Is this the end of social networking?
reb00ted.org
reb00ted.org
Well put. It's interesting that we pivoted in my adult lifetime from:
1. Myspace's emphasis on sharing things on your own webpage, essentially a hosted blog 2. Facebook's evolution from "hosted blog" to "friend update aggregator" to "chat client" to "friend update & ad aggregator" 3. Instagram's callback to simple update sharing (with pictures) and a chronological ad-free news feed 4. Snap's emphemeral sharing 5. Facebook's slow agglomeration and bastardization of all of the features that made Instagram and Snap distinct. 6. TikTok's addictive advertising machine that barely includes any friend connections at all.
Initially I was concerned that this would mean the death of real social media, just like the article initially suggests. But I really like the conclusion the article ultimately comes to: we basically don't have social media right now, we have advertising engines masquerading as social media. Better that Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat show their true colors and become disgusting advertising machines just like TikTok.
If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet. microblog seems promising, but I think even mastodon could provide the experience I'm looking for.
Personally I've migrated from sharing things with friends and family on Facebook/Instagram, to a few group chats where friends and family share photos, life moments, etc.
Somewhere along the line Facebook and Instagram made me feel like my personal photos and updates were competing against ads and other more engaging content in people's feeds, and I felt like I wasn't communicating with the people that I was on those platforms to communicate with in the first place.
Judging by the increase in messages I get through more private channels with casual update content, I don't feel alone.
I would be curious if others have had similar experiences.
The social networks of the past were useful as a way to keep in touch with people. MySpace, early Facebook, and the countless others from back then. Now everyone’s online 24/7, and accessible on multiple services all at the same time, all the time. You don’t need social networks to keep in touch with anyone anymore, their original raison d'être is gone.
What’s sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and whatnot. People want their bubbles. We’re all here on HN for that exact purpose.
100% disagree. I'm here to find ideas I disagree with and tell people how they're wrong. I'm not looking for an agreeable experience here. I'm also here to learn about new tech.
I prefer to talk to people about what interests them. Sometimes it is interesting. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I agree with them. Sometimes I don’t. With most people all four are true. I form my own opinions from there. They change frequently. I vote based on my best current mental model.
It would be more accurate to say that some ideas require more work here. The reasons why are open to debate.
It isn’t about Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian ideas it’s about their red button talking points. So you can discuss say taxes or abortion as long as you don't bring politics into it or get repetitive.
What most often confuses people is you can get heavily downvoted or upvoted for expressing the same idea depending on who shows up to a given discussion about say Nuclear power, Bitcoin, etc.
I think so long as you follow guidelines generally and don’t outright attack individuals then you’re mainly ok. The community might downvote your idea to invisible but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t allowed - just that not enough people thought it was good. That’s fair.
This might be a nitpick, but this depends on your POV of who's allowing/disallowing content.
HN itself allows a lot of comments that the collective HN community does not allow -- by downvoting them into invisibility.
Certain ideas aren’t allowed here — even when calmly stated and cited with evidence.
For example, citing the clip of the BLM founder saying she’s a “trained Marxist” would get you banned: HN was in flat out denial, even though it was her own words on film [1]. She is literally answering a question about the ideology behind BLM.
Unfortunately, that kind of censorship enabled BLM to commit the fraud they did [2].
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM5zUwiCTzw
[2] - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/amazon-boots-black-l...
For those interested in whether there's any truth in those links (there is! though maybe not nearly as juicy as promised), Wikipedia has a great overview as always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter_Global_Netw...
Part of the reason I come to HN is that I know there are entire classes of content and ideas that I will not be exposed to at all so I don't have to waste brain cycles on sorting them.
Similarly I use a spam filter on my email.
"Ignoring" is just choice. And that concept can either promote or extinguish fair and free communication.
I assume you and I share similar political beliefs. Call it censorship, or call it "choice", it ia clear today not all people have fair and free access.
If the government uses its power to extinguish speech (or to burden channels through unfair promotion of counter ideas), then that is censorship. And that is a problem we should all want to fix.
How many other times do you think it'd be appropriate to bring up the same topic? Probably very few, and it would get deleted if not.
Even more important (not that many of us receiving our wages and dividends from probably pedophiles isn't important), the strong connection between Silicon Valley of days past, and, most importantly, from today, with the Military and Security Complex is also shunned.
Whole valley at one time was off limits to anyone from the Soviet Block.
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2022/08/08/can-tech-resha...
At no point did any of this 'trained Marxism' show other than in a small handful of the organization's goals, generally the most neglected ones.
At least i would hope...
But have you considered the countless lives that were lost due to bugs from memory-unsafe languages over the past ~70 years? A murder-for-hire app in Rust would still cost us less lives overall, if it increases the popularity and adoption of memory-safe languages elsewhere. It's a just cause, one could say.
I, for one, am very happy with how the assassination story of Rust is coming along!
You can't use any title you want, for example, they will regularly edit the title and thus effectively change the general meaning of the submission as read by most folks who just skim titles. Which has the knock on effect of making the post less (or more) desirable for users to read/upvote.
For example titles starting with "How I ..." are auto stripped to "I ..." there are quite a few other similar auto editorial changes.
There is no way round this that I know of, so those parts of an idea are non-negotiable and not re-workable.
I have seen instances where this practice completely ruins an otherwise excellent submission that would have been #1 on HN in days of old.
In which case I urge you to, when you see an example where you think the policy has indeed had a negative effect (which I'd also suggest isn't quite as basic as "did it lower the expected number of upvotes" but also "and not because it removed clickbait from the title"), either comment mentioning dang's name and saying why you feel that, or send him an email to the same effect (hn@ycombinator.com)
Not only have I often seen him engage in discussion and be open to changes for a submission when people felt a title shouldn't exactly fit HN's usual rules, but I'd also expect him to be open to changing the rules themselves if your feedback leads to his agreeing that there's a trend of submissions having the meaning of their title unfairly changed due to the generally good rules.
All that said, it's not really an example of a "HN bubble", nor of an "idea" that isn't allowed on HN.
Don’t bother answering that question though because you’d be wrong.
Two men disagree and they bring a local wise man to listen to them. He listens to the first guy making his case, and tells him:
- You're right.
The other guy protests: Hey, here my side too. So the wise man listens to his side of the story too, and then tells him:
- You're right.
A bystandander witnessing this scene then calls out to the wise man:
- They can't both be right!
And the wise man says:
- You're right, too!
You must be new here.
It's abuse.
HN has broad tolerance for a lot of ideas - and a lot of subgroups exist here that don't exist on other platforms. No matter what you believe, someone on HN holds a counter view and can probably give you a good debate about it.
In what sense? The underlying social motivation/interest is still present. And it's not like fundamental communications capabilities have actually changed. Chat's been around since the 90s and SMS is the new email. And social network applications grew and thrived in those situations because pull-and-scan-social-feed across multiple circles has some distinct effort-reward profiles.
I could see the argument that the algorithmic and advertising imposition eventually drive out enough of the value that people opt out, but that's a statement about the business lifecycle of a social network app, not the underlying reason people might use / like them.
What's the feature of today's chat systems makes them qualitatively different from those that are 30+ years old?
The level of technical knowledge required to connect to IRC or a BBS in the 80s was far higher, which meant that only a tiny fraction of people bothered.
had most of the basic features of IRC.
I feel that the point made is a good one. Given that we can share what we want directly via instant messengers that everyone has "turned on" all the time, value proposition of Facebook drops dramatically. Anything you want to share you can share directly and immediately get it to whoever you want to see it.
In any event, the fact that chat programs are different or more common now doesn't mean they didn't exist in the 80s and 90s. IRC is and was chat as much as Slack or Discord are.
One of my first childhood memories was my brother showing me a real-time chat with someone in Germany. It was 1982. The letters appeared one... by... one... on the screen. It was probably a subconscious part of why I went on to study German later.
It’s that we don’t much want to anymore.
The novelty of general-purpose social networking was twofold, in order depending on your circumstances at the time:
- a new angle to seeking a mate
- wow, a way to see what someone you don’t really know anymore is up to and say hi
The former market opportunity is now filled by specialist apps.
