is quite cringe though. Even companies
| share cringe worthy posts, often merely virtue signaling, while
| individuals hopelessly or needlessly exaggerate the greatness
| of experiences or other people. Trying to judge any company, I
| would completely leave their LI posts or profile out if the
| picture, unless it shows things are bad on the inside. And then
| all those recruiters not knowing how to do their job properly
| and just spamming everyone with unsuitable job offers ... LI is
| a strange world in itself and I am not sure it is worth being
| on the platform at all.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I keep hearing about this new Facebook, but as an (infrequent)
| iOS app user everything looks the same. When does doom hit me?
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Y'all should read "Amusing ourselves to death" by Neil Postman if
| you're interested in how mediums have changed over the years.
|
| As Huxley hinted, our soma is just technological narcotics. With
| each new medium of technology brings in a plethora of problems
| that cannot be reformed.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| yes! thank you. huxley was right about a scary number of
| things...
|
| this debate between will self and adam gopnik on 'brave new
| world' vs '1984' is _really_ good if anybody has 1.5 hours to
| indulge.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31CcclqEiZw
|
| just grabbed 'amusing ourselves to death' from libby, thanks
| for the recommendation!
| thenerdhead wrote:
| perhaps that video was inspired by postman's famous
| comparison. here's the comic form:
|
| https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-
| webc...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| private messaging, i.e. telegram/discord seems to be where people
| are moving. I'm not surprised that Instagram copies TikTok for
| the algorithmically driven content, what I'm more surprised by is
| that WhatsApp is still pretty lackluster compared to Telegram
| given that Mark himself noticed that private groups seem to be
| what's next. Hard to overstate how much better their UX is
| compared to anything else.
| nbow wrote:
| I agree with the conclusions, they will definitely be switching
| to a more addictive model. But it seemed like there is an
| implication that the previous model was not 'addictive'. Once
| Facebook figured out how much mentions were driving engagement,
| they added lots of features to try to drive people towards
| mentioning their friends in order to send push notifications.
| Leading to a sort of "addicted to your friend group" situation.
|
| I get that tik tok definitely creates another paradigm shift,
| likely for the worse, but it's not like social networking is not
| without issues ina very similar capacity.
| al_be_back wrote:
| no - but the context is shifting, from Chat -> Clips -> Streams.
| Though it's still mainly a medium to deliver adverts.
|
| Social networking has pretty much replaced TV & traditional press
| - now it too must morph.
|
| the biggest obstacles though I think to the social network are
| the app stores - not necessarily their own decisions but what
| politics of the day may impose on the store.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| If your stated company mission is not the thing that produces
| revenue then it will eventually be sacrificed for the mission
| that does produce revenue.
|
| Examples of mission statements that don't produce revenue:
| Google, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, most news organizations.
|
| Microsoft's missions in 1980 was "A computer on every desk and in
| every home". Their mission produced revenue. There are lots of
| examples of mission/revenue alignment.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Most companies exist for motive X, which they do by providing
| value Y, then monetizing it via method Z. X is almost always
| "profit" and Z is something boring like selling physical items,
| subscriptions, ads, etc, so the mission statement is about Y.
|
| The following statements are true but not very interesting:
|
| Microsoft was never about computers on every desk and in every
| home, it was really about selling software licenses to make
| money!
|
| The Super Bowl was never about football, it was really about
| selling ads to makes money!
|
| Wal-Mart was never about saving people money so they could live
| better, it was really about selling physical items at retail to
| make money!
|
| Facebook was never about connecting people, it was really about
| selling ads to make money!
|
| Is the Facebook one any more insightful because the
| monetization strategy is advertising?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: So it turns out that while bringing the world
| closer together is a nice long-term goal, the world isn't ready
| to be crammed into one giant bull-pen, which was more Facebook's
| style.
|
| Their utter inability to come up with consistent standards for
| policing their walled garden, upon having their hand forced to
| need to try, indicates that maybe that's not a good goal in the
| first place. Maybe it's okay if not everyone's on your social
| media engine.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Maybe just the end of social networking as we currently know it.
|
| There must still be plenty of room and potential value in more
| focused social interaction that is more highly aligned with user
| interests other than viral videos.
| Arrath wrote:
| I thought those were pretty well serviced one or two decades
| ago by niche hobbyist forums and the like, more recently by
| specific subreddits.
|
| Personally I lament the demise of forums and BBs.
| baby wrote:
| I think everyone is wrong. We still need something like facebook
| to keep track of people we meet, and friends. In the west, to my
| knowledge, facebook is still big, along with whatsapp and
| instagram, to keep track of friends.
|
| Tiktok is more like youtube. It's a content platform first. Maybe
| the new generation uses tiktok to keep in touch, or maybe they
| use something I haven't heard of, but social networks are bigger
| than ever.
|
| I think the future of social networks is still not clear though:
| VR? Wechat-like app? Something else?
| frozencell wrote:
| That's already a dystopia, I wish there were decentralized
| social platforms, I'm very tired of having all my SV friends on
| apps that track us like Facebook and Messenger.
| Aleksdev wrote:
| Social network posts are just becoming ads now.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Facebook the company will need to buy up all the grassroots
| social media platforms that sprout up. That costs money and isn't
| possible in China where they can't buy Tik Tok. That's why there
| is such a furore by FB backed lobbyist to make Tik Tok a
| terrorist platform. Long term FB will eventually die as young
| folk will not want to use the platform old folk do and older folk
| are less influence by ads on these platforms. It's a slippery
| slope for FB but there will always be a new platform that sprouts
| that the cool kids all use.
| impalallama wrote:
| Archive Link for those experiencing the hug of death like me
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220811190332/https://reb00ted....
