[HN Gopher] Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now domin...
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Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social
media feeds
Author : 1vuio0pswjnm7
Score : 565 points
Date : 2026-06-08 11:58 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| Insanity wrote:
| Social media was never really "social" in my opinion. Reading
| updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions
| with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I'm not sure
| if this change to "fads" makes it meaningfully less social than
| it already was.
| blitzar wrote:
| I 'member when facebook was campus only. For about 5 minutes my
| friends were friends.
|
| 10 minutes later it was just a frenzy of (trying to) poke
| people that I thought I might have seen at some point that
| year, and conversations about how many "friends" people had.
| LtWorf wrote:
| It was quite social if you only added your actual friends
| instead of everyone.
|
| Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see
| someone I know.
| skydhash wrote:
| As someone that was raised in a small town, the feed was very
| shallow compared to my actual interactions with friends. It
| was great for status updates (especially for friends in
| foreign countries), but messenger was way more popular than
| the feed.
| bluGill wrote:
| Close friends are better. However I want to know how my now
| very distant old friends (ie from high school) and
| relatives are doing. I want to know when they have babies,
| see a couple pictures of their kids dance reticle - it
| gives me something to talk about when our next reunion
| comes around.
|
| My life is worse because instead of see the above I see
| only fads. Now that I only check my feed once a month I see
| less fads are more real life - but I also have reason to
| believe there is more going on from those distant friends
| that facebook chooses to hide from me because I don't
| interact with them enough.
| skydhash wrote:
| > I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie
| from high school) and relatives are doing
|
| YMMV, but I got all of these through words of mouth (and
| WhatsApp status updates). I think it's ok to be estranged
| from a friend or a relative. The next time, we meet, I
| can ask them how everything is going and what has
| happened. And if they want they can show me pictures
| then.
| emodendroket wrote:
| All right, but "I personally don't care for that" wasn't
| actually the proposition anyone was arguing with.
| dbspin wrote:
| For some context, messenger (originally FB chat) didn't
| launch until 2008. A year later in 2009 FB started sorting
| posts by popularity, by 2011 they'd switched the newsfeed
| to a blogspam / advertising feed, burying your friends
| posts. Depending on your age, you may never have used
| 'golden age' Facebook. As someone who was in college 2003 -
| 2008, there was a period in which Facebook was an insanely
| useful tool for organising your social life. You could
| literally make a facebook post about an event or even
| stating where you were on a given night, and know that
| people were likely to see it.
|
| Facebooks business model after around 2011 explicitly
| became disconnecting people. This isn't stated loudly
| enough or often enough, but algorithmic feeds and mixing
| 'news' 'entertainment' with real status updates meant that
| social networks in general became forces for disconnection
| and polarisation around this time.
|
| Early FB and Twitter were useful and operated in precisely
| the opposite way - because they didn't use any algorithmic
| filtering whatsoever.
| piva00 wrote:
| For a brief period it was social. Even if you had hundreds of
| people you had barely interacted with there were still people
| you continued to interact in real life from that lot.
|
| Getting updates helped me even to form friendships long after
| the first interaction where we had added each other, I'd see
| someone I had connected with visiting a place nearby, and could
| go grab a beer with them while they are around. Or the other
| way around, I'd be visiting their city and would try to catch
| up, more often than not it helped to keep in touch, develop a
| deeper friendship, etc.
|
| That is absolutely dead nowadays, it's drowned in noise on any
| "social" feature (feeds, Instagram stories [and similar
| features in other "social" apps], etc.), just a barrage of ads,
| influencer bullshit, and the odd friend update that isn't just
| a meme...
|
| The worst part for me is that it was a deliberate choice from
| these companies to disappear with most social aspects of these
| apps in favour of the money printing scheme that created the
| whole influencer culture.
|
| I still have hopes for the rebound, when people get extremely
| fed up with how these apps work, and something different
| appears to retake what "social" means, not this doublespeak-
| esque meaning it came to be.
| pryelluw wrote:
| I wrote a humor post about it
| https://open.substack.com/pub/yelluwcomedy/p/old-school?r=7c...
| estearum wrote:
| Curious how old you are?
|
| There was definitely a sweet spot if you were in highschool or
| college in like 2004 - 2010 (so born something like 1986 -
| 1994?) where online social media was almost painstakingly
| manicured to mirror real-life social dynamics.
|
| Many people remember the drama of deciding who your "top
| friends" were on MySpace.
| Insanity wrote:
| I was in high school when Facebook took off in my country
| (2008). And fair enough, first few years were maybe more
| "social-ish". I left the platform by 2012 though.
|
| Might also say more about me and my social behaviour than the
| social media platforms themselves, I never cared about it too
| much.
| hinata08 wrote:
| personal blogs, tumblr, forums, BBS, some kind of irc and
| platforms like Discords remained active throughout the
| 2010s to actually be social
|
| a bunch of ppl turned to Facebook as it was just what the
| mob did, but it still required to be active in groups
| indeed
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I was in college at that time and I did not get this feeling
| in any possible way.
|
| Instead I can remember online topic focused forum boards, of
| which some I had numerous daily interactions with the same
| people over years. These online forums made no pretense about
| replacing real life social dynamics and yet they were still
| so much better for real social experiences than the social
| media that replaced them at that time.
|
| To me social media has always felt artificial for people who
| shout into a vortex hoping for attention.
| cjrp wrote:
| It's been downhill since FB removed pokes.
| jezzamon wrote:
| I think they're still there, but deeply hidden in their
| menus
| trollbridge wrote:
| Yeah - MySpace accurately mirrored high school circa 2004,
| and Facebook accurately mirrored college circa 2007 (complete
| with it being elitist where it was hard to get into when it
| first launched, just like real colleges).
|
| But that was 20 years ago.
| al_borland wrote:
| I worked at the IT help desk at my college when Facebook
| was first rolling out. We'd constantly get high school
| seniors calling up to try and get their college email
| address early, just so they could register with Facebook.
|
| None of my friends at the time used it (or even MySpace)
| and I didn't even have an account, so I found this very
| odd. The first time I realized it may have actually been
| popular was when a couple sorority girls came in and wanted
| me to make an account to friend me... not to actually be my
| friend, but because they had a contest on who could get the
| most friends. I did not make an account that day, and it
| told me everything I needed to know about how shallow the
| connections were. Those were in the glory days, 2004-2005,
| and it was already pretty shallow in certain circles. It
| only went downhill from there.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| For me it was when Facebook sent the C&D order about the
| Whopper Sacrifice.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whopper_Sacrifice
| semitones wrote:
| This was my experience - when I was in high school was right
| around the time that Facebook started to replace Myspace. Who
| you were friends with online and who/how many people liked
| your photos was a big deal, and it very much mirrored the
| actual IRL dynamics/relationships we had in school - what
| happened online was directly related to what happened in real
| life. Around 2013 it felt like that started to change as the
| social media sites shifted more towards algorithmically
| recommended content, like joke sites and videos, with some
| ads. At that time it was still fun to watch it and share it
| with friends, because it was so new.
| wraptile wrote:
| I regret not taking advantage of this sweet spot. In that
| time I took a strong stance against Facebook etc. due to
| privacy violation and consolidation of the web - who knew
| that it would get a million times worse and my boycott meant
| absolutely nothing.
|
| At least I got to experience irc, forum boards and other
| early group chat apps - that was some of the best internet
| experience. Early Reddit was incredible as well.
|
| It's sad that today's youth will likely never get anything
| remotely similar to this.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I think early instagram was like this for about 12 months.
| tantalor wrote:
| You're confusing social networks and social media.
|
| Social media was never meant to be a virtual extension of
| social life. It's what it says on the tin: media created by
| users, and shared from user to user. Old-school BBS were social
| media.
|
| Of course you can have _actual_ social experiences, make
| friends, etc. on social media. But that almost never happens.
|
| Online social networks on the other hand basically do not exist
| any more.
| mbesto wrote:
| I am very critical of social media but this is far too of a
| myopic take. There is a ton of real life social benefit to
| these platforms.
|
| Simplest example - someone posts a picture/video of them in a
| city that I also am in and now I know they live there /
| traveling there and I can meet up with them.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I fell out of touch with my relatives in New England and got
| back in touch because I got back on Facebook so something
| social does come out of it once in a while.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Yes the social aspect does definitely still exist, it's
| just half buried by all the other nonsense.
| switchbak wrote:
| What annoys me is this is how a lot of people expect social
| interactions to happen - so if you want to stay off the
| corporate platforms to maintain your attention/mental
| health, etc - you get treated like you're snubbing them.
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| Sounds like adict talk to me ;) Seriously though, the legit
| claims of benefits are from people who need outreach and
| don't want to pay for advertising. But your favorite taco
| truck gets attention while you get to slip into depressive
| oblivion.
| mbesto wrote:
| There are legitimate benefits. I just think its very easy
| to argue (which I agree) that the benefits don't
| necessarily outweigh the harm for most people.
| everforward wrote:
| This is bizarre to me, because anyone I know well enough to
| link up with on a trip also knows where I live and vice
| versa.
|
| That's just a really odd relationship to me. Maybe it's a
| social media thing.
|
| FWIW, I hear things like this but have never heard of any of
| my friends that use social media actually doing it. In the
| same way that you could use an Emmy as hammer, but nobody
| does.
| Insanity wrote:
| Yeah this is my feeling as well. I have a handful of
| friends in different countries, when we are near each other
| we just send a quick text.
|
| I don't need Facebook to tell me someone I vaguely remember
| from high school is in my area to then meet up with them.
| If I vaguely remember with them I hardly care.
|
| And if I am actually close with someone, I don't need
| Facebook either as we'd be in contact over text or discord.
|
| That said, social behaviours do differ so YMMV. For me
| personally, I'm glad I'm not on social media as it seems
| like a huge waste of time with more downsides than upsides.
| mbesto wrote:
| > trip also knows where I live and vice versa.
|
| Do those people also have access to your travel schedule?
| Mine don't.
|
| Maybe you're just not as globally social as me? I've lived
| in 5 different countries and have friends all over the
| world and in probably 20 different US states that I can
| name off the top of my head.
|
| Do I have close friends that I regularly contact? Do I send
| them a message when I'm in town to see if they are there?
| Absolutely. But it's not mutually exclusive with a cohort
| of people I will link up with when I'm traveling.
|
| > well enough to link up
|
| It seems bizarre to me that you only limit yourself to
| these people. I regularly try to meet up with people I
| don't know super well but want to get them or their city
| better. Social media has absolutely helped facilitate this.
| everforward wrote:
| > It seems bizarre to me that you only limit yourself to
| these people. I regularly try to meet up with people I
| don't know super well but want to get them or their city
| better. Social media has absolutely helped facilitate
| this.
|
| It's bizarre to me that you can't find enough people
| locally to be inundated in events (unless you live
| somewhere remote, which is an aspect of social media I
| hadn't considered).
|
| I don't even consider myself particularly social and I'm
| inundated with events and people I need to text because
| it's been a while. I had to cut back because it was too
| much. Magic on 3 separate work nights with different
| groups, an event every Sunday with the locals from the
| bar, a family event most Saturday's and friends if not.
|
| And then trying to weave in the new acquaintances into
| existing stuff, because I'm a lush and 3 beers in I'm
| everybody's friend and am setting up a grill out with a
| stranger to see if his jackfruit tacos actually taste
| like chicken so I can tell if he's just a vegetarian or a
| vegetarian _and_ a liar!
|
| There are something like a couple million people within a
| half hour drive of me, I really don't have to use
| Instagram to find someone doing cool stuff around me.
| shimman wrote:
| Yeah I agree with this. It's great being social in your
| community because those are the people you routinely run
| into periodically. It makes relationships easier to
| maintain too, especially when you're just a walk away
| from people. The cost to maintain these things (time +
| energy) are extremely low when everything is local.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Facebook definitely was social before about 2010. Especially if
| you were at uni in the golden era before they left everyone in.
|
| You pretty much only had people you actually knew as friends.
| People posted photos and messages about real life. No sharing
| of posts, memes, few stupid people. It was great.
|
| We'll probably never get that back.
| microtonal wrote:
| For a window, it was really social, early to late 2000s (anyone
| in NL remember Hyves?). It was a great way for keeping up with
| friends as you went to different schools, when they were
| traveling, etc.
|
| There were a bunch of things that destroyed it: Ajax [1], async
| tech made it possible to continuously push new dopamine shots
| when viewing a page; the rise of smartphones, since before
| smartphones you could only check social media when you were
| behind a computer, which was not true for most people most of
| the day; and the realization that dopamine shots + ads can
| bring in a lot of money.
|
| Even though we had cell phones in the early 2000s, in most
| countries it was just for calling and some SMS (which was
| expensive outside the US). You would only go to Hyves, Myspace,
| or whatever when you had some time in the evening. I am sure
| some people got addicted, but it was much harder than having a
| device that tries to entice you all day to look.
|
| That said, I still find social networks like Mastodon very
| useful. Not so much as a replacement for keeping up with
| friends/family, but it makes it very easy to discover what
| people who are in niches I'm interested in are up to. And since
| it does not have an algorithmic feed or ads, the addiction
| factor is much lower.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
| nehal3m wrote:
| I'd krabbel your HN profile if it let me. Respect!
| emodendroket wrote:
| When I was in college it served as a useful directory of
| everyone I met (like, "oh, who was that guy again?" type of
| questions) and also essentially every offline event was
| organized through Facebook. It served a clear social function
| that posting in meme groups does not.
| overgard wrote:
| Facebook, when it was only-for-college-students was a much
| nicer/more social experience. Once it became a general social
| network it really fell off the cliff in quality, in my opinion.
| Like, when I had 30 friends and I actually knew them and cared
| it was a lot different than having like 1000 friends and
| regularly being like "who is this person?"
| everdrive wrote:
| Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but
| worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel
| insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.
|
| Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more
| effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is
| the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by
| also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation.
| It's long past time to leave it permanently.
|
| And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
| The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the
| word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely
| tiresome.
|
| I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing
| that.
| yifanl wrote:
| We keep saying it, because it's what it is. There's some
| black box (that can _sometimes_ be reached via dang) that
| determines what you see on HN's front page, and this place is
| just as susceptible to trends and rabbit holes as any short
| form video app, it just doesn't have the funny sound effects.
| appplication wrote:
| > just as susceptible
|
| It's really not though. There is no personalized algorithm,
| which is 98% of the issue with social media. It may seem
| pedantic, but it's like saying a horse and a car are
| essentially the same thing, the car just has an engine.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| The personalized algorithm is not the root issue though.
| The root issue is that social media sites live by
| increasing engagement of its viewers. Because of this,
| they all get away from the original stated purpose of
| bringing people together, and go all in on maximizing
| engagement by increasingly shady ways. Of course, the
| personalized algorithm is a huge one, but there are also
| things like "Show HN" controlling what is on the front
| page, selectively taking down flagged material. Remember,
| HN has advertisements as well, and will regularly post
| job ads for positions in startups. They know that
| outright going in the direction of 'personalized
| algorithm' would alienate their viewerbase, so they avoid
| it, but still do all of the other practices that social
| media sites do.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Yes, just because it is uncomfortable for them to realize,
| doesn't make it not true. Words have meanings.
| malfist wrote:
| Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never
| really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents
| now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news
| going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you
| should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole
| time.
|
| Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016
| and reddit in 2023 over similar fears. Back then I said
| facebook was bad for my mental health, and I quit reddit when
| they made it harder for me to prevent what I called amygdala-
| bait. But it's totally the same thing.
|
| These days I love to watch nuanced explanations on youtube of
| complex issues, but youtube's algorithm desperately wants to
| feed me stuff like How Money Works and other channels where
| it's dressed up as nuanced explanations of the world, but every
| single episode is how X is screwing you over or how the Y is
| going to blow up the economy any second now.
| UltraSane wrote:
| "one of them always has a 24 hour news going "
|
| Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.
| walthamstow wrote:
| It doesn't matter which one. My mother mainlines BBC News
| which is state-owned, establishment-centrist, has no
| adverts or profits, but has the same effect of dialing up
| the viewer's fear of the outside world.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| sadly forces in the BBC also value "engagement". Idk how
| we got here, it never used to be like this.
|
| This is why cultural stories now are higher than before
| on the main site. It used to be the case that news was
| _just_ news. Politics, crime, economics, health,
| environment, etc. Now culture stories, like puff pieces
| about the royals or entertainment end up on the front
| page.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Because the BBC now has to justify its licence fee to the
| government, so they need engagement metrics and all the
| rest like what proportion of X demographic they're
| reaching.
|
| Back in the day, both the BBC and universities were
| funded by the government without the stereotype of a
| fresh MBA graduate in charge. Back in the day before
| MOOCs, the BBC produced programmes for the Open
| University because that was the way to get video content
| out to the nation.
|
| > puff pieces about the royals
|
| have been on the front page of the tabloids since way
| before the internet.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > have been on the front page of the tabloids since way
| before the internet.
|
| Yeah but not the BBC. There used to a be a line. :(
| ffsm8 wrote:
| While I'm not American, calling bbc centrist in 2026 is
| just objectively false. It was centrist in 2000s, but it
| hasn't been in at least a decade.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Whose interests does it serve now? That is the main thing
| to understand of you are to get anything out of news.
| gambiting wrote:
| Everyone can agree BBC has an agenda. But it usually
| looks like no one can agree what that agenda actually is.
| NopIdoN wrote:
| FWIW there's a new Director-general: Matt Brittin, whose
| CV includes Cambridge rowing team, MBA from LBS,
| McKinsey, Trinity Mirror (owner of _The Daily Mirror_ )
| and 18 years at Google.
|
| He was the Google boss who said in 2016 that he doesn't
| know his own salary.
|
| Presumably he wants what's best for all of us.
| UltraSane wrote:
| It matters very very much. Fox News is much much worse
| than most news channels. It was created specifically as
| GOP propaganda.
| intended wrote:
| Unfortunately, pointing this out is not fun. In general,
| everyone assumes that there is little actual difference
| between CNN and any Murdoch enterprise. The difficulty in
| disabusing this position in a few short sentences, is one
| of the reasons there is such a chasm in American
| politics.