The latter, while it was fun for a while, and might still hold some prospect for thrills, is nothing to build a business around.
None of those sites are good for that any more. All the interesting people on reddit have been banned. No one sane uses twitter. And finding people to talk to on tiktok is plain impossible.
That's their form of the internet, because everything else won't even load with speeds less than 100kBit/s.
Also: Whatsapp somehow works on dumbphones. I don't know how (yet) but there's apps for KaiOS, Samsung Bada and other old phones. I wonder if vendors reverse engineered the APIs and implemented their own clients.
How "dumb" are those dumbphones? I ask because since around 2002 (prior to smartphones), some phones allowed apps to be downloaded. From around 2005, most phones supported downloadable apps, written by third parties.
They were called "midlets", written in Java, and I wrote a few of them myself.
Facebook had a short lived glory when we were all open with ourselves. But inevitably it wasn't long before the issues came. Someone posts a pic on a night out with some friends and another mutual friend gets upset they weren't invited. That creepy friend of a friend starts liking all your bikini pics. The nice friend of a friend starts posting attention seeking stuff that makes you like them a bit less. Family politics get aired in public.
People shared less of their lives and except for a few egotists there isn't much of that old genuine content we all loved. It's all content aggregation filler now.
Chat groups allow for keeping in touch but allows us to those groups like the 'No Homers Club'
In India WA does an excellent job of being that social graph. There are segregated groups of family, colleagues, collage friends and what not. Messages, memes, updates are shared on those groups. Lot of commercial transactions also take place. So Facebook usage has dropped significantly. Of course WA is owned by FB.
yeah, but meeting people there isn't really meeting people. the friends you have on those aren't real friends. you can stay in touch with a friend on social media, but if your friendship is only there it's only pretend.
We live in the Infinite September. Scale is not conducive to valuable or fulfilling communication. Decentralization, variety, and focus are. When I want to read about motorcycles I have a forum for that. When I want to plan a vacation with the family we use email. When I have a question about a software project I get on their IRC channel. At no point is my racist uncle (or yours!) involved. This is the potential of the Internet and it is not social media.
When I want to be depressed by all the things that other people have better than me I go to Social Media. I can't think of a single fulfilling experience I ever had on Facebook or any other social media platform. It's just not possible when you put everyone in a room. It's like studying philosophy on a bus.
Social Media is by (my) definition the valueless corruption of the Internet. In that sense I am glad it is dead, I hope it stays that way. Facebook and Tik Tok are the inevitable end-state of "Social Media". There's no "good" social media and there never was. Anyone who builds a platform for "everyone" is doomed to die the death of social media.
So I guess I use social media for the exact reason you don’t like social media. Nobody’s supposed to like that stuff, but I mean, why else would you care what everyone else is doing other than to compare status?
A more positive one would be those people actually got better at their skills and improved as people. I'd like to think I'm a better person than I was in high school.
But if you're constantly exposed to their social feeds, you would have the data and probably know better. :)
From my observations, some industries (film, for instance) will give people a chance, then get rid of them if they don't work out - so a lot of people I vaguely knew had very brief acting careers.
Other companies seem to trundle along with really dysfunctional leadership, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, I suspect it's because the explicit aim of the company (say, mining) is not what the company is actually doing (say, some kind of rent extraction) so it doesn't matter that the CEO has no skills to speak of.
Also, when you know the people, and you see like an interview they've given, you can usually tell if they're bullshitting.
It’s sad seeing a guy who was in the “gifted and talented program” with me is apparently now a janitor who posts pictures every day about what concert or sports game he’s at and he’s always alone. I was excited for him because he took a picture with a woman and I thought he’d met someone but it turned out to be his sister.
I think matrix.org would be more fitting, especially for your holiday planning.
Modern and secure, but still federated, also you can talk to people across platforms using bridges!
As much as I hate Facebook/Meta and everything it stands for, I got a lot of value out of Facebook and Instagram during my teenage years. I lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere, not very walkable/bikeable but also without any other kids my age to hang out nearby. My school was really small (I graduated with a class of less than 30 people) and there weren't many like-minded students.
During the 2000s, Facebook was an absolute lifeline for me. It's where I lived. It's where I met new friends. It's where I shared (cringey) posts about my passions, my interests, books and TV shows and movies and games. And my friends talked about that cringey stuff with me on Facebook, over chat and in comments.
But that was a world before Facebook killed the chronological feed, before they introduced ads in the feed (remember sidebar ads? Not enough $$$ to pay tens of thousands of engineers, I suppose), before they started "recommending" content. They were still manipulative, but they provided a valuable service.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that early-stage simple social media was useful to many people, and that's likely why late-stage social media remains popular today -- people want that core functionality. I made lifelong friends on there, just like you did on blogs, forums, and IRC. At the early stage, it wasn't about influencers and ads. Just slightly-more-than-local attention seeking.
15 years ago, we’d lost touch with old friends and acquaintances because there are a ton of people in our lives that mean something to us but that don’t warrant much 1-to-1 contact through phone calls or messaging.
Myspace and early Facebook reinvigorated those relationships with relaxed, casual networked update blasts, but then iMessage, What’s App, were able to make the same connections more private, more personally shaped, and more collaborative.
So social networks drifted towards public feeds and commercialized feeds, which is what TikTok — as a well-funded latecomer — had the luxury of aiming for directly.
The blasting life updates at everyone know ever knew part of it though is just so unnatural. It was a novelty for a while but that stage is well over now. Facebook eventually got features to allow people to be more granular about updates but they have never really pushed them.
At one point I would use Skype with friends which was terrible. Discord now though is basically everything I could ever want for group messaging.
Reminds me of:
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.
Which was achieved by WeChat since 10 years ago. It's something to think about that why are we so behind technologically.
I don't have as much hope for such a thing. To me, this trend is also a reflection of perhaps the societal devaluing of IRL social connections.
In a world where encountering "new people" was novel, and typically done only In Real Life, maintaining that connection using an online component had value. You may not encounter that person again, and good connections are rare, so you want to keep in touch. However, over time, the internet has made it trivial to encounter new people, even if the encounters themselves are more trivial than the previous In Real Life meetings were. Perhaps there was a two-way conversation before. Well now, you just read their tweets or watch their videos and click a button to follow.
Tracking real-life encounters isn't as valuable as it once was, especially when you can find an online substitute who is actively creating "content" to keep you engaged.
The newer connections are also way more transactional than they used to be. Just about everyone is selling something or trying to use their channels to promote themselves somehow.
I think there's an interesting overall trend in here between the fall of social networks and societal devaluing of real life connections (as well as a trend of them being more transactional), but I'm not an academic, so these are all just hunches.
Is there a species of 'Tinder'... for finding friends?
Over the last 25 years, all but one of the people I've dated, have been people I met online, including the mother of my son. Most of them have been people who I'd never have crossed paths with if it wasn't for meeting them online.
Under no circumstance do I want to go back to the horror of relying on meeting people offline, without being able to quickly filter out people I'm not compatible with first.
Is it because it's impossible to maintain meaningful relationships over the internet? My experience in the online forum and gaming communities implies otherwise -- some of my most meaningful friendships started (and continue) in those communities.
I suspect, instead, that it didn't work because Facebook murdered it. They abused dark patterns, injected ads, suggested content, radicalized grandmothers, and hacked engagement to the point where relationships didn't just stagnate, they withered and died because they were hidden and forgotten.
I have a lot of chats and friends in Telegram, and it's very easy to maintain those chats over time because I have a chronological feed of interactions right in the app. Facebook hid and diluted an entire medium, their original focus, "posts from friends" in favor of content they thought you might engage with more. Facebook chat exists, sure, but app invite spam diluted that to hell just the same, so it doesn't have the same chronological list of meaningful conversations that I have in Telegram. And notification spam diluted the meaning of any new developments on Facebook -- comment replies, messages, whatever.
And now, Facebook pushes videos, "TV", reels, stories, and god only knows what else instead of just letting me see posts from my friends and family. I think it's fair to say that online social relationships can work... they just don't work in a hostile environment. It's kind of like maintaining your friendships only in the middle of Times Square, surrounded by ads, tourists, and costumed performers trying to scam you out of $20 for a picture. Not impossible, but eventually you'll get tired of it.
