App Makers Reach Out to the Teenager on Mobile
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's amazing how mean I see girls being to my 15 year old niece on Instagram. Their little meangirl phrase is "tbh" - short for "to be honest." So they're write something nice, then "tbh" and then something mean. It goes like this, "you're a sweet girl but tbh your new backpack is kinda ratchet" or "your hair is beautiful but tbh u r slutty." Or whatever... I told my sister about this and she locked down her insta but she still gets random comments like this all the time. They all do.
Getting likes weighs on my neices 24/7. They were complaining when I took them to Star Wars that their insta photograph of them kissing yoda "only" got 15 likes.... and were considering deleting it! Because only 15 likes is about 30 too few likes.
If people are liking 90% of the posts on their feed, the "like" doesn't become that useful of a signal to determine what people truly like. It is being used for something else at this point. Some way of extending and re-inforcing a persons graph of friends? I'm not entirely sure.
I'm 28 and people definitely notice when you don't notice one of their posts. A like is often just an aknowledgement of "Yes, I saw this, I still follow what you're up to, we're still friends"
- have at least twice as many followers as you follow
- have at least 10% the number of followers as likes per pic
So, you could have 700 followers, but follow no more than 350 people, and must get 70 likes or more per pic. That's "success." Granted, as you get into 2,000+ followers, it can get harder to maintain the 10%.
Social is the weapons-grade plutonium of online design; you can use it as part of a stable fuel source, or as the components of a weapon, but it's most likely to end up carelessly scattered around your community poisoning it for generations to come.
In Instagram's case, its social enablement is relatively anodyne, but it illustrates some common problems: comments are higher-bandwidth than content, and comments are easier to create than content. Thus, low-value information is added to the system at a much higher rate than high-value content. Solving this is, to put it mildly, not easy.
That right there is sheer genius, ladies & gentlemen!
It's interesting to compare sites with healthy social components (e.g. HN & reddit), to those whose social component has died off (e.g. /.), to those which use it unhealthily, if profitably (Instagram?).
What makes a social component healthy/unhealthy? I generally found myself nodding to posts until I read yours, which made me think quite a bit harder. Can a community with questionable moral value (neo nazis) have a healthy social community? I certainly think those two are not mutually exclusive, and to tie them together may detract from a complete understanding of what "unhealthy" means.
(To answer the question myself, "healthy" vs "unhealthy" in my eyes is whether the community is a self perpetuating echo chamber, (for which many parts of instagram this certainly holds true, content regurgitation and mindless browsing, but I'm apt to believe not ALL of it) and similarly an ISIS forum may have more of a tendancy towards "unhealthy" social content, I don't believe it necessarily dictates it; I've read some fascinating discussions even on HN (linked to other sites) between extremist Muslim/European religious experts that would be a fit for the most cultured discussion boards, even if context of one sides subject matter is far darker.)
And subreddits are different. I really don't see much connection between Instagram and /r/polandball
Instagram itself is not the problem. How teenagers are using social media is a behavior or perspective issue in my opinion, not a problem with an actual product that just offers a nice tool. Growing up before the internet, these attitudes were in effect, just exposed differently. Honestly I think it is a cultural problem, because there are other places in the world where this obsession with acceptance does not exist, and where everything is not driven by ego or lack thereof.
I'm pretty sure that these behaviors just come from being a teenager and aren't caused by any specific technology.
It's become the mosquito of the Internet, possibly useful in some mysterious way but if I had to choose a species to exterminate it'd probably be that one.
Important point about the evolution of social networks - unpacking it:
1) focus more on small groups rather than a large whole - most teenagers now know they won't become social celebrities, but still need validation within reach.
2) validation should be lasting, and "social failures" should be short - teens are aware enough of the algorithms promoting & demoting their content that they consistently manually remove content. As such, these algorithms either adapt to being played, or become useless.
Any smart community architects out there should be encouraging small, close groups over a large whole.
Important issue - but unimportant article in my opinion.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830311 and marked it off-topic.
> I deleted it because it had about -5 points.
I wonder if you're the one more concerned with the feedback and likes than your niece, and you're what caused her to delete it. Why are you worrying about the negative comments they receive and bothering them about your worries, which they then respond to by deleting what worries you? I can see an alternative view where from their perspective it was more like, "Gah, my uncle is stalking my IG and freaking out on me; deleting to make this drama go away!"
It's not that I need validation, I use social networks to help me understand how to negotiate difficult topics. If I re-read a downvoted post and I think I did a good job of expressing an idea people just don't like, I'll leave it up.