| UltraSane wrote:
| People don't want to hear that fox news was created
| specifically to lie.
| duderific wrote:
| Remember when Fox was sued by the voting machine company
| for libel (or slander, can't remember which), after Fox
| supported and broadcast claims that the machines were
| rigged against Trump in 2020, and Fox argued that nobody
| should take what they say seriously, because they're
| merely entertainment.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I had a relative for which it was CNN. We even share the
| same political views, but watching that stuff or having it
| on in the background literally from 8 am until midnight is
| tiring.
| croisillon wrote:
| when in a hotel on vacations we sometimes have a
| television and hence bbc or cnn... i used to nickname cnn
| "the fire squad": whatever the topic they're just
| shouting and hyperventilating... it is tiring indeed
| malfist wrote:
| It's actually CNN, but they flip to local news often too to
| hear about all the car wrecks and local murders and
| robberies and other things to make them afraid.
|
| Fox and CNN are both bad, but different flavors of bad.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Fox is bad in a way far more fundamental than CNN. It was
| created specifically to lie to people.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I do find it amusing how on the internet the X and Y can be
| governments or corporations, or the hosted platform itself.
| Seems like something a competent "we control everything"
| organization should be able to prevent. But as long as you do
| nothing but come back for another helping of rage, I guess
| they're fine with it.
| harrall wrote:
| Cuz the actual nuanced reality is that it's structural.
| (Most) corporations don't want to control the world but
| they do have their own self-interests, but because there
| are so many corporations there's always some corporation
| controlling some facet.
|
| For another example of a structural problem, California has
| been trying to add housing for the past few years but it
| has been one piecemeal solution after another. People who
| own homes don't want their lives to change, cities like how
| they are laid out already, parking requirements exist to
| prevent developers from skimping at the time, environmental
| reviews are meant to protect the environment... at no point
| was anyone thinking "I want a housing problem that leads to
| job flight and homelessness" -- everyone is just solving
| their own problem at the time but together it creates a
| major structural obstacle.
|
| The people at YouTube don't actually care about controlling
| the narrative. They just want to make money while removing
| problematic content, but they're not exactly sure what
| problematic content is and Google tends to invest in
| algorithms more than support, but the end result is
| channels get randomly removed sometimes.
|
| The world's problems are hard because not because people
| are generally malicious, but because everyone is just doing
| their own thing. That's why the only fixes are structural,
| but structural solutions are really hard.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| News are for news worthy things - which are things that
| deviate from everyday life. Wars, disasters, crime, in short
| things of concern. As well as political struggles, economic
| struggles, and any kind of conflict.
|
| So all is well in that aspect. That's how news have always
| been, since the first pyres were constructed to light fires
| to alert neighbouring communities of enemies arriving.
|
| But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the
| presenters talk. The voice they use to speak to the watcher
| is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending
| voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the
| broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very
| important" things they are talking about. Weak minds are
| conditioned to feel respect and reverence to those who treat
| them with despise, and unfortunately also to feel the
| opposite to people who they believe themselves superior to.
|
| It's completely deliberate, to make people addicted to it.
|
| Consider if a well dressed person came to your house and
| started talking in the same voice as the TV anchors do. You
| would instantly think it was a dangerous psychopath on the
| loose, and try to find a weapon swiftly to ward them off. If
| somebody at a barbecue started talking like the TV anchors,
| you'd think they were on drugs and tell them to leave. People
| would call the police.
|
| The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being
| with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You
| will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and
| spiritually unwell to talk and act like that. You can
| practically smell the reptilian from them. Do the same thing
| with politicians and other leaders too. Many of them say
| things that on paper seem nice, but with a demeanour that you
| wonder when they're going to break out into "Who is the boss
| of you!? I am the boss of you!?"[1]
|
| And I don't think they can see it in themselves or smell it
| on themselves, like everybody else with a mind can.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QM_AcLBSQM
| afavour wrote:
| > The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them
| being with you in your living room instead of in the TV
| studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is
| mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that.
|
| They're two different scenarios so it's not exactly a
| surprise they sound different. Same goes for anyone giving
| a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre
| if they were just say in a room with you.
|
| > The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom.
| It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV
| watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and
| therefore give attention to the "very important" things
| they are talking about.
|
| I can't say I identify with that at all. I do not hear
| "pure venom" when I listen to a newscaster. They're usually
| either trying too hard to be serious or trying too hard to
| be lighthearted and chummy. But neither is venomous.
|
| IMO the biggest problem with cable news is that it runs
| constantly. News doesn't. So they have to fill endless dead
| time with hyperbole. One newscast in the evening ought to
| be enough for anyone, really.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The basic problem of CNN is that a person who tunes in at
| 5:30 pm has to get basically the same story as someone
| who tunes in at 7:30 pm so they have to repeat the same
| "news" over and over again. You could have a magazine
| format with lots of little documentaries about little
| different things that happen all over the world and you
| would be better "informed" in the sense of learning
| something but you wouldn't have as much shared experience
| with other viewers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian
|
| is most famous for his book _The Media Monopoly_ but his
| obscure 1971 book _The Information Machines: Their Impact
| on Men and the Media_ was highly predictive of what news
| on the web was going to look like because he had worked
| for the RAND corporation and tried to sell a very
| unprogressive (in terms of business) media interest on
| the idea of online personalized news and they didn 't
| want to make the investment.
|
| That book has some of the most damning indictments of the
| concept of "news" from a McLuhanite perspective that ever
| been put to writing, most of all a description of how the
| editor of a small-town newspaper has about 6 seconds to
| look at a newswire story and decide if he wants to run
| it. It's a fundamental act of violence against the
| framework of reality to throw out 99.999% of it and the
| kind of "bias" that people get stuck on where people
| think we need an equal balance of stories that infuriate
| right-wingers and infuriate left-wingers.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Some are absolutely better than others when it comes to
| this. But I was shocked and instantly repulsed when
| hearing and seeing CNN at an airport after having been
| away from televisions for a few months.
|
| > Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their
| cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just
| say in a room with you.
|
| Then imagine these newscasters giving a public speech in
| that same way. You'd think you had stepped into the
| quarterly meeting of psychotics planning a spree.
|
| EDIT:
|
| And most importantly in my living room example: That's
| where the TV is. If you wouldn't invite a person in the
| flesh and blood to your living room to behave like this,
| why would you invite them through your TV?
|
| What about true crime and murder series on Netflix? Who
| would want to spend their evenings with a flesh and blood
| person in their bedroom who would go on into gory details
| for hours about murders and abductions? But still people
| invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.
| matwood wrote:
| I used to fall asleep to Forensic Files every night.
| Something about the host's voice on low volume puts me
| right to sleep.
| afavour wrote:
| > But still people invite these reptilians to their
| bedrooms through the TV.
|
| You recognize that you're the outlier here... has it
| occurred to you that maybe your reaction is the unusual
| one, not everyone else's? There's literally a podcast
| called My Favorite Murder that has millions of
| subscribers. A lot of people go to live shows for it.
| They literally do invite people in flesh and blood to sit
| in front of them and talk about murders. It's not
| necessarily my kind of thing either but there's no doubt
| it's popular.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > has it occurred to you that maybe your reaction is the
| unusual one
|
| I am very well aware of that, what would make you think
| otherwise?
|
| > There's literally a podcast called My Favorite Murder
| that has millions of subscribers.
|
| Millions of people are subscribed to meth or fentanyl as
| well, and a lot of other things.
|
| I have no doubt that murder podcasts are popular, and
| that there are people who are so far gone that they would
| go to a live show. Something being popular doesn't mean
| that it is good for you.
|
| If a person close to you had been the victim of a brutal
| murder, how would you feel that people took great
| pleasure in that kind of thing, calling it "their
| favorite murder"? It's dehumanizing.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgJgTL5JmE
|
| I can say circa 1990 people in my pod noticed this
| phenomenon that "ruling class" people who get interviewed
| on TV as well as many TV performers (new anchors!) seem to
| show a kind of asymmetry of facial expression that you
| don't see so much in ordinary people.
|
| Today we might blame the botox but it's widely thought that
| this is a sign of emotional suppression
|
| https://www.jnforensics.com/post/chirality-a-look-at-
| emotion...
|
| Though as much as we wish we could be observant and
| understand people like Cal Lightman in _Lie to Me_ signs of
| deception are never completely reliable.
| andrepd wrote:
| > But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the
| presenters talk.
|
| "So para as pessoas perceberem la em casa" is the standard
| phrase TV pundits use back in $home_country. Translates to
| something like "just so that you there sitting at home can
| understand". It's _incredibly_ condescending, truly the
| gall of these mfs with zero credentials and maximal
| confidence, speaking assertively about every single topic
| always with the tone that implies everybody else is a
| moron.
|
| I haven't watched actual TV for many years so this passes
| me by except on occasion, but when I see that there are
| people that watch _hours_ of this garbage every day, part
| in the TV and part regurgitated on social media... By god
| it explains many things rotten with the world.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| In defense of 'How money works' I don't think there's much in
| the way of positive anything to cover for his format/field,
| not for current times in particular
|
| His most famous videos are on the topic of bullshit jobs, the
| movie Wolf of wallstreet, various X is collapsing and a Money
| Laundering Explanations
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| There's lots of positive things to cover. He made a video 2
| weeks ago about tourism, his first ever as far as I can
| tell, and there's plenty of interesting things a general
| Youtube audience could learn about how money flows around
| in the context of tourism. But he chose to instead talk
| about "The End Of Budget Tourism", believing (perhaps
| accurately!) that a negative framing would help get people
| to click on his video.
| jandrese wrote:
| YouTube is ruthless in promoting clickbait headlines and
| thumbnails where it's someone's face with a shocked
| expression and an attention grabbing byline. You don't
| play by their rules the algorithm will bury you.
|
| Content creators are a slave to the algorithm. It's so
| easy for Google to just not show put your video on the
| feed, even your subscribers. That's why every video looks
| the same now, if you refuse to play you don't get views.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family
| has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on
| and a few TVs and it drives me nuts when he watches Fox News
| and they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration"
| which is exactly what his family did to great success.
|
| YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff
| but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men
| suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost
| their way", "it all sucks", ...
| malfist wrote:
| Absolutely. It's a very thin line to go from "just pointing
| out a problem" to "everything is a problem" to "everything
| is broken" to "nothing I can do will change anything" and
| then people disengage in the process and politics and
| everything else becomes the domain of whoever can shout the
| loudest with volume, rhetoric, or money.
|
| To quote Mon Mothma in Andor:
|
| I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we
| are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what
| is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things
| at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the
| most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory
| of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away,
| when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to
| the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This
| Chamber's hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman
| Plaza. What took place yesterday... what happened yesterday
| on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that
| truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster
| screaming the loudest? The monster we've helped create? The
| monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor
| Palpatine!
| dottjt wrote:
| I think the "nothing I can do will change anything" is
| actually a predominant theme that's emerged over the past
| decade. I don't know if you've watched any of Adam
| Curtis' documentaries, but his documentary
| HyperNormalisation explores this in great detail (most of
| this documentaries have a similar theme I've found).
|
| Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't
| Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all
| revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to
| overthrow simply become the new guard.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| Adam Curtis docs are wonderful. I've grown so accustomed
| to when people suggest a doc, its some youtuber that
| posts a doc once a week and utilizes the youtube
| documentary style to disguise how poorly executed it is.
| Adam Curtis is certainly not that, for anyone considering
| this suggestion.
| Terr_ wrote:
| _Night Watch_ (2002), by Terry Pratchett.
|
| > People on the side of The People always ended up
| disappointed, in any case. They found that The People
| tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-
| thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-
| minded and conservative and not very clever and were even
| distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the
| revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't
| that you had the wrong kind of government, which was
| obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
|
| Additional context: The city is being (mis-)ruled by a
| paranoid dictator, whose brutal secret police don't care
| too much about if you're innocent. The cynical
| protagonist is frustrated that some of the resistance is
| also extremist or at least overly-optimistic about what's
| going to happen next.
| Loughla wrote:
| My favorite quote from any novel comes from that book as
| well;
|
| "Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come
| around again. That's why they're called revolutions.
| People die, and nothing changes."
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "Meet the new boss..."
| PaulHoule wrote:
| God that guy pushes conspiracy theories I haven't heard
| anywhere else!
| toast0 wrote:
| 25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No
| command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably
| stoked by the news. She immigrated as a child, technically
| naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers
| naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and
| renaturalized through his naturalization... because the
| citizenship of a married woman was determined by her
| husband's citizenship back then), but definitely in favor
| of pulling the ladder up.
|
| "They should follow the rules, like I did"
|
| Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow
| back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you
| were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to
| show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you
| can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the
| wrong country though.
|
| Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot
| longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa
| priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted
| country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't
| have qualified family, and you don't have qualified
| employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky
| people.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes
| is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of
| the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the
| 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant
| pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against
| immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started
| to form.
|
| Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a
| valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising
| again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a
| significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan.
| In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight,
| and history is, as always, not just repeating, but
| practically plagiarizing itself.
|
| [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
| saghm wrote:
| > history is, as always, not just repeating, but
| practically plagiarizing itself
|
| Every time in US history that there's been an influx of
| immigrants, there were people spouting essentially
| identical arguments to the ones they're spouting now
| (stealing jobs, lack of assimilation, etc.), and every
| time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the
| long run. I've long had the opinion that most of the
| people vehemently "against illegal immigration" would
| probably have basically the same opinion if the numbers
| were identical but everyone followed the processes they
| claimed to support, and seeing how the current
| administration is trying to deport refugees of color
| while expanding the programs for only white South
| Africans feels like a pretty transparent confirmation of
| that.
| peyton wrote:
| What would you say to somebody who simply feels their
| quality of life has been lowered (vs. somebody "spouting
| essentially identical arguments")?
| saghm wrote:
| I would need more details to understand what they mean by
| that
| suburban_strike wrote:
| > and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-
| issue in the long run
|
| Except for countries like Yugoslavia collapsing
| altogether. Eventually these subgroups' differences
| become irreconcilable. "No issues here" if cultural
| erasure and ethnic conflict are the desired outcomes.
|
| The Talmud documents that Sancheriv's conquest in 722 BCE
| destroyed the distinct ethnic identities of various
| nations, including Amalek and the Kutim (Samaritans),
| through mass deportation and intermixing. If Jewish lore
| is to be believed, even the Egyptians aren't indigenous
| as a result of this shuffling of demographics. This
| mixing is cited as the reason why specific tribal or
| national origins can no longer be definitively identified
| in the Jewish people today-- the diaspora diluted them
| out of existence. Your argument suggests Jewish erasure
| was a "non-issue in the long run."
|
| Mass migration drives Balkanization and directly
| destroyed the Jewish identity itself once before. Here
| you are celebrating similar sociopolitical warfare
| tactics effected upon us all while trying to convince us
| it's a humanitarian imperative. It just doesn't sound
| like a good idea, but what do I know. Berakhot 28a
| directly implicates open-borders policy, replacement
| migration, and a financial motive for chaos migration:
|
| > Sennacherib already came and, through his policy of
| population transfer, scrambled all the nations and
| settled other nations in place of Ammon. Consequently,
| the current residents of Ammon and Moab are not ethnic
| Ammonites and Moabites, as it is stated in reference to
| Sennacherib: "I have removed the bounds of the peoples,
| and have robbed their treasures, and have brought down as
| one mighty the inhabitants" (Isaiah 10:13).
|
| The Great Replacement isn't conspiracy theory; it's
| Jewish history.
|
| Ironically, Sancheriv fed your same rhetoric to the Jews
| so that they would self-exile willingly ("You're being
| pogrommed and exiled to Africa, but here's why that's a
| good thing"):
|
| > Rabbi Yohanan says: For what reason was that wicked
| person privileged to be named "the great and noble
| Asenappar"? It was due to the fact that he did not speak
| [sipper] in disparagement of Eretz Yisrael, as it is
| stated: "Until I come and take you to a land like your
| own" (II Kings 18:32), and he did not say that he was
| taking them to a superior land.
|
| > Rav and Shmuel disagreed with regard to that statement
| of Sennacherib: One says he was a clever king and one
| says he was a foolish king. According to the one who says
| he was a clever king, he said that he is taking them to a
| land like their own, as he thought: If I say to them: I
| am taking you to a land that is superior to your land,
| they will say: You are lying. And as for the one who says
| he was a foolish king, he explains: If so, if he said
| that he is not taking them to a superior land, what is
| his greatness and how would they be convinced to go into
| exile?
|
| History does indeed plagiarize itself, and is full of
| liars willing to murder with deception to repeat its
| outcomes.
|
| > trying to deport refugees of color while expanding the
| programs for only white South Africans
|
| Removing the whites from Africa returns the continent to
| its ancestral stakeholders. They do not belong there.
| Colonization was a mistake. So we are sending everybody
| home.
|
| Israel has been deporting its African "refugees" since
| 2021; you're insisting we need more of them. Jews have
| unique experience of being on the receiving end of
| weaponized migration. What do they know that you're not
| telling us?
| saghm wrote:
| > Israel has been deporting its African "refugees" since
| 2021; you're insisting we need more of them. Jews have
| unique experience of being on the receiving end of
| weaponized migration. What do they know that you're not
| telling us?
|
| It's not even clear you've read what I _did_ say, because
| literally the first few words of my comment were "Every
| time in US history". If you're somehow trying to infer my
| view of Israeli foreign policy based on that, it doesn't
| sound like I have any ability to influence what you
| decide you think I'm telling you.
| adjejmxbdjdn wrote:
| People aren't, and will not, have as many kids going
| forward. We are seeing this in rich countries and poor
| countries.
|
| Right before the baby boomers are fully retired is a
| heckuva time America decided it wants to contract its
| population by prioritizing keeping the working adult out.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The Boomers are retired except for a few who don't know
| what else to do so they keep working. I'm GenX and
| looking at retirement in a couple of years.
