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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Social media is as successful as it is precisely because it works so well as a communications paradigm. No popular social media platform is difficult to communicate on, they draw in so many users because they're easy to use.

My mother who can barely use Windows knows how to chat with me on Facebook. People use social media to communicate between friends, family, coworkers etc all the time. That's how all of that monetizable data gets generated.

Yes, the purpose of social media is to profit from user-generated content and data, but it still works as intended for 99% of people.

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That's not quite what I meant. Sure you can chat directly fairly easy through Facebook, but communicate is more than just that. Keeping to the Facebook example, much of the 'communication' is done through user or group wall posts.

It is notoriously difficult to browse through, responses are sorted in non-intuitive ways, sometimes responses are hidden for no apparent reason, yet people regularly use it to communicate.

When people post status updates or pictures or whatever, they're trying to communicate, how many times have you gotten status or upload notifications from people you haven't talked to in years, but it never showed you your best friend's new baby pictures or something like that?

Twitter, It's designed around a character limit that strictly discourages longform communication. Yet, you get people trying to write blog posts using it, much to the chagrin of many HN commenters, and generally, the quality of most communication suffers greatly on twitter because of the inherent design.

>it still works as intended for 99% of people.

I would argue that it feels like it works, for 99% of people. I strongly believe that "social media" is a low-quality and unsatisfactory replacement for meaningful social interaction and bonding.

Social media was never intended to be a replacement for meaningful social interaction or bonding, any more than telephones or letter writing, or the generation of forums and personal websites it more or less replaced.

I dunno, replacing it was exactly the vibe I got from the Facebook people when my employers sent us to a Facebook dev conference in London.

Whole thing creeped me out.

>"Founded in 2004, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them."

Facebook's mission statement.

> I would argue that it feels like it works

But that's effectively the same thing if you can't get users to change networks/platforms, eh?

> I strongly believe that "social media" is a low-quality and unsatisfactory replacement for meaningful social interaction and bonding.

Sure. It's easy-bake oven internet for non-geeks. But they don't care. The cupcakes taste fine (to them.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy-Bake_Oven

> they draw in so many users because they're easy to use

They're easy to use because the major social media platforms know that reducing friction to use draws people in and keeps them there, while the platform serves their attention up to advertisers. There's even ways that they make it harder to stop using them than to just keep scrolling/refreshing. Dark Patterns abound.

People on social media are generally not communicating with each other, at least not in a meaningful sense. Social media users are sharing things that other people have created to draw attention, and whatever gets the most attention and shares, aka "engagement" sells the most ads, and makes the most money.

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