I have a hard time believing this is generally true.
I also wonder if this is a (temporary) side effect of larger societal issues. It certainly feels like all of my old relationships are trending towards hyperpolitical interactions (even ones where we agree on most topics) and/or transactional/performative obligations. In the city I live in now, I've yet to meet anyone that feels like a decent enough human being to even want to be friends with. Maybe the problem is me, or widespread cynicism, or people concerned with bigger issues than just friendships. I don't know, but I don't really see any reason to put effort into making and tending friendships (especially IRL friendships) anymore. I'd much rather have relationships where I can come and go as I want or have time (online groups, meetups, hobbies, being friendly to strangers, etc) without worrying about all the added context of "are we friends?" and everything that entails.
I would say add that we tend to hang with people that engage in active hobbies and probably consume somewhat less media than average. But maybe I’m just reasoning backwards there…
Aside: if you happen to live in Minneapolis - I’d be happy to buy you a coffee sometime.
Someone who is antisocial, and just in it for their own profit would say exactly that, and that's exactly the type of person you don't want long-term relationships with.
Between this and some syncing issues that didn’t yet have fixes, I dropped it before putting in the effort to get fully on board and I still need to find a replacement.
People's ideas of update cadence are interesting. I find it really odd that people want to have to run frequent updates and want to use unstable software for the important things nowadays. For important things, I prefer stuff that'll still run and work the same in 20 years.
A contributing factor to the “stalled” impression was that the original team/developers had publicly announced a new product March 2022… the exact same month that regular updates stopped.
In terms of real connections: I prefer to share things that matter in my life directly with people who care to hear about it. And, notably it has advantages you lose on social platforms like being able to read the room, having a pretense of trust and assumption of goodwill and intent, synchronous engagement that makes true debate possible, and most importantly speech is not regulated. You can have a beer and speak your mind amongst real friends.
In my opinion, it's not real connections that are being devalued, it's needing to uphold the illusion that you have 1600 of them that is tiring and obnoxious (and simply not possible). Where I think you're onto something is that I'd say it's less important that real connections start IRL. It's perfectly normal to meet someone online and become close, possibly eventually turning into an IRL friendship, too. So I agree that it's less important to maintain "friendships" in the way that those of us who had FB in HS thought was going to matter in a social media world. But I don't agree that that means "real" connections are being devalued. Most people are just fine with ~10 real good friends and some family here and there.
We have this: Facebook. At least that's what I use it for. I keep a list of most of my friends there, and use it to chat with many of them, including video chat. I don't post anything, ever, and almost never look at anyone else's posts. It's just a glorified "friend phone book and chat app".
It is unfortunate though that as "a glorified phone book" Facebook engages in so many practices that are creepy and intrusive. I think that if Facebook did just provide phonebook-like functionality I would be so interested in using it. Instead, it feels more like an application(s) built to serve ads that happens to provide some phonebook functionality.
But, ultimately Meta's business model won't change for users like me -- and I don't blame them. And they don't necessarily need to change because although everyone seems to dislike the practices they engage in, nobody really quits Facebook.
If you aren't using their apps and block their embeds on third-party sites it just sits there and allows you to be what our parents described as a global phone book.
I deleted everything I uploaded, unfollowed everyone, locked it down and made a backup. Most of their indeed very creepy practices are optional.
edit: this is also probably a good learning for other services: have a working non obstrusive mode to retain almost-off users.
For me, this is exactly how it works. I never see any ads.
I know that for you it's just a "friend phone book and chat app" but for others it's basically a casino. Consider deleting your account and keeping in touch with your friends via other mediums (email, text, letters, and phone calls go a long way!) instead, for the good of the community at large.
That sucks, but there's no better alternative just yet.
>Consider deleting your account and keeping in touch with your friends via other mediums (email, text, letters, and phone calls go a long way!)
Ok, I've considered it. No. It's stupid. Phone calls are horrifically expensive and don't have video, and letters cost a fortune to send across oceans. If you want to be a Luddite, go ahead.
"By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships."
That may include extended family, neighbors, coworkers, your acquaintances from hobbies/bar/church/whatever. They're not all close friends or immediate family, but still people that you sometimes interact with, and might want to contact.
Conversely, there are plenty of friends whom I know personally, but did not connect via Facebook (we use IM for that). This may probably be counted towards the close friends I really cared for; only few (no more than 10) people fits this criteria of mine.
[0] indicates the average number of friends is roughly 9
[1] indicates the number is roughly 5
[2] indicates the number is roughly 16
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[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/10891/americans-satisfied-numbe...
[1] https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/friends-adults-amer...
Family, and local friends, I did not friend on Facebook, because I was going to see you anyway.
My mom asked why I wouldn't 'friend' her, and I responded that I talked to her on the phone for 60-90 minutes every single weekend. Without fail. Plus, I used to snail mail her printed photos on a regular basis.
When she died, I found two boxes crammed with every photo I ever sent her.
I’m older. I used PCs without modems. I didn’t have access to the internet until I was 15, and I was ahead of the curve. So I didn’t grow up with social media. But I was a heavy user. Now this an a relatively anonymous Twitter account are all I have left. Every time one evolves past me being able to have conversations, I move on.
But through all of that, nothing has really changed. I have my handful of friends. I have the restaurants where they know my order when I walk in. My kids still play with the neighbor 2 doors down.
In urban settings where people are swarmed by other people, they form little communities. The dynamic isn’t much different than a small town. There’s just irrelevant people moving around and through it.
That all said, I’m thinking about moving to “the sticks.” So maybe that’s just my family and I maintaining an old world view I’m attracted to.
Facebook? I’d rather be fishing.
I see it instead as a recalibration of traditional social interaction. We didn't used to be obsessed with the lives of 500 loosely related people. We cared very narrowly about our immediate friends and families. Occasionally someone would mention a funny anecdote about a friend of a friend. Without social media we go back to our evolutionary default. I've already embraced this way of living again and it's wonderful.
Well, I don't. I don't care about them.
But I guess that most people do connect. When I inspect other people profiles, they might have 100 or even more "friends". I have may be 5 friends in my life and may be 20 people I barely know.
The solution is simple. Social network services should develop algorithms to reduce that clutter. Unfriend everyone, keep only those that you actively engage with often. People should keep their social circles small by default and social network services must encourage this behaviour. This is natural for human. Yes, I guess some people do have 100 friends in their real life, but that must be a rare exception.
Just because I know that guy name and he was introduced to me 10 years ago, does not mean that I want to have any connection to that guy in facebook. If facebook knows that we have friends in common, very well, present me that information when I stumble upon this guy. Like I saw his comment in some public community and next to his name add "1 common friend". But don't push that information to me without reason.
May be we should get rid of this "friends" feature at all. Just add ability to follow someone and that's about it. It must be asymmetrical and there must not be a way for someone to know whether am I following him or not. And, I'll repeat it again, never do not suggest me who I should follow. I'll find out it myself.
I think that messengers like telegram are winning because they follow this model. Telegram never asked me to add a "friend". I naturally have some chats that I'm interested with and that's better way to communicate.
Boy is this off-putting. Even amateur athletes and nobodies in hobbies I follow on Instagram are pimping anything and everything. I can't hate someone for trying to make a buck, especially as full-time athletes in non-lucrative sports, but it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But not as bad as the taste of protein from anywhere other than Mega Protein Source! Use code THISSHTSUX for 10% off of your next purchase!
I deleted my Facebook account pre-COVID, and I don't miss it at all. And my Instagram account is next. It brings me no joy anymore. It has not for several months now.
My only online 'social' activity now doesn't involve any IRL friends at all. About three or four really pleasant Reddit groups that actually help people learning new skills, or trading ideas they have tried. So little snark, it is refreshing as can be.
I don't think too people actively use them, but some people do. I'm actually unsure how Classmates actually works --is it a subscription model, what's it's business model and could it end up morphing into the TheFB of old but subscription based? Maybe the draw of advertising money is too strong to resist.