| thatmf wrote:
| Many 1st gen immigrants have the pull-the-ladder-up-
| behind-you attitude. My grandparents (also Italian)
| certainly did. Everyone wants to imagine they did it the
| "right way" and that their struggle is the most unique
| and deserving one.
|
| Which made it even funnier when I discovered that they
| never actually legally naturalized.
|
| Many such cases.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think people are pretty ignorant of what the rules are
| and what the situation on the ground is (just try
| shipping homeless people from LA to pick fruit on farms
| in the central valley and see what happens)
|
| On the other hand the "follow the rules" thing is pretty
| strong and you cannot fight it and win.
|
| I got pretty mad riding the subway in NYC paying the toll
| and seeing turnstile jumpers hold the emergency door open
| to let people in.
|
| There are all these rules you have to follow big and
| small that you don't agree with that you either follow
| resentfully or you disobey while taking some real or
| imagined risk.
|
| To take one stupid example I've been through multiple
| toilets in one bathroom and haven't found one that
| flushes reliably. It's easy to blame the regulation in
| New York State that a toilet has a maximum flush volume
| and you'd better believe I am thinking about going down
| to PA to get a toilet and see if I have better luck. We
| all have these things that we could be resentful about
| and one thing that keeps it in check is knowing that
| other people are subject to this too: when we see people
| who seem to be "cutting the line" it makes our blood
| boil.
|
| Now you can say it is not what people think, like really
| the chicken houses that hire 600 illegal immigrants
| wouldn't want to hire legal workers because then they'd
| have some protections, and that's all true. But the iron
| law of political psychology applies and if you want to
| change attitudes it would be a big help to move immigrant
| workers out of the shadows or to cut back on rules that
| make people resentful with little benefit.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Shit, the jokes about "monitoring the situation" are
| actually true.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration"
| which is exactly what his family did to great success
|
| Where is the contradiction here?
| jacobolus wrote:
| One is people's lived experience: "Hard-working families
| immigrate to a land of better opportunity and build a
| life for themselves, integrating as upstanding members of
| the community."
|
| The other is nativist propaganda: "Hordes of scary
| 'aliens' are coming to take your jobs and destroy your
| way of life, bringing their drugs and crime and turning
| your neighborhood into a trash heap. They might even eat
| your pets!"
|
| People have difficulty noticing that the second story is
| supposed to be a description of what they or their
| ancestors personally lived as the first story; people
| compartmentalize and sometimes believe the propaganda
| version even though it directly contradicts their lived
| experience.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Well they did it and got prosperous by successfully
| contributing to the economy and improving it for all of
| us.
|
| In Binghamton there are Turkish immigrants who run Middle
| Eastern restaurants which our extended family love to go
| which are so much like the Italian restaurants that
| Italians still run and I'll see a teenager hanging out
| there who seems so much like an Italian teenager.
|
| A person seeing that similarity could (and should) have a
| sense of "these people are going to come here and
| contribute and pay taxes and grow the economy to help
| support me" which is what the outcome is most of the
| time.
| frantathefranta wrote:
| I'm probably a heavier user of reddit than most but I
| recently deleted the reddit app on my phone because it's just
| too much. I still use the site though, but now I use an iPad
| with old.reddit to make using it as difficult as possible.
| justonceokay wrote:
| Reddit is fun for a while but there is a strong "lowest
| common denominator" problem that plagues almost every
| subreddit.
| malfist wrote:
| There's a very strong hive mind there. It takes very
| little to grassroots a subreddit. Just like at the biking
| subreddits and tire recommendations. It's almost always
| the GP 5000 that is recommended. Which, don't get me
| wrong, it's a great tire. But it isn't always the best,
| and there are tires out there that beat it. The community
| has just latched on to the one true tire and that's all
| you'll ever see recommended.
|
| Most subreddits that do any sort of product
| recommendation have the same problem. For a while, the
| pilot metro was the fountain pen de jure, or Stronglifts
| the default recommendation for weightlifting (and now
| it's never recommended).
|
| If they hive mind rallies around products like this, it
| also rallys around other ideas, policies and whatnot.
| Just look at the politics subreddit and see nonstop
| "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control
| the funding of the democrats" everywhere. Even where it
| doesn't make sense. You can have one of those muckraking
| websites that run an article like "Schumer didn't vote
| against [insert house bill]" and it gets to the top and
| the narrative is relentless against schumer, even though
| he literally can't vote against a house measure since
| he's in the senate. Is he feckless? Absolutely. Does that
| mean everything he does or doesn't do is a sign of his
| fecklessness? Absolutely not.
|
| In the hivemind, there's no room for nuance, it's all
| "look at that bitch eating crackers"
| ryandrake wrote:
| Reddit is a pretty extreme example, though, where mods
| are basically subreddit dictators. For whatever reason,
| Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and
| conversation-shaping power to mods, to the point where a
| handful of like-minded mods can enforce in great detail
| what is allowed to be discussed and what isn't.
|
| Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the
| reason for the "circling around a particular brand
| recommendation" observation would become clear.
| suburban_strike wrote:
| > For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of
| censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods
|
| It's been "bad" since the 2010s, but censorship went into
| overdrive once OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit a few
| years ago (2021?). The mods do the dirty work of
| aggressively sanitizing all future training data for
| "safety" so the entire site is curated to align with
| ChatGPT now.
| ars wrote:
| What you are describing is not hivemind, but rather paid
| participants. Companies pay for these "grassroots"
| recommendations, and Iran pays for those Jews posts.
|
| It used to be more subtle with real people paid to post,
| but AI has made the quantity of it skyrocket, to the
| point where you can start to notice it, if you pay
| attention.
|
| For example you'll see some comment about Jews, and very
| rapidly a bunch of upvotes. And you'll see a very similar
| comment elsewhere, with the same upvote pattern.
|
| I've cut back quite a bit my participation in these types
| of sites once I realized just how many of the "people"
| I'm talking to are actually bots.
|
| This talks about a company doing it:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/bots-targeting-the-
| r-ga...
|
| This talks about Iran doing it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz8whKktkQg
| malfist wrote:
| I don't know. I don't think it takes too many paid
| participants to sway a large group of non-paid
| participants who perpetuate the paid position.
|
| Especially for product reviews, at the end of the day,
| the best product is the one you bought since most of them
| work well enough. I buy a new tire for my bike and buy
| the one reddit recommended and the next ride, buoyed by
| excitement for the new tire, go out and ride 1-2 mph
| faster than before, now all of a sudden I'm a convert.
| It's the best tire ever and I recommend it to all my
| friends.
|
| Nevermind I don't have anything to compare it too.
|
| This is super common in astrophotography community. You
| ask people what's the best camera or best mount and
| because they're so expensive most people only have had
| one, or maybe two and so everyone comes along to
| recommend their particular item because clearly it's
| better than the rest, when in fact, it's all about equal
| but nobody has compared. Part of that makes sense too,
| right? I buy a mount for my telescope from Software
| Bisque that's $14k and I decide to add another pier to my
| backyard observatory, $14k is a lot to gamble on and I
| know I'm happy with the mount I currently have, I'm just
| going to buy it again. I never tried iOptron's $7k
| alternative because if I hated it, I've wasted $7k
| romanows wrote:
| I'm actually pretty thankful that the GP 5000 is a solid
| consensus recommendation for general road racing. I see
| some others being mentioned though, I think Pirelli
| Zeros?
|
| Contrast that with gravel tires, where there is zero
| consensus. The conditions vary and the sport is evolving
| quite a bit over time as well, so it's understandable.
| But it's a huge time suck to try and puzzle out a near-
| optimal decision. I _wish_ there was a "good-enough"
| consensus.
| pydry wrote:
| >see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or
| "jews control
|
| 9 times out of 10 somebody who perceives a huge amount of
| anti Semitism online wrapped up in criticism of israel
| will absolutely categorically refuse to condemn the
| genocide.
|
| When they refuse, this is how you can tell that it is
| simply projection and disguised islamophobia.
|
| Israel is also pretty open about funding bots to spread
| that kind of message both offline and online.
| everdrive wrote:
| Exactly right. It's a good place to gather information,
| but it's not a good place for discussion or for
| community. It's very useful; but it's not a place to
| spend time.
| haunter wrote:
| I follow dozens of subs through RSS and that's pretty good.
| You just need a reader which has features to filter out
| certain users and words (like Newsblur what I use)
| downsplat wrote:
| Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of
| curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right
| answer. Substack has been a pretty good addition to the
| landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without
| calling it that). But for the skimming/reading interface,
| RSS beats the app.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I've noticed that I watch much less funny shit and much more
| "you should be afraid" but I really don't know how to change
| this.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Is it not also possible that you _should_ be, at least
| figuratively speaking? I think it 's fairly obvious that
| not only are we at an inflection point in society, but
| we're at numerous inflection points happening all
| simultaneously - geopolitics, economics, tech/social
| media/"AI", fertility/sustainability, and much more. We're
| even at presumably happy inflection points like with
| progress into space.
|
| But the point of this is that in a relatively short period
| of time, the world is going to look far different than the
| overwhelming majority might ever expect. This is because
| most expect the status quo, in some form, to indefinitely
| persist, yet of course it never does. And it seems we're on
| the cusp of major shifts across many different domains, all
| at once.
| bijowo1676 wrote:
| anxiety is what creates uninformed consumerism, which
| drives the capitalism
| chasd00 wrote:
| > but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired,
| one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non
| stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to
| you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.
|
| Don Henley wrote a song about that kind of news:
|
| "We got the bubble headed bleached blonde
|
| Comes on at five
|
| She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her
| eye
|
| It's interesting when people die
|
| Give us dirty laundry"
|
| https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/donhenley/dirtylaundry.html
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Great song.
|
| And long before that, Yellow Journalism:
|
| _Journalism historian Frank Luther Mott used five
| characteristics to identify yellow journalism:_
|
| _1. scare headlines in huge print, often sensationalizing
| minor news_
|
| _2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings_
|
| _3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines,
| pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-
| called experts_
|
| _4. emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually
| with superficial articles and comics_
|
| _5. dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the
| system._
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism>.
|
| The same or highly similar tactics apply equally in the
| 2020s as they did in the 1880s (and before).
|
| What many people don't realise: the "prestigious"
| journalistic prize, the Pulizter, is named for one of the
| most infamous low-quality yellow journalism publishers,
| Joseph Pulitzer. This is an early example of successful
| greenwashing of a reputation.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Upvoted your comment but my inner pedant can't help but
| point out that's more an example of whitewashing rather
| than greenwashing (which itself is a derivative of
| whitewashing).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Fair point ;-)
| nunez wrote:
| I know this works on YouTube Premium, but I have my watch
| history turned off and use the desktop app with UnTrap for
| YouTube so that it turns off all of the distracting nonsense
| I don't use (Shorts and recommendations)
| everdrive wrote:
| A bit of a tangent, but Google is doing everything they can
| to stash more "recommendations" everywhere. Even now, you
| need a browser filter to keep them out of the subscriptions
| view.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| I used to only rarely look at Youtube (repairs, cooking, the
| odd live concert) but since I started looking at it more
| often (for guitar and piano tutorials), I've found its UI to
| be too distracting. I added the following custom uBlock
| filters to make it less annoying: ! Remove
| the "Up next" sidebar (the #secondary container) so that the
| main content area (#primary) takes up the full width.
| youtube.com##ytd-watch-flexy #secondary:remove()
| ! Ensure the video takes up the full width when playing full
| screen. youtube.com###panels-full-bleed-
| container:remove()
| titzer wrote:
| Ads became the default business model of the web. When people
| started to get sick of blaring in-your-face blinking banners,
| it mutated into search ads and placement. The same thing
| happened to mobile apps and games, YouTube, Facebook,
| instagram, even Tik Tok. When it becomes too blatant then it
| embeds itself one level deeper as placements and endorsements.
|
| It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing
| holding up the edifice anymore. It's crazy to me because
| ultimately what holds up the economy is money changing hands
| for services, and ads aren't that. So ads are fundamentally
| driving people to spend money elsewhere. I just don't
| understand how the system holds up a multi-hundred billion
| dollar advertising parasite...everything would be cheaper if
| there were no ads.
| close04 wrote:
| > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the
| word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely
| tiresome.
|
| For an arbitrary definition of "normal"? The last remark is
| unwarranted and can only have a chilling effect on the
| conversation. Or outrage bait, a typical sign on social media.
|
| Why is it not social media? It exhibits the same signs as seen
| on any social media platform. Can you define social media so we
| can all follow the same play sheet?
|
| I see the same opinions here as I see on Reddit, Facebook,
| LinkedIn, or X even from the same people here as there. The
| topics that reach the front page are the most popular, or
| divisive, or "addictive". A lot of people post for the karma,
| there's a lot of pandering to popular opinion. There's an
| opaque algorithm that decides which topic stays on the front
| page and for how long, which comment stays on top and for how
| long, when a post or comment gets flagged or reappears, etc.
| that dictates how the conversation can be carried and on which
| topics. There are a lot of political topics where some voices
| or opinions are buried while others are pinned to the top. Some
| people spend hours and days posting here. There's a lot of
| astroturfing. The parallels can go on. The main difference is
| scale and at this small scale it can maintain a higher level of
| quality... most times. But quality isn't what defines social
| media, is it?
|
| Many on HN see themselves as better than the "simpletons" who
| fall for "normal" social media, and any view that challenges
| that is tiresome. But your dismissal of whether HN is social
| media holds water like a sieve.
| chownie wrote:
| Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how
| lacking the term "social media" even is? We have people here
| arguing that BBSs were social media, it will not be long
| until email is considered social media.
|
| At this point it's a vague term meaning "a place where you
| talk to another person online" and nothing more than that.
|
| I'm solidly of the opinion especially after seeing so many
| arguments of this form on HN that the whole world has
| accidentally forgotten the term "social network" at some
| point, because "social media" means _nothing_.
| close04 wrote:
| > Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how
| lacking the term "social media" even is?
|
| It's very clear. Empirically a common sign across all
| social media is basing very strong opinions on very vague
| personal interpretation of something that that will forever
| stay unwritten so it can't be challenged. Anyone can just
| cement their claim to eternal correctness by ending a
| personal opinion with some outrage bait like "anyone who
| doesn't agree with me is tiresome".
| armchairhacker wrote:
| "Social network" is a better term. I think "parasocial
| network" is better; the former implies small group chats
| while the latter doesn't.
|
| Except "mainstream social media", because everyone knows
| what you're talking about, including some who'd be confused
| by "mainstream parasocial network" because they don't know
| what parasocial means.
| anonymars wrote:
| I think it can become diluted to a meaningless term, or co-
| opted to mean different things to different audiences (not to
| sidetrack from the point but the first two examples I can
| think of what I mean are "fake news" or "woke")
|
| So you're not wrong at all, but I think there's also a
| significant difference when the personalized algorithms come
| into play, which can segregate people into their own
| epistemological echo chambers
|
| I suppose I'd summarize as
|
| 1. I don't think we have a precise term for the actual thing,
| and "social media" is one loose term people use for it
|
| 2. There's a spectrum for this, maybe multidimensional:
|
| * Does it display the same reality for everyone? For example
| obviously true social media will be different depending on
| your friends, but chronological vs engagement are different.
| Even new reddit and old reddit I think differ here too
|
| * Infinite scrolling? Or specific page advancement?
|
| * Text? Pictures? Video? (Video duration?) Each one is
| different
|
| So in that respect, sure, they're all social media, but
| they're very different, and I think there's probably
| combinations of those features that result in very different
| effects/harms
| jquery wrote:
| Well said. But I think when people say "HN isn't social
| media" what they're really saying is "HN is nutritious social
| media, not junk food social media". Not sure I agree with
| that, but there's some arguments to be made at least. HN
| generally doesn't let itself get too political. Anyone who
| posts too much political or polemic stuff will get put on a
| "cooldown list" that rate limits their posting (ask me how I
| know).
|
| HN is also highly resistant to jokes and memes dominating the
| conversation. On other social media sites, the top comments
| are generally jokes or jabs.
|
| HN also lacks pictures or video or ads or infinite scrolling,
| and makes self-promotion quite difficult.
|
| Is HN social media? Yes. So were BBS's back in the day. But
| is it the omnipresent toxic social media that's currently
| rotting society's collective brain on a generational level?
| At the very least, it's not that.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I really forgot how stupid cable tv was 20 years ago. In my
| area, that old stuff is now getting broadcast over the air,
| which is the only kind of tv I get. It's not the history
| channel's Ancient Aliens exactly, but it is all the 2nd tier
| offshoot stuff that didn't air on the big cable channels. About
| half of them are "about" Hitler, and the topics are treated so
| unseriously you get things like "Dude, look! This door has an H
| on it! This must have been where he went!"
|
| It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be
| dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.
| jmye wrote:
| > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the
| word.
|
| That it's less destructive than Meta doesn't make it less
| "social media" - and I'd argue that it's style (links fall off
| the page quickly and discussion becomes impossible after a
| relatively short period of time, solely to foster a sense of
| "missing out") is part of what defines current "social media".
|
| It's a noisy attention sink, whatever high-mindedness people
| want to pretend it has.
| reactordev wrote:
| I love me some knowledge forums and sites like HN that allow
| for general discourse. I'm afraid an entire generation doesn't
| know what that is like.
| shimman wrote:
| I always delineated the two as one being corporate social
| media, I do wonder if there is a better word/phrase for it but
| IME if you use the phrase two describe it as such to those that
| were online pre-2008 they immediately grasp the difference; but
| these people are likely a minority.
| amelius wrote:
| > It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also
| packaging something enticing along with that manipulation.
|
| What baffles me is that they call this manipulation
| "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.
| djeastm wrote:
| Similar is when people refer to themselves or others as
| "content creators"
|
| Not filmmakers or artists or writers... "content creators".
|
| Like they exist just to produce a continual stream of this
| amorphous "content" for consumption.
|
| Now, perhaps that's all that art/writing, etc ever was. But
| to just abandon even the pretense is another in a long line
| of surrenders we've made to commoditization.
| reg_dunlop wrote:
| Was there ever a time when any of the classical/fine arts
| were used as propaganda or promotional material, prior to
| the medium elevating to loftier aims?
|
| Is this history repeating itself?
|
| The idea that content creators could be considered artists
| is one I may have considered before, but only tangentially.
|
| What I'm also curious about...is how this commoditization
| and consumption via "influencers" has altered any
| individuals attitudes towards blatant manipulation. Free
| will seemed to be a much more guarded value. Now, the
| willing surrender of our free will seems to be the norm...
