[HN Gopher] Social media decline: Users are shifting to messagin...
___________________________________________________________________
Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and
group chats
Author : thunderbong
Score : 307 points
Date : 2023-08-31 09:57 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| michaelt wrote:
| A few years ago I heard an interesting description of social
| behaviour on a radio program interviewing a sociologist.
|
| They compared human social interaction to the way an actor can be
| on stage or back stage, and would behave very differently in the
| two situations, even though we wouldn't consider it dishonesty.
| Likewise, it's completely normal that a food service worker
| interacting with customers would behave very differently to how
| they do in the staff break room or outside of work.
|
| In the back stage context, for example, you can try on new ideas
| and then discard them after discussion, secure in the knowledge
| it'll soon be forgotten. Or you can speak plainly about topics
| where opinions differ, knowing how the people you're talking to
| will feel. Or you can be a bit boring, a bit derivative, a bit
| cringe. And of course, how public the discussion is doesn't just
| impact you - it also impacts who'll reply, and with what.
|
| I can well believe people have found there's much more
| authenticity in group chats than there is on the major social
| media platforms.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| The trust of a small, private group goes a long way, but I also
| wonder whether we've internalized the idea that things you say
| on the internet can last a long time. Even if the UI claims to
| be ephemeral, someone in your close group can screenshot what
| you posted and distribute it anonymously.
| jt2190 wrote:
| The title I see:
|
| > Social media is dead: Group chats and messaging apps killed it
|
| Which I'd edit down to:
|
| > Group chats and messaging apps killed social media
| lolive wrote:
| I have an addiction to Twitter, but I am the first to admit that
| top-quality tweets are one in a million in my timeline. The big
| advantage is that I follow so many different kind of people at
| once that there is a HUGE diversity of infos.
|
| On the contrary, I follow very specific topics on Reddit. And as
| far as I am concerned, the quality of info is top-level, and the
| signal/noise ratio is VERY good.
|
| Regarding Facebook, I mostly only follow [dedicated] groups now.
| And once again, the signal/noise ratio is much better.
|
| Conclusion: apart from Twitter, social media are all back to
| being fancy Usenet clones :)
| tomrod wrote:
| I took a 2 year break from Facebook. It just got to be too
| much. I just rejoined, as kids' schools send messaging and
| announcements regularly there and other groups of local
| interest use it to coordinate. Outside of that, no one is
| posting anything but meme reshares that echo 1990s email
| forwards.
| morkalork wrote:
| I think nobody posting anymore is an overcorrection or reaction
| to the days of over sharing and posting about every little bit of
| drama.
| [deleted]
| c4mpute wrote:
| I think this is an eternal cycle. Maybe related to what has been
| called "enshittification", but not the same:
|
| Users will flock to a platform, make it their own. The platform
| will grow. Then the advertisers, professionals, and hucksters
| will swoop in, do their thing, and slowly overshadow the old
| "normal" users. Then old users will leave, leaving a wasteland of
| ads and glossy shiny.
|
| I'd like to call it "glossification".
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Users will flock to a platform, make it their own.
|
| As a user (in particular as a non-paying one), you _never_ make
| the platform your own. This feeling is pure entitlement.
|
| If you want to make a platform your own, set up your own web
| platform.
| Etrnl_President wrote:
| I left when I realized the platform is controlling what I see,
| is pitting me against my friends and aquaintances to generate
| negative interactions, and is filled with bots and fake users
| pushing politics.
|
| https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/225933-2017-09-22-faceb...
| romusha wrote:
| Would this be like gentrification?
| morkalork wrote:
| Sure. Like how a neighbourhood with low rent, cheap cultural
| non-corporate restaurants (pho, tacos, gyros), full of
| students, young professionals, immigrants and all the
| character those things have is like a young platform. Then
| because it's a cool place to be, brands move in (hello
| Starbucks), rent goes up, and the people that made it
| interesting in the first place are pushed out.
| [deleted]
| quchen wrote:
| How is this not the same? It sounds exactly like I understand
| enshittification. Literally:
|
| > First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their
| users to make things better for their business customers;
| finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all
| the value for themselves. Then, they die.
|
| (Source: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-
| doctorow/)
|
| Do you mean that the context here is not user/business, but
| personal/curated?
| c4mpute wrote:
| I see the difference in that "enshittification" is what the
| platform owner does. "Glossification" is what the users do.
| Of course both are closely related.
|
| To elaborate, with an example: ebay has once been a platform
| to find things non-professional people would sell from their
| attic on the cheap, as an auction. Then professional sellers
| came in, first with auctions (either more expensive ones, or
| by using sockpuppet accounts to drive up the bid). That was
| glossification. ebay then of course went through
| enshittification, with fixed-price offers, selling preferred
| spots, etc. But interestingly, they currently seem to try to
| revert some of that, because glossification and
| enshittification affect their bottom line, so now non-
| commercial sellers get zero fees and their own classifieds'
| platform
| CM30 wrote:
| Yeah, they're two related yet distinct issues. Take Medium
| or Quora for example. The whole 'login to view any content
| at all' issue would be enshittification, since its the
| platform owners trying to screw over users for their own
| benefit. The flood of low quality, crappy articles and
| answers by people trying to make a quick buck would be this
| other phenomenon, since its the users trying to make a buck
| at everyone else's expense.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| They are definitely related. The social media
| 'enshitification' is a subset of all tech/industry
| 'enshitification'
|
| Think the Doctorow 'Enshitification' was more broader than
| just social media, and was all technology, even non-social
| apps eventually turn bad as the goals switch from being
| focused on the user and providing value, to corporate greed
| trying to extract money from the user.
| philipov wrote:
| Isn't enshittification simply the business cycle? It's
| describing in detail the why of the bust portion of the
| cycle.
| dahwolf wrote:
| It's an annoying word in itself, and yes, it's simply
| business as usual in startup land. Invest aggressively at
| a loss to accelerate growth, then later monetize, if you
| get that far.
|
| Can't we do better? Have a stable business, organically
| growing and profitable from the start?
|
| No. Tech is winner takes all. You need to be first and
| grow the fastest or somebody else will.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I'd say in one case it's a strategic corporate tactic: you
| intentionally build something to attract people with the
| understanding that you'll slowly boil and eventually gouge
| them if you're successful, peeling away freedoms and adding
| fees in some form.
|
| In the other case, it seems like something is a victim of its
| own success. A product or service becomes so successful it
| draws attention of the lifeless leeches of society who swoop
| in to try and acquire and/or exploit it knowing there's
| opportunity there. There was no strategic plan to do this
| (other than the fact all leeches are drawn to blood as an
| inevitability). Also, in many cases, exploitation occurs from
| user space: we don't own this thing, only have the abilities
| of everyone else using this thing, but there's a lot of
| potential money there so how do we grab some?
| ben_w wrote:
| My understanding is that enshittification is much more
| general (though perhaps this is just linguistic drift); an
| organisation that has done a hard thing, but now has to
| justify its continuing existence and expense coming up with
| things nobody needs and which add zero or negative value.
|
| This can be rent extraction (literal or metaphorical, no
| matter where on that spectrum advertising goes); and also it
| can be feature creep, mission creep, scope creep,
| bureaucratic bloat.
| john-radio wrote:
| Yeah, I used to call enshittification "Black and
| Deckering".
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Interesting comparison, do you mean this because B&D now
| come up with things people don't need?
| Angostura wrote:
| I think they were a brand known for fairly high quality
| equipment that had a good reputation. They capitalised on
| their brand by producing increasingly inferior products
| salawat wrote:
| This is called "cashing out the goodwill of the brand". A
| steady decrease in quality of output while optimizing for
| minimum inputs in seek of alpha.
|
| A.k.a Welching. Gettin' the juice out.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| IIRC the private equity operators prefer the phrase
| "maximizing brand value". Such a nicely positive ring
| about it, yes?
| gnu8 wrote:
| What we need is a way to objectively quantify the
| reduction of quality over time so that people will have a
| clear idea of what they're actually buying rather than
| relying on a hazy and outdated idea of the brand's
| reputation. People would know that the drill B&D is
| selling in 2023 is a 40% drill, not the 80% drill they
| were selling in 1993.
|
| Reducing quality and coasting on goodwill isn't really
| alpha, it's actually just stealing. They used information
| asymmetry to sell the customer less drill than they
| thought they were getting and it shouldn't be allowed.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Reminds me of the interview with Steve Jobs where he
| talks about large companies not caring about product
| because of their market position. Soon all that really
| matters is sales and marketing, so all the people that
| were good at making good products leave or get drowned
| out by bad decisions
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| My accountant mom introduced me to the term goodwill which
| is an intangible asset. It's basically the extra value over
| assets minus liabilities. It's based on brand loyalty,
| established customer relations, etc.
|
| MBA culture promotes the idea that it's advantageous to
| burn a companies goodwill to boost a couple of quarters
| earnings. MBA's love to do that because it's easy and MBA's
| are fundamentally lazy and incurious and will jump ship
| before it plays out.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It's not advertisers that keeps users from posting. Plenty of
| people doom scroll on Facebook and instagram. ads hasn't scared
| users away all that much.
|
| It's that the platforms have been invaded by professionals
| coupled with an expanded "suggested for you" posts with a
| little bit of platforms pushing users to grow their graphs
| endlessly.
|
| This creates a combination where posting isn't really for your
| friends, it's for everyone and do you really want to share with
| everyone? While at the same time the platforms are pushing
| towards being a content delivery platform and not a content
| creation platform.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| You don't have to be scared away. It just needs to be shit
| enough that you're going to use a second social medium
| alongside. Then it's just a normal "use the fun one more, use
| the shit one less" until you realise the shit one just makes
| you feel like shit and you stop using it entirely.
|
| And of course, there'll always be a segment that never gets
| to that realization, keeping the corpse animated.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It is not just that. At this point, most people know that
| their online presence is scoured by entities that may be
| unfriendly for one reason or another, or maybe is gathering
| information about you ( say HR people looking at your recent
| Linkedin posts ).
|
| Honestly, if that is true ( and I have no real way of knowing
| ), I think that is a good thing. People are finally
| adjusting.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >It's that the platforms have been invaded by professionals
| coupled with an expanded "suggested for you" posts with a
| little bit of platforms pushing users to grow their graphs
| endlessly.
|
| It really shows the hubris and lack of humanity in social
| media platforms. Instead of letting people naturally figure
| out who they want to talk to and hear from, social media
| empowers randos to butt in on private interactions, by
| design.
| [deleted]
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Yes
|
| Early Digg was pretty good.
|
| Early Reddit had a lot of good help guides and interesting
| perspectives.
|
| Now on HN. And crossing fingers.
|
| (Slashdot seemed to go through the cycle, bottom out, and is ok
| again?)
| ModernMech wrote:
| Slashdot will never be okay again. I go there every so often
| to check, and it's still a dumpster fire.
| queuebert wrote:
| And R.I.P. kuro5hin.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I tried soylent for awhile. But then realized the people
| who lit the dumpster fire at SD were there too.
| zirgs wrote:
| Most niche subreddits are still good. Just avoid big/default
| subs and anything related to politics and culture wars.
|
| That's what disappointed me when I tried reddit alternatives.
| Politics and culture wars were there too, but niche subs were
| nowhere to be found. They don't seem to understand what made
| reddit worse in the first place.
|
| So I went back to reddit.
| bluetwo wrote:
| The problem I have with Reddit is every subreddit seems
| filled with amateurs posting the same starter questions
| daily, never looking at the feed to see these questions
| have been asked and answered daily.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The niches basically succeed because they aren't worth it
| to marketers and "influencers" to shit up with "content."
| It's awful when a nice community gets too big, because once
| it does it's now worth money to do that.
|
| I also think this is the magic that forums used to have,
| and Reddit is basically a convenient platform for forum
| hosting.
| lynx23 wrote:
| s,subreddits,events, and s,/default subs, festivals, in
| your first paragraph and it is still valid.
|
| Saying that because I noticed this effect as a young
| festival goer. As the size of the event grew, the number of
| people I'd much rather not be around also increased. I am
| suspecting something similar is also at play here, in
| addition to the bot-effect...