Worth mentioning is Jimmy Wales' effort in this vein: https://wt.social/
Then, there's also a lot of small and medium sized manufacturers/artists where their whole channel is showing off their stuff. Kind of ad-like, but quality tends to be good and it doesn't feel sneaky like subtle product placement. Ex. there's a chinese factory that manufactures polycarbonate dome houses, they'll post montages of their domes, nicely decorated in beautiful locations. I think the product is cool, so I intentionally follow and consume their 'ad' content.
what about Wikipedia? Maybe it's the exception that proves the rule. But as far as I can tell, no online knowledge store has come close to the comprehensiveness and cultural cache of Wikipedia. And it's not showing ads constantly, it relies on donations entirely.
I remain hopeful that a federated social media service that offloads the hosting costs to passionate individuals (with modest ad support to keep the lights on) could survive just fine without venture capital or advertising creep. Think: WoW servers, AKA "blessed" federation.
Venture capital-driven business models will never align with my interest of keeping in touch with friends and family. The desire for profit and revenue growth (what us filthy plebeians call "greed") is simply too strong.
1) Trust is the scarcest element in social media today. Any social media company that is built on advertising will never have the trust of a subscription-based social media company. Companies that address scarcity tend to be successful.
2) What's no longer scarce: the underpinning technologies of social media: capturing and displaying photos and videos on multiple types of devices, recommending new social connections and posts. What was cutting-edge in 2004 is now well-known.
3) Meanwhile, users are getting increasing used to paying for subscriptions: app stores, streaming services, SaaS applications, cloud services, etc.
4) Connecting socially with others is a basic human need. This only increases as some kinds of jobs can be done from anywhere, and friends relocate far away.
5) As Facebook/Meta and others pursue the novelty-driven user experience of TikTok -- "show me what's interesting from people I don't know" -- it creates room for companies that want to get back to meeting the need for keeping in touch with friends and family, even when remote.
6) Large tech fortunes have created a donor class focused on legacy, not profit. Example: MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos. Or Craig Newmark, of Craigslist.
--
Put all these together, and it seems like new social media companies could be created along the following lines:
1) Mission-focused. Focus on social connection first, not whatever drives the most revenue. In other words, don't get pulled into the latest fads, as Facebook is doing with TikTok.
2) Subscription business model. This eliminates the conflicts of interest that drives Facebook's trust-eroding privacy practices. Again -- trust is the scarcest element.
3) Subscriber-owned business. Each subscriber owns a portion of the company, and thus the company has a fiduciary, legal obligation to protect their interests. This is similar to what Vanguard does -- investors each own a portion of the company -- which forces Vanguard to act in their interests. It's the opposite of Facebook/Meta's ownership structure, where Mark Zuckerberg controls 90% of class B shares, giving him control over the company. [1]
4) To fix the cold-start problem [2] inherent in building a business with network effects, make the service free until it gets to a critical mass of subscribers. We can debate if critical mass is 10 million users, 100M, 1B, or some other measure. But be transparent about the threshold, and the subscription price once its hit. Speaking of price...
5) Keep entry level prices low to be point of being negligible for the vast majority of users. Maybe one dollar a month. Whatever it is, keep it lower than most other subscription services in order to encourage adoption, but not to shift back to the problematic ad-driven model.
6) A very low subscription price, at scale, can fund innovation. 100M users at $1/month is $1.2 billion per year. That's enough to pay cloud infrastructure and the engineers to build and run apps. Back-of-the-envelope path: suppose for argument's sake that half of that, $600M, goes towards cloud service providers. That's approaching the $1B/year that Netflix spends. The other $600M could fund 2000 engineers at $300k/year/engineer. That's enough to build a great deal of capabilities and bring them to emerging platforms (like AR glasses, cars, IoT/smart home...).
7) A business like this probably might not attract traditional venture capital funding. Even if every one of Facebook's 3 billion users all switched to this business and paid 1 USD/month, that would be $36B per year. That's well short of Facebook's $120B/year [5]. Who might fund it? A set of mission-driven investors, who wants their legacy to include a trusted, self-sustaining organization that socially connects the world. Craig Newmark could be one such investor (at least advisor), having built one such Internet institution (Craigslist) that facilitates community and commerce in an economically-sustaining manner. But there could be many other investors as well. Again, the technologic acumen and capital required aren't what's scarce; trust is.
[1] https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-facebook-si...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Start-Problem-Andrew-Chen/dp/006...
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/netflix-pays-1-billionyear-am...
[4] https://datareportal.com/essential-facebook-stats
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
It's never going to happen.
Federation is a solution to a problem no one actually cares about. Obviously "no one" here is somewhat hyperbolic but so few people actaully care about this you may as well round it to zero.
We haven't had an at-scale federated network since POTS (and, by extension, SMS). That's a historical artifact. And look at all the problems POTS/SMS has with spam, caller impersonation, robocalls, etc. Now part of that is due to these being open addressable networks rather than the opt-in networking that has become dominant now.
But to say that's th eonly reason would be to miss the point that any federated systems will always have bad actors.
In the 2000s we had XMPP as an effort to make IM services interoperable. Remember how Google got flak for removing the ability to talk to non-Google services? That was mostly misplaced because the reason it was removed was that Microsoft allowed its IM users to talk to Google Chat but not the reverse.
Spam exists on POTS/SMS largely because smaller exchanges "launder" bad traffic with good traffic (and charge higher rates for it) to make it harder to filter or even identify who the bad actors are.
As for open? There's really no incentive for this except from the "losers" (in the market).
I think this conflates two things: the number of people who are familiar with a problem as a discussion topic (yes, that’s very niche in this case), and the number of people who are affected by a problem and might be receptive to a solution to it if one was available and understandable to them.
Did my friends and family hate IE enough to switch away themselves? Nope.
Did I care enough to find out about Firefox? Yup. Did my friends and family hate IE enough to switch to Firefox when I suggested it? Yup.
Social media could be the same situation.
I’d add on to the idea of social media is over by saying the age of social networking in public is going through a rethink (or is just over for a while).
And as much as one wants to take it as a turn towards the networks becoming an ad machine and blame it on networks themselves, I’d also say it’s a human thing. The moment a platform gains escape velocity and starts growing, we immediately see the influencers, hustlers, and businesses approach it with a “grow your brand and audience” mentality. This eventually skews the network towards serving them because they actually bring money and shortly after, tadaaaa. It’s an ad machine laid on top of a content network rather than a social network.
Chats don’t suffer from this so in my experience, that’s where “social” networks are going for now. I’ll hold my breath on federated networks being the next step.
But I think social media brings out the worst in people right now. By constantly "recommending" content that radicalizes people into tiny niche opinions and conspiracy theories and incentivizing "sharing" links and video spam, we're amplifying the worst opinions that people have.
But I'm sure those same people have interesting thoughts too -- something as simple as a cute picture of their dog, or a nice sunset, or information about a hobby they enjoy like woodworking or bike riding. Maybe I'm just an optimist who wants to believe the best in people.
When I look at Facebook these days, I don't assume that my relatives are actually JUST hateful, conservative, xenophobic conspiracy theorists. I assume that's what Facebook brings out of them -- it's what it suggests to them, it's what it suggests to their friends, it's what they see in their feed so it's ultimately what they share and what they end up thinking about more often as a result. But it isn't who they are. I know these people: they love kayaking, and gin & tonics by the ocean, and their pets, and their kids, and fireworks, and campfires, and boating, and books, and gardening, and a million other things. But you'll never see posts about those other things on Facebook because they aren't "engaging."
So we have this divide of advertising products and the rest of us who do not participate in advertising networks. The trend toward the latter is growing but slowly.
Propietary products are usually more curated in features and stability than the free options, and those reach the market quickly. Big companies have money, free comunities do not.
And that's been true of mainstream media for a long time also.
There is no great unfulfilled demand for a version of that which is also semi-public because then you get your public and private spheres mixed up. Younger users appear to have looked at the mistakes of older users and figured out that this is not the right move - they know that Tiktok/IG/etc. is fake and not friend based, the fakeness is sort of the point, they're there to watch the 2022 version of TV, and participate in a popularity contest and stroke the ego/receive affirmation from a Like count.