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| [deleted]
| aczerepinski wrote:
| I want to see more niche social networks that are only for one
| thing. I actually really like Strava which is for workouts only.
| There's no way to share pictures of inspirational text. I've
| never seen anyone abuse the platform by sharing a run that is
| actually 0.1 miles plus a rant about Fox News or anything like
| that.
|
| If I were independently wealthy I'd spend my time building a
| newsfeed for musicians to share music things where it's similarly
| impossible to post pictures of text or news articles. You'd need
| to be vigilant to prevent it from overstepping the way LinkedIn
| did.
|
| The challenge is that if you can share photos or video or links
| at all, it becomes terrible.
| circuit8 wrote:
| Agreed. What I love about Strava is it leverages some of the
| same darker parts of the human psyche that traditional social
| media does (desire for social status by showing off etc), but
| in doing so it encourages its users to actually do something
| extremely positive. It makes me think of how I'd like to see a
| really well made addictive VR based MMORPG that encouraged its
| users to exercise in some way to progress.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Nah, it's more like the beginning of segregation: people who like
| social media will stay there but I'm seeing more and more people
| bail out and setup friend clubs (Meetup, Telegram and such).
| psi75 wrote:
| Probably. We ended up with a completely different internet than
| the one we still thought should be possible in 2004.
|
| For a brief period of time, the internet genuinely subverted the
| corporate beetle-men and the gatekeepers who've always owned the
| "official" or real world. You could send an email to a well-
| known, accomplished person and there was a 75 percent you'd hear
| back. There really was a culture of punk equality... of course,
| we were quite harsh to people who used the platform to say stupid
| things (and, since I was young, I said stupid things a lot),
| because that's requisite if you want to stay relatively
| meritocratic. The internet was smaller in the 1990s and there
| were far fewer ways to make money from it, but it was
| legitimately subversive.
|
| We've lost that, though. Twitter used to be a way for nobodies to
| gain a degree of influence. Now it's the opposite--instead, it
| measures and ratifies our lack of influence, because every time
| you apply for a job, the bosses know that you're no threat if
| mistreated--the fact that you only have 3,000 followers, as
| opposed to 100,000, proves that.
|
| The internet and the web didn't fix capitalism; instead, to the
| detriment of all of us, it ended up looking like capitalism. The
| technology grew up too fast; our moribund economic system hadn't
| died yet (and still hasn't). This was bad enough, but if
| capitalism is still around when we see AGI (granted, I don't
| think that'll actually happen for at least a hundred years) we
| are properly and irreversibly facefucked.
| [deleted]
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| Social media cannibalized itself to death in pursuit of ad
| revenue via increased _engagement_. The harder they pushed, with
| content assumption algorithms, the more toxic it became. The more
| toxic it becomes the more it appeals to extreme personalities
| while alienating everyone else, a poisonous viper eating itself.
|
| It's only market lag between the revenue source, media source
| agencies, and the realization that better markets for their
| business. When that occurs the death spiral hyper accelerates to
| rapid finality.
|
| Like all death spirals this could have been avoided had they
| treated their users as a potential revenue source instead of a
| product. I was watching a history video yesterday about the
| Aztecs who completely alienated the tribes in their empire in
| their own death spiral. The empire was already dead before the
| Spanish arrived, but the Aztecs just didn't see it yet.
| abvdasker wrote:
| I genuinely believe that AB testing as practiced by every major
| tech company (and the incentives it creates) has caused much of
| this. AB testing is a really unsophisticated way of measuring
| extremely short-term incremental gains in isolation. That's how
| we've ended up with products which have gradually become so
| hostile to users, because individually the changes seem like
| small wins, but taken together and over the long term they are
| deeply destructive to the core product. AB testing doesn't
| capture long-term changes to user behavior from the
| accumulation of disparate features. The incentive structures
| within these companies are all set up to be able to prove these
| small wins in dollar values to get a raise or promotion which
| has led to a race to the bottom as teams create features nobody
| wants to justify their existence.
|
| Anecdotally I and many people I know have reached a kind of
| breaking point where these apps have become so demanding in
| terms of attention that we have to stop using them entirely.
| Whether it's YouTube's incessant advertisements, TikTok's
| infinite scroll or Facebook's insane jumble of a UI/feed these
| products are demonstrably inferior to their incarnations 5-7
| years ago.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| I was the A/B test engineer for one of the most well known
| dot com brands about a decade ago.
|
| A/B testing media (advertising) is extremely misleading
| compared to testing against something transactional. The goal
| of a transactional sequence, called a conversion (payment in
| exchange for a product or defined service), is a supremely
| simple metric. Although the goal is simple to define and
| recognize the costs associated are wildly complex. Media is
| the inverse of this where the goals and consequences are not
| immediately clear or known but both the costs and revenue are
| immediately straight forward.
|
| The reason the financials of conversion are complex is
| because you need to account for the expenses to third parties
| to pull a user in, the purchasing horizon in time, potential
| for cannibalism against other purchasing decisions, and
| various other factors that cost the business money.
|
| The reason metrics associated with media are complex is
| because users HATE it. Increased advertising presence drives
| traffic away. Shifts in traffic occur over a wide duration
| due to a variety of factors so it is almost impossible to
| measure just how toxic advertising is to a given product
| oriented business in isolation in accordance with a variable
| time horizon. Its actually much worse than that for a variety
| of technical factors. In the past legitimate ad placements
| have been delivery vectors for content and logic of malicious
| criminal activity. Advertising logic is frequently poorly
| written. Many websites will isolate their advertisements into
| iframes in order to protect their website from accidental
| defacement of presentation and/or broken logic.
| Advertisements come into the page super slowly which
| completely pushes out the waterfall for what might have been
| a quick loading page.
|
| When I did A/B testing I would describe the media side of the
| business in terms of illegal job deals. I did this because of
| so many parallels in the transactions and risks in those
| markets, not because they are both filthy evil things.
| dont__panic wrote:
| > [TikTok]'s addiction-based advertising machine is probably
| close to the theoretical maximum of how many advertisements one
| can pour down somebody's throat.
|
| Well put. It's interesting that we pivoted in my adult lifetime
| from:
|
| 1. Myspace's emphasis on sharing things on your own webpage,
| essentially a hosted blog 2. Facebook's evolution from "hosted
| blog" to "friend update aggregator" to "chat client" to "friend
| update & ad aggregator" 3. Instagram's callback to simple update
| sharing (with pictures) and a chronological ad-free news feed 4.
| Snap's emphemeral sharing 5. Facebook's slow agglomeration and
| bastardization of all of the features that made Instagram and
| Snap distinct. 6. TikTok's addictive advertising machine that
| barely includes any friend connections at all.
|
| Initially I was concerned that this would mean the death of real
| social media, just like the article initially suggests. But I
| really like the conclusion the article ultimately comes to: we
| basically don't have social media right now, we have advertising
| engines masquerading as social media. Better that Facebook,
| Instagram, and Snapchat show their true colors and become
| disgusting advertising machines just like TikTok.