| yelling_cat wrote:
| A niche sub equivalent succeeding on, say, Lemmy would
| either require the existing reddit sub to close and migrate
| there or for the Lemmy active user count to grow to the
| point where a critical mass of users interested in that
| niche want to discuss it there. There needs to be some way
| on Lemmy to promote those forums as well. A couple of niche
| forums I'm subscribed to are gaining a little traction, but
| I only found out they existed when they were mentioned on
| the reddit subs they're based on.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I don't remember the correct term, maybe someone can help, but
| this is what happens to "scenes".
|
| Cool kids do their own thing (art, music, whatever), some
| people notice and like what they're doing and enjoy it
| genuinely. They spread the word and more people join the scene.
| Then posers come in and try to imitate the cool kids, but can't
| really capture the same spark.
|
| Scene grows and an eternal September commences where the
| original intent of the cool kids and genuine interest of the
| original fans is lost, as newcomers are there just to be part
| of the scene. Eventually they dominate the scene.
|
| Finally advertisers and capitalists see a money making
| opportunity and they monetize the whole thing, ruining it for
| everyone.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| It is also an age/generation thing. FB was cool until your aunt
| was there. Then IG was cool until the same. TikTok probably
| well through that cycle. etc.
| dahwolf wrote:
| I think my aunt is great and much cooler than my peers.
|
| I object to this weird anti-family culture. I don't give a
| shit what is "cool". It's a made-up concept, unlike family.
| Family has my back, and I have theirs. But I guess on
| "social" media being social isn't cool.
|
| There's nothing more natural and important than socializing
| with your family.
| cvhashim04 wrote:
| All the cool kids are on Locket
| queuebert wrote:
| All the really cool kids never left EFnet.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Someone deeper in the comments posted
| https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths , which describes
| the phenomenon well. Many years ago a similar lifecycle issue
| was noticed with "MUDs", the ancestor of MMOs: they lasted for
| a couple of years then users would gradually migrate elsewhere
| as the old place became "stale".
|
| Social media is both a platform and a set of communities using
| it. If the health of public communities is not good, people
| will migrate away. I do think that the past decade of
| intensification of the "culture war" on social media has
| contributed to its destruction; people are simply exhausted,
| and new users (kids) who've grown up in a high-surveillance
| environment are less keen to post about themselves because it's
| an attack surface.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| HN loves to complain about Discord (with good reason), but
| Discord is anti-gloss.
|
| Small Discord communities can generate a lot of discussion, a
| lot of user generated content. Discord is also a poor place to
| do stealth advertising; if you post fake messages about how
| good your product is, those messages will just get buried and
| will never show up in a search result; it's not very effective.
|
| Things changed this year. We saw the rise of LLMs and the fall
| of Twitter and Reddit and the rise of federated social
| networks. I think the Twitter / Mastodon format is more robust
| for both small and large user bases; the Reddit format is
| dying. Real-time chat rooms still have a place, especially with
| the right tooling / notifications. LLMs threaten to replace all
| of them and end the online network effect altogether.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| My biggest problem with Discord is still more related to
| support communities (what would have previously been a
| focused forum or subreddit) moving there, and the subsequent
| lack of archival of topics and answers for future reference.
| Xunxi wrote:
| On android, as soon as your display timeout it will auto
| scroll to new messages. It is also very tedious to go and
| stay in the first post of threads.
|
| Quite infuriating especially on a lengthy thread. There's a
| 5 year old feature request that nobody ever bothered to
| respond to.
|
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/community/posts/3600320...
| margalabargala wrote:
| This has actually been fixed in the past ~6 months, and
| quite nicely.
|
| They added the concept of a "forum" channel, where you can
| have individual support questions, and each one has its own
| thread that addresses that specific question.
|
| Better yet; the search box and the "make a new post" box
| _are the same box_. So if you 're starting to ask your
| question, as you type, it's filtering previous questions
| based on the words in the question you're trying to ask.
| cdcarter wrote:
| The Zig programming language community has a very active
| Discord, and they use the forum mode. I've searched for
| questions I feel "certain" someone else would have asked
| (like how to convert a `[]const u8` to a `[255]const u8`)
| and rarely can get Discord's search to find something
| relevant. Thankfully, the community answers quickly
| anyway.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Discord is the windows 11 of chat apps. Ads and subscription
| begging behind every third click.
| cfeduke wrote:
| As I type a message in Discord, a pop up appears next to my
| cursor with some disabled Emoticons, prompting me to pony
| up my credit card and upgrade to Nitro... so I can include
| these in my message.
|
| This is the forum replacement. Right. :\
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I've never seen an ad on Discord, but I have seen them
| trying to sell premium features. When I talk about Discord
| being "anti-gloss", I mean all live-chat formats, Discord,
| Matrix, IRC, etc.
| ngc6677 wrote:
| Using matrix.org to post in public/private chat rooms is
| practical, and can chose any client to CRUD content, or
| subscribe to rooms (feeds). Element allows export of room
| contents (with attachments) to JSON or XML.
| https://libli.org/libli-news:matrix.org
| Madmallard wrote:
| My brother told me there was an FBI study concluded about
| Reddit over some recent foreign policy related matter that the
| percentage of botted posts on the site exceeded 60% in total
| volume. Seems pretty insane. I wonder what percentage of them
| cluster in the politically charged subreddits.
| layer8 wrote:
| The problem is engagement-driven algorithmic feeds. Without
| them, none of that would happen. Enshittification doesn't
| happen with traditional web forums. It's entirely a function of
| how the platforms are set up.
| meroes wrote:
| Also some stack exchanges I frequent were absolutely bombarded
| with ChatGPT for a few weeks.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| Yep. It's how 'you'tube became 'corp'tube. Remember when the
| selling point of youtube was 'you'?
|
| > Then the advertisers, professionals, and hucksters will swoop
| in, do their thing, and slowly overshadow the old "normal"
| users.
|
| It's more insidious than that. Corporations demand special
| treatment, favorable algorithms and censorship. In the past,
| when breaking news occurred, I checked youtube, reddit, etc to
| get more raw news from ordinary people. Now it's all censored
| on these platforms. Similar to how 'you' can't use bad words on
| youtube, but corporate entities can. The scales have been
| tipped overwhelmingly to one side. But I guess that was
| inevitable.
| tfgg wrote:
| What was remarkable is how Facebook's Threads app jumped
| straight to being full of advertisers and hucksters - they
| didn't think that maybe the right way to bootstrap a social
| network would be to make it full of authentic conversations, at
| least to start with.
| delfinom wrote:
| Lol, I think their plan is to still federate with Mastodon
| specifically to pad out their vapid platform with content.
| They were just too much of a self imposed rush to capitalize
| on Musk and his stupidity, to do it before launch.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Facebook doesn't care about the tiny amount of content on
| Mastodon. And it's the wrong type of content anyway.
| Mastodon is for misfits, nerds, anarchists, Tumblr-style
| far-left politics, doomers, weirdos and very bad artists.
|
| Instagram and Threads couldn't be more different. It's
| commerce. Beautiful people. Beautiful places. Shopping.
| Mainstream pop idols. Grifting influencers. Celebrity
| gossip. Lifestyle. Fashion. Interior design.
|
| Facebook prefers the latter group as this is where
| advertisers thrive. The typical Mastodon user would have an
| anxiety attack when they see an ad.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Because it was seeded from Instagram, a platform which
| promotes people who look good (like myself, of course) not
| necessarily people with anything interesting to say.
| "Authentic conversations" was never a possibility.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Also possible that they were given early access?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > they didn't think that maybe the right way to bootstrap a
| social network would be to make it full of authentic
| conversations, at least to start with.
|
| I doubt that _any_ social media platform owner wants
| authentic conversations - even initially.
|
| Instead of giving arguments, I refer to Paul Graham's essay
| "What you can't say":
|
| > http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
|
| If people were really authentic in their conversations, they
| would be in real trouble quite soon - and the social media
| platform on which these really authentic conversations are
| posted would be, too.
|
| So, what social media companies do is enforce some kind of
| "editorial policy" (moderation) which makes the conversations
| that don't become censored still feel "somewhat authentic" to
| many visitors, so that this bluff only gets busted after some
| time in which the platform's owners can make sufficient
| money.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I had forgotten about that essay. Quite appropos in these
| times (probably in all times, but there are a few current
| topics that immediately spring to mind).
| nitwit005 wrote:
| If social media means a way to communicate with friends, family,
| and extended community online, it's pretty clear Meta and Tiktok
| don't want their products to be that. They've made sure you can't
| get a feed of just your friends.
|
| It's natural the people who want that sort of thing will go
| elsewhere.
| [deleted]
| hot_gril wrote:
| I think they saw engagement dipping as people got bored with
| it, so they started filling it with algo stuff instead. If they
| went back to pure friends, I'll bet it wouldn't work.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Meta and I'm sure TikTok as well, would be MORE than happy to
| follow wherever users want to take the platform. The problem
| is, time and time again, users do not want what they say they
| want.
| soerxpso wrote:
| What you mean to say is that time and time again, users do
| not want what causes them to maximize engagement levels and
| click on the most ads. "Users said they wanted this feature,
| but we implemented it and engagement didn't go up," doesn't
| mean that the users lied about what they wanted, it just
| means that they don't want to use the product in a way that
| requires a lot of wasted time.
|
| TikTok users say all the time that they want the option to
| see a feed of videos from people they're following, in
| reverse-chronological order. They're not lying. The issue is
| that the reason they want that is so that they can use TikTok
| for a short (30 minutes or less) session to check for updates
| on things they actually care about and then close the app,
| which would be entirely contrary to TikTok's fiscal goals.
| [deleted]
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tiktok are all basically Tiktok
| now.
|
| Reels, Stories, Shorts etc are all just a doom scroll inducing
| version of the same content posted across networks.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| 0. It's been 15 years and I still don't know how to use Twitter.
|
| 1. Most of my online social interactions come from people
| interacting with my work (writing, code, drawings) through:
|
| - my say hi calls (https://sonnet.io/posts/hi) - Mastodon
|
| Quality > quantity ("the Internet is big. Really big. You just
| won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is.", i.e.
| small niches are big enough)
|
| Not every company needs to be a unicorn, and you don't get closer
| to people with 10000s of followers vs. 100s who genuinely care.
|
| 2. When I started moving my content from instagram to
| potato.horse I noticed that suddenly content selection and adding
| captions to images became so much easier. It's so hard to escape
| the performative/"screaming into the void" frame of mind when
| using algo driven social media. Now, I still syndicate to IG and
| Reddit, but I have templates with comments redirecting users to
| potato.horse, where I can do whatever the f*ck I want with my
| content.
| nicbou wrote:
| Our personal websites are so similar!
| (https://nicolasbouliane.com) I thought "wow that font is
| beautiful" then realised that it was also EB Garamond. The art
| really brings it together. I wish I sketched as often or as
| well as you do.
|
| Potato.horse is a work of art. How do you syndicate to
| Instagram and Twitter? I'd love to do something similar. I like
| your art and the way you chose to present it.
|
| I also met a lot of people through my work, including close
| friends. I love when people reach out and I try to reward it
| whenever it happens. What you describe seems like being a
| participant in a small community, instead of a person on a
| soapbox.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Wow, that's uncanny. Your site looks lovely. Random remarks:
| I also used a fleuron as a decoration on my site before I
| replaced it with a little doodle (I call him Janusz). And,
| I'm even working on a recipes section for my own site at the
| moment! Also, hope the little subheader with the
| pronunciation of your name works.
|
| (psst just checking out your carbonara recipe, here's my
| cacio e pepe with black garlic: https://docs.google.com/docum
| ent/d/1OUytE9oUnmnwf5BPqt79vqi_...)
|
| > it was also EB Garamond.
|
| Yeah, EB Garamond does the heavy lifting for me design-wise.
| I use it in Enso (enso.sonnet.io) and Sit. (sit.sonnet.io). I
| also have an alternative "brutalist" font stack (e.g.
| butter.sonnet.io), which I use in less serious/"louder"
| projects. I think I picked it up from a Germany based writer
| IIRC.
|
| > How do you syndicate to Instagram and Twitter?
|
| Instagram is hard. I don't know if even Buffer supports it
| without any manual steps. For Twitter I used their API. A GH
| Actions CRON job would query Contentful for the most recent
| posts, then push them to Twitter using the twitter NPM
| package. Recently it's been quite janky.
|
| > I also met a lot of people through my work, including close
| friends. I love when people reach out and I try to reward it
| whenever it happens. What you describe seems like being a
| participant in a small community, instead of a person on a
| soapbox.
|
| It does feel like this. Sometimes I manage connect some of
| the people I meet this way, but it happens rarely. I
| entertained the idea of having a small forum (like
| ponder.us).
|
| Let's talk some time! (https://calendly.com/hey_hey)
| romesc wrote:
| I also love it and am interested in hearing more about how
| you approach syndication!