I guess it is different than "we are interrupting your current show for this important topic," but to be honest, I think the new style of marketing is more sinister. We can expect a TV or radio station to show ads and understand it doesn't exactly reflect the thoughts of the stations. In "influencer marketing," we are led to believe that some 16 year old really knows more about the stock market and crypto than those Wall Street guys.
might be true for people like us. the other 7 billions out there won’t care
Of course I think the whole world would benefit if everyone switched away from Facebook, but no need to rush anything.
A threadmill of products to "bring the world together" under different names and mottos but all sooner or later devolving into advertisement machines. Maybe next: WhatsApp, then Signal then Mastodon? For this to happen, founders just need to sell out, for example to Meta. WhatsApp already sold out but did not yet pivot.
That being said, I'm strongly considering switching to a Matrix client these days, since I like the idea of encrypted chat that works across whatever client I prefer. If you're knowledgeable in the encrypted chat space I'd love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons.
Realistically, if he steps down for any reason and someone decides they need to layer in ads to support it...that'll be the end.
I would desperately like Signal to have a commercial service offering you can pay for which would of offer the possibility of sustainment.
That will kill it even quicker. What does this look like? All users have to pay to have an account? Now you’ll have less users and miss out on network effects. If only some users have to pay, what do they get besides feel goods? Ad removal? They’re stuck, Signal must continue being free. So agreed, Signal has a finite lifespan
If it's free to the user, it has to be ad-supported (or I guess donation-driven; the Wikipedia/Guardian model, but I don't see that working so well for social media). If it's ad-supported that means the advertiser becomes the customer and the point of the thing gets subverted to maximise ad revenue.
If it's not free to the user, then we have to educate everyone that they need to pay for their social media. Not an easy task.
- host your own instance, no limits on usage because you're paying your own way, hosting your own images and content, running your own server
- use someone else's instance, they can show you whatever ads they like (though preferably in a sidebar, not integrated into your main feed) and subject you to space limitations. In a truly federated environment where users can easily switch between instances, those instances can compete based on ad and space efficiency. Some folks, like myself, might shell out for their own instance and host friends and family with no ads and ample space just to be nice.
Facebook as of 2009 was damn near "feature complete" social media. Messaging, photos, videos, comments, chronological feed. It's not that complicated. You could run the whole thing as an open source + donation based project, like Wikipedia or Mozilla. You don't need tens of thousands of engineers and venture capital that forces you to employ dark patterns and inject more and more ads and growth. Hell, I think that governments could even donate to a project like this since it's essentially a public service and (compared to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok) an investment in public mental health.
But that's my point: companies have to keep moving, and optimising, and growing (because shareholders). If the revenue is supplied by advertisers, then they're the customers, and any optimisation is aimed to increase lock-in/revenues/etc based on their experience. The actual users get a worse experience as time goes on because their needs are secondary to the advertisers. Eventually the whole thing ends up where we are with FB: the user experience is shitty and people start leaving.
If this is really going to work properly, then we have to persuade people to pay for their social media service.
Forums and blogs with comment sections are the only high-latency mediums, and I guess we will keep reinventing them every five years.
The whole "broadcast yourself to the world" part of social networks just moved to Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram etc.. I think.
Twitter is anonymous, but 100% public. There is no way to limit your audience to a smaller group.
FB is not anonymous and mostly public. Private groups do exist, but you still mostly need to have an actual name on your account.
TikTok & Snapchat are mostly for people who show their faces, not anonymous.
WhatsApp shows everyone everyone's phone numbers if they are in the same group, not anonymous. You can also be forcibly added to a group of hundreds of people you don't know without permission.
Telegram and Discord are more like old-school IRC was. Just a nickname and that's it, no personal info needed. (IRC did have the hostname, but some networks masked it)
As for Discord, I've got a few accounts and have been asked for telephone numbers 0 times. It's only needed when a specific server demands it, haven't seen any yet.
see
[1] https://spkz.io/
[3] https://gm.xyz/
*disclosure i'm a co-founder of #2
I used to be real hardcore into bitcoin, around the $1-10 range. You people need to give it up already and quit annoying the rest of us by trying to force fit an insanely inefficient technology into every aspect of life.
“Preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
LinkedIn is what the adult version of a social media would be, because most people are happy to share some aspect of their professional life to the public, and professional life is usually fake and a mirage.
This isn't true anymore. You can choose your audience now and there's even more features like that in test.
Interestingly, I mostly see this sort of limiting or disabling of discussion when the information in a tweet is clearly false.
I look back at my Instagram and my last post was 2 years ago. All of the people that I used to see pop up, the people that would like my photos, and I would like their’s, those people seem to be gone. Friends from college, and high school have all been replaced by short videos of strangers, ads, and influencers.
I think the biggest missing piece for me is keeping up with people I know, but wouldn’t otherwise talk to (by any means listed above). It was nice to see those people pop up sometimes, but I have no way of serendipitously finding them anymore. That’s what social media was to me.
Notice I didn't use the word "algorithm" or "social"? These takes are tired and naive, TikTok isn't addictive in any operationally useful sense of the word, people just like it and use it. You may as well write a blog post saying "TV is addictive and it's dying because of commercials". It's just not an accurate conceptualization if the landscape.
clearly there's more to it than "it's simply video first"
vine was literally killed by twitter.
snapchat isn't the same
they both had implementation differences and primarily execution differences that had little to do with their platform, and more so finances
its not just video, its video+algorithm, its video+algorithm+content-subsidies
a lot of popular content creators on TikTok are still from the vine days, getting paid a lot more directly by the platforms now, as well as from whatever they can monetize on and off the platform.
Bytedance (TikTok) is willing to throw a lot of money at this, and they've been extremely high on compensation for engineers for years before TikTok reached critical mass.
I think TikTok is winning because their objective algorithm optimizes for a different outcome.
Facebook and YouTube optimize for time spent on the site. Youtube famously cut ad revenue for content that is watched for fewer than 10 minutes. They both make decisions based on what will increase time spent on the site, thinking that's the best way to sell ads.
TikTok optimizes for content that people love by giving the most reach to items that commenters buy gifts for. This has the side effect of making content that consumers really connect with get paid the most. There is a big difference between what people love and what makes people spend a lot of their time.
Tiktok optimizes for similar metrics. There's no difference there. The main difference is that they are more focused and have been doing short form video from the ground up.
Sometimes you don't want long form content.
YouTube will proceed to show that content down your throat and if you are like most people you will let it. It will make your experience miserable though.
All I get is Family Guy, sigma grindset nonsense, and military stuff. I hate all of those.
Seriously, NewPipe is what all apps should aim to be like.
There is no Newpipe on the Play store, it breaks the T&S of the play store.
Here is the official website for Newpipe https://newpipe.net/
There is no Newpipe on the Play store, it breaks the T&S of the play store.
Here is the official website for Newpipe https://newpipe.net/
Life is better, now. I highly recommend it. Your phone doesn't need a browser.
TikTok is addictive in every category. People are addicted to it just like people are addicted to other mediums like books, radio, and tv. Creators are also addicted to creating for it manipulated by incentives and sponsorship opportunities. It is a borderline technological narcotic.
To be human is to be addicted to something. We are addicted to the many "wants" in our lives being sold through these 15s-3 minute videos.
> You may as well write a blog post saying "TV is addictive and it's dying because of commercials"
When the going gets tough, the tough goes shopping.
There's actually a few books on this! i.e. consumerism and advertising
Four arguments for the elimination of television by Jerry Mander
Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman
The shallows by Nicolas Carr
And the classic, brave new world by Aldous Huxley
It’s only market lag between the revenue source, media source agencies, and the realization that better markets for their business. When that occurs the death spiral hyper accelerates to rapid finality.
Like all death spirals this could have been avoided had they treated their users as a potential revenue source instead of a product. I was watching a history video yesterday about the Aztecs who completely alienated the tribes in their empire in their own death spiral. The empire was already dead before the Spanish arrived, but the Aztecs just didn’t see it yet.
Anecdotally I and many people I know have reached a kind of breaking point where these apps have become so demanding in terms of attention that we have to stop using them entirely. Whether it's YouTube's incessant advertisements, TikTok's infinite scroll or Facebook's insane jumble of a UI/feed these products are demonstrably inferior to their incarnations 5-7 years ago.