|
| If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-
| suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the
| power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency
| communication over the internet. microblog seems promising, but I
| think even mastodon could provide the experience I'm looking for.
| moreira wrote:
| I think it might just be that that's not needed anymore.
|
| The social networks of the past were useful as a way to keep in
| touch with people. MySpace, early Facebook, and the countless
| others from back then. Now everyone's online 24/7, and
| accessible on multiple services all at the same time, all the
| time. You don't need social networks to keep in touch with
| anyone anymore, their original raison d'etre is gone.
|
| What's sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded
| people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok,
| and whatnot. People want their bubbles. We're all here on HN
| for that exact purpose.
| beebmam wrote:
| > People want their bubbles. We're all here on HN for that
| exact purpose.
|
| 100% disagree. I'm here to find ideas I disagree with and
| tell people how they're wrong. I'm not looking for an
| agreeable experience here. I'm also here to learn about new
| tech.
| guelo wrote:
| You want an audience for your disagreements and maybe to
| cause a rise in people (trolling). But that's not fun for
| the audience which is why a lot of communities become
| insular bubbles to keep the annoyers away.
| mortenlwk wrote:
| Nice way to describe your taste in bubbles.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| That may be true, but I doubt you're actually too
| interested in people with completely different interests.
| Just like utilitarians and deontologists might be
| interested in finding and talking with each other but not
| someone who is wholly uninterested in ethics as a simple
| example.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Is HN the digital equivalent of going to a bar looking for
| a fight?
| labster wrote:
| No, it's not. And you better be shut up about it if you
| know what's good for you, pardner.
| id wrote:
| Maybe, but you want to have your disagreements with the
| people that typically frequent HN about topics that are
| typically discussed on HN.
| mulmen wrote:
| Bubbles don't need to be harmful. HN is a bubble. There are
| ideas that are not allowed here. There are other ideas that
| are explicitly promoted. This is the value proposition of
| HN. You are free to go elsewhere to get other perspectives
| or interactions. This is as it should be.
| tmaly wrote:
| I try to shake that up from time to time. It is nice to
| see the other side of the discussion. Groupthink is not
| something to strive for.
| [deleted]
| themitigating wrote:
| It depends on what the bubble is about. If it's for a
| specific anime who cares but politics is a bubble whose
| influence exits the bubble
| walterbell wrote:
| _> There are ideas that are not allowed here._
|
| It would be more accurate to say that some ideas require
| more work here. The reasons why are open to debate.
| spoonjim wrote:
| There are definitely ideas that are not allowed here.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I'm not sure there are ideas that aren't allowed so much
| as the way you speak, structure, and present them. I've
| tested many different ideas on topics here and some have
| received far more positive feedback than I'd imagine and
| some have been buried too.
|
| I think so long as you follow guidelines generally and
| don't outright attack individuals then you're mainly ok.
| The community might downvote your idea to invisible but
| that doesn't mean it wasn't allowed - just that not
| enough people thought it was good. That's fair.
| superturkey650 wrote:
| I can't think of any non-rulebreaking comments that would
| get you banned just for expressing a distasteful idea.
| Can you give some examples?
| mulmen wrote:
| The ideas that break the rules.
| superturkey650 wrote:
| There aren't any ideas that break the rules though. Just
| structure, tone, and context of comments/posts.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I don't think that's true.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32432564
| NERD_ALERT wrote:
| "non-rulebreaking" implies that there are rules stating
| that certain ideas are not allowed.
| superturkey650 wrote:
| No it doesn't. The rules can be based around the effort,
| structure, and tone of your comments. Not the ideas
| expressed within them. I think the only "idea" not
| allowed is asking for violence and I've even seen those
| allowed.
| Retric wrote:
| Politics as a subject is strongly discraged on HN.
|
| It isn't about Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian ideas
| it's about their red button talking points. So you can
| discuss say taxes or abortion as long as you don't bring
| politics into it or get repetitive.
|
| What most often confuses people is you can get heavily
| downvoted or upvoted for expressing the same idea
| depending on who shows up to a given discussion about say
| Nuclear power, Bitcoin, etc.
| spoonjim wrote:
| No I can't, because my account would get banned. Probably
| under the pretext of the stated rule, "Eschew flamebait.
| Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and
| internet tropes."
| superturkey650 wrote:
| Those seem to be based around the relationship of the
| comment to the post it is in rather than any specific
| idea in the comment itself. As if any comment flagged for
| those reasons could have the same idea expressed in a
| relevant post and not be flagged.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| That is what the text of the rules say, but not how they
| actually operate.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| bawolff wrote:
| If someone did a show HN, for their murder for hire app
| to connect assains to clients, i imagine it would
| (rightly) go over poorly.
|
| At least i would hope...
| zmgsabst wrote:
| vorpalhex wrote:
| A bubble can be less about topics and more about how we
| communicate - if I ask about sources on HN I'll get links
| and pdfs in return. If I do that on reddit, I'll get
| insults.
|
| HN has broad tolerance for a lot of ideas - and a lot of
| subgroups exist here that don't exist on other platforms.
| No matter what you believe, someone on HN holds a counter
| view and can probably give you a good debate about it.
| shevis wrote:
| I 100% disagree with your idea that you, or anyone for that
| matter, is just here to disagree with other people's ideas.
| Nobody disagrees with stuff just for the sake of
| disagreement. Who would do such a thing?
|
| Don't bother answering that question though because you'd
| be wrong.
| [deleted]
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I feel like I'm watching you cosplay what I see 20 times
| a day on Reddit and why I've increasingly stopped
| browsing it.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| This isn't an argument, it's just contradiction!
| tbossanova wrote:
| Oh I'm sorry, is this a five minute argument, or the full
| half hour?
| dmarlow wrote:
| You're not wrong. But, you're not right either.
| tibanne wrote:
| Neither of you aren't not wrong.
| coldtea wrote:
| They can't be not wrong.
| tomrod wrote:
| Everyone is wrong, we live in a wonderful world where
| everyone can be wrong.
| krapp wrote:
| > I 100% disagree with your idea that you, or anyone for
| that matter, is just here to disagree with other people's
| ideas. Nobody disagrees with stuff just for the sake of
| disagreement. Who would do such a thing?
|
| You must be new here.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Either that, or you are, having apparently missed the
| obvious irony (mostly in the sentence you didn't
| quote)...
| wwweston wrote:
| > You don't need social networks to keep in touch with anyone
| anymore, their original raison d'etre is gone.