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Hello :) I just wanted to let you know that I intend to reach
| out and say hi to you soon. Your website resonated with me and
| I think we'll click in our conversation.
|
| I'm travelling for a week come tomorrow, but when I am back in
| town I'll book something.
|
| Cheers
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Roger that, speak soon!
| muhammadusman wrote:
| I love the domain potato.horse
| jmrm wrote:
| I had Twitter around ten years ago to talk with content
| creators, like youtubers or writters. Outside that is mostly a
| politics and celebrities echo chamber.
| jiofj wrote:
| You don't know how to use twitter but you know how to use
| mastodon? Aren't they basically the same thing?
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| There is a bit of nuance in how these two are different and
| I'd say Mastodon feels more like early Twitter or early
| Facebook. On the consume side, that means your home feed has
| no algorithm.
|
| Practically, it means you only see what you want and you only
| see it linearly. You never wonder "why am I seeing this and
| how do I make it go away?" (e.g. Elon constantly in my feed
| for some reason) Content can only enter your home feed via
| your followed tags or handles. The home feed is linear like
| the early days of FB.
|
| Early FB was great; I used it as a news feed as I only
| "liked" sources I wanted news from. Today? The feed is
| algorithmically assembled and full of content that is
| indistinguishable from ads (because of course, both FB and X
| make their money from ads and algorithmically enhanced
| engagement). Am I seeing this because someone paid to boost
| the views? How do I get this feed to behave? (Hypothetical
| question; maybe it's possible with a lot of tuning and config
| -- Mastodon just does exactly what I want/expect out of the
| box: follow these tags + follow these people = see this
| content in a linear flow)
|
| To me, this simplicity makes it much more approachable on the
| consume side.
|
| On the publish side, it lets you see the activity level of
| tags in the past week. This makes it easier to decide "how
| should I tag this content?".
|
| One other aspect that I think the HN crowd can appreciate is
| that you don't have to figure out the platform settings for
| privacy and opt out of ads, tracking, and so on. Yes, there
| are still some privacy settings to toggle, but Mastodon isn't
| an ad platform and doesn't make money from being able to
| track you across the web and feeding you ads.
|
| More intuitive on both the pub and sub sides, IMO. If you
| liked early FB and early Twitter, you'll instantly find
| Mastodon more pleasant and intuitive to use.
| queuebert wrote:
| I also found that Elon was always in my feed even though I
| don't follow him, so I blocked him and now he's gone.
| abathur wrote:
| So _you 're_ the reason he wants to remove the block
| button :)
| klardotsh wrote:
| If I recall from the algo weighting dump they did last
| year, Elon is hard-coded to be basically the absolute
| most important thing to the sorting algo with a pretty
| long decay time. When he posts, it's effectively
| guaranteed to be in all Twitter users' feeds, and that's
| how he wants it.
|
| Then again, I don't know first-hand; I quit Twitter many
| months before it got this version of Billionaire
| Buffoonery as an owner.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Same here:
|
| 1) block the brain parasite,
|
| 2) disable half of the UI using an ad blocker,
|
| 3) condition yourself to click the "Following" tab
| without noticing it, and
|
| 4) voila, now you have a semi-pleasant Twitter
| experience.
| Rustwerks wrote:
| This is the reason that Twitter is removing the block
| button...
| sznio wrote:
| I never figured out how to find something interesting on
| Twitter. The algo feed doesn't surface anything interesting
| anyway. On Mastodon, since I picked an instance that fits my
| interests I can actually browse the local instance
| feed/trending and see things that do interest me.
| b800h wrote:
| I'm pretty sold on Mastodon now, but I am wondering what
| it's failure mode looks like. Everything eventually gets
| worse - how might this happen with Mastodon?
| rpastuszak wrote:
| The other comments explain this better than I could.
|
| In short:
|
| I can post the same message on Twitter and Mastodon and get a
| thoughtful comment on the latter vs. no engagement/shitpost
| on the former.
|
| Twitter feels like a bunch of angry people screaming into the
| void, whereas Mastodon is like screaming in a small cave
| filled with friendly weirdos. I like that. Eventually you
| lower your voice and start chatting.
| nicbou wrote:
| An online community should feel like an online pub. It should
| have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is
| somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of
| belonging encourages participation and good behaviour.
|
| HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are
| like that.
|
| But now every social media website became like that one
| pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic
| commercial space built around spending money. It has no
| personality, it's not safe, and no one feels at home there. Why
| would you invest yourself in a space like that?
| jwells89 wrote:
| Much of this has to do with scale. In small communities,
| interactions are more likely to skew positive, meaningful, and
| desired. The discussions that rise to the top are those that
| are most interesting and relevant to the community.
|
| In giga-networks like Twitter, you might get some vague sense
| of a belonged-to community, but the boundaries are fuzzy at
| best and when posts find their way beyond those boundaries,
| context is lost and you end up with scores of randos whose
| full-time job is seemingly to surf the service searching for
| posts to clout farm with by either replying to them with their
| entirely uninformed (often inflammatory) opinion or quote-tweet
| with similarly uninformed ridicule, which can turn disastrous
| for the quoted poster if it goes viral. The posts that rise to
| the top are the ones that are the most flame-baity and
| controversial. It's a much more negative experience overall.
| bmacho wrote:
| > An online community should feel like an online pub. It should
| have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is
| somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of
| belonging encourages participation and good behaviour.
|
| > HN is like that.
|
| HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon,
| and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can
| joke and feel belonging literally everywhere else, catpost half
| drunk and high, noone cares really, from the small subreddits
| and discord servers and fb groups to the big subreddits,
| discord servers, fb groups.
|
| > But now every social media website became like that one
| pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic
| commercial space built around spending money.
|
| We must have a different internet, every other place I know is
| full of personality and total unique, people repeat the same
| sets of inside jokes over and over. HN is way the driest and
| most soulless.
| paganel wrote:
| There are no jokes in here, but HN definitely has a
| posting/comment "culture", a vibe, as the OP calls it, that's
| for sure.
|
| For example I could never understood how come the rationalist
| thing was not derided to the moon and the back, especially
| after that crypto debacle with the Bahamas guy. But while
| there was a slight reaction shorlty after the fact that
| rationalist mindset has returned here in full force.
| logdap wrote:
| [dead]
| r00fus wrote:
| > HN is way the driest and most soulless.
|
| Well if you are looking for memes and catposts, yeah, the S/N
| ratio here is quite low.
|
| Honestly I think of those things as noise, so I see S/N of HN
| as much higher. I can always go elsewhere for the vibes.
| markjonsona989 wrote:
| My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after
| giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated
| "soulless" HN.
|
| It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent
| jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of
| effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a
| place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all.
| There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of
| jokes and fun. One thing that keeps immature and rude
| people away is precisely the "dullness" that the post above
| speaks of. People get tired and move on, leaving the place
| clean and tidy for others to use.
|
| HN has problems of course; downvote bullying is one of
| them. I'm not saying HN is perfect, but I'd rather not turn
| it into Reddit or Youtube. So I don't know where this
| leaves HN between the "pub" and "commercial street".
| soerxpso wrote:
| I prefer it this way. I would love to see original jokes
| on HN, but the issue is that if you allow "jokes" in
| general, there's a flood of low-effort repetition of
| popular phrases or comments where the only "comedic"
| value is that they've forced something into a cliche
| sentence structure. That feels more soulless than the way
| HN is, because comments get so samey. You see the same
| effect sort of start to creep in on certain political
| posts, where people feel that they can achieve a cheap
| sense of attention and comradery for expressing a trite
| idea instead of a joke (comments that mostly amount to
| "Elon Musk is a mean man! Who else agrees???")
| epolanski wrote:
| I think HN is fine as it is.
|
| I come here because it is one of the very few places
| where you can have interesting discussions and read
| interesting comments from people with a similar intent
| and interest.
| A_Venom_Roll wrote:
| I really like this metaphor
| rchaud wrote:
| My soccer club's message board is exactly like this. Old school
| phpBB, lots of cantankerous regulars and useless back and forth
| chatter, just like a pub. Design wise it's completely unchanged
| from the 00s look except for a mobile friendly stylesheet
| introduced some years ago.
| epolanski wrote:
| vBulletin/phpBB forums and IRC were for me peak internet.
|
| I would maybe add early Facebook for the social, but not
| funniest part.
|
| Some discord servers do a good job at recreating the vacuum of
| IRC (albeit every single one of them has always way too many
| channels) but the vacuum of forums is just not well replaced.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| I don't see any real difference between your "online pub" and
| globalized-entity "pedestrian street" examples.
|
| They're both highly-controlled and highly-curated venues.
|
| Environments like those just encourage conformity. That, in
| turn, results in interaction/discussion that's rather bland,
| homogeneous, and sterile.
|
| I definitely find this site to be like that. The "showdead"
| setting very slightly mitigates it, but even then, I almost
| never find any sort of truly thought-provoking discussion here.
|
| Those venues seem to exhibit a false sense of community to me.
| There's interaction, but the participants are either ruthlessly
| conforming, or they're walking on eggshells.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I think online communities aren't. A pub is a healthy, proper,
| community experience. Any human interaction that isn't face-to-
| face is injurious to your health.
| lambic wrote:
| I very strongly disagree, without online interactions I
| probably would've gone crazy during lockdown. Even now that's
| all (mostly) over, I still rely on online interaction for
| communicating with most of my family.
| chromakode wrote:
| This is often termed a "Third Place"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I love having a word for this.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's very similar now that you mention it. It should feel the
| same and achieve roughly the same goals.
| Tarsul wrote:
| Thank you for posting this. Now I finally understand the
| PlayStation 3 (?) marketing... :)
| Sebastian_09 wrote:
| Although not exactly generic shopping streets you describe, but
| "anonymous" places also have been theorized and dubbed a "non-
| place" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place)
| vntx wrote:
| > Why would you invest yourself in a space like that?
|
| Low barrier to entry. Convenience. Ease of use. Sign-up and now
| you can talk to your friends from across the world!
|
| Now, you have to be force-fed shit ads along the way.
|
| I don't think anyone who values their social life would like it
| if you put it like that, but inertia and the gravity of network
| effects are a bitch.
|
| The real problem is these private platforms have the power of
| public utilities, and we treat them like public utilities until
| they pull the rug from under us, and siphon our data to profit
| psychopathic overlords.
|
| Furthermore, these companies don't just throw ads at you, they
| also aid the surveillance state which can compromise your basic
| rights to privacy and fair elections. Malicious foreign
| governments use it to influence elections with false
| information and propaganda. Malicious domestic government can
| use it as a easy spying tool by buying or scraping data.
|
| No one will be safe on these things until we get proper
| government regulation. The EU's GDPR is a step in the right
| direction but more work needs to be done.
| nirvael wrote:
| Seems like one solution could be to limit the transition from
| everyday users using for social reasons to brand/content creator
| users using it for monetisation by capping or limiting the social
| graph (e.g. a cap at 150 followers/following/friends/whatever you
| call them). Brands and content creators would have no incentive
| to join and devalue the network with constant marketing and high-
| effort posts when they can only reach a maximum of 150 people.
|
| I thought I vaguely remembered a similar idea, and a quick Google
| search only returns a brand called Path (no longer operational).
| Maybe there would be renewed interest in the idea.
| thefz wrote:
| Best definition of "content" I ever heard:
| https://youtu.be/kHe4wwF9O6Q?t=149
|
| "content is a commodity that fills social media feeds so we can
| be sold as a collection of preferences [...] attention but not
| understanding, engagement but not exploration"
|
| Every time I hear "content creator" I perceive it as Styrofoam.
| Filler used to convey a product.