A/B testing media (advertising) is extremely misleading compared to testing against something transactional. The goal of a transactional sequence, called a conversion (payment in exchange for a product or defined service), is a supremely simple metric. Although the goal is simple to define and recognize the costs associated are wildly complex. Media is the inverse of this where the goals and consequences are not immediately clear or known but both the costs and revenue are immediately straight forward.
The reason the financials of conversion are complex is because you need to account for the expenses to third parties to pull a user in, the purchasing horizon in time, potential for cannibalism against other purchasing decisions, and various other factors that cost the business money.
The reason metrics associated with media are complex is because users HATE it. Increased advertising presence drives traffic away. Shifts in traffic occur over a wide duration due to a variety of factors so it is almost impossible to measure just how toxic advertising is to a given product oriented business in isolation in accordance with a variable time horizon. Its actually much worse than that for a variety of technical factors. In the past legitimate ad placements have been delivery vectors for content and logic of malicious criminal activity. Advertising logic is frequently poorly written. Many websites will isolate their advertisements into iframes in order to protect their website from accidental defacement of presentation and/or broken logic. Advertisements come into the page super slowly which completely pushes out the waterfall for what might have been a quick loading page.
When I did A/B testing I would describe the media side of the business in terms of illegal job deals. I did this because of so many parallels in the transactions and risks in those markets, not because they are both filthy evil things.
A/B testing is great when you are helping eliminate confusion and dark patterns nobody can articulate more directly.
Illegal job deals was an autocorrection of my phone. I meant illegal drug deals and didn’t catch the change.
I will try to do my own research on how it's done but if you can expand a bit on confusion and dark pattern elimination that would be very much appreciated. I feel like everything I ever stumbled upon regarding A/B testing was "sales funnel optimization" which seems to be the root of much evil.
One example of dark pattern elimination occurs when steps in a purchase process are dramatically reduced. That reduction eliminates opportunities for messaging but increases the potential for transaction quantity.
Perhaps it is a very bad decision which will never work, I don't know. I guess in this ecosystem the only way to at least not lose is not to play, otherwise we will all be eventually brought down to aggressive A/B testing, ad infested, tracking, no-privacy environment, to match other products... I don't want that kind of world.
We’re leaving money on the table, for sure, but I really don’t care. I’m going to make something that is biased to the customer, and they’re going to appreciate it.
The amount of value I’ve gained from threads on people I follow on how to do something or learning something is insane and the “rich, subtle discussion” in those threads on that topic is sometimes just as good if not better than the thread itself.
No denying the default Twitter is loud, and just wants to suck you into mindless scrolling of ads and things to get you angry about, but you are in charge of how you curate your feed.
"distribute misinformation to rile people up"
Around 2012-2014, the newsfeed mostly was just updates from your friends with some ads sprinkled in. Everyone was on Facebook, so if you were hosting a social event, you could just invite everyone on Facebook and they’d hear about it. Birthdays were great because everyone would wish you happy birthday and you would do the same for them. There was a location-based search feature, where you could travel to basically any city and search your friends list to see who was there.
I felt closer to a lot of old friends from growing up than almost any other time, because suddenly everyone was on Facebook and it was super easy to catch up with someone I hadn’t talked to in years.
That’s all vanished these days, sadly. Social events are organized by email again (which is fine but less convenient). I’ve lost touch with old high school friends again because nobody uses Facebook anymore except for a few die hard holdouts.
I really remember thinking “Man, Facebook is just so dominant, I don’t see how they could blow it.”
Turns out, if you keep feeding the growth monster in search of more and more “engagement” (enragement?), eventually the growth monster destroys you.
Facebook was essentially a way to connect to people outside your inner circle, and before 2012 it was a way for younger people to connect to other younger people outside school/college/university. It was similar to what Instagram does now except for the new friends feature.
Facebook works in a social environment where everyone knows your personal details and you maintain a casual-formal image (school, university...) but is useless in most other contexts. Instagram provides flexibility in who you can add, but is bad as a tool for socializing.
My wife and I have never used Facebook. We would miss invites to things all the time since everyone assumes that everyone was on there and forgot that we were not. We used it as a litmus test to figure out who our true friends were. Fortunately now all of our friends have abandoned social media in favor of group texts.
Social Media strongly encourages Hot Takes, because those get clicks. I found myself examining how I comment on reddit, and what people call "The Hivemind".
You can't have nuanced discussions on social media, someone will infer what kind of asshole you exactly are, and that's the end of the discussion.
Some poisoned phrases:
Be Reasonable - "why can't you just be reasonable"
Both Sides - "there are good people on both sides"
Some Responsibility - "she bears some responsibility"
Nuanced Discussion - "you can't have a nuanced discussion on social media"
I'm sure there are some poisoned phrases you react instinctively to.
I think weak arguments are good, actually. You don't need to move someone from the swamp to the mountain, you just need them to get on dry land.
Now I'm sure someone has inferred exactly what kind of asshole I am, and they are correct. This is the kind of asshole I am. The kind that wants reasonable arguments to exist in the real world, even if I have to make them up.
I have often wondered if we can turn gamification on its head, so we can optimize for engaging discussion instead of outrage? There's a lot less money in that, so it'll get way less attention, but I wonder if it's doable?
Of course you're still playing in a game theoretic landscape, so it'll be taken advantage of for sure, but it might still be better than this local minima we're in.
Something as simple as a like button leads to this cascade of odd behaviour. HN seems to do ok with its voting scheme. I'd love to see some folks dive deep in this area.
In other words, yes. The original post was about social media. You can chat on social media platforms, but that's not what most people think of.
The way to do this might be to engage people, who are so interested, in email threads. But that doesn't drive dopamine cycles in the same way.
Two notes:
1. The moderation on the site is driven by the culture of the people on the site. In sociology and politics you can approach things from the top or the bottom - what does the King say or what does the Populace say. Even a King's powers are not unlimited, they need political support from someone, and those people need political support - you can see this many times in history when a king is de-throned (I'm saying king, but you can substitute any political leader)
2. I don't think it's the moderation or the mantra that make reddit a horrific hellscape. I think it's the feeling of righteousness around certain topics. Righteousness is very useful to leaders. It is very motivating, it gets people to take action and vote or give money to a campaign. It's completely natural to feel righteous about topics of morality.
Social media turns that feeling of righteousness into clicks and interactions. When you have clicks and interactions, you can sell ads. This doesn't even need to be an intentional from the company or platform. People will do it automatically.
Unfortunately, that feeling of righteousness may not be personally or socially rewarding in the long term, and it is very destructive to authentic and meaningful conversations.
Just imagine a social network that combines all of the good things invented in the past 25 years: the customizability of MySpace, the visible social graph of Facebook, the easy sharing of Twitter, the speed of propagation of Friendster, the transparency of Web of Trust, the security and user empowerment of PKI, the distributed and decentralized model of Usenet, the lack of spam of a private tracker, the long-term discussion threads of a forum, the solidity of BitTorrent, the ease of access of AOL, and the compatibility and accessibility of Any Browser Web...
Wouldn't you want something like that for yourself and your communities?
I agree that it has to be self-funded, not reliant on "monetizing". But if your goal is a stable utility service, not growing to make a profit, I think it is realistic.
So of course, the single problem of anything geoloc is safety and privacy, which is not the strong aspect of any social network right now. Tinder and others work hard to make their users safe, and it's difficult because users are not aware of it.
Social networks always should have been used to meet people OUTSIDE of screens, for discovering other people and things.
I want to meet people through activities (board games, running, walking), (loneliness is a huge problem in the west!) and except bumble BFF, which isn't popular, there is no popular app to do just that. Of course there is meetup and other things, but those are too narrow.
Neighbor apps are nice too, but nobody use them because they're focused on services, which isn't fun.
Don't you think it's a huge contradiction that current social networks don't let people meet?
but hey, why not? someone should try with the hope to become the new meta in social networking.
Betapet is another example in the same vein. Local scandinavian community for playing Scrabble online against strangers, with many stories of people who even got married to each other. https://www.betapet.se/
Parents with young kids may have other friends with similarly aged children, but many don’t. It can be isolating because so much of your non-work life/time becomes child focused. Kids that age are too young to have friends from school or activities. Some can strike up conversation at parks, but many find the inertia too much.