|
| In what sense? The underlying social motivation/interest is
| still present. And it's not like fundamental communications
| capabilities have actually changed. Chat's been around since
| the 90s and SMS is the new email. And social network
| applications grew and thrived in those situations because
| pull-and-scan-social-feed across multiple circles has some
| distinct effort-reward profiles.
|
| I could see the argument that the algorithmic and advertising
| imposition eventually drive out enough of the value that
| people opt out, but that's a statement about the business
| lifecycle of a social network app, not the underlying reason
| people might use / like them.
| spdionis wrote:
| Chat has not been around since the 90s, not in the form
| that is used today.
| wwweston wrote:
| Now that I think about it, this is correct on at least
| one front: I can recall chat systems that existed in the
| _80s_.
|
| What's the feature of today's chat systems makes them
| qualitatively different from those that are 30+ years
| old?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| emojis?
| subpixel wrote:
| I'd go further - it's not just that we don't need a way to
| 'connect' with people on a platform today (you can ping them
| in myriad ways).
|
| It's that we don't much want to anymore.
|
| The novelty of general-purpose social networking was twofold,
| in order depending on your circumstances at the time:
|
| - a new angle to seeking a mate
|
| - wow, a way to see what someone you don't really know
| anymore is up to and say hi
|
| The former market opportunity is now filled by specialist
| apps.
|
| The latter, while it was fun for a while, and might still
| hold some prospect for thrills, is nothing to build a
| business around.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >What's sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded
| people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok,
| and whatnot.
|
| None of those sites are good for that any more. All the
| interesting people on reddit have been banned. No one sane
| uses twitter. And finding people to talk to on tiktok is
| plain impossible.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Social networks aren't that important to stay connected. In
| countries where there's still load shedding or shitty
| internet, people connect via whatsapp and gmail and you'll
| see advertising signs and paint on buildings and even cargo
| ships that just contain a whatsapp number and a gmail
| address.
|
| That's their form of the internet, because everything else
| won't even load with speeds less than 100kBit/s.
|
| Also: Whatsapp somehow works on dumbphones. I don't know how
| (yet) but there's apps for KaiOS, Samsung Bada and other old
| phones. I wonder if vendors reverse engineered the APIs and
| implemented their own clients.
| 1337biz wrote:
| At least Tiktok doesn't force me to watch their stupid ads like
| YouTube does. I am too lazy to install adbockers on my mobile
| and tablet. But the force-watching of Youtube ads is one of the
| worst ideas in advertising.
| robryan wrote:
| At least they provide a premium ad free service.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| mc32 wrote:
| Where does classmates fit into the picture?
|
| I don't think too people actively use them, but some people do.
| I'm actually unsure how Classmates actually works --is it a
| subscription model, what's it's business model and could it end
| up morphing into the TheFB of old but subscription based? Maybe
| the draw of advertising money is too strong to resist.
| mulmen wrote:
| IMHO Social Media is a toxic mutation of the capabilities
| offered by the Internet and is the opposite of federated, open
| communication. I don't consider blogs, forums, or IRC to be
| "Social Media". When you add the idea of followers and audience
| and attention seeking (both from participants and the platform)
| that's when you get "Social Media".
|
| We live in the Infinite September. Scale is not conducive to
| valuable or fulfilling communication. Decentralization,
| variety, and focus are. When I want to read about motorcycles I
| have a forum for that. When I want to plan a vacation with the
| family we use email. When I have a question about a software
| project I get on their IRC channel. At no point is my racist
| uncle (or yours!) involved. This is the potential of the
| Internet and it is _not_ social media.
|
| When I want to be depressed by all the things that other people
| have better than me I go to Social Media. I can't think of a
| single fulfilling experience I ever had on Facebook or any
| other social media platform. It's just not possible when you
| put everyone in a room. It's like studying philosophy on a bus.
|
| Social Media is by (my) definition the valueless corruption of
| the Internet. In that sense I am glad it is dead, I hope it
| stays that way. Facebook and Tik Tok are the inevitable end-
| state of "Social Media". There's no "good" social media and
| there never was. Anyone who builds a platform for "everyone" is
| doomed to die the death of social media.
| wincy wrote:
| I recently friend requested a bunch of people I went to high
| school with who all thought I was a weird loser and I am very
| excited that I am doing much better than all of them. It's
| made me like my social media feed a lot more seeing the
| school bully who loved ICP post about how "he's ready to find
| the right girl and settle down (at 35)
|
| So I guess I use social media for the exact reason you don't
| like social media. Nobody's supposed to like that stuff, but
| I mean, why else would you care what everyone else is doing
| other than to compare status?
| pasabagi wrote:
| If you come from a wealthy background, you get the really
| depressing version: the school bully who loved ICP posts
| about how they got a new job with McKinsey, the slimy moron
| who used to spread shit about you is the CEO of a up-and-
| coming startup, and the guy who was too dumb to understand
| how truly dumb he was is now at a senior position in a
| thinktank.
| Andrex wrote:
| That's the disingenuous presupposition.
|
| A more positive one would be those people actually got
| better at their skills and improved as people. I'd like
| to think I'm a better person than I was in high school.
|
| But if you're constantly exposed to their social feeds,
| you would have the data and probably know better. :)
| Andrex wrote:
| I'm not sure continuous exposure to schadenfreude is any
| healthier than the more depressing topics, to be honest.
| wincy wrote:
| I mean I don't actually revel in it, I was being a bit
| cheeky. I just wanted to reconnect with high school
| people during Covid so I friend requested a ton of
| people.
|
| It's sad seeing a guy who was in the "gifted and talented
| program" with me is apparently now a janitor who posts
| pictures every day about what concert or sports game he's
| at and he's always alone. I was excited for him because
| he took a picture with a woman and I thought he'd met
| someone but it turned out to be his sister.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Sounds like not much has changed for you since high school.
| wincy wrote:
| I mean nowadays I get free lunches from recruiters and at
| conventions instead of being on the school free lunch
| program but I suppose not
| allenu wrote:
| > If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-
| suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill
| the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency
| communication over the internet.
|
| I don't have as much hope for such a thing. To me, this trend
| is also a reflection of perhaps the societal devaluing of IRL
| social connections.