| googlryas wrote:
| I've heard content creators either say explicitly in videos, or
| in text under videos, things along the line of "Sorry I made a
| mistake here but I need to get this video out". Imagine reading
| an essay where the author tried to pull something like that.
| chooma wrote:
| "TV programs are interruptions of commercial blocks" was the
| quote that stuck with me back in the day.
| cfeduke wrote:
| > Every time I hear "content creator" I perceive it as
| Styrofoam. Filler used to convey a product.
|
| This is so good. Perfect. I love it.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| There are a number of reasons. One big one is that a lot of
| content is now generated by professional outfits.
|
| Why would you post something you've made yourself when you are
| competing with big budget production companies or well funded
| creative marketing teams?
| TjZkxkxeky wrote:
| But..... marking teams don't have interesting things to say..
| "competing", perhaps, but they aren't winning.
| hackermatic wrote:
| I've seen a lot less engagement with my Facebook posts in the
| last couple years, and been shown a lot fewer posts from my
| friends compared to groups, ads, and "suggested" posts. I used to
| wonder if it was primarily because Facebook was openly
| downranking news and politics, and my friends and I posted about
| those things a lot more than your average users.
|
| Now I think it's just because most of them have silently stopped
| using the platform -- but I think a big reason for that is we
| figured that if no one is going to see our stuff, then why post
| it at all? In other words, anticipating the algorithm led to a
| kind of chilling effect on our usage in general, at least for my
| own behavior.
|
| Not that Internet political arguments have gone great with the
| current platforms and their incentives, but I don't like the idea
| that they might not happen at all, especially at a time that
| seems as important to discuss as this one.
| happytiger wrote:
| Users are shifting away from social media, not towards messaging
| and group apps. It's an important distinction.
|
| Enshitification at work imo.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| I stopped posting frequently when I realized I was putting my
| name on a thing in a public database, and that most hiring
| processes these days involve putting my real name in google and
| looking at whatever pops out. I still post nowadays, but it's
| usually under a pseudonym, from a VM, through a VPN, over HTTPS.
| I should probably look into encrypting my DNS too.
|
| Nowadays when I'm posting in the clear with my real name I
| usually stop and think "Would someone hire me if they read this?"
| and then delete everything I wrote and just move on with my life.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Good thinking and it's a rule I live by.
|
| I do not share anything digitally that would backlash if
| revealed. Also not in private digital spaces. Not in work chat.
| Not even on a private device in a note. Nowhere.
|
| Digitally, I do not gossip. I have no political opinion on
| divisive topics. I have no nudes. I don't swear in game chat.
| There is no smoking gun to be found at all even if you get full
| access to my entire digital life.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Massive thanks to Reddit for going ahead with their API changes
| and killing Apollo. Since then, I waste probably no more than 10
| minutes a day on there, and I don't doomscroll anymore.
| andrewgioia wrote:
| > "How does a brand show up in somebody's DMs or Discord server
| if they're not invited?" Haberman said. But in many ways, that's
| the point. People can still go on Instagram to check on their
| favorite celebrities and influencers, but young people don't want
| brands and marketers infiltrating the closed communities where
| they spend most of their time.
|
| _All_ people don't want brands in their closed communities!
|
| Anecdotally I strongly agree with the article. I pretty much only
| use Discord and group texts anymore among friends and family
| (though I do self host and share on Mastodon/Pixelfed/Lemmy it's
| a fraction). Any time I poke around on traditional social media
| it just feels like a wasteland, 90% ads/curated content. Fine if
| you want to go read a magazine for a bit I guess but a shell of
| what it was like a decade ago.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| The main thing for me is that I don't want everything I share
| with my friends and family to be public.
|
| If I e.g. comment on a photo that my brother posted, I
| absolutely don't want any of his other random acquaintances to
| also see that. And also the other way around, if my friends
| comment something on my photo I don't want my brother to see
| that.
|
| Private groups are the only way to avoid that. Or maybe a
| system like G+ had with the Circles, so I could e.g. share tech
| things _only_ with my techie friends without bothering my aunt
| with it.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > _All_ people don't want brands in their closed communities!
|
| Since you can't avoid having these ads/brand placed in your
| preferred social media platform (the users are the _product_
| (to be sold to advertisers) and not the customers), the next
| best thing that you can do as a user is to _subvert_ the
| undesired brands that you see in your social media stream (e.g.
| by posting something that makes fun of an ad that you see) to
| make the social media platform a less desirable place for the
| respective undesired advertiser.
| brap wrote:
| My Facebook feed is about 40% sponsored posts, 30% suggested
| posts, 30% group posts (usually from very large groups), and then
| maybe 1% actual friends (and it's usually just something that
| they've shared or commented on, almost never actual content).
|
| If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is
| from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB
| more frequently and I'm sure most of my friends would too. Surely
| FB would make more money this way.
|
| How did we end up like this?
|
| I think once engagement dipped a bit, they started adding filler
| content just to keep us scrolling and seeing more ads. But that
| made things worse so they had to add more filler. Which made
| things worse. Repeat until it's all just filler and ads and
| people don't use it anymore.
| dcsommer wrote:
| FB has a friends-specific feed, but it is buried a bit. EDIT:
| just browsed it a bit and I was refreshed to see things that
| are at my scale and about the people I care for. I wish this
| was still the main thing with FB.
| hgomersall wrote:
| If we could go back to the days when there was no feed and
| Facebook was just a way of keeping track of your friends and
| sending a message, I might use it at all.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| The problem is the incentives for any ad-supported profit-
| driven social network and the incentives on "what makes a
| social network good for users" are basically a venn diagram
| that's two circles that touch about 2% in the center.
| happytiger wrote:
| Spot on. It's ironic because a social network that stayed
| true to users will presumably ultimately crush those that
| wander off into profit-chasing, as ultimately their
| currency is user engagement.
|
| But it seems impossible given the incentives you touch on.
| They can only come up from a startup apparently.
| timeon wrote:
| > How did we end up like this?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If it's anything like my friend groups, the reality of the
| matter is that small groups aren't chatting 24/7. But a social
| media site never wants to look "empty". Gotta always keep them
| scrolling.
|
| - Part of that is age, of course 20's people will have less
| time to microblog than their teenage counterpart.
|
| - Part of it is novelty. We're far past the point where sending
| messages to people everywhere is a hot new thing. So we simply
| won't talk as much once that wears off
|
| - And lastly, part of it is societal. We are also far past the
| point where people WANT to post everything for the internet's
| view forever. Hearing about job opportunities lost because of
| FB posts made over a decade ago or being cancelled online over
| some twitter flame war means that talking is dangerous. You
| don't want to leave everything in your mind out to the public.
| So you either close down your privacy settings, or talk less.
| Why take unnecessary risk on stuff you may not even stand by
| later on?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| My mastodon feed is 100% actual friends. That reality exists;
| it's just not evenly distributed yet.
| zeta0134 wrote:
| Probably the nicest bonus feature of Mastodon is that I can
| subscribe to a friend's original posts but unsubscribe to
| their "boosts," which is Mastodon's way to quickly share
| content. This way I can follow artists that make cool stuff I
| want to keep up with, but I don't have to see their political
| reblogs and other interactions, which helps to cut down
| considerably on the noise.
|
| It's great because it's granular at the friend level. Some of
| my follows do legitimately act as curators, infrequently
| boosting cool content that I do want to see. Some are more
| noisy, and I can pick and choose and tailor my own feed
| accordingly. It's a nice happy medium, one I'd like to see
| other platforms emulate if possible, but I suspect they won't
| because the algorithmic feed is much easier for advertisers
| to pay to manipulate.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I wish SoundCloud supported this.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Someone should make SoundCloud for the Fediverse.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Does Funkwhale count?
|
| https://funkwhale.audio/
| [deleted]
| CameronNemo wrote:
| While it is a cool piece of software, it doesn't really
| work like Mastodon or SoundCloud.
|
| That said, you can post audio clips on Mastodon quite
| easily.
| epolanski wrote:
| This is what made me delete my Twitter account.
|
| I may follow a software engineer that writes books on
| functional programming but I just don't care about his
| stupid dogs or his alt right political ideas.
| markdown wrote:
| > 100% actual friends
|
| But no family because they'd never figure out how to use the
| damned thing, amirite?
| soderfoo wrote:
| And if they do join, there is the implicit SLA of ongoing
| support anytime issues arise.
| dahwolf wrote:
| It is. On Facebook you can sort your feed that way and also
| on Twitter. Not sure about Instagram.
|
| In my opinion, people are bored out of their mind also on a
| chronological feed from their friends. Not because they
| dislike their friends, it's just all very repetitive and
| time-consuming with very little to show for it.
| [deleted]
| Zambyte wrote:
| My Pleroma feed is not 100% actual friends of mine, but
| that's because I choose to follow certain organizations or
| public figures. The Fediverse is great because it's exactly
| what you make of it.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > How did we end up like this?
|
| Shareholders, product managers, business people. Unlimited
| growth.
|
| That's how these companies become shells of their former selfs.
| kamma4434 wrote:
| Same for me. Lately my feed is full of Formula One and Debbie
| Harris of Blondie fame, neither of which is an actual interest
| of mine. And basically no content from people I care about.
| brap wrote:
| Oh yeah, this is definitely a great observation. Once in a
| while FB decides I have a new interest and shoves A TON of
| suggested content in my face, as if it's all I ever cared
| about.
|
| And it's usually the most random things. Dragon Ball Z.
| Gangsta rap. NBA. Race cars. Marvel. None of these things
| interest me yet for WEEKS they only showed me those very
| specific things.
| brewtide wrote:
| Maybe they have tuned into your hn username -- would
| explain the race cars and gangsta rap...
| mavamaarten wrote:
| This is my biggest frustration! For some reason, Facebook
| stubbornly thinks I'm into cars, into Hollywood drama and
| some other weirdly specific topics. I cannot for the life of
| me figure out how to indicate that I'm absolutely not
| interested in any of those topics.
|
| Deep into the ad topics I managed to find a place where I
| could search for topics and indicate that I would not like to
| be targeted for those, and that seemed to have done
| something. But it replaced one topic with another.
|
| It's crazy how they managed to ruin their own product.
| They're rapidly bleeding real users and it's totally their
| own fault. Facebook used to thrive with close social
| interaction mixed with some suggested content that seemed to
| be actually relevant. Now it's just anonymous filler content
| and they don't even show relevant posts anymore.
|
| The only reason I'm still on Facebook is because our local
| town's official communication is through Facebook (sad, I
| know) and the neighborhood is active there as well. Otherwise
| I would have happily deleted my account a long time ago.
| hot_gril wrote:
| The non-friend posts on social media are the root of all
| problems here. Once your engagement is with people you don't
| know IRL, bad things like ragebait and bots tend to win the
| global popularity contests. The simple "algorithms = bad,
| chronological = good" mentality was right all along. Explicit
| sharing is fine too.
|
| How'd we get here, well the inflection point was removing the
| timeline and putting algo feed instead, which was probably a
| response to dipping engagement as social media became less
| cool. The cool places nowadays are group chats.
| happytiger wrote:
| Social media companies focus more on investors than users
| these days, and the negative effects for users are painful.
| Crazy ad loads, totally irrelevant and vapid but popular
| posts to boost time-on-site and engagement metrics, and every
| other trick of the trade to keep those investors happy make
| users seek alternatives at scale.
| paganel wrote:
| > How did we end up like this?
|
| Because sharing personal stuff privately, on group chats,
| groups made up of close friends, family etc., is the normal
| thing to do, sharing our personal stuff on FB, IG and the like
| was the exception. No, it was definitely not ok to share photos
| of one's unborn baby on FB/IG for almost anyone to see, that
| was creepy.
|
| Glad that things are returning to a sort of normal.
| acjacobson wrote:
| For a long time Facebook was friends only - so what you
| posted was only visible to people you knew. They slowly
| changed the default to friend of friends and then public and
| that changed the whole feel.
| paganel wrote:
| Nobody in their real mind has more than 10, let's say 15
| close-ish friends (with whom to share photos of your unborn
| baby, for example), as such Facebook was never really about
| friends, it was more about acquaintances.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Sure, however I want to follow what acquaintances are
| doing too. It's especially useful if they are in my city
| and I see that on social media and want to catch up with
| them.