Good foundation to expand into clothes/toys reselling/gifting, babysitting co-op scheduling, nanny share, etc. which could all be monetized .
Probably a good niche for Facebook though I would rather see someone else do it.
The commercial nature of social media is that there's a perverse incentive to keep people attached to the app or site rather than encourage them to leave the app for physical face to face meetings.
I think the problem is social media in general. As an alternative, a friend of mine recently invited me to a "IT nerds social group" that meets every few weeks at a local pub. There's no agenda other than spending time with like minded people. We have dinner, a few drinks, talk about random stuff, then go home. Sometimes, members will organise between them to meet up for lunch, dinner, or board games.
People are invited by group members if a member thinks they fit the group. The entire thing is a list of email addresses and a regular calendar invites. There's no platform to monetise, no chat groups, no special software.
It's honestly been better than any IT related meetup I've been to.
I really liked the article but am perplexed by the naive ending.
Friends/family and the world are two very distinct use cases. Most people, young people included, are taking the friends/family part private, in chat apps. Then they may or may not engage in a "public square" social network, but probably with a burner account.
The public square part has failed in epic ways. The idea that you can just "build" something that unites people whilst dodging a laundry list of threats and toxic behavior seems optimistic, to say the least.
And yeah, let's not run ads. Ok, fine. But how will you monetize instead? These seem pretty important questions to me.
Some radicals might point out where the expectation, and need, for "monetization" is itself the root of the problem, and wonder if an extractive capitalist mindset could ever solve the problems which itself has created.
Free service with 1GB of storage for family photos and movies and 3$/10GB yearly fee if going above that limit. Storage is very cheap if profit is not your main consideration. You don't even need software employees and just make it open source.
Examples of mission statements that don't produce revenue: Google, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, most news organizations.
Microsoft's missions in 1980 was "A computer on every desk and in every home". Their mission produced revenue. There are lots of examples of mission/revenue alignment.
The following statements are true but not very interesting:
Microsoft was never about computers on every desk and in every home, it was really about selling software licenses to make money!
The Super Bowl was never about football, it was really about selling ads to makes money!
Wal-Mart was never about saving people money so they could live better, it was really about selling physical items at retail to make money!
Facebook was never about connecting people, it was really about selling ads to make money!
Is the Facebook one any more insightful because the monetization strategy is advertising?
And how would they have made money without lots of computers on lots of desks paying subscriptions?
All companies exist to make money, that’s the point.
X === make money. Y === sell something to make money. Z === make money.
I’m really struggling to understand your point.
For example, Facebook isn't really about connecting people, but a hypothetical competitor with the exact same feature set that charged a subscription fee instead of running ads would be about connecting people?
As Huxley hinted, our soma is just technological narcotics. With each new medium of technology brings in a plethora of problems that cannot be reformed.
this debate between will self and adam gopnik on 'brave new world' vs '1984' is really good if anybody has 1.5 hours to indulge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31CcclqEiZw
just grabbed 'amusing ourselves to death' from libby, thanks for the recommendation!
https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...
After reading this article, I am starting to wonder if people didn't simply migrate to LinkedIn because of the degradation of Facebook's quality as a Social Network and as they still feel the need to share their lives, started sharing those cringe posts.
If I were independently wealthy I’d spend my time building a newsfeed for musicians to share music things where it’s similarly impossible to post pictures of text or news articles. You’d need to be vigilant to prevent it from overstepping the way LinkedIn did.
The challenge is that if you can share photos or video or links at all, it becomes terrible.
On the other side, there are social apps which just want me to spend as much time as I can there.
Ahahahaha! As if the normal shareholder of FB, or almost any other company, would tolerate them making less money than they possibly could. There is plenty wrong with Facebook, but the two-class stock structure is not the cause, because a single-class stock structure leads to equally pathological behavior.
The feed of each of these platforms, if it existed at all, was usually a side feature you might interact with (eg: MySpace bulletins) after getting bored doing what you had gotten on to do in the first place: see if anyone had consciously, deliberately reached out to you specifically by commenting on your meticulously composed profile or pictures, or privately by sending you a direct message. And then reach out to someone yourself.
Short of spam, everything waiting for you when you signed on was signal. No noise. Don't like someone but feel obligated to accept her friend request? No biggie—just don't go to check out her profile. You'd never have to take on the indirect stress of learning your friend's roommate takes pride in being shitty to fast food cashiers. You'd probably harbor less resentment and be more optimistic about prospective social interactions with anyone you meet.
And, most importantly (to me, someone who made most of his best friends online in the '90s and '00s), the pull approach encouraged exploration and discovery of new people, communities, perspectives, hobbies, whatever. You couldn't rely on a feed to keep you busy—you had to seek out new interactions. New drama. Whatever. Find good things, find bad things. At least it was your choice to go find them, rather than having them shoved in your face.
I also think most people have lost track of the distinction between social networking and social media. Where the former is focused on socialization around networking (meeting new people, forming communities, etc.), the latter is focused on socialization around media (liking images, commenting on videos, etc.). It sounds obvious when stated, but I think the conflation of these terms has made it more difficult to discuss the differences between what I see as two fundamentally different social experiences, each with their strengths and weaknesses. In some respect, these must coexist, but platform design can favor either direction. Social networking, I feel, is conducive to conversation; dialogue. Social media, by contrast, is conducive to parallel monologues.
I suspect most people would agree that it's better to talk to each other than over each other.
Not to be pessimistic, but this missing the whole point. Just because social networking is gone doesn’t mean it’s somehow in the hands of the people. They will flock to the ML addiction machines and 20 years from now something even more horribly grotesque.
I care about Mastodon, ActivityPub, PeerTube, BlueSky and all these open standards. But these platforms Are sole dependent on users and at the moment, they all look like programmer/activist-centric wastelands.
If I meet an old friend in my city I would take them for a walk in a public park for a chat, or sit at a nice cafe. What I would not do is go to a place where I do not trust the people who listen to sell that information. And this is what social media has become.
It must not be like this, and maybe the solution is really aomething like the fediverse, but social media without the people you like is no use.
Tiktok is more like youtube. It’s a content platform first. Maybe the new generation uses tiktok to keep in touch, or maybe they use something I haven’t heard of, but social networks are bigger than ever.
I think the future of social networks is still not clear though: VR? Wechat-like app? Something else?
It's barely searchable on their native search bars too, and with no scoring or back-linking possible you're stuck searching chronologically. That's only viable on a small enough channel + keyword so that results are limited. Otherwise you don't search, you just ask again.
So far Social media has strived to be just consumption platform, not utility. Social media can drive every day activities from dating to finding jobs to finding summer camps to garage sale to purchasing gifts etc. There is a lot of untapped potential that FB unfortunately didn’t managed to build upon. The problem with consumption platforms is that they will fall out of fashion eventually. It is astonishing that large swaths of humanity suddenly don’t find FB newsfeed interesting any more. It almost happened to so many people and just over span of months. To me it looks like more of biological saturation rather than anything else.
Admittedly the last one seems to be the default (I assume like in most cases, the most popular stuff of all is softcore porn, and therefore it'll default to showing that), but if you scroll past the sexy girls dancing instead of sitting through the whole video, it'll learn you're not interested. So I can only surmise if you kept getting them it's because you're watching them. I don't think TikTok has a feature to detect HN users and turn the algorithm off just for them for some reason.
I did not have a similar experience at all. I’d be a little concerned if I had.
As others have said I think most people’s experience is that TikTok is absolutely phenomenal at discerning what people want to watch - even if they are not aware of their preference themselves.
Facebook sucks and I‘d hope that politicians in Germany would take action against it. Start with the algorithmic timelines. All content only your friends and interests. Nothing from outside to addict you further.
But, yes I agree, I used to use Path also with just a group of 5 friends around 2013. The app was cleanly designed and it definitely felt intimate.
My message, though, is not that BeReal or anything new is going to be the future of sharing info on the net.
I think the future is looking a lot like the best of the past, with improvement.
Which is why I got this info on a newsletter, that directed me to a blog.
The missing pieces are "personal newsletter made easy" (for producing content), "newsletter discovery made non spammy", and "making all those services sustainable without ads".