|
| In a world where encountering "new people" was novel, and
| typically done only In Real Life, maintaining that connection
| using an online component had value. You may not encounter that
| person again, and good connections are rare, so you want to
| keep in touch. However, over time, the internet has made it
| trivial to encounter new people, even if the encounters
| themselves are more trivial than the previous In Real Life
| meetings were. Perhaps there was a two-way conversation before.
| Well now, you just read their tweets or watch their videos and
| click a button to follow.
|
| Tracking real-life encounters isn't as valuable as it once was,
| especially when you can find an online substitute who is
| actively creating "content" to keep you engaged.
|
| The newer connections are also way more transactional than they
| used to be. Just about everyone is selling something or trying
| to use their channels to promote themselves somehow.
|
| I think there's an interesting overall trend in here between
| the fall of social networks and societal devaluing of real life
| connections (as well as a trend of them being more
| transactional), but I'm not an academic, so these are all just
| hunches.
| tepitoperrito wrote:
| Look at monica crm https://github.com/monicahq/monica. I've
| yet to offer to start hosting it for people, but that could
| be a neat conversation piece for changing the tides there.
| [deleted]
| rphv wrote:
| > If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-
| suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill
| the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency
| communication over the internet.
|
| Worth mentioning is Jimmy Wales' effort in this vein:
| https://wt.social/
| swatcoder wrote:
| I suspect that that what really ate up _personal_ social
| networking was very simple: private group messaging finally got
| good enough.
|
| 15 years ago, we'd lost touch with old friends and
| acquaintances because there are a ton of people in our lives
| that mean something to us but that don't warrant much 1-to-1
| contact through phone calls or messaging.
|
| Myspace and early Facebook reinvigorated those relationships
| with relaxed, casual networked update blasts, but then
| iMessage, What's App, were able to make the same connections
| more private, more personally shaped, and more collaborative.
|
| So social networks drifted towards public feeds and
| commercialized feeds, which is what TikTok -- as a well-funded
| latecomer -- had the luxury of aiming for directly.
| robryan wrote:
| Yep. I think it is useful to have a list of people you know
| incase you ever need to connect them, which is basically
| Facebook Messenger.
|
| The blasting life updates at everyone know ever knew part of
| it though is just so unnatural. It was a novelty for a while
| but that stage is well over now. Facebook eventually got
| features to allow people to be more granular about updates
| but they have never really pushed them.
|
| At one point I would use Skype with friends which was
| terrible. Discord now though is basically everything I could
| ever want for group messaging.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I didn't know I was supposed to be using iMessage like that.
| Maybe that's where everyone went.
| circuit8 wrote:
| I completely agree. In my view group chats on apps like
| WhatsApp much more accurately mirror how humans actually
| communicate in real life. That is to say it's more like a
| spontaneous conversation rather than social media which is
| more like a narcissistic advertising board for your life.
| fullshark wrote:
| Social media for most is your phone's contact list + a group
| chat. It's just not broadcast for everyone to see and as of
| now, an ad free experience.
| patch_cable wrote:
| I was just thinking this.
|
| Personally I've migrated from sharing things with friends and
| family on Facebook/Instagram, to a few group chats where
| friends and family share photos, life moments, etc.
|
| Somewhere along the line Facebook and Instagram made me feel
| like my personal photos and updates were competing against
| ads and other more engaging content in people's feeds, and I
| felt like I wasn't communicating with the people that I was
| on those platforms to communicate with in the first place.
|
| Judging by the increase in messages I get through more
| private channels with casual update content, I don't feel
| alone.
|
| I would be curious if others have had similar experiences.
| hkon wrote:
| Discord is becoming huge - just people, chatting.
|
| Like it was when I started using internet and IRC
| timbit42 wrote:
| Doesn't everything on Discord go into a black hole? You can't
| search it with search engines.
| meditativeape wrote:
| I like the analysis and optimism in this article, but it does not
| answer a key question: who would pay for this social network that
| truly "brings the world closer together", if not advertisers?
| What is the business model?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| How come I'm not seeing any tiktok like redesign on my fb app?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "And because it was never about "bring[ing] the world closer
| together", they drop that mission as if they never cared. (That's
| because they didn't. At least MarkZ didn't, and he is the sole,
| unaccountable overlord of the Meta empire. A two-class stock
| structure gives you that.)"
|
| Ahahahaha! As if the normal shareholder of FB, or almost any
| other company, would tolerate them making less money than they
| possibly could. There is plenty wrong with Facebook, but the two-
| class stock structure is not the cause, because a single-class
| stock structure leads to equally pathological behavior.
| gizajob wrote:
| Is this the end of reb00ted.org?
| jsemrau wrote:
| Yes social is changing. The initial value proposition of sites
| where we needed platforms to stay-up-to-date, meet new people,
| and communicate with each other can now be replicated easily.
|
| Most social sites have stayed in the UI paradigm of 2003/2004.
| Just have a look at how much wasted space there is at LinkedIn.
|
| Sites like Lunchclub, Clubhouse, and Finclout are sites where the
| tools are expanded through social networks (i.e, come for the
| tool stay for the community)
| thehappypm wrote:
| I loved reading this article. TikTok is perhaps the endgame of
| all entertainment, from 1920s radio straight to Netflix: monetize
| people's willingness to pay for the next bit of entertainment.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| I think the "social" part of social networks just moved to group
| chats. All my friends share updates of their family events, kids'
| stuff etc.. over Whatsapp and Telegram. Strangers gather over
| topics that interest them and want to talk about it seem to have
| moved to discord, slack etc.
|
| The whole "broadcast yourself to the world" part of social
| networks just moved to Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram etc.. I think.
| causi wrote:
| A development I'm quite thankful for. It's nice being able to
| participate to the degree expected of me by the people I
| actually know without being a terminally-online internet
| personality.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| time is a flat circle, were back to forums. tbh they never
| left, forums rule
| Gigachad wrote:
| Group chats are the last place that is chronologically ordered,
| advert free and semi private.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Some people are moving back to anonymous communication with
| limited audiences.
|
| Twitter is anonymous, but 100% public. There is no way to limit
| your audience to a smaller group.
|
| FB is not anonymous and mostly public. Private groups do exist,
| but you still mostly need to have an actual name on your
| account.
|
| TikTok & Snapchat are mostly for people who show their faces,
| not anonymous.
|
| WhatsApp shows everyone everyone's phone numbers if they are in
| the same group, not anonymous. You can also be forcibly added
| to a group of hundreds of people you don't know without
| permission.