| screwturner68 wrote:
| It was for college kids, it was for hooking up.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number Just in
| case you weren't aware :)
| neovialogistics wrote:
| I think it might just be the corollary of the aphorism: "If you
| build it, they will come."
| shmde wrote:
| I loved Facebook during 2010-2014. Everyone would post their
| silly photos or some super inside joke that only people in our
| classroom could relate to. It was soo refreshing. Crush liking
| your photo etc. Now I don't even remember my Facebook password
| and the last time I logged in I remember it was just some shitty
| hyper local meme/news page with crass content. And I dont have an
| instagram account. Feels good to just connect one on one with
| people directly on Whatsapp nowadays.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| ""How does a brand show up in somebody's DMs or Discord server if
| they're not invited?" Haberman said. But in many ways, that's the
| point. People can still go on Instagram to check on their
| favorite celebrities and influencers, but young people don't want
| brands and marketers infiltrating the closed communities where
| they spend most of their time."
|
| For some reason, it takes people a long time to figure this out.
| There is no room for advertising in peer-to-peer networks which
| is the OG design for the internet. I have been experimenting with
| running private L2 overlay networks since 2008, pre-Wireguard.
| The networks are small, managaeable, there are no strangers, no
| large audiences. If marketers, advertisers and so-called "tech"
| companies want to try to hack into each and every one of these
| private networks, then let them. It will be a ton of effort to do
| on a mass scale, and for little reward. If they are caught I
| think we can sue them.
|
| The open web, walled gardens and "app stores" will always be
| around for marketers, advertisers and so-called "tech" companies.
| If anyone wants to communicate person to person or person to
| small group through a third party's website/server, say, "Mark
| Zuckerberg" or some other person they don't know, they certainly
| can. Unless it's HN, advertisers, "creators" and "influencers"
| will all be there.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| > "It's really bizarre to me that everyone's gone to this place
| in their mind that content has to be so curated," Bruening told
| us. "So curated that you can't show what you're cooking for
| dinner, because that's not cool enough."
|
| Uuuuuh what? Everyone is doing the thing you want to do, but
| everyone else is doing it better, so you're complaining. If you
| were number 1, would you be complaining as well? Sounds like
| you're just a bitter loser.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Even in the very earliest days of the Web, there was PointCast,
| where things came to you. So there was some demand for that
| mode,even then.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Zuckerberg is really damn good. He really positions Facebook to
| take advantages of this.
| dahwolf wrote:
| He predicted the privatization of social networks 5 years ago.
| Which isn't that brilliant, the trend can be casually observed.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| When thinking about Internet platforms, the lens I like to view
| things through is one of power. As a user what power do I have if
| any, to control my experience? To control what I see when and
| from whom. If I have little or no power, or the power is only
| shallow or superficial, if the power isn't very granular, then
| this all counts against the platform. It may surprise some
| (younger) members of HN, quite how much power the individual user
| had on early "primitive" platforms like USENET or closed user
| groups or chat systems, compared to the big, modern social
| networks of today.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| "If you're not the customer, you're the product."
| madrox wrote:
| I've been predicting this trend for years, and it's validating to
| see someone else say it. It isn't even just messaging apps.
| Discord and Twitch are also killing social media usage. It's any
| walled community where people within the community get to decide
| who is in and who is out, and the reach of casual sharing is
| limited. Social media can't counter this trend, because it's not
| in line with their incentives (massive sharing and virality).
|
| Social media companies are going to have to react to this
| eventually. If I had to guess, they're going to go harder into
| content production.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I just wish there was a good and decent messaging app. All the
| high security E2E encryption apps not run by tech companies that
| are spying on me have no usable chat history.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Social Media started it's down fall ~2008 when the teachers and
| parents joined facebook.
|
| I remember when facebook was _only_ the fellow kids you knew.
| There were inside jokes, offensive stuff, lots of pure text
| posts. It was _way_ different.
|
| Parents and teachers joined, a couple kids got in trouble for
| what they posted on facebook, and everyone stopped using it
| freely.
| 89vision wrote:
| I remember when this happened. It felt like everybody's parents
| joined at the same time almost overnight
| lifefeed wrote:
| I remember the exact moment that happened to me. I was
| sitting with an old friend, and we were looking at Facebook
| friend requests from my mom, and we looked at each other
| silently, and realized that everything was about to change.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| We call that "the public" and it's why restricted spaces with
| barriers to entry exist.
|
| Allowing Z people to keep X people out of their groups and vice
| versa.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| seydor wrote:
| They went full circle and now they are back to passive TV zapping
| , but now it's called doomscrolling on tiktok and watching mr
| beast
|
| It wasn't good while it lasted, in fact in retrospect we will see
| it was one of the most insane, narcissistic periods of modernity.
| good riddance
|
| I really hope people re-re-discover forums
| ddingus wrote:
| Me too. The value captured in forums is very high. It is
| relevant for years.
| dahwolf wrote:
| [flagged]
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I predict this trend to accelerate if "freedom of speech
| absolutism" gains more adherents, or the Netchoice vs Paxton case
| gets decided for Paxton.
|
| People want topical forums, without getting dogpiled/brigaded.
| Both trend and case degrade the ability to enforce topicality and
| manners.
| matsemann wrote:
| I posted a lot on facebook in high school. Had maybe 50 friends
| there, like my classmates, soccer team etc. Posted at least once
| a day what I was doing, same did everyone else, and we discussed
| in during lunch next day. Or I would post a general "going to the
| soccer field, just join in", and we'll be a group there. Then
| joining university and getting new groups of friends, it didn't
| feel relevant to "spam" everyone with these things anymore. And
| then friends and family joined. Then I got a job and new groups,
| and suddenly there's 500+ friends on there I don't want to tell
| everything to...
|
| And the opposite problem with people I follow on social media. I
| care about your tech writings, or your sport performances or
| whatever. But not everything else you post. I want a slice of
| you, not everything.
|
| Hence, silence.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Relatable.
|
| My idea is that a profile should indeed be sliced. Personal,
| professional, specific niches (cooking, tech, whatever) and
| that we have a reliable labeling system that accurately detects
| the "channel", preferably fully automated. The signal to noise
| ratio would improve drastically and you could once again get
| value out of a social network.
|
| Likewise I propose the same for moderation. Let me pick my
| comfort level. Ranging from "give it to me raw" to "I need to
| call my therapist because I saw a micro aggression" and
| everything in between.
| jonahrd wrote:
| This makes me wonder if something like Google+ "circles" or the
| idea of maintaining a finsta could translate into a way to
| bring back posting on social media.
|
| I think what Google+ got wrong is that connections are a 2-way
| street, you may not realize your new friend _wants_ the day-to-
| day updates and soccer game invites, because to you they may
| just be someone you met at work.
|
| Imagine if you could have a list of feeds to follow, personal,
| professional, etc. And when adding someone you could follow
| whichever feeds you wanted, and unfollow certain ones at any
| point. Some could be private, so you'd have to be approved to
| follow.
|
| Then I wouldn't feel the need to remove old acquaintances from
| fb, I would just unfollow their feeds. I would feel comfortable
| posting stuff related to my job/networking because I know only
| people following my professional feed would see it. And I'd be
| comfortable posting personal stuff to my personal feed if it
| was locked and I was the maintainer of who could follow it.
|
| They could pretty easily implement this in facebook and I could
| imagine it breathing life back into the platform.
| dahwolf wrote:
| I remember the circles concept working for about 2 weeks.
|
| I'm into photography and people started creating "best
| photographers" circles, one of them had 700 posters in it.
| You could follow the entire circle with a single click after
| which your feed is pretty much done.
|
| A handful of circles would be massively followed which means
| whoever was lucky to get in early, ruled the platform or
| niche.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| This is why I love subreddits on Reddit. I want a slice of you,
| like say I was to discuss topics like cloud hosting or vinyl
| records. I don't really care what else you're into I want to
| connect on these topics we have in common.
|
| As much as the Reddit website and app and overall experience is
| garbage the communities can be good
| navaati wrote:
| Why not remove these persons you don't feel close to from your
| friends list ? When I was using facebook, after I moved in
| life, say going from highschool to university and my list grew
| with my new university acquaintances there, I pruned it from
| the acquaintances of the past life, high school people I knew
| didn't matter so much to me once they were not part of my life
| anymore.
|
| So my friend list organically went through cycles of growth and
| shrink and probably stayed roughly constant, with the only long
| term growth being people that "sticked around" in my life.
| matsemann wrote:
| Because I kinda want to keep up with their big events. Like
| kids, marriages, jobs, a new house or whatever. And I see
| some of them occasionally when "back home" and then it's nice
| to have kept somewhat superficially in touch. And fb works
| for that. It's just all the day-to-day stuff no one posts
| anymore.
| navaati wrote:
| Makes sense, thanks for your answer.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| There's also the unspoken norm that un-friending someone is
| rude. I frequently prune my following lists and then I run
| into someone I've met and imagine them getting slightly
| upset that I have unfollowed them. Maybe that sounds silly,
| but I'm pretty sure that a lot of my peers would say similr
| things.
|
| The way that we describe the action, "un-friending",
| probably influences the notion that it's a serious / rude
| thing to do. We need some kind of UI that emphasizes that
| it's not a big deal whatsoever and is not a rude thing.
| archo wrote:
| https://archive.is/wXMp5
| gumby wrote:
| The funny thing for me is that my FB feed is nothing but user-
| generated -- no glossy productions. While I've tried instagram at
| the instigation of my partner and the opposite appears to be
| true.
|
| And twitter, which I've never really liked, is still for me at
| least small things written by humans.
| DueDilligence wrote:
| [dead]
| reportgunner wrote:
| I revived my instagram account that was dormant for 5 years and
| I'm surprised how little my network posts. With ~100 followed I
| see about 3-5 posts per day before "I'm all caught up". I see
| about 10 "stories" per day.
|
| The rest is just a sea of ads and public posts that I absolutely
| don't care about.
| dathinab wrote:
| IMHO this article shows a clear misunderstanding of what social
| media is.
|
| Humans are culturally used to interacting with limited sized
| communities, probably even evolutionary idk.
|
| When social media was new it was still limited sized, even
| through it was global, due to filter and it not yet having been
| adapted everywhere. (note: the term "limited sized" is a bit
| oversimplified, through I think most people will know what I
| mean)
|
| Then it tried to add many more ways to uphold the illusion, e.g.
| by adding better filters and similar.
|
| Then people moved to mainly consume social media platforms which
| do not create the dynamics of a more limited sized community,
| sure.
|
| But they never did stop posting on social media which did have
| that property!
|
| For example discord, which was fundamentally build around the
| idea of having limited sized communities with only some limited
| degree of cross community features.
|
| Similar that family group you might have on WhatsApp, Telegram,
| Threema or similar _is still social media_. Sure it might be a
| bit more private but that doesn't make it not social media. And
| it can be semi public, too. And people post there "social media
| content" all the time.
|
| Facebook is also still in use a lot, even through more in the
| background by older people.
|
| In the end platforms like TickTock and Instagram focused on
| making people consume media, instead of creation of more natural
| feeling social cycles, but jumping from there to "no one is
| posting on social media anymore" just misses the core of the
| issue: There are many different kinds of social media with
| different dynamic.
| philipov wrote:
| Social Media is a word that means less than the sum of its
| parts. It is not just the word Media modified by being Social;
| it was invented to describe algorithmic feeds like Facebook and
| Twitter. Discord is not social media. Discord is a forum, a
| type of thing that existed before social media.
|
| Social Media's organizational principle is the user page, while
| Forums are organized by community and discussion topic. Reddit
| is also not social media, despite having some algorithmic
| features, because it is organized by community/thread, not by
| social network. You go to a subreddit to read the posts there,
| not to a user page to follow them.
| dathinab wrote:
| what you describe is not the definition of social media which
| I see commonly used, especially in a legal context
|
| technical details like weather it uses threads in the end
| IMHO doesn't matter for weather is social medi
|
| social media is internet media used is used for socializing
|
| which means that while classical forums are most times not
| social media but they can be
|
| discord is not a form, it gained forum functionality somewhat
| recently, but the most common use case people have for
| discord is to socialize, hangout and chat in small
| communities. Does't mean it doesn't also get used as a forum,
| still it's more used for social interactions then anything
| else.