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I must be using social media wrong because all I see on my
| timeline are funny pics and niche porn.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Are you on the correct site/app?? :-P
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Rule 34, bro.
| geophph wrote:
| (Pedantry erupts below)
| grvdrm wrote:
| HN has plenty of social media components.
|
| Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled
| social media website. That specific version makes most sense to
| me.
| tekla wrote:
| HN is literally an ad.
| grvdrm wrote:
| I don't think of Show HN as quite the same. Nor Ask HN. I
| know that otherwise there is plenty of "advertising" within
| posts/comments/etc.
|
| Where I think the argument that it's not social falls down
| is aligned with some of your comments. The feeds, upvotes,
| downvotes, etc. Let's not forget the spam.
|
| Those mechanisms are pervasive across many social
| platforms, so why are they so different here? Don't think
| they are.
| Kiro wrote:
| It's not tiresome. It's spot on. Nothing is as addictive as HN.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Wikipedia is.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| - And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the
| word. -
|
| Thats right in that sense - but in a sense of doom scrolling,
| it is for me: Very often Im clicking through dozends auf pages,
| fortunately I have to activly do a click to get to the next
| site, so this dampens a little bit :-D
| everforward wrote:
| There's also an end to the feed. I forget the limit, but at
| one point I think I hit the maximum number of pages at like
| 50 (quality drops pretty dramatically, by like page 10 there
| was almost nothing interesting or notable).
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| Social media was first (that I know of) weaponized in 2016 by
| Cambridge Analytica to manipulate Facebook users to vote for
| Brexit & Trump. I'm surprised that the article left those
| totally out.
|
| 0 -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
| hedora wrote:
| That incident was definitely ahead of its time, but before
| that, targeted ads for scams were propping the industry up.
| For instance, Experian used to spend $$$ to funnel people
| into credit card scams -- one year, they stole our CC#, and I
| called our top 5 US bank to dispute the charges. The bank
| fraud department rep said Experian drove most of their case
| load, to the point where they had a special flow to block
| just Experian affiliates because physically reissuing stolen
| cards was too expensive. You can back estimate how many
| predatory ad dollars that involved. Of course, there was also
| a long tail of smaller companies that wanted to sell
| supplements, useless other useless services, etc.
|
| Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major
| search engines except early Google, which basically just
| broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way
| they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail,
| but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target
| things only mentioned in private correspondence).
|
| LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for
| access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini,
| alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent
| now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the
| open weight models will be the last ones to fall.
| intended wrote:
| Social media was weaponized from the days of PHP forums. I
| remember Palantir shilling sock puppet management technology
| at a time where most people didn't even know what a moderator
| was.
|
| AFAIK, Russia's Internet Research Agency was the first
| organization to weaponize social media and the internet.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.
|
| The article's main claim is that traditional social media is
| not social media any more. That Facebook et al are now junk
| entertainment. So IMO HN hews much closer to the traditional
| role of social media than Facebook et al do.
| eszed wrote:
| That's what I took away from it, too. Facebook circa 2008 was
| _great_ : your friends talked what were up to; everyone
| posted their pictures from that party last night; you didn't
| see anything from anyone who wasn't at most a second-degree
| connection. There were problems - people were jerks, and
| worse, and some people got pulled into chasing clout, and
| promoted bullshit - but they were _human-scale_ problems, and
| you could largely scrub your feed from things / people like
| that. Unfortunately for _the entire world_ , that sort of use
| wasn't profitable enough.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The problem for Facebook is there is a limit to how much
| your friends would post. You could check Facebook for 15
| minutes and then you had seen everything your friends had
| posted and had to come back tomorrow for more. New
| Facebook/instagram can trap users in hours of scrolling
| video in a zombie like state.
| Gigachad wrote:
| HN is more like a forum where strangers discuss ideas. Old
| school social media was a place you posted life updates to
| your friends and family. New social media is content creator
| short form video while the majority of users are entirely
| passive consumers.
| willXare wrote:
| HN is not social media. It's social media with type safety.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book
| Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of
| the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the
| 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch.
| Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained
| how much new generations would benefit from what he called
| interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn
| anything of interest instead of being forced to consume
| whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say
| there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure
| some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary
| social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from
| channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch
| and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game
| with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a
| moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to
| be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars
| at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into
| anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of
| interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted
| that fictional plot as believable?
|
| https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/
| lfuller wrote:
| > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the
| word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely
| tiresome.
|
| This is claimed by users of Reddit regularly as well and I
| think most people here would consider Reddit to be a typical
| example of social media.
| Gigachad wrote:
| You could argue back in the day reddit was a forum rather
| than a social media. But after the new UI and several years
| of changes, particularly when they started to ignore your
| subscribed subreddits and just showing whatever in the home
| feed, it's now fully social media.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the
| word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely
| tiresome.
|
| The amount of times I've read a very thoughtful article only
| for the comments to be political drivel (the worst was peak-
| COVID SF discourse) weakens your argument quite a bit.
|
| It's even more foolish to think outside forces aren't using
| bots/tech to sway the discourse.
|
| Just because it's not engineered for the mainstream's dopamine
| addiction doesn't mean it doesn't do the same thing.
| alphazard wrote:
| > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the
| word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely
| tiresome.
|
| Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend.
| It's rare to see the authors of small, but
| interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments,
| surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be
| common, even the default, if you look far enough back.
|
| Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I
| don't think I've seen a single software project here in the
| last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being
| pushed by a company with a marketing budget.
|
| In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making
| cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to
| find it.
| grey-area wrote:
| > In theory AI should have helped.
|
| Why would generative AI help stop enshittification? If
| anything AI has made low-effort slop _far_ more common on the
| front page and sometimes it gets voted up because of a snappy
| headline and few people attempting to read it, particularly
| if long-form and initially convincing.
| alphazard wrote:
| I agree with everything you said. Most open source projects
| are limited by contributor labor. Generative AI does help
| with that problem, but it introduces a sea of vibe coded
| slop as a side effect. Truly a Genie/Jinn.
| intended wrote:
| This was always going to be the case, no genie situation
| at all.
|
| Information sharing networks with humans in it can only
| track so many things, or spend limited time on
| consumption. The more stuff on the network, the harder it
| is for things to be seen. The stuff that gets seen is
| content that is evolved to gain attention, or is
| resourced to gain attention.
|
| This is as inevitable as sunrise.
| Gud wrote:
| HN is not and never has been "social media". It's a threaded
| discussion forum.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the
| word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely
| tiresome.
|
| I came here after reading the comment section for the "Dopamine
| Fracking" story right below this one. In that comment section
| there are arguments that Hacker News isn't social media because
| it doesn't have social features like friending people you know.
| The argument is that it's a place to discover cool content and
| comment on it.
|
| Which is precisely the argument being made in this BBC article:
| That traditional social media is becoming less about
| communicating with friends and more about discovering content
| and commenting on it. Which is the exact purpose of sites like
| Hacker News and Reddit.
|
| > "I spend a lot of time scrolling through videos made by
| content-creators," says Lucie, also 16. "They're more
| interesting than the posts of people I know."
|
| > "What we're seeing is social media splitting in two," says
| social media consultant Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout
| Newsletter. "Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are
| becoming more about entertainment and discovery. WhatsApp is
| becoming the place people go to actually be social.
|
| EDIT: I had to use Wayback Machine to find this:
|
| > 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
|
| > Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive.
| So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you
| limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your
| profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your
| profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off
| by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll
| only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a
| time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are
| 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at
| a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can
| override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock
| starts over at zero.
|
| That's from
| https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...
|
| That has been erased from the internet, but it was widely
| understood that sites like Reddit and HN could were social and
| had addictive properties for people without strong self
| control.
| post-it wrote:
| The content here is very different. I can kill maybe an hour
| a day reading HN, which is a lot, but the feed does end. Most
| days, I don't want to spend an hour here, because the feed is
| designed to push popular content to the top, and a lot of it
| is content I don't care about. Other sites have infinite
| feeds designed to keep me personally hooked as long as
| possible.
| whateveracct wrote:
| HN is a secret third thing: A forum
| haunter wrote:
| > HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word
|
| Hard disagree. The upvote/downvote system and the algorithmic
| front page makes it a social media to me.
| jandrese wrote:
| IMHO both of these problems stem from the same source:
| Engagement.
|
| Anything that attempts to maximize engagement will inevitably
| optimize for outrage, anger, and disgust. You will end up
| handing the platform over to trolls and propagandists.
| Platforms need to optimize instead of quality and sanity, but
| unfortunately that is expensive will never get as many views
| and advertiser dollars as cheap outrage content. It's a big
| reason why our current media landscape is so hellish, the other
| main reason being the continual takeover of more and more media
| outlets by billionaire aligned interests.
| rockskon wrote:
| HN has its own share of enticement/manipulation - most recently
| with regards to AI.
|
| Plenty of variants of "people who don't use AI will be left
| behind" are sprinkled around various threads about AI. It's an
| attempt to both manipulate via fear as well as sell.
| icepush wrote:
| This is so different from my personal experience that I feel
| like one of those kids being told chickens used to be
| dinosaurs.
|
| I have an account on facebook, on which I am pretty active. If
| I attend some infrequent event (Which I do fairly often) I will
| take a picture of it and post it there, with a description of
| what it's about. That's pretty much the extent of what I put on
| facebook. Sometimes I see similar posts from people in my
| friends list, or videos about whatever facebook thinks I am
| interested in this month (Right now it's showing me lots of
| people taking apart pumps and motors). What sites are you
| using, and what exactly are they showing you ?
| wuliwong wrote:
| So you infrequently post on FB, that is exactly in line with
| the article. You didn't mention whether or not the content
| you see in your feed is from people that you know in real
| life or not, so I can't evaluate if your experience is inline
| with the article. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| icepush wrote:
| I did say my feed is a mixture of content from people I
| know, and people I don't. My comment wasn't that long.
| da_chicken wrote:
| Not just television. Also the supermarket checkout aisle
| magazines. Not just tabloids, although that, too. Also the
| "glossy" magazines. Vogue, People, Us, Cosmopolitan, Vanity
| Fair, McCall's, Seventeen, etc.
|
| The commercialization of the engines of culture continues.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| HN is absolutely social media in all senses of the word and
| meets your definition of cable TV pretty well -- it's a news
| blog run by a startup incubator as a way to increase discussion
| and submarine in their concept and products.
|
| "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is
| just as true here as anywhere.
| zuzululu wrote:
| I agree half way. While recent years HN seems to have
| imported much of Reddit, it still has an anti-establishment
| undertone and decent moderation to keep it from sprawling
| nunez wrote:
| Not in the sense that's disucssed in the article. Social
| media like a forum (which is "old school" social media IMO)
| instead of like Instagram (short video clips, reactions,
| designed for max engagement and dopamine hits).
|
| Yes, HN is a front for YC. However, HN is still very much
| about longform submissions and nuanced discussion. There
| aren't very many places like that anymore, and those that
| still exist are dying, with some exceptions (mostly car
| forums, for some reason).
|
| (Instagram wasn't always this way! It was originally an
| alternative to Flickr, but focusing on sharing images and
| discussion instead of photography. It gradually became the
| psychological gateway drug that it is now, though even that
| was a response to threats like Vine and Quibi that unlocked
| short-form video at scale.)
| cautiouscat wrote:
| I agree but there's definitely room for nuance. I follow a lot
| of artists because I genuinely like seeing their work. I follow
| a lot of miniature painters for their tips and tricks. I follow
| my close friends to see what they're up to.
|
| I think the folks you're talking about are influencers. Which I
| wholeheartedly agree with your take in that case.
| ambicapter wrote:
| That's just advertising. Yes, mom and pop stores can
| advertise "just like" the multinational corporations can.
| Guess who gets the lion's share of airtime and guess who has
| armies of men+machines crafting the most convincing
| messaging.
| cautiouscat wrote:
| How is someone showing a 3D render with no products or
| services to buy from advertising _to me_? In addition, why
| does that matter if I enjoy the content?
|
| It's not "just" advertising. Again this is nuanced.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the
| word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely
| tiresome.
|
| What's probably tiresome is trying to come up with a proof that
| it is not. Your frustration and the insult "pedantry" will not
| suffice.
|
| If you had a real proof, you would simply include it, instead
| of performing emotion about being so lowered to even have to
| discuss HN being social media. The idea that people shouldn't
| argue with you because it might injure or tire you to be argued
| with is so 2022.
|
| If you have something specific to say about the actual actions
| that are taken in what you call social media (but does not
| include HN), there's plenty to discuss - in fact the difference
| which you insult as _pedantic_ is the _most important_ thing to
| talk about. Why is one mediated talking to people good, and the
| other mediated talking to people bad? And if we try to make it
| an argument about something other than vocabulary, or even
| worse the vague-assed "changes in technology," it might
| accomplish something.
|
| It's insane how this is enough to begin a thread on HN. Vague
| negative handwaving and insults (nerd-sniping, I guess?).
| That's not going to hurt whoever you think is doing evil,
| that's going to help them.
|
| "Social Media" isn't a thing. It's a bag of techniques for
| mediating communication between people who are usually not
| asking for a mediator. Talking about those specific techniques
| and their applications is always going to be more useful than
| arguing about the referent of some term that you have no
| obligation to sign onto unless you find it useful.
|
| But god if you're so tired could you just not participate?
| xnx wrote:
| Additionally, "social media" is as inaccurate a name "ride
| sharing". A better name would be "targeted ad scroll media".
| jimbo808 wrote:
| It's worse in many ways but also better in one way, which is
| that buried in all the propaganda and manipulation is usually
| the truth somewhere in there. Before, the truth was simply not
| available.
| bluesounddirect wrote:
| I completely get the cable tv bit. Grew up without cable just
| OTA tv and Radio . I remembered how i would feel left out of
| the cable tv connection / conversations . Then I eventually
| moved on to living in the city and not really watching TV
| except simpons reruns and the news hour on pbs for many years .
| The parallels reveal how we just need to go out to social place
| outside of our homes . The pool, a restaurant, bar , library, a
| club a religious place and be involved. But more importantly we
| all need our own opinions again, and not to be so offended when
| you disagree.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I miss the early days of FB where people just wrote thoughts
| about what they were feeling or doing.
|
| I wish we had something like that where there was no
| reposting/resharing, and links & photos were allowed but
| deemphasized in the UI. Also, no like button, that just
| encourages empty engagement.
| snthd wrote:
| The product is you?
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM
| 45612987 wrote:
| Given that even reaction videos from modern Jerry Springer
| figures with 20 million subscribers can attract 20,000 comments
| that all parrot their guru and demand doxxing of the target or
| worse, it is no longer a mystery how totalitarian states form.
|
| Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both
| sides of a story.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I (mostly) stopped looking at Facebook around 2016. It just
| wasn't fun anymore; and at least for me, my feed was all
| political nonsense trying to manipulate me.
| SirFatty wrote:
| And this is a revelation to the BBC? Who doesn't know this?
| sublinear wrote:
| > What we're seeing is social media splitting in two [...] young
| people publish a lot of content but it's more funny parodies and
| remixes of existing material. The goal is to make people laugh,
| not to tell people about their lives. [...] Whether it's TikTok,
| Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, we are a long way from the
| "digital town square" of personal interaction that social media
| was even just a few years ago.
|
| I don't understand why this article has to play dumb. This is how
| most of the internet always was until commercial interest invaded
| social media. They yelled their billions of dollars worth of
| messaging so loudly for over a decade that it drowned out
| anything authentic.
|
| Now that there's a political break away from all the tone deaf
| pseudoprogressive messaging and the money for it has dried up,
| what did they expect to see there? Most people never posted
| sincere "life updates" unless they had something to sell or were
| a naive part of the bandwagon.
| avaer wrote:
| Imagine if everyone called it "fad media" or something more
| accurate. It would be dead overnight.
|
| The only thing keeping it afloat is the lie that it's social.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| "Fantasy Media" or "Social Fantasy"?
|
| After all, the advertising powering the media is all about
| creating a fantasy around a future you _will_ be living once
| you have bought the product.
| holistio wrote:
| Or just f ad media.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| In other news, water is wet.
|
| This has virtually always been the case and it is only "social
| media" is an Orwellian sense. It is an antisocial consumerist
| machine.
|
| In consumerism, everything is for sale.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Now? It's been like that for a decade.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Friends haven't been a focus of social media feeds for almost 20
| years now.
|
| There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people
| share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations,
| engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but
| there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait
| and division.
|
| Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge
| companies purely by profitability and why you shouldn't ever let
| the CEO also be the primary shareholder and chairman of the board
| that's meant to govern the company's behavior.
| hedora wrote:
| Twitter was similarly bad.
|
| A better heuristic is market share. We should reintroduce media
| ownership rules that cap audience share to something < 10% per
| distribution channel. Meta, Disney, Paramount, etc should not
| exist.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| In a way, I'd argue Twitter was the thing that motivated
| social media to take the path it's currently on.
|
| Facebook was originally about people you were acquainted with
| in real life. You had a pre-existing reason to engage with
| them. That engagement wasn't as lucrative as SV investors
| wanted, but it was there.
|
| Twitter never had that premise, or lost it very early on. You
| screamed into the ether, and people either responded or they
| didn't. One way to increase the chance of receiving a
| response is to say outrageous things. Once people figured
| that out and how to put ads adjacent to the outrageous thing,
| there was at least some pressure on Facebook (later Meta) to
| do the same thing, because we're here to make money, not
| friends.
|
| And really, there are elements of that in old media, too.