|
| Telegram and Discord are more like old-school IRC was. Just a
| nickname and that's it, no personal info needed. (IRC did have
| the hostname, but some networks masked it)
| dhosek wrote:
| Aside from locking your account so that only followers can
| see your tweets, I've been offered the option to restrict the
| audience of tweets on twitter (although I'm not sure if that
| was a transient experiment or if I've blocked my noticing the
| offer of the option or if I've asked it to stop asking).
| rrdharan wrote:
| That's Twitter Circle:
|
| https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-circle
| f1refly wrote:
| Both telegram and discord need phone numbers though -
| telegram upfront and discord after your used it for about ten
| mimutes.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Of course not. Tying such general terms to specific companies is
| naive, diagnoses of 'the end of ubiquitous thing' are little more
| than clickbait.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Ending this with "tweet your comment" and "discuss this on
| twitter" is amusingly ironic, given that Twitter has always been
| a place that's actively hostile to any kind of rich, subtle
| discussion, and has pivoted away from "keep up with people you
| want to follow" to an official stance of "keep up with the news"
| and an actual stance of "here is an endless scroll of engaging
| content, mostly things to get angry about, that we can slip ads
| into".
| hello_newman wrote:
| I think that's entirely dependent on who you follow and if
| you're not actively utilizing your blocked/muted accounts
| and/or muted keywords from your feed.
|
| The amount of value I've gained from threads on people I follow
| on how to do something or learning something is insane and the
| "rich, subtle discussion" in those threads on that topic is
| sometimes just as good if not better than the thread itself.
|
| No denying the default Twitter is loud, and just wants to suck
| you into mindless scrolling of ads and things to get you angry
| about, but you are in charge of how you curate your feed.
| egypturnash wrote:
| If you're willing to spend a while figuring out how to make
| Twitter stop showing you conversations your friends are
| having/stuff they're faving/popular posts/etc then it doesn't
| suck as much as the default, true, but you're still stuck in
| a conversational medium that makes it impossible to emit an
| entire paragraph at one go. I run a Mastodon instance whose
| post length limit is set to roughly 7k and it's _amazing_ how
| much I could feel a part of my mind unclenching after years
| of Twitter as I got used to it.
| jjdeveloper wrote:
| No. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by
| the word no." The sweeping generalization refers to the poor
| journalistic practice of writing sensational headlines in the
| form of a question in order to compensate for the author's lack
| of facts.
| swayvil wrote:
| I think that the "tree of replies" format, like we have here and
| reddit, is pretty much perfect.
|
| We just need a better way to filter/trollkill.
|
| What more do we need?
| timbit42 wrote:
| Kuro5hin.org had the filtering figured out.
| matlin wrote:
| The approach at my company is to be group chat first. We think
| there is a distinction between social media (FB, Instragram,
| Twitter) and pure social networking. I think social networks that
| are unbounded and broadcast centric actually demonstrate _anti-
| network effects_ where the more followers /friends you get the
| less value you get from your network unless of course you're
| trying to be an influencer. The ideal network always as a
| discrete audience anytime you share content or communicate which
| is exactly what a group chat or direct message provides. But
| unfortunately, Telegram, Whatsapp, iMessage, etc don't provide
| the rich interactions that made platforms like FB and Instagram
| so fun in the beginning.
|
| Give us a shot if you want to try to a new form of social
| networking: https://www.aspen.cloud/
| simonmorg wrote:
| I read something once, that questioned whether social media was
| working to make us happy, or were we working to make the AI more
| intelligent.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| > Imagine what social networking could be!! The best days of
| social networking are still ahead. Now that the pretenders are
| leaving, we can actually start solving the problem. Social
| networking is dead. Long live what will emerge from the ashes. It
| might not be called social networking, but it will be, just
| better.
|
| Not to be pessimistic, but this missing the whole point. Just
| because social networking is gone doesn't mean it's somehow in
| the hands of the people. They will flock to the ML addiction
| machines and 20 years from now something even more horribly
| grotesque.
|
| I care about Mastodon, ActivityPub, PeerTube, BlueSky and all
| these open standards. But these platforms Are sole dependent on
| users and at the moment, they all look like programmer/activist-
| centric wastelands.
| boomer918 wrote:
| "Tweet your comments", oh sweet irony.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think it is only the beginning of a new age of maturity and de-
| dinosauring of social networks. Just like the dinosaurs, today's
| most used social networks kept growing larger and larger until
| they were too big to sustain themselves. And just like the
| dinosaurs, they will go extinct and be replaced by smaller, more
| nimble and competitive social networks, with accessible
| maintainers, consensual relationships with their users, and
| features and dynamics we are only beginning to dream of today. I
| find it very exciting to think about and work on.
|
| Just imagine a social network that combines all of the good
| things invented in the past 25 years: the customizability of
| MySpace, the visible social graph of Facebook, the easy sharing
| of Twitter, the speed of propagation of Friendster, the
| transparency of Web of Trust, the security and user empowerment
| of PKI, the distributed and decentralized model of Usenet, the
| lack of spam of a private tracker, the long-term discussion
| threads of a forum, the solidity of BitTorrent, the ease of
| access of AOL, and the compatibility and accessibility of Any
| Browser Web...
|
| Wouldn't you want something like that for yourself and your
| communities?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Sounds great, but no one is willing to pay for it. And as long
| as it has to be ad funded, there will always be pressure to
| track, monetize, and increase engagement.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Once the software exists, I think it can be easily paid out
| of pocket by the subscribers. If one focuses on hosting a few
| hundred or thousand users, it does not have to cost that
| much.
|
| I agree that it has to be self-funded, not reliant on
| "monetizing". But if your goal is a stable utility service,
| not growing to make a profit, I think it is realistic.
| _dain_ wrote:
| the dinosaurs didn't die out though. there are birds. they make
| a tweet-tweet-tweet noise.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| TikTok is winning because it is video first. The more immersive
| the media, the more profitable the ads. Facebook is having
| trouble pivoting it's products to video. Facebook is betting big
| that the next more-immersive medium after video will be VR.
| That's basically the whole story.
|
| Notice I didn't use the word "algorithm" or "social"? These takes
| are tired and naive, TikTok isn't addictive in any operationally
| useful sense of the word, people just like it and use it. You may
| as well write a blog post saying "TV is addictive and it's dying
| because of commercials". It's just not an accurate
| conceptualization if the landscape.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| YouTube is video first.