|
| Reddit on the other hand is in between a classical forum and
| social media, though increasingly more social media in recent
| years and saying it's not social media just IMHO isn't right.
| philipov wrote:
| So you think that even IRC and text messages on your phone
| are social media? Can't agree. Being a chat room is not
| enough. The social in "social media" stands for _social
| network_ , not just any kind of social interaction at all.
| The key innovation with social media is using technology to
| leverage your social network for discovery and
| recommendation systems. You can't have social media without
| a social network platform through which it gets
| distributed.
|
| EDIT: On reflection, the key point is that social media is
| an alternative to traditional media, like newspapers and
| magazines. The term refers to a way of publishing and
| distributing content. So I change my position that Reddit
| is indeed part of social media, not because you socialize
| on it, but because it is a platform primarily used for
| publishing/distributing content. Places where you just hang
| out with your friends on the internet are not content
| distribution platforms, however. (Unless the only
| interaction you have with your friends is sharing and
| discussing internet media.)
|
| I propose this definition: Social Media is the _practice_
| of leveraging social network and community platforms to
| publish and distribute _media_.
|
| While communication platforms like Discord might get roped
| into the social media ecosystem, sharing liking and
| subscribing is not its primary purpose. For something like
| Reddit and HN, it's easier to say that media distribution
| is the primary purpose, but not 100%. Going a step further,
| platforms like Youtube and Twitter are used for both
| publishing and distribution, so they're not just
| communication platforms, they're the end-to-end social
| media platforms.
| sylware wrote:
| Will social media use AI to post content in order to keep
| attracting advertisers, showing that "stuff" is happening on
| their platform? Advertisers who should only trust One Metric: the
| correlation of the actual sales with an online advertisement
| campaign.
| collaborative wrote:
| That metric is never important. Brands have always lost money
| advertising. Spending on ads is seen as burning extra budget to
| stay ahead of the curve and remain relevant
|
| They are simply digging trenches for survival and domination.
| That is why I believe brands with profits above average should
| be banned from spending on ads. They polute the market and
| decrease competition
| sylware wrote:
| I disagree, this metric is the only one which matter, and
| this is not related to loss or not of money on advertisement
| from brands.
| [deleted]
| mrkramer wrote:
| I kinda understand this because in the first 10 to 15 years of
| the commercial internet people were eager and hyped to get
| connected and share everything what they do and think. Later on
| this backfired with security and privacy issues like numerous
| hacks, leaks and privacy fiascos and now they seek more private
| space to get connected. Nowadays only influencers, content
| creators and "public personas" want get as much exposure as they
| can plus private businesses and public institutions.
|
| Ordinary people "hide" behind pseudonyms or rarely post with
| their real names unless I will say it again, they are aspiring
| content creators/influencers or whatever they want to become in
| their professional life.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Even the public personas are having a rough time. Twitter is
| falling apart and then there is Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and
| just generally a very fractured yet crowded space where you're
| up against dirty tactics of your peer influencers.
|
| I don't feel sorry at all for commercial grifters, but there's
| also genuine publishers. Institutes that just want to share a
| message and get it out to the public, as a service. That model
| is now quite broken.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| An alternative worth pondering: maybe social media just has a
| shelf-life of 5-10 years. You get into it during your hyper-
| social teen years, and then you get bored of it. That doesn't
| mean it will die. So long as we keep having young people there
| will be a market. But the social media apps are definitely
| delusional if they keep projecting that the entire human
| population will keep using social media all the time.
|
| I know that this doesn't align with the article, because the
| article says that Gen Alpha prefers private messaging apps, but I
| still think there is something to this idea.
|
| A lot of us here are the first generation of mass computer and
| internet usage and I think that clouds our long-term perspective
| about what computer usage will be like for future generations
| born into a world where computers always existed.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| There are tons of old people on social media though
| kaycebasques wrote:
| They are also part of the first generation of mass
| computer/internet usage, like us. And they were often slower
| to adopt a smartphone. So they could very well be going
| through their "first 5-10 years of internet" experience. The
| fact that they're old right now might just be a distracting
| factor.
|
| Or maybe it is indeed a hint that social media is more likely
| to be used by certain age brackets and we can think of it in
| waves:
|
| * During teen years you use it for 5-20 years
|
| * You get sick of it for 10-20 years
|
| * You enjoy it again in the 50-70 age bracket
|
| * You stop caring again after 70+
| jraph wrote:
| Using social media seems common for people around 50 years old.
| Isn't it?
| mancerayder wrote:
| I've been observing a pattern that I've been trying to articulate
| here and I can best describe as a framework where stuff 'comes to
| you' whereas the Internet for a long time was an enabler of 'you
| go to stuff'. The pendulum swung back, thanks to ad tech, and
| centralization, that have or are trying to orchestrate a culture
| shift. Okay, here are some concrete examples.
|
| 1. Television/cable (absent a TiVo type device), things come to
| you (ads and programming were fixed and you had to conform to
| their schedule back in the not-so-old days). Early 2000s, we
| could download content (illegally), we could pay for Netflix to
| send us DVDs of our choosing, and the algorithm was benevolent:
| its recommendations were superb. Russian and French directors I
| positively rated -- ratings 1 through 5 stars plus a written
| review were permitted back then -- opened my world to suggestions
| for other movies that I got to select. Today, Netflix/HBO/etc
| display a limited UI set of options, highly hyped shows and
| movies shown repeatedly, and it now Comes To You. You have a tiny
| bit of choice, but not much.
|
| 2. Google search. Before, it was a resource for you to customize
| and find what you wanted: information about medicine, a product,
| or a store. Now, it Comes To You. You search for thing X, you end
| up in a rabbit hole of Y and Z topics or things, and a lot of
| things seem algorithmically generated or manufactured to steer
| you rather than help you.
|
| There are many many patterns like this, from news searches to
| even tech problem searches and articles. Don't even get started
| on product comparisons. It's scary I can't even search on
| medicine interactions (I add reddit to the search field).
|
| I should add, web sites all have their own mobile app so you get
| trapped, they can steer you, and you can't control ads, the UI,
| cut and paste, and so on. Thanks, world in which Things Come to
| Us now.
|
| Such as it is: a heavy weight on pulling and steering us, and new
| generations growing up on phones not knowing it could be
| different.
|
| Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a world
| in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore
| affect us cognitively long-term?
| dahwolf wrote:
| The article touches upon this. You can phrase it as social
| media becoming just "media" again. A small group of heavy
| posters is responsible for the content backed by an algorithm
| that broadcasts it.
|
| I think the cognitive effects are already visible. We become
| lazy, addicted, complacent, distracted and anxious.
| usea wrote:
| A similar concept is whether something is a "tool" or not.
|
| Tools are things that you use to accomplish tasks. They behave
| predictably, and you can become skilled in using it more
| effectively.
|
| Non-tools are things that try to adapt to you. They're
| optimized for first-time users, or to create an "experience".
| You cannot go fast with them, even with familiarity. They don't
| act in your best interests.
|
| A hammer is a tool. Excel is a tool. Google search used to be a
| tool, but it's been more non-tool for the better part of a
| decade.
|
| Sometimes people want non-tools. It varies with person and
| task. But in general, long-term users tend to prefer tool-like
| uses.
| screwturner68 wrote:
| But a tool for the most part is open source, a screw driver
| is a screw driver, if you turn a screwdriver to the right it
| pushes a screw into the wood. It doesn't take notes of the
| type of wood you are using and then strongly suggest that you
| buy walnut from Home Depot.
| SoKamil wrote:
| [flagged]
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Google search. Before, it was a resource for you to customize
| and find what you wanted: information about medicine, a
| product, or a store. Now, it Comes To You. You search for thing
| X, you end up in a rabbit hole of Y and Z topics or things, and
| a lot of things seem algorithmically generated or manufactured
| to steer you rather than help you.
|
| This is because "recommendations" are a big business. For
| example YouTube generates billions of views from recommended
| videos and God knows how much revenue. But I think
| recommendation algorithms are counterproductive from the
| business point of view because you will sell less ads if your
| platform content creators figured out how to get recommended by
| recommendation algorithms.
|
| On the other hand recommendations are good for users because
| they will hopefully discover new content that they like.
| Platforms just need to be more flexible and offer their users
| tools to tweak recommendation algorithms according to their
| preferences.
| incongruity wrote:
| FWIW, I've always seen it best described as push vs. pull.
| You've expanded the idea a bit but I think it's still a good
| distinction and useful for what you're getting at.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Content you go to has to be good enough to justify your effort.
| Or advertised to make it good enough.
|
| Content they feed you just has to be enough to keep you from
| leaving.
|
| The first category is what every "channel" invests in but hates
| to do so. It's expensive, the creators get expensive, and diva-
| ish. The second category is what all the execs love to
| successfully get away with making.
|
| Comic book movies are perfect second-category content.
|
| It's strange that TV / Streaming seems to produce better
| content high points than movies these days, considering you
| have to physically go to the initial screening of movies.
| koofdoof wrote:
| Walter Benjamin wrote about this all the way back in the 1930s.
| He observed that early art like frescos painted on walls and
| sculptures in temples require the viewer to travel to them, but
| they gave way to paintings on canvas and busts that could
| travel to cities to meet audiences where they were.
|
| Technology continued to push this trend, reproducing art
| through photography and printing in books and newspapers let it
| move even further to meet people in their own homes.
|
| These current patterns you are seeing are an extension of this,
| the relationship between art and viewer has inverted, art is
| now expected to come to us, the focus has moved to within
| ourselves.
|
| Marshall McLuhan also expanded on this and the idea of
| technology as extensions of us with his work "Understanding
| Media: The Extension of Man" if you'd like to read more.
| mulberry_seas wrote:
| Do you have a reference for where Benjamin wrote about this?
| I found this excerpt from "Art in the Age of Mechanical
| Reproduction": "With the emancipation of the various art
| practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the
| exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a
| portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit
| the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the
| interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as
| against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it."
|
| But wasn't sure if this was exactly what you were
| referencing, or some other piece.
| mcshicks wrote:
| There are some places where I still experience "Things Come to
| Us". The open library on the internet archive is one. Worldcat
| is another although I still have to reserve/pick up the items.
| Using RSS and w3m to read news is another. You can use
| something like UserLand to run w3m on a phone, and the terminal
| program is pretty slick.
|
| I've been reading older books on computing on open library,
| like "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" written
| in 1984 by Sherry Turkle and it's fascinating to see the
| questions people were asking back them. My favorite quote from
| that so far is this:
|
| "That question is not what will the computer be like in the
| future, but instead, what will we be like? What kind of people
| are we becoming?"
| kouru225 wrote:
| There was an early art collective called the videofreex that
| defined what you're talking about in terms of channel
| direction. Basically they defined media in the 1980s as being
| one-way channels where there was no response from the audience
| whatsoever, and they saw this as a form of control that
| strengthened class divides. They were excited about creating a
| two-way channel communication network because they thought it
| would break down the social hierarchy.
|
| I think what you're talking about is sort of like the
| recreation of the one-way channel within a two-way channel.
| Technically we can respond, but the amount of power our voice
| has has been lessened dramatically over the years.
|
| I talked to one of the members of the videofreex recently
| (which is how I know about them), and his attitude was the
| classic "bittersweet nostalgia for my overly idealistic youth"
| attitude. He still thought he had a point, but he also felt
| like he underestimated A) the amount of problems that would
| come from disinformation and B) the amount of control that the
| old powers would still retain. I think he saw the structure of
| the media as reinforcing the social hierarchy, but now it's
| looking like the structure of the social hierarchy was what was
| reinforcing the structure of the media... or maybe just a
| little feedback loop between the two... anyway the point I'm
| making is that just cause the media changed doesn't mean the
| social hierarchy has.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > the amount of problems that would come from disinformation
|
| When we used to say disinformation I imagined deep webs of
| false references, faking critical data.
|
| Now I can lookup most "fake news" and find the truth of it,
| generally a too-broad take on quoting someone, within
| minutes. It's just that for partisan reasons people don't
| look, and when they have it pointed out they tend to say
| "yeah, that might be wrong but it's still mostly right in
| spirit" and keep on going.