| Their business model was to have captivating programming on
| TV and radio that would keep you tuned in to see what was
| happening in the next part of the show after the ad break.
| Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, every 24-hour news channel,
| etc. were all very good at this, coarsening of the discourse
| be damned.
|
| Regardless of who owns it, if you introduce a motive to
| constantly and eternally increase the value of a media
| company, you will see a move towards slop content at some
| point if you have a long enough timeline. It's inevitable.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum.
|
| You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to
| Facebook's reality TV, but even "documentaries" can be dopamine
| sinks that aren't actually informative (or accurate).
|
| (But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here,
| documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so
| I'd hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the
| caveat.)
| titzer wrote:
| You don't see pictures and videos directly on the site. It's
| text links and text comments and discussions. In the minimal
| sense of the word, even printed text is media, so it's
| technically true that HN is social media, but I think it's more
| like a news aggregator and discussion forum.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| How does being text only make it not social media?
|
| Good explanation at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Because the people who think HN is social media and avoid
| social media aren't going to see this and respond. It's a
| selection bias.
| titzer wrote:
| > OP: The pedantry involved in that comparison is
| extremely tiresome.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Maybe take a rest from HN if pedantry is fatiguing?
| dust-jacket wrote:
| see IMO it isn't. HN is an online community. Same as forums,
| and BBSs were. I don't think they were social media really -
| they're online spaces that form around a shared interest, where
| Facebook etc were _originally_ online spaces that augmented a
| real world community.
|
| But we're a long way from that now.
| liotier wrote:
| > HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were.
|
| That is the very definition of social media.
|
| "Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't
| valid categorization.
| dust-jacket wrote:
| if you think social media just means any space online with
| multiple people in it, then I guess we just disagree on
| what social media is.
|
| Is the linux kernel mailing list social media? was usenet?
| close04 wrote:
| > if you think
|
| What do _you_ think social media is? What are the clear
| criteria that make something social media, or make it not
| social media?
|
| If you know HN is not social media that you have a clear
| demarcation of what is.
| dust-jacket wrote:
| I said so above. I think originally they were "online
| spaces that augmented a real world community". Even
| twitter, you mostly started by following people you knew
| or had heard of.
|
| I get that this isn't at all where we are any more. And
| y'know, everyone's gonna use terms to mean whatever they
| want. I'm fine with that. I guess I just think its
| pointless if "social media" means "anything online where
| people can write messages"
| chownie wrote:
| Not that user but I don't think this is as difficult as
| you're making it out to be?
|
| On Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok et al I can create a
| community on that platform. I can get find other people
| into Booktok, I can join the Rowing subreddit, I can get
| into Knittinggram or whatever. Posters expect roughly
| their micro-community to see their posts, users expect to
| see their micro-community's posts.
|
| On hacker news I see the same community everyone else
| does. If HN was a vBulletin forum with threads posted for
| links it would function almost 1:1 the same, I guess all
| you'd need to change is a modification for making threads
| bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.
| close04 wrote:
| TL;DR. If you ask me, the essence of social media today
| is the algorithm and the "social curation". Is what I see
| dictated by some behind the scenes algorithm and by the
| mob (votes, views, engagement, flags, clicks)? It's
| social media.
|
| But fair enough. Don't forums have subforums for
| different interests, topics and specific discussions and
| sub-communities? They have the option to follow other
| members or topics in a customized consumption experience.
| In my personal experience on large and small forums,
| including those I administered or moderated, most users
| lived their entire life in specific subforums. The user
| that only posted in the CPU subforum, or the Nikon
| subforum. The user who created the "photos of flowers" or
| "case modding" topic and only hung around there with
| kindred souls in their micro-community. Forums were
| really reddit at a smaller scale.
|
| > I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for
| making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-
| post.
|
| This is downplaying the weight the hidden algorithm has
| on what you see on HN. Much like every other social media
| site and very much unlike classic forums, submissions and
| comments here live and die at the hand of an algorithm
| that decides whether today you get to read about the
| Israel/Gaza conflict, about Democrats/Republicans. This
| algorithm is driven on one hand by the social aspect
| (people deciding what's media and what isn't, hence the
| "social"), on the other hand by some obscure engagement
| rules that none of us can see or define.
|
| I don't make it "seem" more complicated, it "is" more
| complicated because experts don't fully agree on exactly
| what social media is. Everyone tries to use their
| experience, preference, and common sense and these all
| vary.
|
| P.S. The current top comment isn't there because it's the
| most recent, the only objectively correct one, or a mod
| pinned it. It's there because the algorithm driven by
| social engagement decided it's the media I should see
| first.
| chownie wrote:
| You're equating subreddits to forums but on forums people
| recognised other posters and the average subreddit poster
| will never read the same username twice, if they even
| notice they're there.
|
| I see the argument you're making, but it's not
| convincing. These just aren't similar types of social
| engagement.
|
| > The current top comment isn't there because it's the
| most recent, the only objectively correct one, or a mod
| pinned it. It's there because the algorithm driven by
| social engagement decided it's the media I should see
| first.
|
| When people neglect to vote that they like the comment
| you posted, or they vote that they didn't like the thing
| you posted, this is algorithm driven by social
| engagement.
|
| When the forum software which sorts by newest-posted-
| first bumps your thread off the front page because no one
| cared enough to reply that was also an algorithm driven
| by social engagement.
|
| It seems a lot to me like the "hidden algorithm" part is
| the same? It is still the users indicating more/no more
| in the end.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >What are the clear criteria that make something social
| media
|
| I have no idea why people are making some mysterious deep
| question out of this, wikipedia quite literally offers a
| definition[1]. Web 2.0 based platforms, user generated
| content, social networking including social mechanisms
| such as followers, groups and lists.
|
| This doesn't apply to HN. You could randomly assign
| everyone a new name tomorrow and it wouldn't matter.
| Identity is virtually irrelevant here, there are no
| mechanisms to connect users to each other, there are no
| networks of people, users do not generate their own
| content and there is a criterion that what is discussed
| is of of public, not merely social or personal interest.
|
| If some crash wiped out all HN users tomorrow and we'd
| all start over at zero almost nothing would change. If
| that happend on social media, like Instagram, the site
| would be dead. That's the social part.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media#Definition
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > This doesn't apply to HN. You could randomly assign
| everyone a new name tomorrow and it wouldn't matter.
| Identity is virtually irrelevant here
|
| This is wildly untrue. I follow specific people here and
| I recognize names all the time. It would be super
| confusing if some of the people I'm interested in hearing
| from completely different names. And comments _are_
| content. I read old threads all the time. If that all
| went away, a huge part of how I use this site would be
| gone.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| That is not what they said. Strawman fallacy, and you
| still refuse to define the term.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Well, it's _A_ definition, which is more than the opposing
| side has yet to offer.
|
| I knew someone who described everything he didn't like in
| politics as "socialism". He literally couldn't define
| "socialism" when pressed; it was always a circular
| reference to the current irritant.
| kiicia wrote:
| HN is public forum (one of the last), it's a bit different
| thing
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Reddit is a forum, is it not social media?
| mr_mitm wrote:
| This comes up often, particularly on Reddit, and I don't
| think we're doing us any favors by counting it as social
| media. It has a few substantial differences to Facebook,
| Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, et al:
|
| - The focus isn't on connecting. It has a "friends" feature
| (I believe?), but the social graph is extremely weak.
|
| - You are not expected to use your real name. On the
| contrary, it comes off as weird unless you're a celebrity.
|
| - There is no algorithm maximizing engagement, or at least
| not a hyper personalized algorithm that analyzes your
| scrolling speed and every sensor under the sun feeding into
| a machine learning system designed by professional
| psychologists to keep you hooked.
|
| - Individuality isn't as encouraged. The user name is
| small, and there are no avatars, or at least used to be (I
| don't use the new interface very much). The focus is on the
| content instead.
|
| I suppose you can find a definition of "social media" that
| includes Reddit, and surely the differences are fluid,
| especially since we can recognize some efforts by Reddit to
| become more like the real social media sites, but I vote
| for putting it in a different category for the sake of
| discussion.
| Ldorigo wrote:
| Reddit absolutely has algorithmic feeds since it ipo'ed
| (maybe earlier but I used third party apps so I wasn't
| subjected to them). 90% of my home page is bullshit I
| didn't ask for.
| mcmoor wrote:
| Yeah there is argument that reddit wasn't social media,
| but currently is trying to be
| walthamstow wrote:
| IMO, the old reddit UI wasn't, but the new one is, since
| they started the algo home page and showing stuff outside
| of your subreddits.
| wussboy wrote:
| Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social
| media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever
| a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a forum in the early
| 2000s.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| The fact that they intentionally include a
| rightthing/wrongthink button and keep score is a
| fundamental difference between modern "social media" and
| legacy BBSes and forums where there was no score keeping.
| Perhaps keeping score of rightthink is not enough to make
| HN social media, but it's certainly enough to not put it in
| the same bucket as forums and BBSes
| al_borland wrote:
| Having some sort of recommendation algorithm seems to
| also be a defining feature of modern social media, which
| is something old school forums didn't have.
| zerobees wrote:
| Forums of the early 2000s were almost always sorted by
| recency, not upvote count. They also typically weren't
| dominated by vendor press releases and news stories,
| whereas domains such as anthropic.com, blog.google,
| openai.com, along with outlets such as techcrunch.com and
| arstechnica.com, are probably among the most popular URLs
| of the past year.
|
| But I don't think it's a meaningful distinction to begin
| with. Usenet was an endless time sink to get angry at
| things that didn't matter and argue with strangers who
| might not even be real people. It wasn't monetized, but it
| still made it easy to waste years of your life.
| tekla wrote:
| Hell no, the forums of the 2000s were "topic that had the
| last post gets pushed to the top", and pretty much nothing
| else.
|
| HN has an algorithm that manipulates what you see, and we
| do not know at all how it works.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming
| that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social
| media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is
| text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't
| social media. HN makes it quite difficult (technically
| impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos
| and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than
| "social media".
|
| Many other Internet forums are similar--they might technically
| have the capability, but the prevailing culture might be that
| people rarely do it.
|
| Adding to this is that HN has surprisingly little AI-generated
| content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated
| blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted
| and don't get attention. That makes it fundamentally different
| from other social media platforms today.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| HN has comments which are social media. I don't get why
| people care, because social media isn't intrinsically bad; I
| always say "mainstream social media" or "toxic social media"
| to clarify what I'm referring to.
|
| > HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but
| you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures,
| which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".
|
| What's the difference? Submissions usually include at least
| one picture, sometimes videos or interactive content.
|
| > HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its
| discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts,
| etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't
| get attention.
|
| I'm sorry, but this isn't true. HN has less AI than say
| Reddit, and many users try to combat, but I still frequently
| see top-voted (obvious) AI-generated articles and less
| frequently comments.
|
| When something has lots of em-dashes and other
| https://tropes.fyi, I recommend checking on Pangram.
| vitalyan1234 wrote:
| >HN has comments which are social media. I don't get why
| people care
|
| how can they participate in the daily "social media bad"
| two minute hate sessions demanding regulations and bans if
| they acknowledge that things _they_ like are also "social
| media"?
|
| hence the mental gymnastics.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Comment threads are not "social media", no matter how badly
| anyone wants to redefine that they are. They date back to
| the 1970s on USENET and mailing lists.
| fluffybucktsnek wrote:
| That might imply USENET and mailing lists to be forms or
| primitive forms of social media.
| andoando wrote:
| Why do people argue so hard on semantics? Its social
| media in some ways and its not in others
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't
| remember when HN first appeared?
|
| For anyone that was an adult in the "web 2.0" days it's hard
| _not_ to see HN as "social media". The first wave of social
| media sites where defined by community news aggregators that
| allowed commenting and, most important, _up voting_ of
| comments and submissions. Digg, Reddit, HN, del.icio.us
| (though it lacked formal 'up voting') were all part of this
| first wave of social media.
|
| The absolute key differentiator between HN and an old school
| internet forums, that absolutely makes it "social media", is
| that the community _votes_ on your opinion and users have
| some way to score against each other. This is precisely the
| mechanism that is at the root of all problems in social
| media: you get a measurable reward for your content that
| pressures you towards saying things and sharing content that
| increases that reward.
|
| Perhaps one of the best decisions HN ever made, which fights
| this somewhat, is removing the upvote count from being
| visible to other members of the community (this was not the
| case in the early days of HN). But for anyone that saw the
| rise of "social media" it's hard to imagine HN _not_ fitting
| that description.
| rcoveson wrote:
| I'm very confused by this comment. The era you're talking
| about is also the era that Facebook was released and it
| _didn 't_ have a voting system, not even likes/reactions.
| But that's when the term "social networking" really took
| off, and it definitely referred to Facebook and not Digg or
| Reddit or Slashdot, to name another that has a comment
| voting system.
|
| "Social media" as a term comes even later, to capture
| Twitter and the social features of YouTube and other stuff
| like that. But it's all sites where most users are people
| using real names and real faces, and users generally
| produce content themselves and follow each other's content.
|
| There's clearly a cluster there and HN/Slashdot/Reddit/Digg
| are clearly outside it. An umbrella that covers both HN and
| Facebook is almost meaningless; it's "all websites with
| user-generated OR user-supplemented content."
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| There were many attempts at this time to figure out how
| to scale forums. The bottleneck on forums and chatrooms
| was always human moderation. But a forum could only get
| so many mods and mods eventually burned out because
| moderation just really sucks. Moreover quality between
| forums was quite variable. One forum on Beets might be
| good, but the forums on Fantasy novels was run terribly
| and full of flamewars. Having a large social site of good
| quality would be a lot easier to manage than 30 different
| sites of varying quality.
|
| Gaia Online was famously a large forum with a huge
| moderation staff, and the sheer amount of effort that
| went to running Gaia Online was incredible, and despite
| that it was popularly thought of as being a pretty low
| quality forum.
|
| Reddit tried the upvote and downvote. HN tried upvotes
| only. 4chan tried full anonymity (rather than the
| pseudonymity of forums/usenet.) Facebook tried real
| names. Tumblr had the reblog (which became quote tweets
| when Twitter took the feature and is widely thought of
| now as a fairly controversial feature due to toxicity it
| can produce.) Twitter tried hashtags for discovery. It
| was a period of experimenting with how to build social
| spaces.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't
| remember when HN first appeared?
|
| FWIW this site has an older demographic and I doubt that's
| the reason. More likely most people weren't aware of HN
| until recently. It only started populating in Google search
| results recently. My guess is most people these days
| stumble upon HN by seeing a search result, or a Reddit or
| Twitter comment mentioning HN. A lot of people only got
| exposed through social media with things like Facebook and
| Twitter and never socialized on the internet before that.
|
| Agree with you on everything else. It was obvious at the
| time that HN was part of a wave of social media along with
| Reddit, 4chan, Digg, Kuro5hin, etc. At that time moderation
| was seen as a crucial bottleneck on scaling a social site
| and upvotes were meant to be an innovation that helped
| scale these sites bigger than the forums and Usenet lists
| of yore. Turns out that the true revolution in scale didn't
| come until things like Facebook and Twitter.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > HN is social media
|
| I haven't posted any personal pics, or stories about things
| that I've done in my life or am currently doing, so how can it
| be social in the same way that social media is? To me, there's
| a clear distinction between a news aggregator and discussion
| forum like HN, and a social media site. Sure, I can post
| something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written,
| but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social
| interaction.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Forums came before social media. It's a forum.
| haunter wrote:
| Forums don't have algorithmic front page and upvote/downvote
| system
|
| You can't bump a thread to the top of HN so everyone sees it
| whateveracct wrote:
| I don't think that quite makes it social media though.
| moffkalast wrote:
| No, people just keep reposting the same shit over and over
| instead. But the end effect is very similar, dang even
| links to old posts almost every time.
| fl4regun wrote:
| by this standard, isn't a public bulletin board even included
| in the term "social media"?
| sethammons wrote:
| Social media started in the early 1500s if we squint with
| this logic.
|
| Martin Luther's ninety-five theses were the OG forum post
| that went viral, and required a printing press.
| talon8635 wrote:
| The HN comments section certainly feels increasingly hostile,
| manipulative, manipulated, and jokey. It use to be a reprieve,
| but it's feeling more and more like every other comment section
| online. To me anyways.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| Tell me something that involves other people that isn't a
| social media then.
| andix wrote:
| I used to browse through my instagram feed a few times per month.
| Just to keep updated about those friends who often posted there.
| Now it's mostly crappy shorts and I can't even find the "friend
| feed" anymore. No idea if it's just well hidden or completely
| gone. Now I don't use it anymore at all.
| zbikowski wrote:
| It is so well-hidden, in fact, that there is no visual
| indicator that it exists at all, so you cannot be blamed for
| thinking it is gone. On the homepage (house icon) tap the
| Instagram logo and select "Following." It will present you with
| a chronological feed of posts from only those you follow.
|
| Again, there is NO ARROW or any UI to indicate this is
| possible. You used to be able to set it as the default view,
| but that has been eradicated it seems.
| mattbruv wrote:
| Wow, I've been using instagram for 5 years and I just learned
| that there's a following-only feed. I had always just assumed
| that Instagram was designed in bad faith to always interleave
| posts from people you didn't follow to try to capture your
| attention. It's incredibly annoying that I can't set this as
| my default.
| andix wrote:
| You just discovered OG Instagram. The feed used to be just
| your friend's posts and nothing else. Maybe an occasional
| ad, but the first few years it was mostly ad free if I
| remember correctly.
| andix wrote:
| I've found it. I'm quite sure the drop down wasn't there a
| few months ago.
|
| But the sad reality: nobody is posting anything anymore. I
| follow around 500 real people I know in person, and in the
| last 30 days they published only a few posts. Very short
| feed.
|
| So instagram became something completely different over time,
| and I still opened it occasionally, because I associate it
| with old memories. To feel closer to people I lost touch
| with, or didn't see for a while. But instead I get bombarded
| with BS and ads (and the occasional "real" social media
| post), without me consciously noticing the change for years.