|
| I think TikTok is winning because their objective algorithm
| optimizes for a different outcome.
|
| Facebook and YouTube optimize for time spent on the site.
| Youtube famously cut ad revenue for content that is watched for
| fewer than 10 minutes. They both make decisions based on what
| will increase time spent on the site, thinking that's the best
| way to sell ads.
|
| TikTok optimizes for content that people love by giving the
| most reach to items that commenters buy gifts for. This has the
| side effect of making content that consumers really connect
| with get paid the most. There is a big difference between what
| people love and what makes people spend a lot of their time.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Facebook does not optimize directly for time spent, it's too
| hard. I know because I worked on these algorithms. Time spent
| is a metric Facebook monitors and works to increase over
| time, but basically no work is done to increase time spent
| directly. Facebook also tries to give more reach to content
| that people like. There are whole teams of people that work
| on that, they are just less good at it than TT.
|
| Tiktok optimizes for similar metrics. There's no difference
| there. The main difference is that they are more focused and
| have been doing short form video from the ground up.
| ok123456 wrote:
| 100% this. Everyone else is trying to make a tiktok clone and
| bolt it on to a maze of existing, and in some cases very
| similar, social media offerings. TikTok works because it's
| video only from the ground up.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| then why didn't vine or snapchat or whatever other video
| first platform from yesteryear catch on as big too?
|
| clearly there's more to it than "it's simply video first"
| shaunxcode wrote:
| vine did! twitter mothballed it.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| The fact that it's video first was necessary but not
| sufficient
| LesZedCB wrote:
| yes thanks, that is much more clear
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| snap is not video first -- yes it supports video, but it
| supports pictures just as well or better since they
| integrate into chats.
|
| vine was literally killed by twitter.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| vine did
|
| snapchat isn't the same
|
| they both had implementation differences and primarily
| execution differences that had little to do with their
| platform, and more so finances
|
| its not just video, its video+algorithm, its
| video+algorithm+content-subsidies
|
| a lot of popular content creators on TikTok are still from
| the vine days, getting paid a lot more directly by the
| platforms now, as well as from whatever they can monetize
| on and off the platform.
|
| Bytedance (TikTok) is willing to throw a lot of money at
| this, and they've been extremely high on compensation for
| engineers for years before TikTok reached critical mass.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| While you aren't using the words "algorithm" or "social",
| another perspective to see is that the "medium" is not just
| video. It is a specific type of short, repeatable, and
| trivialized pieces of video content. Created by _mostly_
| individual creators in niche social networks that convey
| extreme feelings of pain and pleasure in an infinite feed.
|
| TikTok is addictive in every category. People are addicted to
| it just like people are addicted to other mediums like books,
| radio, and tv. Creators are also addicted to creating for it
| manipulated by incentives and sponsorship opportunities. It is
| a borderline technological narcotic.
|
| To be human is to be addicted to something. We are addicted to
| the many "wants" in our lives being sold through these 15s-3
| minute videos.
|
| > You may as well write a blog post saying "TV is addictive and
| it's dying because of commercials"
|
| When the going gets tough, the tough goes shopping.
|
| There's actually a few books on this! i.e. consumerism and
| advertising
|
| Four arguments for the elimination of television by Jerry
| Mander
|
| Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman
|
| The shallows by Nicolas Carr
|
| And the classic, brave new world by Aldous Huxley
| wincy wrote:
| My wife deleted TikTok after a few weeks because she just
| couldn't handle how addictive it was. All she wanted to do was
| watch TikTok. Then she started getting Shorts on YouTube now
| she wants to completely stop watching YouTube even if the old
| creators she enjoyed are still making philosophy videos and
| stuff, it's just not worth it to stick around when the goal has
| become quite clearly to keep you hooked.
| eligro91 wrote:
| Same here. I completely blocked myself from accessing to
| YouTube on my smartphone and MacBook, just because of the
| shorts. This stuff is so addictive that I couldn't avoid it
| in my free time for dozens of minutes every single time I've
| opened youtube.
| yreg wrote:
| Perhaps too late for you unless you open a new account, but
| I seriously recomend everyone here to never ever click on a
| YouTube short while logged in.
|
| YouTube will proceed to show that content down your throat
| and if you are like most people you will let it. It will
| make your experience miserable though.
| ElSinchi wrote:
| I've found quite effective blocking channels and actively
| informing yt "don't show me more like this"
| jacooper wrote:
| She can use custom apps for YouTube like Newpipe, which offer
| YouTube experiences without ads and Shorts.
| jokoon wrote:
| I think that the only domain where social networks can be
| relevant is in the geoloc domain. Dating apps are quite an
| obvious example where it works very well, but dating is a very
| limited scope.
|
| So of course, the single problem of anything geoloc is safety and
| privacy, which is not the strong aspect of any social network
| right now. Tinder and others work hard to make their users safe,
| and it's difficult because users are not aware of it.
|
| Social networks always should have been used to meet people
| OUTSIDE of screens, for discovering other people and things.
|
| I want to meet people through activities (board games, running,
| walking), (loneliness is a huge problem in the west!) and except
| bumble BFF, which isn't popular, there is no popular app to do
| just that. Of course there is meetup and other things, but those
| are too narrow.
|
| Neighbor apps are nice too, but nobody use them because they're
| focused on services, which isn't fun.
|
| Don't you think it's a huge contradiction that current social
| networks don't let people meet?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| My experience is that Neighbour apps are exactly as miserable
| as Facebook and equally populated only by people my parents
| age.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| I have not found the humans on Nextdoor to be particularly
| terrible of late in my portion of the South Bay. There are
| occasional bad takes, for sure, but fewer than I would have
| expected. Mostly just been discussion of neighborhood cats,
| garbage days, people not picking up dog poop, etc.
| t_mann wrote:
| There's also a need to be filled to let your friends know which
| college you're going to, how awesome your last vacation was,
| what job you got,... LinkedIn seems to be filling the void left
| by Facebook. I don't know if many people who used social media
| other than dedicated apps to _find_ dates.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| I think for dating/sex people are willing to leave their
| comfort zone and meet new people/take some risks. I not so sure
| about boardgames and walking... who wants to play a boardgame
| with a complete stranger ?
|
| but hey, why not? someone should try with the hope to become
| the new meta in social networking.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I would argue that "play dates" for parents of kids 2-5 would
| be a (small) niche.