|
| It seems like hyper-partisanship or tribalism instead of
| being primarily based on bad data because the data so rarely
| comes into question.
| stinos wrote:
| Good points, and I've made/discussed/seen these elsewhere as
| well, but one thing to add explicitly: it is still possible to
| get 'you go to stuff'. I don't have the impression I changed
| how I do that. But: it does seem to get harder and harder and
| I'm actually not sure it will remain doable in the future
| (except perhaps by a small subset of hacker-ish people) because
| it gets indeed not pushed at all.
|
| Examples are things like LineageOS on your phone and/or not
| actevily using it as an extension but as a tool, illegally
| downloading content (still thrives), it actually seems a lot
| easier these days to download music from lesser known to
| virtually unknown bands (even if it's just via YouTube) and I
| still find this like I used to i.e. mainly by going to shows or
| looking at who's playing and finding related bands like that,
| choosing anything but Google/Bing/... as principal search
| provider and using multiple search engines, ...
|
| So, I'm personally not heavily affected by that steering but I
| do indeed fear that it might become a lot harder in the future.
| On the other hand we shouldn't forget that for a lot of
| humanity out there the previous decades they just got their
| information from 1 or 2 TV channels, radio, cinema, and a
| newspaper. If they wouldn't actively seek value they'd be
| basically in almost the same boat. Except that today's boat is
| a lot more pushy.
| neogodless wrote:
| Overall I think this is related to a personal choice to consume
| or create. Of course with DVDs/streaming or social media, a lot
| of it is naturally going to be consumption no matter what. But
| the medium kind of steers you towards one or the other. Social
| media seemed like a way for you to express yourself, to create
| and share, but the algorithms nudged everyone into endless
| consumption scrolling. Creativity is only rewarded if it helps
| the money-making machines.
|
| I don't want to push a value judgement upon creativity vs
| consumption, but I do think people should take it upon
| themselves to look critically at their own values, and what
| they want to spend their life doing - particularly how much of
| a balance they want between bringing something into this world
| vs. taking what they can get from it.
|
| In creative pursuits, you want to "go" to the stuff that will
| be a tool or enabler of what you aspire to do. (And sure,
| you'll want some inspiration to "come to you".) You have to
| decide for yourself if you value "the machine" bringing
| everything to you more than you might value some individual
| pursuit.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Overall I think this is related to a personal choice to
| consume or create._
|
| Or maybe "consume" vs. "create/curate", the former being
| passive and the latter being proactive to different degrees.
| fooker wrote:
| Facebook's VR bet was exactly this.
|
| Experiences come to you instead of you going to experiences.
| shpx wrote:
| How? You have to deliberately search for and buy stuff in
| their app store.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Some of this is knowing where to look. If you want medicine
| interactions, examine.com has everything there is to know about
| the published scientific data on dietary supplements, and the
| FDA itself publishes all of the drug inserts for actual
| pharmaceuticals with every know interaction and side effect
| discovered during clinical testing. Great video content still
| exists, too. I recently watched most of the Kurosawa back
| catalog recently, which I should have done years ago, but now
| most of it is on HBO Max. Every studio having its own streaming
| platform now at least means virtually every great film ever
| filmed is at your fingertips now, but you have to put up with
| the reality that you still need to explicitly look for it.
| They're never going to put this stuff in the trending
| recommendations or whatever.
|
| It's like the world needs librarians again and maybe all the
| nerds who used to staff video and record stores, poorly paid
| but passionate purveyors of information who had no incentive to
| sell you anything because they were going to get the same shit
| wage no matter what. Except I guess we need to figure out a way
| to also pay them.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Maybe the key is bypassing what we (rightly or wrongly) view
| as 'Guardians' like the Googles of the world
| briffle wrote:
| I miss pointcast, back in the day when T-1 lines were crazy,
| that downloaded full web sites of your favorite sites for you
| to look at later. Similarly, I miss Google Reader. I used
| feedly for a few years after readers' demise, and it worked
| okay, but many sites have gone to a super small summary in the
| rss feed, and you have to go click the link to read the
| article, so they can show you ads...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast
| kypro wrote:
| Interesting. You describe something I've noticed myself, but
| haven't thought about in terms of the push / pull dynamics of
| tech products.
|
| > How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to
| Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?
|
| As you touched on your yourself this was probably the default
| before the last couple of decades. There was a short period
| around 2010 where people (especially the youth) were quite
| divergent in interests and political views.
|
| Today it seems people increasingly have shared opinions and
| interests. This is is a shift that's been quite alien to me
| since I grew up during the early internet when it was the norm
| for people to play different games, watch different films and
| listen to different music. There was no social media network
| effects and little to no recommendation algorithms or ads
| online.
|
| Today this seems to have changed. Try finding a Gen Z who
| doesn't have an iPhone and isn't wear a pair of Nikes, for
| example. They are the result of the trend you describe, I
| believe. They like things not because they sought them out
| neutral platforms but because these things were pushed on them
| either by the network effects of social media or the
| recommendation algorithms and ads that litter the internet
| today.
| Liquix wrote:
| Excellently written. A nitpick on your final point:
|
| > Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a
| world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things
| anymore affect us cognitively long-term?
|
| This may be looking at it backwards. Rampant smartphone
| addiction and overuse begins to shape all things in a "medium
| is the message" type of effect. The less need there is to
| physically "Go to the Thing" - whether the thing is the
| television room, office, movie theater, mailbox, rental store,
| newsstand, grocer, etc - the more natural it becomes to sit in
| place and let Things Come to You. If we accept everyone using
| their phone all the time as "the way things are now", the
| vicious cycle will continue.
| mancerayder wrote:
| So you're saying we're allowing ourselves to be victimized by
| it via laziness ?
|
| That's certainly true, if that is what you mean.
|
| I guess the part I didn't speak about was: some people value
| independent thought more than others, and I think for those
| that do, the Things Come to You paradigm is even more
| frustrating.
|
| My concern is that children are growing up in the Come to You
| dynamic. Flip side: they can generate content and release it
| in the wild, something that couldn't be done even in the 90's
| prior to IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Maps. We had FPS maps.
| rchaud wrote:
| I've watched Nirvana perform on local public access TV
| (ironically on Youtube) in 1989, so some level of public
| distribution was possible.
|
| Similarly 50 Cent sold mixtapes of his music out of his car
| trunk to get the word out in the pre-Soundcloud era.
|
| In the mid-00s, Kevin Hart (comedian) would maintain his
| own email lists when he toured, and would send out email
| blasts when he returned to those towns College bands used
| to do this as well, especially as email was adopted earlier
| there.
| nkjnlknlk wrote:
| Laziness is poor framing. Can the masses be "lazy" or is it
| pointless moralizing in the face of unfettered propaganda
| and behaviour manipulation?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That's a pretty interesting question, the tough as nails
| salesman closing deals everyday would consider nearly the
| entire population is lazy as all heck, whereas the hermit
| fisherman would consider the opposite, that nearly all
| are needlessly agitated.
|
| Placing the bar at the 50th percentile isn't very
| inspiring for the passing reader though.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Is this not the nature of all social problems?
|
| If you have X problem, that is your problem.
|
| If Y% of population has X problem, as X grows large
| enough, eventually everybody is affected by the side
| effects of said problem.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yes but roughly half the population will always be below
| average in terms of laziness, assuming it's normally
| distributed. So saying that is just a tautology.
| irrational wrote:
| >they can generate content and release it in the wild,
| something that couldn't be done even in the 90's prior to
| IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
|
| In the mid-90s I was creating content and releasing it to
| the wild on my own website that was hosted for free on one
| of the myriad free website hosting platforms back then.
| Frankly, the website sucked, but it was my content.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to
| Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?
|
| Goodbye serendipity.
|
| Probably goodbye creativity.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| gitowiec wrote:
| I and my friends 3 years ago switched to closed group on Signal.
| We switched from our makeshift mail group we used for 10 years
| (we all were just using "reply to all" to the infinity). Thanks
| god Signal has mute option. The emails always waited for me not
| knocking on the doors like Jehovah's witnesses!
| dahwolf wrote:
| Hardly a new insight, Zuckerberg acknowledged that the future of
| the public square is private, about 5 years ago.
| dzonga wrote:
| that's why tik-tok has grown. there's a sense of authenticity
| with it. no fake posturing.
|
| disclaimer - i'm not on tik-tok. just based on videos I see
| shared and posted everyn now and then
| meroes wrote:
| If you watch any food videos you'll see the advertising soon
| enough though, usually in the form of rage bait or similar.
| Like using fast food as ingredients to recipes or way too much
| Velveeta in their recipe.
| neilalexander wrote:
| I'm not really sure on your definition of "authenticity" but it
| seems to me that TikTok users are optimising for the algorithm,
| for engagement and for advertising revenue just like on every
| other platform. If anything, TikTok seems to give users the
| power to be even more annoying and repetitive, between the
| computer-generated voiceovers and the same few songs being used
| over and over again ("oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no").
| azangru wrote:
| > no one is posting on social media anymore
|
| "Nobody comes here anymore, its too crowded".
| mandmandam wrote:
| Yeah but who's in the crowd?
|
| It used to be my friends. Now it's a bunch of **s trying to
| piss me off for engagement clicks, or scam me.
|
| I feel worst for the vulnerable - older or less cynical people,
| who get caught in the layers and layers of bullshit that
| constitute the poisoned well. There are people who live and die
| warped by it.
| dade_ wrote:
| Too crowded with robots designed to piss me off.
|
| The bots are like tourists. The population of Venice is in
| steep decline, but the streets are congested.
| piva00 wrote:
| I feel this misses just one adjective: "nobody _interesting_
| comes here anymore, it 's too crowded". A similar feeling I get
| from overtouristed places, initially they are interesting
| because of some attraction: the nightlife, the art scene, the
| food scene, or any combination of these (and other factors I'm
| too lazy to list) with some quirkiness that attracts people who
| are interested in the twist. Over time it becomes attractive to
| more people because they hear about it from others who
| experienced it, then it goes downhill where people will flock
| to a place but nothing that made it initially interesting is
| there anymore, it just becomes a self-perpetuating meme.
|
| It feels it's a pattern that develops in social media, tourism,
| products, etc., something fresh appears which gets overextended
| and bores us out in the end, the laggards missed the magic.
| Rinse and repeat.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| I can resonate with this, the same applies to cities that are
| small and friendly. As they grow bigger, crime and scams
| rise, people are not friendly and more, stores that where
| quirky and odd close due to competition from low-cost big-
| store brands..
| buildsjets wrote:
| RIP Seattle.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
| piva00 wrote:
| Woah. I had never crossed paths with this, it's great. It
| describes really well an experience I had with a few
| subcultures... And it hurts I can see it happening in real
| time to a subculture I've been part of since the early
| 2000s.
|
| Thanks a lot for sharing.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You care to namedrop them? I have never experienced this,
| but maybe that is because I am too late to the party each
| time to realize.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Social media seems to be pushing a bunch of content that isn't
| the people that I actively follow. Twitter, I mean X keeps
| switching me back to the "For You" tab, and Facebook changed
| their page/group interface that switches my profile out every
| time I don't pay attention for a second and I see a feed of
| random. I can't speak for any of the rest as I generally don't
| use much else.
|
| Given that case, of course I'm less likely to engage on social
| media. I'm much less there to interact with random strangers. Of
| course so many people don't go out and do anything anymore, don't
| engage with people around them when they do, and may be put off
| if on the other side. It's a really weird time to be alive to say
| the least. And that doesn't even get into culture issues that
| most people don't care about, but those that are active in social
| media are nearly obsessed about (including myself at times).
| dutchCourage wrote:
| Social networks put engagement before everything else and
| alienate their products. I moved away from Facebook to Instagram
| when it stopped being about my friends, and did the same when
| Instagram tried too hard to be TikTok.
|
| And I like these services independently. I watch short content, I
| like following what my friends do and I follow(ed) strangers on
| Twitter. But the moment everything is crammed into one app the
| experience becomes dull.
|
| I wish they'd spin up new apps instead of adding more and more
| layers to the existing ones.