| al_borland wrote:
| This is why I don't understand why my family/friends keep
| wanting me on Facebook or Instagram. It's not about keeping up
| with each other. They just want it to be slightly easier to
| send me memes. But if I wanted to browse memes, I could just go
| do that. I don't need them sending me their feed with a bunch
| of jokes that are funny to them, but not me.
| andix wrote:
| I have a lot of unread messages on those platforms. And I'm
| not going to check if it's just stupid memes, or if some more
| personal messages hide there. Googling my name puts my
| contact details and phone number on the first page. So anyone
| who wants to get in touch should be able to.
| projektfu wrote:
| I was on it for the comic strips, but the rest of it is so
| noxious to me that I don't want to go there just to get a feed
| of comics.
|
| Oh well, there's always GoComics :) It is missing a lot of the
| new ones that are on Instagram, though.
| keybored wrote:
| I deleted my FB when they gave us the Your Data Or Your
| Subscription ultimatum. I don't scroll TikTok, Instagram, or any
| other video "content". I do watch some YouTube shorts but only
| while sitting at a personal computer type laptop or the ones
| which are connected to external monitors.
|
| I read this site. But lately it's been more difficult since the
| AI "content" stresses me out. Maybe social media always did that.
| But it's come to the point where I cannot kid myself. Many times
| it just makes me more wound-up than it winds me down. So then
| what's the point? Then I intentionally search for specific
| topics. When I'm out of those I can stare out the window. Which
| is a nice change.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| I've started visiting quiet rooms[1], just to hear myself think
| again. The world and the internet has become so loud that some
| quietness is refreshing. Luckily for me there are several where
| I live so I've even got a choice.
|
| Strangely these rooms are quite different to being silent at
| home or somewhere else private. For me it seems to be that
| these spaces are public, you are being silent in public spaces
| - a different setting and experience than in places that are
| private. Being silent together can be disconcerting!
|
| It's also different to using noise cancellation or listening to
| music or other forms of "silence", truly unique in many
| aspects.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_room
| PcChip wrote:
| I think I'm on an A/B test on the Facebook app, now whenever I
| open the app it goes straight to reels and starts playing videos
| with sound enabled. I looked through all settings to try to
| disable this but couldn't, so I finally just gave up and
| uninstalled it
|
| I open the app to keep up with what my friends are doing, and
| also check the dating portion of the app for new matches. I
| purposely always avoid reels on any app, because I hate them and
| what they do to people. So when I open the app and it immediately
| starts playing reels with sound on and no way to disable it, it
| feels like a slap in the face
| exabrial wrote:
| A new game: determine when you meet someone if they use tik-tok
| or not without asking them.
|
| People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty
| hilarious how small minded people are.
| hdhdhsjsbdh wrote:
| What are the tells? Since COVID I've noticed that every new
| person I meet seems to harbor at least 1 or 2 oddball opinions.
| Conversation tends to veer into weirder places than it used to,
| creating a surreal sort of feeling of being in the world. I've
| felt that this is just a result of everyone being tuned by
| whatever personalized feed is amplifying or directing their
| base instincts.
| boelboel wrote:
| I think what's more interesting is that the odd opinions
| don't mean anything anymore. Before someone with odd opinions
| tended to be either really crazy or they were intelligent and
| thought a long time about something. Nowadays they seem
| shallow, they saw something on tiktok but don't really know
| what they're talking about, just totally rehashing whatever
| they heard.
|
| It might partially come from the fact that writing essays
| isn't deemed important anymore, when you hear people talk
| about how X or Y is good/bad they can hardly write down why.
| I've seen articles how we're going from a written culture to
| an oral culture and the sort of cranks you get with social
| media certainly fit with the latter.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| The tell is they don't know it.
|
| People who read a lot or get deep into history podcasts and
| have a hot take on the French Revolution know that this is
| some whacky shit and if they bring it up explain it first.
|
| TikTok people say the crazy thing and they're surprised when
| everyone gives them the look. Also the thing they bring up is
| usually provocative, factually ridiculous, and a little
| unhinged.
| AlfredBarnes wrote:
| I could very quickly sus out what was on FOX news last night by
| the conversations my coworkers have.
| baggachipz wrote:
| > sus out
|
| Intentional typo as a good pun?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| "sussed it out" = "worked it out" is a fairly normal slang-
| ish phrase where I'm from (Australia).
| supertroop wrote:
| You're just learning how small minded people are? In the US
| there was an attempted insurrection filmed live. We elected the
| guy who led it who then pardoned 1600 jailed criminals. Now he
| is trying to creat a slush fund to give them millions as
| reparations. 33% of the country is delighted by this. These are
| Plank sized brains.
| hedora wrote:
| billions; 30%. (His approval rating is finally starting to
| drop below the historic floor).
| gavin-1 wrote:
| Where are you seeing 30%?
|
| I feel like I keep seeing this claim, month after month,
| but then I look it up and he's still got around the same
| ~38% approval. I keep getting my hopes up that people are
| finally realizing how awful he is, only to be disappointed
| again. It's depressing.
| alphawhisky wrote:
| They're probably not looking on the first page of Google,
| for a start. We're at the sunset of the Information Age,
| that means that companies have bought all the info and
| are now manipulating it.
| supertroop wrote:
| He's still not at Bush Jr pre 9/11 numbers. That's a ways
| to go.
| saadn92 wrote:
| yep, even people I thought educated voted for this fool.
| seriously, they have college degrees, but apparently get
| their news from random social media accounts
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| College degrees aren't the differentiator they used to be
| (and I'm not sure if they used to be either).
| hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wrote:
| Anti-social take. People are being exploited by some of the
| smartest people in the world who use natural human desires
| against people but somehow they are at fault for being small
| minded?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Nah, this is the same self-congratulatory dismissive mindset
| humans have been having about each other for years. "Wake up,
| sheeple," "NPC," etc.
|
| We're not lacking for opportunities to believe the worst of
| each other. It's not something TikTok invented.
| abhaynayar wrote:
| I've been able to quit short-form content, but does anyone have
| any tips on how to quit long-form content like YouTube or
| Netflix?
| baggachipz wrote:
| Books are a thing.
| hedora wrote:
| Or, buy a bluray player, then find a library.
| captainclam wrote:
| I use the firefox extension "Unhook" to completely hide
| suggested content on Youtube. Really effective, I kindof can't
| believe how much time I spent getting suckered into watching
| video essays that absolutely did not deliver.
| jbd0 wrote:
| Time box it. I play video games for 1 hour on Fridays. More
| than that and it makes me depressed.
| spking wrote:
| If this subject interests you, and you haven't read it yet, I
| highly recommend the book _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ by Neil
| Postman.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
| randusername wrote:
| 40 years old now and as relevant as ever.
|
| IMO even better than Chomsky's Necessary Illusions (1989) or
| Bernay's Propaganda (1928) at giving you that backstage at
| Disney world feeling.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| There is also a book called Infinite Jest that touches on this
| subject
|
| Its a breezy novella you can finish over a lunch break
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I use it to weigh down my transportable home in tornado
| alley. Hasn't failed yet. Density, more-so than size, is
| important in such an application.
| defmetrix wrote:
| The only social media I really use is linkedin and X. I find
| linkedin useful for following companies and colleagues, and im
| pretty picky about who I accept or request as a friend. I also
| find X to be insightful, but I only use it to follow people for
| stock research.
| ThunderBee wrote:
| X is excellent for following niche research interests but
| they've been pushing quite hard to force political
| news/opinions into the feeds which is really annoying.
| baggachipz wrote:
| It's run by a guy who literally did a nazi salute. One of
| their most prolific users is named "catturd". I'm astonished
| that anybody in research or science still remains there.
|
| Edit to add: The owner of the platform contributed millions
| of dollars, endorsements, and manipulation of the platform to
| elect a regime which actively works to dismantle scientific
| and research funding and institutions. By continuing to use
| the platform, these people are contributing to the
| destruction of their work and careers.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I feel like I'm 'old' to say this, but I'm consistently
| surprised (which means it's at least some kind of a
| personal flaw) that companies put press releases out on a
| third party platform. They have their own website, and yet
| they update on other platforms more quickly and more
| frequently than their own. It's unnecessary outsourcing.
|
| Even more-so now that it's impossible to see a feed in
| chronological order without signing up. It's a site that's
| supposedly for keeping up with the state of the world, and
| yet it's got a big wall around it. Talk about mixed
| messages.
| close04 wrote:
| Why is nobody here defining social media, put down the clear
| criteria? "I say this, I am tired of people saying that" isn't
| productive if everyone has their own interpretation of what's
| being discussed.
| everdrive wrote:
| In my case, I don't think most people who claim HN is social
| media are making a serious argument. They are taking two
| different things which have a few points of inter-comparison
| and using that as a basis to claim those two things are
| actually equivalent. This is done as a retort (eg, "you say you
| hate social media, but you're on social media _right now_")
| rather than in service of a larger argument.
| close04 wrote:
| You wrote a paragraph to say you don't "think" the others are
| right. What is the definition that made you think this?
| stickfigure wrote:
| I'm making it as a very serious argument.
|
| HN is social, it has an algorithmic feed, people upvote and
| downvote your content, hell it has a social credit score. The
| idea that HN somehow isn't "social media" is hard to take
| serious. This is Reddit for a niche audience.
|
| The main difference is that HN has a small and relatively
| high quality community, plus the traffic is low enough that
| it gets a fair amount of manual moderation. It's still social
| media and if there were enough people here, we'd eventually
| read stories of kids who offed themselves over downvotes. But
| we're thousands, not billions, so the law of large numbers
| doesn't apply.
|
| If your FB feed or Youtube feed is garbage, spend some time
| curating it. HN is mostly curated for you, which appears to
| be creating unrealistic expectations of the broader world.
| pennomi wrote:
| By strict definition it obviously is social media.
| "Interactive forms of media that allow users to interact
| with and publish to each other, generally by means of the
| Internet."
|
| People don't want to admit it's social media because that
| delegitimizes their argument "all social media bad!" and
| instead of refining their argument they just double down.
| It's a very human behavior.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I agree that HN is "social media", but I'm starting to
| wonder if Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/Reddit/YouTube aren't
| "social media", but instead a new category of media
| tangentially related as OP posted to cable news. Something
| like "attention media" where your attention is the point of
| it.
|
| HN, on the other hand, your attention matters less. They
| aren't paying for this platform using our "attention"
| necessarily. I'm sure it is a way to curate an audience of
| tech-enthusiasts where they can exploit our knowledge and
| push their investments in front of our eyes.
|
| I like HN for that reason, I don't feel like I'm the
| product as much as with other attention-seeking platforms.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I suspect a big part of the reason you feel this way is
| that you don't see advertising on HN. Because HN itself
| _is_ one gigantic advertisement.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| That isn't true, because I don't see ads on YouTube
| either, but I know their algorithms keep leading me to
| staying on it as much as possible.
|
| HN doesn't feel the need to keep my attention 24/7.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Genuine question - how many times a day do you load HN?
| Is it already getting enormous amounts of your attention?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I don't have the data to quantify it, but M-F, 6a-4p,
| maybe once an hour or so just to check the headlines. If
| I have comments, I might check my threads to see if I
| need to respond. On the Weekends, though, I might check
| it in the morning and again before bed just to see if
| anything interesting happened.
|
| But it isn't like YT (which is running in the background
| nearly 24/7) or Reddit, that I habbitually check. Those
| feel way more addictive. Same with Instagram, but I don't
| really care for short form content, so it doesn't capture
| me the same way as news and long form videos.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Well just to offer another data point, I check HN far
| more often than any of the others. Many times a day. I
| consider it far more addictive - there's usually
| something interesting, and scanning is low investment.
| Youtube requires headphones and willingness to block out
| the world for 15+ minutes at a time. Facebook just
| doesn't have much interesting in it anymore since friends
| stopped posting.
|
| I feel like all of this is fine? HN is winning the
| attention game for a niche audience of people vaguely
| like me. TikTok is winning the attention game for other
| kinds of people. I don't understand why we have to
| agonize over this. What would you rather people spend
| their attention on? What would you rather spend your own
| attention on? Why don't you?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I agree that HN is addicting. When I have a blog post
| that I find on the front page, I get drawn in for
| multiple days straight, but I feel like it is a
| better/safer addiction. Like vaping vs cigarettes. Weed
| vs alcohol. Opium vs fentanyl.
|
| TikTok is low-fat, high-sugar ultra processed "diet"
| food. HN is a fatty cut of steak with mushrooms and
| onions. Both are terrible for you everyday, multiple
| times a day, but one of them is arguably worse. But
| either one of them in moderation, is actually good for
| your soul lol.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Sure, but deconstructing the platform to look at the
| engagement points is also useful. Some things that I think
| set HN apart in a good way:
|
| The lack of any kind of personalization whatsoever on
| Hacker News is a huge differentiator. There are no
| notifications, so if you want to find out if somebody
| replied to you, you've got to go check. Everybody's front
| page is exactly the same. There are no direct messages.
| There are no in-line images or videos or even emoji. The
| feed is not endless. There is no targeted advertising.
| There are no reactions to posts other than upvote/downvote.
|
| I guess you can lump HN in with Instagram and TikTok, but
| it just feels like a very different product, in ways that
| are relevant to the analysis of whether its existence is a
| net positive for society.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > if you want to find out if somebody replied to you,
| you've got to go check.
|
| Let me spin this a different way: Because there are no
| notifications, HN users need to frequently come back and
| check. This is "positive random reinforcement" and is one
| of the most powerful mechanisms known for creating and
| maintaining addictive behavior. It's the same principle
| that slot machines and loot boxes use.
|
| > There are no direct messages.
|
| I'm not sure why this is good or bad, but it's not really
| true. Many people (including you and me) put their email
| address in their profile.
|
| > The feed is not endless.
|
| The feed is definitely endless. If you mean specifically
| that it's paginated rather than loads automatically... do
| you really think it matters? Like, you think that HN
| quality would suffer if users didn't have to click the
| "more" button?
|
| I don't think HN quality would suffer, just as I don't
| think FB quality would improve by adding a "more" button.
|
| > There are no reactions to posts other than
| upvote/downvote.
|
| Upvoting, downvoting, and commenting are HUGE social
| functions. Facebook doesn't even have downvotes. You
| could easily spin this as a major social negative for HN.
| You _downvote_ other people!?! Sounds toxic!
|
| The other points (frontpage, images, emoji, advertising)
| are interesting but honestly I'm not seeing how this
| makes HN something fundamentally different. It does
| probably make HN appeal to a different audience. Which is
| the point... but don't confuse "great audience" for
| "better social technology".
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Let me spin this a different way: Because there are no
| notifications, HN users need to frequently come back and
| check. This is "positive random reinforcement" and is one
| of the most powerful mechanisms known for creating and
| maintaining addictive behavior. It's the same principle
| that slot machines and loot boxes use.
|
| I personally fall victim to this. On days I just browse
| the site I only refresh a few times a day or maybe just
| once in the afternoon. If I write a comment I constantly
| refresh and spend way more time reading the site. It's
| one of the most negative patterns for me on here.
|
| > But don't confuse "great audience" for "better social
| technology".
|
| I'd go further and say that this framing itself is a bit
| toxic. Nothing about the interests in this site make the
| audience "great" simply different and more relevant to
| you. There's an underlying "the nerds are better than the
| pleb normies" that suffuses this entire discussion that I
| find hilarious given how low the average comment accuracy
| is here for non tech things.
| gilgad13 wrote:
| The feed is algorithmic, but its not personalized, and the
| algorithm isn't directly optimizing for engagement.
|
| I believe these are the exact technical advancement the
| top-level poster was contrasting with cable networks, so
| the distinction matters here.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I believe these are the exact technical advancement the
| top-level poster was contrasting with cable networks
|
| You would have had to guess, because it went unspecified.
|
| If we're talking about algorithms to surface content, we
| should talk about them; although I'm pretty sure that has
| nothing to do with cable television. Cable television
| advertised in the way we are told than advertising is not
| bad: they created specialized channels, and took
| advertisements on those channels that people who were
| interested in those specialty subjects would also be
| interested in. They didn't track or attempt to manipulate
| individuals.
|
| I don't know what cable television did that was special
| or above and beyond what a magazine or a newspaper
| supplement 100 years ago would have done. The only
| difference between TV and magazines is that you don't
| consume TV, it's simply pointed in your direction - and
| you can't skip around ads. This is notably _not true_
| about modern television, though. If anything, it has
| technically fallen backwards since DVRs (or even
| videotape in general.)
|
| I think a lot of intellectuals were forced to take
| Cambridge Analytics' marketing claims as truth because of
| the political positions they entrenched themselves in
| shortly after that scandal broke.
|
| It's certainly caused a lot of 50s narratives about
| Vietnamese and Chinese communist mind control to come
| back posing as serious science, and a bunch of Key's
| "Subliminal Seduction"'s grotesque sexiness mixed in to
| make it nominally anticorporate. Although, predictably,
| it has generally been expressed politically as giving
| social media more ability _or even responsibility_ to
| suppress the speech of average, un-notable citizens when
| they go against _government narratives_ about
| _controversial subjects._
|
| That is not defeating social media, that is defining and
| institutionalizing social media as a trust and a means of
| government control. There is no reason we couldn't have
| had this same argument about telephones, other than that
| the average US citizen was less disdainful of their own
| civil rights back then - civics was drilled in as a
| religion, and it involved obligations the state had to
| you. Obligations that you are not allowed to give up if
| you want to live in a civilized, democratic country.
|
| This was why we don't have government police whose job is
| to listen to random phone calls and periodically butt in
| to tell the speakers to change the subject, or
| arbitrarily cutting the line, collecting lists of people
| who need more intervention, or banning people from being
| able to use phones because they were seen at a political
| protest. If you ever wonder why the mails are so sacred,
| it's because the mail came about when people were prouder
| and had more shame than we have now.
|
| If you want to regulate algorithms, regulate algorithms.
| Don't regulate "social media." If you have to argue about
| what it is, it is a useless term.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Because the people who say this like HN and dislike Facebook
| and their post-hoc rationalizations are transparent.