|
| Parents with young kids may have other friends with similarly
| aged children, but many don't. Kids are too young to have
| friends from school or activities. Some can strike up
| conversation at parks, but many find the inertia too much.
|
| Good niche to expand into clothes/toys reselling/gifting,
| babysitting co-op scheduling, nanny share, etc. which could
| all be monetized .
|
| Probably a good niche for Facebook though I would rather see
| someone else do it.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| Wordfeud was/is very successful and it's a Scrabble type
| boardgame played with a stranger.
| https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/why-wordfeud-worked-
|
| Betapet is another example in the same vein. Local
| scandinavian community for playing Scrabble online against
| strangers, with many stories of people who even got married
| to each other. https://www.betapet.se/
| myspy wrote:
| The Path app was a good social network in hindsight. Share your
| stuff and look at others stuff. All sorted by date. No
| algorithms. Which is why it probably failed.
|
| Facebook sucks and I'd hope that politicians in Germany would
| take action against it. Start with the algorithmic timelines. All
| content only your friends and interests. Nothing from outside to
| addict you further.
| janmarsal wrote:
| we can only hope
| seydor wrote:
| This is not the first or second time that humanity has tried
| 'social networking'. We used to call it "the mob" and long before
| the time of jesus it was considered that people shouting at each
| other is no way to run a society. People are dazzled by the shiny
| touchscreens of their phones, but shouting behind a glossy screen
| is still shouting, and a mob is still a mob. I don't think
| 'social networking' will go anywhere, it will be abandoned and
| foulmouthed as 'loud crazy old people', in favor of curated
| content, possibly algorithmic if that works. The future of media
| looks a lot like the media of the past, consolidated , more
| professional and polished.
| rnd0 wrote:
| Dear god no. But wouldn't it be nice if it was?
| fumar wrote:
| I've been spending more time on Discord. It is replaced forums
| and subreddits for many of my interests like synthesizers and
| music. I don't like that the information is stored in a chat-
| style vs posts.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I don't like that all the info is locked up and not indexable
| and searchable on search engines.
| _dain_ wrote:
| I like it for precisely that reason.
| fleddr wrote:
| "What about this time around we build products whose primary
| focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and
| family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)!
| Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue!
| What a concept!"
|
| I really liked the article but am perplexed by the naive ending.
|
| Friends/family and the world are two very distinct use cases.
| Most people, young people included, are taking the friends/family
| part private, in chat apps. Then they may or may not engage in a
| "public square" social network, but probably with a burner
| account.
|
| The public square part has failed in epic ways. The idea that you
| can just "build" something that unites people whilst dodging a
| laundry list of threats and toxic behavior seems optimistic, to
| say the least.
|
| And yeah, let's not run ads. Ok, fine. But how will you monetize
| instead? These seem pretty important questions to me.
| inasmuch wrote:
| I yearn for the old days of what I think of as pull (vs. push)
| social networking. When one would "get on" or "hang out on"
| MySpace or early Facebook, approaching the experience actively,
| rather than receiving and occasionally, interruptively,
| responding to notifications.
|
| The feed of each of these platforms, if it existed at all, was
| usually a side feature you might interact with (eg: MySpace
| bulletins) after getting bored doing what you had gotten on to do
| in the first place: see if anyone had consciously, deliberately
| reached out to you specifically by commenting on your
| meticulously composed profile or pictures, or privately by
| sending you a direct message. And then reach out to someone
| yourself.
|
| Short of spam, everything waiting for you when you signed on was
| signal. No noise. Don't like someone but feel obligated to accept
| her friend request? No biggie--just don't go to check out her
| profile. You'd never have to take on the indirect stress of
| learning your friend's roommate takes pride in being shitty to
| fast food cashiers. You'd probably harbor less resentment and be
| more optimistic about prospective social interactions with anyone
| you meet.
|
| And, most importantly (to me, someone who made most of his best
| friends online in the '90s and '00s), the pull approach
| encouraged exploration and discovery of new people, communities,
| perspectives, hobbies, whatever. You couldn't rely on a feed to
| keep you busy--you had to seek out new interactions. New drama.
| Whatever. Find good things, find bad things. At least it was your
| choice to go find them, rather than having them shoved in your
| face.
|
| I also think most people have lost track of the distinction
| between social networking and social media. Where the former is
| focused on socialization around networking (meeting new people,
| forming communities, etc.), the latter is focused on
| socialization around media (liking images, commenting on videos,
| etc.). It sounds obvious when stated, but I think the conflation
| of these terms has made it more difficult to discuss the
| differences between what I see as two fundamentally different
| social experiences, each with their strengths and weaknesses. In
| some respect, these must coexist, but platform design can favor
| either direction. Social networking, I feel, is conducive to
| conversation; dialogue. Social media, by contrast, is conducive
| to parallel monologues.
|
| I suspect most people would agree that it's better to talk to
| each other than over each other.
| t_mann wrote:
| Do I get this right? Meta is turning Facebook into a TikTok clone
| just after rolling back a similar change to Instagram? What on
| earth is their strategy?
| mrkramer wrote:
| I never used TikTok but from what I heard and saw it is
| essentially a Vine with better UI and UX e.g. you scroll
| vertically for new videos and it has very good recommendation
| system.
|
| P.S. I never used Vine too but then again I read and heard about
| it.
|
| TikTok won because like other guy said; videos are the most
| immersive media and I claim that people having short attention
| span made them hungry for short form of entertainment like short
| videos.
|
| From time to time I watch compilation of TikTok videos on YouTube
| and I think "compilation" as a media form is another interesting
| thing that somebody should experiment with.
|
| Speaking of social networking; my understanding of social
| networking/media landscape is that Facebook sort of generalized
| social networking and social networking features and now apps
| like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are specializing in photos,
| ephemeral sharing and short videos respectively plus WhatsApp
| specialized in messaging but Zuck did a great job of making
| Facebook Messenger a standalone app and then specializing it
| according to demands of messaging crowd. And yea Zuck acquired
| Instagram and WhatsApp along the way so competing apps don't hurt
| Facebook and its family of apps.
| spicymaki wrote:
| > This new advertising machine is powered not by friends and
| family, but by an addiction algorithm
|
| This is like the crack epidemic when I was growing up. China is
| hitting the west back hard for the Opium wars. First fentanyl and
| now TicTok addiction algorithms. We are doomed.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-11 23:00 UTC)