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Interestingly both X (TT) and Instagram are trying to popularise
| their group functions, but it's not popular enough.
| datavirtue wrote:
| ""How does a brand show up in somebody's DMs or Discord server if
| they're not invited?" Haberman said. But in many ways, that's the
| point. People can still go on Instagram to check on their
| favorite celebrities and influencers, but young people don't want
| brands and marketers infiltrating the closed communities where
| they spend most of their time."
|
| Young people? That's why I left Facebook. Your brain getting
| chewed up by ads and alt-right trash.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm the article title implies they're talking about all social
| media but most of it is about Instagram.
|
| Also, it smells of a marketer's perspective. Of course if most
| posts are fake people will stop being interested in the platform.
| lifefeed wrote:
| Social media companies can get some of the people all of the
| time, or all of the people for some of the time. For a while
| Facebook and Twitter managed to be in the second group, which is
| an hugely profitable group to be in, and they both thought it
| would last forever.
| nwoli wrote:
| Simultaneously twitter is breaking records in number of users (if
| Elon is to be believed)
| miduil wrote:
| Simply not true
| https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/t...
| lefstathiou wrote:
| The link you provided is from April. When I click on the
| article, then click on the cited Twitter stats "visits to
| Twitter.com", then scroll to "Total visits in last 3 months"
| (for Twitter of course), the report appears to indicate that
| traffic is up 1% MoM and currently at a high for the trailing
| 3 month period (which is all they provide). It is just shy of
| Instagram (which I was surprised to see).
| redserk wrote:
| The number of users is a different metric than amount of
| (interesting) content created by those users.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| I don't see how that's possible, I have been a Twitter users
| for years and last time I checked my feed was basically a ghost
| town. I don't even bother logging in because I know the people
| I liked talking to are now either on mastodon or left social
| medias entirely.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Both can be true
| tomrod wrote:
| Aye, logically it could be, but Elon lies and it is false.
| ChumpGPT wrote:
| Still relevant today...
|
| -Post on 4Chan from a few years ago. I cleaned it up a little
| (removed retarded and autist).
|
| The crux of Social media....
|
| The need for attention, validation, to fit in, and be seen
| fitting it. Its encourages the worst traits of old internet
| forums. The upvote/downvote system is a compounding factor on all
| of this because it gives direct feedback. Violating the group
| think is instantly punished. Conforming to the group think is
| instantly rewarded. They are thereby programmed to attempt to
| appease the group constantly. They live for the rush of
| validation and dopamine when the upvotes start ticking.This shit
| becomes such a powerful feedback loop that they really have grasp
| on reality at all.
|
| I've had the misfortune of talking to some IRL hardcore "social
| media people" face to face. They're socially inept in an entirely
| unique way. They're capable of basic social graces that an actual
| crazy/freak isn't, but they still lack critical self awareness.
| They don't know how to differentiate between the internet b.s and
| real life b.s. They're gullible and will believe anything from
| another person who is even half way agreeable to them. Its
| tragic. They're virtually lobotomized. Genuine NPCs.
| dinckelman wrote:
| The moment social media became mostly corporate, I lost interest
| in it. We're supposed to socialize between each other, not
| between ourselves and the ads that abuse us
| inopinatus wrote:
| The only winning move is not to play.
| orwin wrote:
| That's why I think Twitter would've died anyway (or deflated).
|
| It was quite hard to consume niche information without posts from
| outside the community to pop out. The solution to this was to
| only read tweets with hashtag you wanted to follow, and not what
| was 'trending', but Twitter interface got a bit in the way. The
| new Twitter version have a sightly better interface, but much
| worse content imho (on the hashtags I followed). Also I can't
| read discussions without login in, and that's just a killer
| point.
| 1-6 wrote:
| After a certain point, social media has become a source for
| recycled garbage. It's costly to create original content and
| content creators aren't being properly compensated for their
| efforts. AI will only further this decline as content creators
| will have a cheap source of unoriginal content.
| pmontra wrote:
| I've been using WhatsApp groups for sharing with my friends and
| some Telegram groups too. Everybody has WhatsApp and actively
| uses it here anyway, so there is no extra app to install. No need
| to use Instagram, Discord, TikTok or whatever. It crosses all age
| groups.
| buro9 wrote:
| It might not be for everyone, but I'm posting more on social
| media than ever and seeing more engagement than ever... it's on
| the fediverse where smaller and safer communities are leading to
| much higher valuable engagement.
|
| I'm also finding it a lot more common for people to have multiple
| profiles / personas... the social one, the work one, the furry
| one, whatever is how you want to present yourself and to whom,
| without needing to try and contort yourself to be everything to
| everyone.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Where are you posting? I find so little quality content.
| orwin wrote:
| One feed I used to use Twitter for:
| https://infosec.exchange/public/local
|
| (I never was a fan of Twitter, and I use mastodon like I use
| Twitter : only when I'm bored, every months or so).
|
| You have to find a feed/subreddit that interest you.
|
| Hell, I even spend more time on stackexchange than I do on
| YouTube now. It's about niche, and small communities, where
| read is free but write not so much.
| lexicality wrote:
| If they post it publicly then it won't be small and close-
| knit any more
| pxmpxm wrote:
| Seems like the majority of mastodon content is mastodon
| enthusiasts posting about how good it is to post on mastodon...
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rembrandt-Wolpert/publi...
| CM30 wrote:
| Nah that's more like Threads now. Though that's quietened
| down enough that the 'this is so much nicer/better than
| Twitter' talk has at least calmed down a tad.
| dahwolf wrote:
| [flagged]
| rsolva wrote:
| This was true for a couple of years, but lately, at least in
| my little part of the Fediverse, we have moved past the meta-
| talk.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| >I'm posting more on social media than ever and seeing more
| engagement than ever... it's on the fediverse where smaller and
| safer communities are leading to much higher valuable
| engagement.
|
| Precisely, it's signal vs. noise imo. There's an illusion that
| with more viewers you're more likely to find interesting
| people, but in practice it's mostly a distraction.
| BrotherBisquick wrote:
| [dead]
| seydor wrote:
| TBH i don't get the point of mastodon. Social media is
| primarily "media", broadcasting, so they must be megaphones,
| which by necessity includes large scale commercial and
| entertainment activity. Mastodon's purpose of small cozy chats
| is better served by ... chat which is more self-selective and
| fit for the niches or countercultures
| dahwolf wrote:
| True. And Mastodon's paranoid safety culture is why they
| could have just used chat.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| I think this is why Discord is doing great. You can easily
| find communities about specific topics where you can chat
| in real-time with people... and whatever you write in there
| feels somewhat ephemeral, instead of being permanently
| stored on the public internet.
| dahwolf wrote:
| True. Chat feels alive. Quite different from posting on
| social media where next you have to wait whether anybody
| even saw it at all (usually not) and can be bothered to
| like it (which does nothing) or respond to it.
| NikkiA wrote:
| A full on chat program is more of an active pastime, whereas
| mastodon I choose to browse now and then throughout the day,
| and don't expect replies or reactions to be necessarily the
| same day, just 'whenever'. Perhaps that's why it skews so
| Gen-X older.
| neogodless wrote:
| > large scale commercial and entertainment activity
|
| I think you're redefining "social media" (which I think was
| previously called "social networking" once upon a time) as
| "broadcasting" and "megaphones" so naturally your definition
| doesn't fit.
|
| But socializing online is about sharing information,
| interests, and building a (small, or the size you prefer)
| network of people you consider online friends.
|
| Discord does seem to work well for chatting about those same
| things with the people I know, and I can easily see how
| others use it for the same usage but with online-only
| friends. But whenever I visit my corner of the fediverse, I
| see lots of like-minded people sharing content that's
| relevant to me (the hashtags I follow), and I've engaged and
| enjoyed the experience.
|
| There was and is no reason why any of that _requires_ "large
| scale commercial and entertainment activity", and, in fact,
| those things seem antithetical to building up a community of
| people you want to communicate with online about your
| interests.
| seydor wrote:
| Whatever starts as 'social networking' i think it is
| inevitable that it will end up becoming 'social media',
| because people add friends but don't delete, and by the
| central limit theorem users will become average, that can
| easily be substituted by an ML model. Even if mastodon is
| OK now, it will end up with the same situation as it grows.
|
| I still prefer when the world was divided in forums, not
| friend groups.
| jug wrote:
| Yes it's striking how much smaller user base Mastodon has yet
| better engagement than Twitter.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| It's not social media anymore. In their feed, people are
| bombarded with ads, news, jokes as regular "content creation" and
| group posts where strangers with a narrow interest in, say,
| collectible figurines are posting pictures of their new purchase.
| agent008t wrote:
| It all went to shit the moment 'timeline' became 'feed'.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| This. All people want is to be able to see pics of their
| friends and kids from whatever vacation they're on,
| preferably in chronological order.
| sznio wrote:
| But then you'd just come in for 10 minutes a day and be
| done. Can't earn money on such healthy engagement.
| rpjt wrote:
| People say they want this but I'm not actually sure that
| they do. Didn't FB do some study about this?
| dahwolf wrote:
| People don't want this. They say they do but they don't.
|
| Social media is 15 years old now. Watching what your
| friend had for dinner or some other mundane non-event is
| just not that exciting anymore.
| p0nce wrote:
| Twitter doesn't show me the people I follow, and instead show
| people I "might like", in no particular time order. When I do
| interact, almost noone of my followers can see my post because
| I'm not an advertiser / paid user. Same from Facebook. So it's
| not worth "building an audience" if you can't communicate with
| it, and your audience can be taken from you at will.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I post something almost everyday.
|
| When I see a headline making an absolute statement like this I
| immediately dismiss it as an exaggeration. A variation on
| Betteridge's law [1] perhaps. Their are other social media than
| the big ones.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I know there's a lot of Musk stans in here, but he really did
| destroy Twitter, possibly at the behest of the Saudis, and it is
| now a late night Fox News like ads space full of scams.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I wonder whether Google+ and its Circles would have seen better
| success if it was launched now.
| c4mpute wrote:
| Circles was a great idea. But not really good enough. I'd have
| liked an "ignore" circle, like banning users on other
| platforms, just quietly, like the shadowbans some implement on
| a personal feed level.
|
| Also, Circles was the only good thing about Google+. The rest
| was average to bad, and the forced integration into all kinds
| of Google services, the forced realnames, and the lack of
| third-party integrations killed any kind of goodwill/benefit-
| of-doubt anyone might have had.
| everdrive wrote:
| I think what people sometimes miss is that circles was a good
| feature for users, but a bad feature for the platform. They
| interrupt vitality and outrage, since all messages are
| potentially more contained.
| mekoka wrote:
| If Gmail was launched today would you bother?
| hightrix wrote:
| Absolutely not. It used to be a great email service that
| didn't let any spam hit my inbox. Now, it's basically only
| spam.
| queuebert wrote:
| In its current form, it would look pretty pathetic compared
| to other offerings. But that's because they haven't had to
| innovate due to their virtual monopoly status. If they
| launched a new Gmail with modern tech and design, however, it
| could be pretty attractive.
| politelemon wrote:
| I think its reputation of killing products would still have
| been a factor in avoiding using it. Maybe not a factor for
| everyone but at least in some... uh, circles.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Anecdotal data of 1 but I still post to FB and Twitter (uh, X)
| fairly often. I never got into IG (too superficial, and I
| actually prefer discussion). Tried Threads for a couple days and
| it never latched. Reddit (arguably accidentally) permabanned me
| across all my accounts after I accidentally used a different
| login to post to a sub I had been (debatably, mods can be jerks)
| banned on 1 of my accounts in a long while back (this literally
| flags all of your accounts, which they determine via ML
| fingerprinting, as "ban evasion accounts" which leads to a
| permaban across ALL of them... I wish I was joking), so mostly
| out of pure disgust I haven't been back even to view the read-
| only bits on a multireddit, and there's no one I can contact
| there who will respond fairly, so f**** Reddit (which is saying a
| lot, especially since I've had an account there since it was
| brand new!)
|
| I've started checking out https://lobste.rs/ since I finally got
| an account there, but they literally make you wait 90 days before
| you can invite anyone else (I guess this is "anti-hockey-stick"
| development?)
| MockObject wrote:
| Reddit completely deleted all your accounts for this accident?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It's extremely difficult to get reddit banned, let alone this
| - OP is telling on themselves
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