Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Most people aren't really interested in that sort of discourse, or in changing the world, or in intellectual biodiversity and alternate views. The web wasn't killed by companies, it selected the companies that catered most to what most people actually want out of the web.
He confuses his loss of status as a sign of the web's destruction but it is more a case of failing to capture the interest of changing demographics.
Since you can not link from insta and tiktok, you can not share longer meaningful articles. And even if you do, external links are ranked lower by social media platforms.
Maybe, authors should create videos, however it seems people who have important things to say shy from video form. The question is if really video is the right choice for valuable content, or is not.
Personally I think it is not a right medium for valuable content, therefore social media lacking features supporting text are just forcing not only enthusiastic readers, but also new demographics to consume brain fast-food.
And it really is sad considering how much value has the Internet. I am thus glad that this place still exists.
Blogging is getting a smaller share of a much larger pie, but in absolute terms, it's not going anywhere.
You don’t have blogrolls anymore nor a blogosphere, but the writers are all there. It’s just those of us who follow that are now a tiny fraction of users. But the rewards to that kind of writing have actually increased.
These authors you describe could try to change the format for a broader audience, but their work would still be fundamentally uninteresting to the latter. Even if there were very few alternative options available, most people would still not generally pursue an interest in such content. The current torrent of content that they do like just turns what is already a very unlikely proposition with perfect conditions into a near impossibility.
The underlying mechanism is that the group you describe as still enjoying reading doesn't have much use for social media to begin with. It's not just them being left behind, but rather having better options elsewhere for what they want to experience. I would go as far as to say that social media is probably anathema to them as it runs against many of their core ideals and instincts.
But let's be honest: most content defined as high-quality in direct opposition to what is found on social media is often not that insightful or actually helpful in shaping lives for the better. I believe it is a trap to consider HN as better than brain fast-food, to name one example.
Internet in current state doesn't offer meaningful way for humans to communicate and connect with each other - it has turned from Agora into a dog walking space with erected poles to urinate on them - that is a great way to communicate for dogs, but a really big setback from the hopes that internet initially gave(for humans).
facebook demographics has changed a lot as well - it is getting popularity in non-English speaking world, but it is on a path of decline. I do not use facebook(and many friends are off facebook as well), but my mother interestingly does use facebook a lot, because it is a great tool to do marketing - even if the marketing consists of spreading ideas. The problem about mentioned social apps is that facebook, twitter, instagram can't be treated as something more than tools for marketing and approaching them as communication tools is a failure. Blogs initially offered more as a tools for communication, though most of them nowadays have evolved into online TV, to better serve the audience. Even some journalist I was following and reading articles now does regular podcast on youtube - though most of the reason for it is that this way is easier to earn money.
"The web wasn't killed by companies, it selected the companies that catered most to what most people actually want out of the web." That is false statement from the marketing point of view, where people actually do not know what they want. There are many clones of apps out there and even with better functionality and all the problems fixed that are present on current apps an we can wonder why no one uses them... There are also too many examples of how some of the great companies were killed off by intent and has nothing to do with how web is functioning whatsoever.
There are still blogs, in a better shape than ever, with Patreon or Substack to help financially support them.
There are still forums for specific topics, standalone, as subreddits, all the way to stackexchange.
Three is a ton of IMs for any taste, as decentralized as you may want.
Even the old Fidonet is born again as Mastodon, you can run your own node, or take a "point" on an existing node.
The thing is, of course, that 99% of the audience are in the swamps of Facebook, or in the gladiator arena of Twitter, or the beauty contest of Instagram.
These 99% were not online in 1993. They have little interest in blogs, forums, detailed discussions on deep topics, botherations about privacy, any technical details. They just want to talk to their relatives, share some vacation photos, listen to music, watch videos of funny cats. This is the norm. This is fine.
When the 99% moved in, the old internet did not disappear, it just was shown the scale: "nerds" (not necessarily computer nerds) vs "the rest of the population".
Deal with it.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/10/people-need-...
We need a way to end this TOS feudalism.
"At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement -- the longer the better -- and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible"
"What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users join extremist groups, and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?"
"Will the future belong to the innovations that make our lives better, more fulfilled and more human? Or will it belong to those tools that prize our attention to the exclusion of everything else, compounding our fears and aggregating extremism, to serve ever-more-invasively-targeted ads over all other ambitions?"
Just off the top of my head, but I think we all know extremism when we see/hear it.
I think there's a substantial amount of people that don't. Or rather, they can easily identify extremism in people they don't relate to while completely ignoring it in people that they find even the tiniest amount of common ground with.
This seems to be the natural and inevitable result of treating politics like a team sport for 200+ years.
TV ok somewhat bad but not all bad. It made us all on the same page, believing the same facts and entertained. Radio had to be pretty much all good. A kid listening to old radio shows laying in front of the console was in pure heaven. Facebook, etc. is purely detrimental to humanity like cigarettes or meth.
I’d post the references but there are simply too many. I’ve never seen a study that didn’t find Facebook, Twitter, etc. detrimental to mental health.
Few television shows did that for me — "Connections" is a HN favorite and changed my way of thinking.
Several books by Kurt Vonnegut (and Dune as well, FWIW) also changed how I think about the world.
Content is important is my point.
Even Myspace routinely banned users and groups over content issues. Here's one from 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20111011112224/http://www.secula...
Maybe that's why Facebook makes so much more money.
While the marketplace is more crowded, the number of markets has shrink. To continue your analogy, each marketplace vender used to be its own market, so you had a lot of options. Now there were really only 2-4 giant marketplaces, and vendors with a good location have made it really difficult to set up shop.
"No one ever died from browsing Facebook" is likely false, but would be generally accepted as arguably true. "No one ever died because of Facebook" should be understood to be obviously untrue to a well-informed person.
But I'm speaking metaphorically, of course.
But people find scapegoats so much easier. Facebook is vapid trash because vapid trash is highly popular.
It can sometimes seem that way, but I think it's more accurate to say that large chunk are potentially horrible, and it's the situation they find themselves in that brings that out.
The implied hope here is that it will be easier to change such situations, than change "human nature."
But Facebook isn’t even doing that. They are optimizing for “engagement”, and for keeping people on the site so they can serve more ads to them.
Just because they are highly effective at this does not mean they serve what we really would like to see.
This is why I stopped browsing Facebook a long time ago. The only reason I have an account still is for people that talk to me on Messenger, and for occasionally checking on upcoming events. Now in the Corona pandemic I haven’t even had a reason to check on upcoming events so I haven’t almost gone onto Facebook at all.
Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook, is doing a better job however, at providing me with content that I am interested in. So even though I dislike Facebook as a company I am actively using Instagram almost daily still.
How else would they know which pages, friends, posts, you want to see the most?
- People will write long, impassioned screeds in response to the things they despise most.
- People don't just view posts that are about things they hate/fear, they "like" and share them because they feel the need to approve of and disseminate every "exposé" of the "bad guys". Even though most of it is vacuous FUD or twisted misinformation that accomplishes no such "noble" goal.
As for the rest, I never argued for valuing sharing, and while those might generate likes they won't generate long comments unless they are at least slightly constructive.