| airstrike wrote:
| HN and Facebook are entirely different beasts. I have no idea
| who you are, stickfigure. I can't remember usernames from HN,
| I can't follow people, I can't curate my feed
|
| not every user submitted feed with upvotes is the same
| stickfigure wrote:
| You can always find some slight difference. HN is orange,
| FB is blue!
|
| You absolutely can follow people here. Accounts have
| profiles and you can look at all their comments and
| submissions. If you want to make it convenient, there are
| browser extensions. But I don't see why that matters. You
| stick around here long enough you tend to recognize the
| frequent commenters.
|
| And what do you mean you have no idea who I am? That's a
| choice. Like you, I have plenty of identifying information
| in my profile. People who want anonymity create throwaway
| accounts, just like reddit et al.
| airstrike wrote:
| Yeah, none of that makes the two comparable.
|
| Both a wheelbarrow and a Ferrari have wheels.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Both a wheelbarrow and a Ferrari have wheels.
|
| What is this supposed to mean? They're also two rolling
| carts steered by a human, and I'm going to make similar
| decisions for both when I'm e.g. designing a path that
| they have to move on, or trying to figure out traffic
| patterns around a construction site.
|
| The people who know it when they see it are exactly the
| people I don't want making any important decisions. Just
| be specific and don't use rhetorical appeals to
| ignorance.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| You can literally go to a users profile and bookmark it.
| You are following them.
|
| You cannot curate your feed on Facebook. You used to, sure.
| Now it's just whatever they give you.
| airstrike wrote:
| I am not following them in the social media sense if I
| don't get a feed of their activities. I can also bookmark
| people on X, and yet, there's a different "Follow"
| functionality. They are not the same thing.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| My personal criteria to specifically identify social media
| apart from other online interaction:
|
| * The platform is a closed garden with a goal to own the
| content, user submissions, and any personally identifiable data
| or relationships thereof.
|
| * User interaction is primarily limited by a terms and
| conditions policy as opposed to a code of conduct. The goal is
| to impose constraints upon user rights as opposed to user
| behavior.
|
| * There exists a profit incentive directly tied to engagement
| frequency. The goal is to quantify content visibility and sell
| those numbers to third parties.
|
| * Exchange and reselling of user profile data, user
| submissions, and any analysis or relationship there upon is
| beyond user control, awareness, or agreement.
| robgibbons wrote:
| What about Mastodon or other federated platforms? If someone
| created a new Facebook, but it didn't have these corporate
| terms, it would still be social media.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| People generally do not consider IRC social media, but its
| much more engaging and active than something like Facebook
| or Twitter.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Social media is any website whose purpose is socialization i.e.
| "small-talk" style discussion, with many (50+) members.
|
| If it's a larger site that contains socialization, like blog
| comments, the blog itself may not be social media but the
| comments can be. I define TikTok, Twitch, and part of YouTube
| as social media because the videos themselves are casual and
| therefore quality as small-talk (if you only visit YouTube for
| large videos or videos without commentary, you're not visiting
| the social media part).
|
| A 1-on-1 or small group chat isn't social media, but a large
| group chat, Discord, or other invite-only platform is. Because
| when these get large enough, they have the parasocialization,
| shock, and constant activity of open social medias (even some
| self-promotion, but it's more authentic and IMO not an issue).
|
| Some people argue text doesn't count because it's not "media",
| but I don't think it matters, because in practice people share
| media on text forums and I don't think there's much difference
| anyways (e.g. name dropping a movie, is that sharing media?).
|
| I define Stack Exchange as not social media, because it
| actively strongly discourages socialization. Video game lobbies
| are social media iff users heavily socialize in the chat (the
| clans in Warcraft, Eve, and Clash of Clans may qualify; large
| Minecraft server chats may quality).
|
| Ultimately, I define social media based on parasocialization,
| with tendency to promote and consistently provide high-dopamine
| text and other media. Someone else can define it as "a
| parasocial dopamine sink with notifications and 'friends'" like
| Twitter, or "a parasocial dopamine sink that encourages your
| real name" like Facebook". I include sites like HN because I
| think, while they're significantly better, they're still
| "social" in a way regular communication isn't, and can still
| have most of the negative effects (you _can_ engage positively
| with HN, but you can engage positively even with TikTok and
| Facebook, if you use it selectively productively).
| cryptopian wrote:
| Given all the arguments above this post, I don't think there's
| a lot of value in trying to categorise any particular website
| as a yes/no to "is this social media". All that achieves is
| people trying to litigate whether a site fits a definition
| nobody can agree on.
|
| Much more effective is trying to identify the mechanisms by
| which a communication platform breaks social interactions. Is
| the feed sorted by engagement or chronologically? Does the
| platform encourage you to chase metrics? Does the default feed
| include content you didn't subscribe to? Are comment threads
| difficult to trace through?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Social media grew out of social networking sites, as far as I
| remember. The distinct feature of social networking sites is
| that they are focused on... well, social networks, comprised of
| nodes of users and links of friendships. Your content feed is
| naturally "personalized" in the sense that you see the posts of
| your friends.
|
| Social media is the development that they can also use that
| personalized feed to show media, and actually, your real
| friends don't generate enough content to keep you hooked 24/7.
| So the site is quickly overwhelmed with professional content
| creators and other entities that are looking for engagement.
| The site might pander to them intentionally, or it might just
| fail to prevent them, but in any case they take over. This
| turns it from a sharing network to a passive consumption
| broadcasting one.
|
| Hackernews was never a social networking site really, and so it
| never had the infrastructure to develop into a social media
| site. It is more like an evolution of a phpBB board, or
| something like 4chan (but, thankfully, with just enough
| moderation to keep out all the unpleasantness).
|
| The important distinction is that the feed isn't personalized,
| content is ranked based on what the community finds
| interesting. This seems to surface better stuff. It could just
| be the moderation and the type of content (tech stuff has
| always been easier to find on the internet than, say,
| politics). But there's probably something to the fact that
| content has to be "better" in the sense that it can't just
| appeal to a specific quirk (weakness?) of an individual viewer.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| People called social graph platforms social media before
| social graph platforms became engagement platforms.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Why is nobody here defining social media, put down the clear
| criteria?
|
| A preference for unfalsifiable babbling. As worthless as
| arguing what exact colors the word "pink" refers to. Just
| define a range.
|
| It's worse than bikeshedding because then at least you get a
| bikeshed. At the end of this discussion, _at best_ you get a
| synonym.
| duderific wrote:
| For me, the central entity of "social media" is a person or
| personality.
|
| The central entity of forums, such as HN or Reddit, is topics.
|
| Sometimes there is crossover between the two types of entities,
| and of course there are exceptions to the rule, but I find it
| to be a useful way to discern what is social media and what
| isn't.
| j45 wrote:
| As soon as devices inserted themselves as a barrier between
| people and called it social, when it was really the media in
| waiting, they could hide and direct the nature of interactions,
| and ultimately, attention.
| torben-friis wrote:
| If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social
| network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-
| friends (and ads).
|
| It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full
| days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I
| hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Interesting, I thought Revanced was just for YouTube, I didn't
| realize it worked with other social media sites too.
| al_borland wrote:
| As people's default shifts to consumption, they stop posting
| content themselves. They also stop living a life worth posting
| about... especially when they start comparing themselves with
| "influencers", who have made a full time job out of pretending
| to live an interesting life.
|
| The problem with filtering out all the junk as a solution is
| that it doesn't fix the actual problem of those sites with
| perverse incentives having control. It seems like the real goal
| should be to get people off these platforms. That's the only
| way to really stop it.
|
| I wonder how long companies would keep paying for ads when a
| site is 100% bot traffic? They could keep the ruse up for a
| while, but likely not forever.
| testudovictoria wrote:
| The problem with some of (all of?) these is that it's
| becoming increasingly moot to bother posting. I posted back
| in the early days of social media to share with my friends.
| In response, my friends and acquaintances kept me up to date
| with their lives. Now the apps only bother to show me
| friend/following posts if they deem it matches my interests.
|
| I understand that this sort of algorithmic feed likely
| matches the metrics to keep people scrolling. This would also
| track with every app moving away from "friend" verbiage to
| something like followers, subscribers, or members. Users are
| encouraged to post _to_ their audience rather than sharing
| _with_ their friends.
| projektfu wrote:
| Yes, I mostly stopped sharing because I don't want it to be
| used for creepy reasons. When Facebook was just a community
| of sorts, it was fine to share. People who cared would see
| it. Facebook wasn't doing too much content mining. But in
| the current world, people who care often don't see it, and
| if I told them to go looking there, they'd be bombarded by
| so much ragebait that I couldn't in good conscience
| recommend it.
| marcod wrote:
| Look into Morphe as a revanced alternative, it's by the peeps
| who make the Youtube patches and I find it better to use and it
| can draw on the same patches.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| The article made me reminisce. I was a young adult when
| Facebook crept in. I felt the constant pressure to _do cool
| stuff_ so I could put it on Facebook and get likes. I used to
| browse through friends walls, look at their carefully manicured
| photo albums, no doubt driven by similar anxieties.
|
| Sad as it was, at least the incentives were somewhat aligned
| with a healthy social life. Seek out cool things in life,
| preferably with friends, share.
|
| This has its own downsides of course too, but is a world away
| from going on Facebook today, full of people definitely
| shutting down thekr life businesses, turning wood into MacBook
| cases and incoherent AI generated videos of 300m waves. I
| seriously can't remember the last time I put something on
| Facebook, certainly not in this decade. Never mind any of the
| other ones...
| m463 wrote:
| > It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this.
|
| what if your friends used it too?
|
| would there be more content (as they seek to connect to real
| peopl), or less (as they leave)?
| Exoristos wrote:
| A deathly calm.
| jonaustin wrote:
| Probably use Morphe now:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedextended/comments/1q20ga5/w...
| api wrote:
| Social media hasn't been "social" in more than a decade. It
| stopped being that when algorithmic feeds and infinite scroll
| were introduced.
| spike021 wrote:
| While I partly agree, I also disagree. I still use Instagram a
| lot to keep in touch with friends I've made in different places.
| Generally as long as they are making posts then my feeds have
| those posts. It's only when they do not and supposedly IG "runs
| out" that I don't.
|
| Personally what I hate more is that there are some content
| creators I've been happy to support over the years and now
| instead of doing regular content posts they now do the "collab
| post" thing as an ad that looks like a regular post. Some of them
| may do but many do not.
| jrflo wrote:
| I built a safari extension called Scrolless [1] to try and solve
| this issue (Disclaimer: it's a $4.99 one time unlock). If you use
| social media in the web instead of the native apps, and use
| Scrolless, you'll only see posts from your friends, no
| recommendation algorithms anywhere.
|
| It's absolutely insane how much influence we have given over to
| social media algorithms as a society. I know so many people who
| I'd consider to be intelligent just completely believe whatever
| they see on tiktok/reels. These recommendation algorithms can
| create such intense polarization, I really hope we can find a way
| to scale back their use and encourage people to think more for
| themselves.
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrolless-feed-
| blocker/id67588...
| nailer wrote:
| Yes, Tiktok staff made this point when they emerged in 2020 -
| "Tiktok isn't a social media platform, they're an entertainment
| platform". Meta's catching up.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That makes talking about the issues a lot simpler. Calling HN a
| social media makes much more sense if we talk about Instagram,
| or Facebook as entertainment or advertising platforms.
| jdw64 wrote:
| i have cut off social media related to my actual career, such as
| Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Because people laughed at me
| for becoming a programmer. So I created my own homepage, and for
| communication, I mainly read posts on large Chinese tech
| communities, Hacker News, or dev.to.
|
| However, when I try to communicate through GitHub or something, I
| wonder if I'm just using another form of social media. My main
| daily routine is to gradually add posts to my own homepage that
| no one will see, and start from there.
| hedora wrote:
| My bar for "is it social media?" is "is the sole benefit
| network effects?"
|
| Now that GitHub's availability has hit one 9, I consider it
| just a social network. Any code I put there is just for
| marketing. Real work stays far away.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| This thread is doomed by a common HN* affliction: People are
| bandying around key terms without defining them, assuming and
| pretending that the definitions are universally accepted.
|
| Here, the term is "social media", which can also be pronounced
| "boogeye man". We all seem to agree it is bad, but very few are
| willing to lay down a solid definition.
|
| It isn't limited to _bad_ terms. It happens anytime we argue over
| whether X displays consciousness, or X has a mind, or X can
| think.
|
| * And other forums, obviously.
| captainclam wrote:
| I don't think the quality of discussion about social media
| suffers from lack of specification. Whether or not you consider
| HN to be social media, or wherever your decision boundary is,
| doesn't change that most of the conversation does apply to the
| general class of apps/websites that have become de-facto short
| form video platforms. Which lots of people use, so the effects
| of use are consequential and worth discussing.
|
| The conversations on consciousness though...oh man. I have to
| steel myself before diving into that mess.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I see commenters ITT vehemently disagreeing on the point.
| Maybe you collapsed those conversations?
| groan wrote:
| This is usually why I collapse the 2-3 top-most ranked comment
| threads. They're very often gamed and calibrated for engagement.
| Every so often anecdotes/stories that completely ignore the
| subject matter (sometimes dangerous if medical). I wish there
| were other ways to organize comments (rip slashdot) but this
| usually helps to make HN less social media-y.
| twodave wrote:
| Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet
| used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of
| influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least
| pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere
| else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything
| is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had
| control, we are now the product.
| saadn92 wrote:
| We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't
| know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this
| site and if we all came together to work on something, surely
| there could be something we can do for this problem.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Not all problems have technical solutions.
|
| We need a national conversation (which we seem to be having)
| about the corrosive nature of these algos.
|
| I personally think they should be liable for much more than
| they are under section 230.
| zerobees wrote:
| The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who
| already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook,
| Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
|
| We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms
| would have been built without an army of willing,
| enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical
| compromises" every day.
|
| And now that there's money made in something else, many of us
| would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat,
| leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to
| other people.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| This is uncomfortably true.
| switchbak wrote:
| They're also the ones that won't let their kids anywhere
| near the things.
|
| That really is a strong statement of the ethics here -
| they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have
| it help ruin their mental health and generally create an
| unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the
| tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to
| their kids? No way.
|
| I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these
| things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip
| Morris?
| swed420 wrote:
| > The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people
| who already "came together" to build businesses like
| Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
|
| Only a subset. HN is not a monolith.
| sph wrote:
| I'd rather ask the Amish how can we fix the internet than a
| bunch of Bay Area VCs and FAANG employees.
| vitally3643 wrote:
| Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it.
| It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each
| other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by
| any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's
| a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your
| shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes.
|
| But the same people decrying corporate social media declare
| mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally
| 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion
| dollars. Shrug.
| intended wrote:
| Far too much money in tech traces its roots to ad tech.
|
| You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech
| firms to blow their salaries up.
|
| There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the
| people who came to tech later aren't driven by the same
| values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather
| than go on a crusade.
|
| Incentives make the world go round.
| swed420 wrote:
| > We should be able to do something around this problem. I
| don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people
| on this site and if we all came together to work on
| something, surely there could be something we can do for this
| problem.
|
| This is a good start for brainstorming:
|
| https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| this made me think of humdog's pandora's vox
| https://gist.github.com/kolber/2131643
| wuliwong wrote:
| I am going to push back without entirely disagreeing. Most of
| the people online are definitely caught in this social media as
| cable tv thing. But the number of people using the internet
| back in the early days is probably similar or even smaller than
| the number of people today that use niche areas of the
| internet, niches that still have that 'playground' experience
| and much less corporate overwatch control. Maybe?
| twodave wrote:
| There's a perspective by which you aren't wrong, and yet
| everything about how we interact with the Internet has
| changed in the last decade or so. Because (to quote School of
| Rock) the world is run by the man.
| squidsoup wrote:
| Capitalism subsumes all culture, even counter culture, destroys
| its essence and commodifies it.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Well said.
|
| I think the only reason I remain staunchly independent is
| because I've never found anything that has had enough common
| ground with enough people to allow me to profit (to any
| degree whatsoever) in such a way as to corrupt the core of
| "me". Oddly I find that the less my venn diagram overlaps
| with others, the more I like my venn diagram and the more
| committed I am to it. If other people start agreeing with me,
| I tend to question where I might be wrong.
| Isaackoz wrote:
| I've deleted all my social media and haven't looked back. It's
| safe to assume Meta tracks every little detail about you: what
| kind of content you like, how long you look at each post, your
| political stance, etc. Every single metric you can possibly think
| of... they're collecting.
|
| Humans are predictable (more than we'd like to admit). Now they
| have AI to crunch all that data and find patterns to predict your
| next move and find out what content will give you the most
| dopamine. Escape while you can.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| hot take maybe: but alot of these shifts have come with the sheer
| explosion in number of people on these platforms and online in
| general - the arrival of many/most of the mainstream/normies as
| it were. Perhaps the reality is that alot of these people's lives
| on and offline actually are dominated by 'fads' and so this is
| just naturally following that.
|
| Think 'keeping up with the jones', 'the latest fahsion, food,
| entertainment, music, x, trends' etc. People live by what I
| dunno, magazines, Oprah, local morning show hosts, entertainment
| news shows, etc, tell them. They've brought that view of things
| with them online.
| hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wrote:
| What I find unsettling is the monoculture that is being created
| by platforms like Instagram. You will see a 30 year old man from
| Alabama engaging in the same trends as a 19 year old girl from
| Japan. Suddenly everyone likes matcha and is posting photos of
| themselves in photo booths. On dating apps, tons of women from
| all ethnicities suddenly love sushi or have a photo at the exact
| same location with the exact same pose.
|
| Same people who run these platforms will preach about diversity
| while destroying it.
| seydor wrote:
| The pendulum has finally swung the other way. There is no longer
| the need for people to shamelessly air their life on live feeds,
| and when something serious happens, people prefer to share it in
| a messaging group.
|
| The extreme gossipy porn of the past two decades has finally worn
| off.
|
| I think it has little to do with privacy concerns as they are
| hypothesizing.
