Perhaps we should organize a national poll against social media. It is time we admit that the Amish were right to a certain extent, and if it helps: believing that technology only brings value is in itself much like a religion.
The stopped when ads once again was called upon to save a business that failed to make a sales pitch directly to its end-users.
It not the fault of the ads as such. It is a reasonable solution, if you can accept that it will never make you insanely wealthy. Sadly that not what happens. Companies keep pushing and pushing to make as much money as possible, forcing their platforms into attention hoarding machines.
Platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, no longer serve any purpose other than sell attention and killing other platforms that would stand in the way of them making a few extra dollars.
For a brief time in history social media provide us with a bit more fun. It allowed us to be a bit more social. Then corporate greed took it away, almost as fast.
Maybe it wasn't a vision, but it could have been.
Why would someone want a personal website? So you don't have to explain everything about yourself to every new person you meet. They can see what your interests are, what kind of ideas or projects you promote, and learn more about your quirks. This helps filter out those who would clash with you, as well as giving potential friends or colleagues a much smoother on-ramp to future interactions.
That was in the MySpace days.
At some point, Facebook took over because it was a more standardized interface with more bells & whistles, and eliminated the issue of really ugly page designs made by amateurs with auto-playing audio of music you might hate. For a little while, FB was a superior product.
Then, they started messing with The Feed so it was more likely to do things that benefited the company. There was some uproar, but it was ignored and those voices turned out to be an inconsequential minority. Other platforms followed suit. This was the turning point which soured the whole experiment.
I still think it can be quite useful when you're hyper-focused on using it to enhance offline interactions and/or certain collaborative efforts. But if you're just idly bouncing around, The Feed will hijack your brain and start pushing you toward things the company thinks will make it more money.
The problem is that social media became an end unto itself, rather than a tool to facilitate other things. Apparently there were hundreds of millions of people with a bunch of idle time who didn't want to do anything challenging with that time other than occasionally be enticed to spend money in an attempt to make themselves feel better about their lives. Their eyeballs were ripe for the harvest. And now we have to reckon with all the unforseen ways this has changed our culture, including the whole 'influencer' plague.
It takes a lot of discipline to avoid the siren's call of FOMO, and most people are not sufficiently equipped to do it. It's inextricably intertwined with our failures to adequately address the mental health needs of the wider population as well. All those of us who are better off can do is lead by example.
Ultimately the problem with social media is no one wants to talk to everyone they've ever met or know of them all the time except for public figures, and then they want to share only watered down PR messages. I guess also people desperately convinced of some political point they want to convince others of. The early days were naive and fun because everyone was oversharing and we were taking on larger risks in terms of public perception in search of fun connections but we wised up, and now only young kids on tiktok still have that naivety.
We need no algorithmic timelines, no manipulation what can be seen by a company. Just what you follow is a scrollable timeline.
Group features that cannot be moderated need to be banned. Forums were good because the mods kept it together.
Same goes for commentaries to posts.
Example of bad faith from Twitter: allowing users to disable replies in order to prevent harassment by mobs, but still sneakily allowing mobs to use quote tweets to dunk. It's transparent. They just want to appear to be addressing the problem (maybe to placate a small contingent of outspoken employees by greenwashing) without actually addressing it.
Another example of bad faith: resorting to content moderation because the real fix (altering dynamics) will cost them engagement.
What's needed is regulation. I don't think the US will be able to do it, both because of ideology and political dysfunction, it'll have to be the EU.
This is the market at work. If the current crop of social media platforms with these patterns hadn’t chosen this path, other platforms that did would have outcompeted them. The fact that people spend so much time in these platforms is proof they are really good at showing them what they want to see.
Wanting to build a “healthier” social media platform is sort of like trying to make a “healthier” alcoholic beverage. We make it healthier by consuming it less, not by changing its nature, because its nature is the point of why we consume it in the first place.
People don't want to be hooked on a website that makes them feel like shit. They keep coming back not because they enjoy it, but because these companies have figured out how to game our primitive dopamine system that has had no time to evolve a defense to this attack vector. So we need regulation to fix this market failure.
That's when it was still good and went down the drain around 2014 or 2015 when the Facebook told me what I should see.
For Twitter I use third party apps that still present me the classic timeline instead of the things they do. And I only follow stuff I want to read, similar to an RSS feed reader.
And ad-funded social media platforms will eventually die when regulation roles in that says what needs to be done. No loss, as it causes more problems at the moment than it solves.
That would require a totally different business model.
For years, I've been convinced that a social network that figured out how to painlessly charged people $0.50 a month for an ad-free, non-manipulated experience would be more profitable per-user than existing social networks.
Any timeline provided by a computer is algorithmic. You just prefer a particular algorithm.
Have you seen the social network behind the css gear submission [1]?
>nobody has gotten it quite right yet
>we think existing platforms have some good ideas, but no one’s managed to create one without profound flaws. we’re borrowing liberally from other sites, but we want to build cohost into something that works well and serves its users rather than just another clone.
There is a huge probability that we haven't figured it out yet. Instead of quitting, we should double down and try new things.
If you can find a way to effectively fight fake news, then there is something to be said for it. Otherwise, sorry, but we've seen enough already.
There's an argument to be made that curation equates to censorship, but I think it's wrong. Anyone can write anything on the internet, but that doesn't come with the right to have your message amplified just because it pisses off a lot of people.
When something is reported, OP can check his facts and alter his content or insist on his view. The reporter then can double down and a moderator looks at it.
Request a down payment for both content and reports, and moderation pays for itself when the losing party has to pay the process.
Don't allow people to post new content as long as a report is open.
The expensive part is the repository of facts. That has to be maintained with membership fees of the social network.
For the grey area, I would allow people to choose their fact provider. The providers have to document the reasoning for their 'facts'. Since time establishes which 'facts' are facts, you can determine which providers are sincere and ask users to choose among them.
As you write:
>During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media companies censored many posts as "misinformation" which later turned out to be accurate
The fact checkers who pick wrong facts stand out and can be excluded. But it takes some time.
However, that only affects people who don't care about their information sources. With a central repository, everybody could check the foundation of "facts" that are used for censorship and switch their fact checker if necessary.
You clearly haven't thought this through.
Users choose their fact checkers. Some have to be chosen, because that's what is required by law. As such, some state agency will enforce whatever has to be enforced.
This is not a complicated idea. Create a platform and a market for the problem, and let the market find the optimum. Right now, every social network has a monopoly on moderation of fake news. That will lead to market distortions.
Imagine Twitter, but it only asks some money from subscriptions, let's say $1/year/user[1]. Now we take away all adverts. And voilà, a wonderful platform.
[1] If memory serves me, this was once upon a time the yearly price for using WhatsApp.
Including HN?
We who? Most of the people enjoy them and spend on them a large part of their time. They don’t want to give up.