| cbold wrote:
| Social media does not only spread bad ideas, but degrades the
| symbolic machinery people use to form ideas in the first place.
| It trains reflexes where thought should be. There is no symbolic
| lattice for things to land and it turns people into reactive
| zombies.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Facebook stopped being good when they took away the order by most
| recent option IMO.
| hinata08 wrote:
| I'm bored when I see how inactive platforms like Discord and
| forums have become
|
| snobs used to be thought on users who liked popular culture or
| "jejemons", "kikoolols", "eternal september,... posters who used
| to be actually active, experimental and creative, but at least
| newcommers were still posting
|
| nowadays the creative part is gone. Forums are dead. You're
| encouraged to use your actual identity everywhere on social media
| and to sign apps. You're indeed not guided to post and be
| creative. The internet became just passive :/
| yannis7 wrote:
| "we were promised social networks, what we got was social media"
| -- Elad Gil
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| A publicly-traded company which must increase shareholder value
| each year is incompatible with Social Networks. You cannot build
| an infinite growth machine on photos of people's dogs. So they
| stopped being social networks, and became a generic entertainment
| channel. Neither Facebook nor Instagram nor X nor Bluesky nor
| <fill in the blank> are Social Networks in 2026. The only true
| Social Network platforms are obscure things like SpaceHey.
| bradlys wrote:
| It's always been this way - people just don't realize it.
|
| Before, people were reposting memes, articles, chain letters,
| etc. Most of the content you'd see wasn't created by the person
| you are friends with.
|
| This isn't really new. And as someone who makes original content
| and posts it regularly - people do enjoy original stuff from
| their friends. It's just that it's hard for people to do. Most
| people are very insecure, have little original thought, and/or
| the interest in sharing anything they think to a broader audience
| than 2-3 close friends. I buck the trend here.
| Willingham wrote:
| I actually used hacker news to get off of social media 2 years
| ago. I consider it 'medically assisted treatment' like suboxone
| for heroin addicts.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| Does anyone remember Path?
|
| Limit circle social network, I think capped at 50 people.
| Beautiful app, and I remember it was a great place to spend time
| when you really just wanted to be with true friends.
|
| Time for someone to reboot this
| floren wrote:
| I honestly liked the Google+ circles thing too, felt like a
| similar idea.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This article has struck a nerve in the comment section. It's
| describing how traditional social media sites like Facebook and
| Instagram are not used for social features anymore, but for
| content discovery. The descriptions of how people are using
| Facebook to find new content anonymously are not that different
| from how we use Hacker News, which has reignited the debate about
| whether Hacker News is social media.
|
| I had to use the Wayback Machine to dig this up:
|
| > 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
|
| > Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So
| the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit
| your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile,
| noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by
| clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default.
| If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed
| to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of
| minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which
| would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then
| not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if
| you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...
|
| Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social
| site and that social news sites could be "dangerously addictive".
| The goalposts for defining social media keep moving as people try
| to avoid any definition that captures their own internet usage,
| but I think it's important to be honest about what we're all
| doing here.
|
| Also the noprocrast feature is still there right in your profile,
| though I don't know if it's documented anywhere.
| rvshchwl wrote:
| Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my
| interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing
| the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this
| site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting
| and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I
| don't think that'll always be the case.
|
| I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much
| time on Social Media sites, that my brain hast just started to
| look forward to "distractions" when I don't have anything else
| to do. If I don't have Instagram, I'll open X. If I don't have
| X, I'll open Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Hacker News. It's hard to
| get away from this constant need for distractions all the time,
| and I've found myself to procrastinate on simple things whereas
| I wouldn't have done that a few years ago.
|
| I'm glad that features like Noprocrast exist. It's unfortunate
| that other media sites would never implement these features
| because their business model is entirely driven on people
| spending more and more time on their sites.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It's unfortunate that other media sites would never
| implement these features because their business model is
| entirely driven on people spending more and more time on
| their sites.
|
| I don't know every social media site, but many of them do
| have built-in time limit functionality. It's even better
| documented than what's on Hacker News.
|
| First two random ones I searched for (Instagram and TikTok)
|
| https://help.instagram.com/2049425491975359/?cms_platform=ip.
| ..
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/support/faq_detail?id=754359745915568.
| ..
| overgard wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember life before internet/social media
| (40ish). One thing that's weird now, to me, is that it's very
| rare that I'm outright bored, but it's like that boredom just
| became diffuse into everything, almost everything in life is
| sort of boredom-tinted (probably just because I'm so flooded
| with too many dopamine-reward-signaling low-value things)
|
| A couple weeks ago, I had a power outage, and instead of
| being upset I felt RELIEVED. Like, everything in life just
| felt calmer for a moment. It was kind of nice to just grab a
| book because it was the only option. (well, I mean, there was
| still the cell phone but at least it was the only
| distraction)
| Timpanzee wrote:
| >Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a
| social site
|
| As with all discussions of whether something does or does not
| fall into a specific category, the devil is in the demarcation.
| How you define a social site, or how I define it, or how the
| vague general consensus vaguely defines it, or how Hacker News
| defined it 15 years ago, or how Hacker News defines it now;
| changes the answer to whether it belongs in the category or
| not.
|
| The same applies to whether AIs are conscious/sentient, whether
| a certain governing body is fascist/totalitarian, or even
| something as simple as whether something is good or bad, comes
| entirely from how those categories are defined in the context
| of the conversation. Without the same, agreed upon definitions,
| we're all just talking past each other.
| overgard wrote:
| Maybe the useful distinction isn't "is it a social site?" but
| rather "is the content curated or user created?". Anything
| that's user created is going to have the issues described I
| think, whether you consider it a social network or not.
| jezzamon wrote:
| We used to call them social networking sites, now they're social
| media sites.
|
| But I think the problem is that people don't contribute very much
| too them, so if none of your friends are sharing things that
| interest you then the media part has to come in as a fallback
| duxup wrote:
| I remember trying bluesky and realizing it isn't just the
| services I don't like. I don't like ... what all the social media
| users like. The heavy memeification / gamification for attention.
| Trite posts, posts that seem like the middle of a conversation
| ... really all negative bits about internet discourse.
|
| But most everyone there likes it that way...
| nkotov wrote:
| Maybe I'm in the minority here (early 30s, married + kids), but
| my social media feed is primarily my friends. Though, if we go
| into the Reels tab, my friends and I share videos back and forth
| through DMs.
|
| I have an alt account for business / lifestyle content that I
| like consuming. That's the only place I actually follow content
| creators. And even then, I check the account once or twice a day
| and rarely view/engage with Instagram stories.
|
| Back to my personal account - I have 2-3 people out of the 198
| that I follow that are trying to hop on trends and become
| influencers. Rest just do photo dumps + daily stories. But the
| reality is only 20-30% of my friends actually share something
| (post or story), rest are just silent observers.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Yes, we've moved from town squares to private parties - whatsapp
| chats, discord servers, even IRC still exists. (Bluesky is a bit
| of an exception but they'll need to get enough stable revenue at
| some point.)
|
| Interestingly, in-person "nerd" events seem to be going just fine
| - LARP, D&D, board games, historical reenactment, trading card
| games and tournaments like M:tG, and a lot more.
| time0ut wrote:
| I have never been interested in the "normal" social media apps
| like Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and the like. The content never
| appealed to me as a consumer enough to get started. Occasionally
| something would go viral enough that a friend would eventually
| link it to me and that was the whole experience.
|
| Recently, I made a dumb little app for my kids and decided to try
| marketing it on social media just to see what it is like. It is
| fascinating in a sense and disheartening as well. I have been
| very unsuccessful, but the most signal tends to come from the
| dumbest content I have tried.
|
| In doing this, I have come into contact with the social media
| feeds I never felt the need to look at and man... they are like a
| drug. I find myself mesmerized by random IG reels. It is one
| thing to understand what they are on an intellectual level and a
| totally different to feel it first hand.
|
| I miss MySpace.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Social media feeds have been completely broken for many years.
| What social media used to be, has now moved to group chats and
| channels.
|
| But, I guess, there's still room for those channels to be run
| through the enshittificator. Wouldn't surprise me if we in the
| not-so-distant future start to see random ads and paid content in
| group chats.
| make3 wrote:
| parasocial media
| daytonix wrote:
| It's so frustrating when this is brought up as if this hasn't
| been the case for almost 10 years now.
| popupeyecare wrote:
| I miss when social media was mostly about my friends' lives. It
| actually helped us stay in touch.
|
| So much of social media now feels built around whatever is
| trending that week, not the relationships you actually want to
| keep up with.
|
| That's why I'm building Dearest (https://dearest.co) : a private,
| email-based Sunday photo digest for families and friends.
| Everyone sends a photo and a short update by Saturday night, and
| contributors get the group's digest on Sunday morning. Hopefully
| this keeps us social and in touch.
| WarmWash wrote:
| The attention economy is real, your eyes have value that is
| surprisingly high, and buying out that attention so you can have
| a pure you-centered experience would just be too expensive for
| most people.
|
| Instagram gets ~$27/mo/user from advertisers. Would you spend
| $27/mo for Instagram? Probably not. Hence the financial void is
| filled with ads.
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| > This all means that small businesses, that have long used
| social media for free promotion have to up their game.
|
| I've recently tried to promote a product on social media (well, I
| still try, I'm just not successful) and, especially as someone
| who doesn't really use it otherwise (outside of HN and reddit), I
| can't even manage to be part of the problem:
|
| - Anything I post on Twitter, personal or corpo account, gets <20
| views. Every time I scroll through it (again, on either account),
| it seems most things barely get any views. I am forcing myself to
| use it, thinking it would help, but I also find it insufferable.
|
| - Facebook has been actually reasonably useful for local
| things/news and had a surprisingly personalized feed until I
| realized half the comments (from seemingly real accounts) were
| clearly written with (or by) AI. When I was forced to post myself
| (again, for promotion), I noticed FB actively prompts you to use
| AI to "improve writing" or whatever it was in its own app.
| Lovely, so even the few islands of real human comments I found
| are written by robots.
|
| - Instagram auto-bans me, despite going to their
| verification/selfie spiel. It is literally impossible to reach a
| human for support, since Meta laid them all off. Seems to be a
| common theme and it sounds like I'm not missing much. Also locks
| me out of Threads (I don't know a single person who uses that).
|
| - BlueSky seemed nicer, until I realized interactions to my posts
| (personal account only) have largely been OF bots. Also lovely.
|
| - Mastodon etc are all enormous tech bubbles that may be
| interesting, but not what I am looking for.
|
| > The social platforms continue to be monetised predominantly by
| ad revenue. That is still the core business model. And ad revenue
| continues to grow," ... > Might there be a backlash coming? Don't
| many people go on to social media to see how friends are reacting
| to their posts or comments before settling down to scroll through
| professionally made content?
|
| Now, I suspect I can solve all these issues by paying them money
| - actually, I'm fairly sure that would fix the Twitter thing at
| least - but I _also_ suspect that all that would do is show my
| traffic to other bots, since I more and more get the feeling that
| no sane human being is voluntarily putting up with this. But
| clearly, that's not the case.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Facebook just isn't a social media site anymore. They pivoted,
| and did so multiple times.
|
| Remember when they were going to be a games platform, where
| Farmville was their big hit? They eventually abandoned that and
| then wanted to be a video and streaming platform. Then Metaverse
| VR was going to replace everything. Now they're some sort of AI
| company.
|
| People long ago started migrating to Whatsapp, Discord, and
| similar groups for actual socializing. They did seemingly panic a
| bit at that trend and bought Whatsapp.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The thing is socialising isn't that profitable. People moved
| socialising to IM apps but hardly any of them are paying for it
| or consuming many ads.
|
| Short form video media is massively profitable and those same
| people are eating it up.
| 255kb wrote:
| The algorithmic feeds are to blame. This would happen less with a
| chronological feed.
|
| I think we will see in the future algorithmic feeds addiction
| rehab, algorithmic feeds self-exclusion lists (like for casinos)
| and even algorithmic feeds ban, which would probably be a net
| positive for humanity.
| sunandsurf wrote:
| The solution is regulations to turn of recommendation systems by
| default in the apps.
|
| Try turning off history in youtube and see how much your time
| spent on it changes when you cant just mindlessly click on the
| next video.
| jonesai wrote:
| Social media down, real connection up. Unsurprising that people
| are buying 'dumb phones' more and more
| zem wrote:
| I think nothing has contributed to the depersonalization of
| social media more than the (facebook led, afaik) push to
| aggressively show as many people as possible everything you post.
| after the first few jarring reminders that random friends were
| being served up my comments on other random friends' posts, and
| that their friends were likewise being served their interactions
| with my posts, I drew back very sharply from the social aspect.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| Right. Anything that matters a blind bit to me is on WhatsApp
| (don't judge!), I don't consume too much from other sources, and
| when I do I don't expect anything more than a sensible person
| would expect. It is what it is. Choose your channel and you'll
| get what you expect. That's pretty much it.
| mannanj wrote:
| Early in COVID I was lucky to have lots of time and a disposable
| budget. I was seeking experiences and practices to make me be
| more present, and have more time and productivity back. I ran
| into this guy named Tommy who led a phone-free movement called
| Brick.
|
| With his insight I came up with my own system around apps and the
| computer that I still use today.
|
| Here's how I'd encapsulate it in a nutshell, and the blocks ontop
| work fantastically to combat all forms of social media addiction.
| Notification Zero.
|
| Notification Zero is when no apps can ever give you
| notifications, ever. Not the phone call, not the text, or sms,
| not slack, etc. Even for work. Now, with that as the default, you
| have to manually set and think through which apps in which cases
| _do_ give you notifications, and this philosophy would built
| itself into a fine AI notifications management system some day.
| So what notifies me? When my phone is not on DND (rarely, when I
| 'm expecting a call) only starred contacts calls. Texts never
| notify me. People know to call if it's serious. With this path I
| use my technology more intentionally, and when I open my phone
| there's nothing nagging me for my attention because it's a blank
| screen with no apps with no alarms set by other people
| ("notifications are like alarms other people set for you" - Naval
| R.)
|
| I don't miss it. and it feels great, minimalist and clean, and
| allows my attention to stay focused on what I opened my phone or
| computer int he first place. (My computer is the same: blank
| screen, matching black, no apps or notifications. On Mac, I set
| the mission bar at the bottom to only show apps if they are open,
| and as we speak, only 7 open windows appear at the bottom though
| the bar is hidden unless mouse overed). The screen becomes a
| canvas for what I'm actively working on, tactically laid out for
| my particular use & focus.
|
| Happy to share more if its of help to anyone.
| firebot wrote:
| You're just a cost of acquisition.
| bamboozled wrote:
| The two single reasons I I have instagram installed are:
|
| * Keeping in touch with people / contacts.
|
| * Knowing when random cafes and restaurants I like are open.
|
| Outside of that I just hate it and want it out of my life. I've
| spoke to others and the loss of contacts is a major reason they
| don't leave also.
| kachurovskiy wrote:
| I've stopped using YouTube and Reddit since early April and it's
| been a mixed bag.
|
| On one side my interest level has adjusted so that normal
| activities make sense again - like sitting in the garden or
| playing a game with my kid. I've also completed dozens of
| projects like replacing old silicon in the entire kitchen or
| updating the garden playground.
|
| On the other side I'm feeling more isolated and lacking
| information / stimulation for creative output because I no longer
| have any idea what other people are doing. However given that
| massive amounts of time have been freed I'm more productive both
| at work and at home, more effort on health too.
|
| It's definitely something to try but it's not all roses.
| rnewme wrote:
| Create rss feed of few curated favorite creators.
| anitil wrote:
| I've effectively dropped reddit because they've made the mobile
| web version near-unusable (and I find old.reddit.com difficult
| on mobile). Honestly, it's an improvement in my life. I don't
| know how I found myself spending so much time on it for so
| little benefit
| switchbak wrote:
| You must have one high-tech kitchen!
| switchbak wrote:
| I'm a big YouTube addict, but I dropped social media well
| before that was cool.
|
| I've felt quite disconnected from folks I knew, and I presume
| they feel like I've pulled away. Sounds like this is kind of
| similar, you end up feeling a bit disconnected? Doesn't sound
| all that bad, but I get what you mean - you feel isolated.
|
| I've learned incredible amounts of things with YouTube - I
| curate it like a madman, but overall I'm still not sure it's a
| good thing. Corporations just tend to end up eating their
| customers eventually.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I've kept YouTube on the tv but avoid it on mobile. Theres a
| lot of great stuff on the site that inspires projects and
| ideas for myself.
|
| I do have to resist watching all the product review videos
| which are essentially just ads.
| mcmoor wrote:
| I've been forced to do it once for reddit, with the API fiasco,
| and I don't really notice improvement but I do notice reduced
| quality of life. Almost no other websites have easily
| accessible niche memes.
|
| YouTube recommendation is never that good to me. I frequently
| just scroll desperately and ended up not watching anything, and
| when I'm peak bored I resort to rewatching my list of liked
| videos. That's why I feel weird whenever I see projects that
| want to make YouTube less engaging, it's already not engaging
| enough for me.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Oops, they hit the 'f' key when typing the headline.
| mystraline wrote:
| Its capitalist 'social media' thats the problem. Doctorow's
| enshittification case study was exactly about Facebook and
| Instagram.
|
| However, you go to Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Lemmy and things are
| dramatically better. Well, no, not just better, but completely
| refreshing. You friend people and what you get is a cronological
| feed. No algorithm bullshit, no gamification, no adverts snuck
| in.
| amatecha wrote:
| Stop using corporate-owned walled gardens and manipulation
| factories.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| topics & individuals
|
| whether something fad or not does not matter to me
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| Never has it been more lonely in my lifetime than when I am
| browsing social media feeds alone.
|
| I believe in a way I hold myself to be partially responsible for
| allowing myself to consume cheap risk free passive interactions
| online.
|
| I can only do my best in person to person interaction to make it
| as good individually for others and myself but it is always a hit
| and miss to have similar risk free or positive interactions in
| real life.
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