Their utter inability to come up with consistent standards for policing their walled garden, upon having their hand forced to need to try, indicates that maybe that's not a good goal in the first place. Maybe it's okay if not everyone's on your social media engine.
P.S. I never used Vine too but then again I read and heard about it.
TikTok won because like other guy said; videos are the most immersive media and I claim that people having short attention span made them hungry for short form of entertainment like short videos.
From time to time I watch compilation of TikTok videos on YouTube and I think "compilation" as a media form is another interesting thing that somebody should experiment with.
Speaking of social networking; my understanding of social networking/media landscape is that Facebook sort of generalized social networking and social networking features and now apps like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are specializing in photos, ephemeral sharing and short videos respectively plus WhatsApp specialized in messaging but Zuck did a great job of making Facebook Messenger a standalone app and then specializing it according to demands of messaging crowd. And yea Zuck acquired Instagram and WhatsApp along the way so competing apps don't hurt Facebook and its family of apps.
Photos weren’t always so easy to share. Having places where media was only based on your friends or people you knew was incredibly novel and useful. A single website you could log in to in order to view photos (and eventually videos) related to you was novel when we all had flip phones and a “camera phone” was special.
Sharing media was tough. Photos - let alone, video - required tech, bandwidth, and a whole-ass computer.
I think that in addition to the social aspect dwindling, changing, or evolving, we must also account for the fact that media is so much easier to create, share, and consume. This is true with friends, relatives, and strangers; locally and afar.
We don’t “need” social media anymore because the media part is mostly solved. Fewer and fewer people don’t have a connected media viewer and creator in their pocket at all times anymore.
Being social with media is as simple as texting someone, or many people. And we do it in high definition all day, every day. No login. No ads. No algorithm.
For that reason I think that what we think of as social networks really are dead. It's not what people truly wanted in the first place.
The transition towards "a nonstop amusement drip" has been gradual and effective but it doesn't mean that the current situation was what people always wanted from the start. This has been the evolutionary journey of companies in search of maximum profitability. It has never been exclusively about what people want, it's also about what maintains profitable engagement and eyeballs for advertisers.
There's a general sentiment that people don't like the addictive nature of social media (see other comments in this thread). Social media users have become boiled frogs as the heat has been turned up on monetizing attention. I think it's fair to say that we've not landed on the optimal solutions for social networking just yet.
IMHO the current social networking market has reached an evolutionary dead-end. The platforms are all converging on a "content stream" model or group chat. I think that there are plenty more opportunities for digital social networking that get closer to what people really want but these opportunities are hard to see. Functional fixedness[0] is the biggest barrier to imagining what comes next but more possibilities exist than these.
Imagine what social networking could be!! The best days of social networking are still ahead. Now that the pretenders are leaving, we can actually start solving the problem. Social networking is dead. Long live what will emerge from the ashes. It might not be called social networking, but it will be, just better.
It'll be called "Community". I don't have to imagine. We've been building the Community Operating System for 10 years. And it's available now. No, it's not Mastodon. It's Qbix :)
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
Yes, it's open source and you can use it now. It's basically a Wordpress for Web 2.0 ... keep in mind that Wordpress powers 40% of the Web 1.0 web. We want to power 40% of the Web 2.0 social web.
Back in 2014 my cofounder and I met with Tim Berners-Lee and his SOLID team. There was a movement underway to decentralize the web. Today, Jack Dorsey is trying to build "Web5" along the same lines but with Microsoft ION / Sidetree protocol, rather than SPARQL (@timbl's obsession) semantic data and JSON-LD.
It's coming along. It's always been coming along. But it's open source so many people don't hear about it, until they do. MySQL took 8 years, NGiNX tooks 10 years but eventually they took over. Open source always does.
Watch the video and feel free to spend some time on the weekend playing with it. https://qbix.com/platform/guide :)
Give us a shot if you want to try to a new form of social networking: https://www.aspen.cloud/
I don't think this will happen. I don't think the failure of existing social networks to do this was a fluke, I think it's a systematic problem that will recur every single time you try it. Like a wagon traveling down a dirt road, any social networking platform will eventually wind up in the same ruts as its predecessors. It may be human nature, it may be economics, it may be the incidental factors related to our current technology and networking structure works. I admit I don't fully understand the mechanism, but I'll go out on a limb anyway.
This is like the crack epidemic when I was growing up. China is hitting the west back hard for the Opium wars. First fentanyl and now TicTok addiction algorithms. We are doomed.
I get that tik tok definitely creates another paradigm shift, likely for the worse, but it's not like social networking is not without issues ina very similar capacity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com
As far as I remember that was the first social media website.
We chose to not make our user's album public by default, where most competitors are doing so and benefit from the SEO involved, but we want to focus on sharing with family and friends, not the whole world.
Now the elephant in the room is monetisation and getting people to pay for their usage, this is not easy but we firmly believe it can be done but probably not with a trajectory allowing you to raise VC money.
It's basically a private timeline, written in Markdown and with optional pictures. Also provides a RSS feed.
Not affiliated, but was in touch with the author this week to help him with his Docker setup and hosting: https://havenweb.org/2022/08/10/pikapods.html
There must still be plenty of room and potential value in more focused social interaction that is more highly aligned with user interests other than viral videos.
Personally I lament the demise of forums and BBs.
Friendster was interesting, myspace was weird, but facebook just became a boring manicured lawn. Eventually it turned to astroturf; fake green to make it look beautiful.
Perhaps snapchat is the evolution of the social network; a closer "social" live snapshot of people we are close to.
Or perhaps its something else.
Most social sites have stayed in the UI paradigm of 2003/2004. Just have a look at how much wasted space there is at LinkedIn.
Sites like Lunchclub, Clubhouse, and Finclout are sites where the tools are expanded through social networks (i.e, come for the tool stay for the community)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_serv...
↑ it's a long list
https://makeawebsitehub.com/social-media-sites/ ← "101 social networking sites you 'need to know about' (ugh) in 2022"
Like Facebook hasn't been that and tried to be even more so since their very first day.
The string of articles with threatening undertones about Tiktok should really lead people from the US to question their tendency to give a pass to the most egregious behaviour from tech companies as long as they are US.
Social networking has pretty much replaced TV & traditional press - now it too must morph.
the biggest obstacles though I think to the social network are the app stores - not necessarily their own decisions but what politics of the day may impose on the store.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mQK-J2Y...
But what is next? Long tail social networks?
1: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/08/01/tiktoks-poison-pi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220811190332/https://reb00ted....
Whose rollout of what now? I updated my app to be sure, even though it only showed fixes and perf in the update. I loaded it in my browser and it looks the same as it has since I last looked months ago. Is this overzealous hypothesizing about being A/B tested or something?
If we keep inventing the same things over and over again my bet is that the next big thing will be connecting people in small groups based on geographical location or sub-culture like in the long long ago in the times of IRC.
I can see Telegram broadcast channels (or Signal/Matrix groups with only sending permissions for admin) filling the void for people who'd like to "microblog" short updates like a blog, but just for friends.
The push into short form is just another way to get users to stay in app longer. Come for your friend's posts/stories (or marketplace, groups, etc), stay for the Reels.
Not the end. Just the beginning.
We just need a better way to filter/trollkill.
What more do we need?
Unpunished? To continue committing their moral (at least) crimes?
Like it was when I started using internet and IRC
TikTok is similar to TV. People would sit around the TV for hours per day, TikTok is usually in the magnitude of minutes. The algortyhm also does not feel politically or culturally motivated, unlike Reddit.
No.
For a brief period of time, the internet genuinely subverted the corporate beetle-men and the gatekeepers who've always owned the "official" or real world. You could send an email to a well-known, accomplished person and there was a 75 percent you'd hear back. There really was a culture of punk equality... of course, we were quite harsh to people who used the platform to say stupid things (and, since I was young, I said stupid things a lot), because that's requisite if you want to stay relatively meritocratic. The internet was smaller in the 1990s and there were far fewer ways to make money from it, but it was legitimately subversive.
We've lost that, though. Twitter used to be a way for nobodies to gain a degree of influence. Now it's the opposite--instead, it measures and ratifies our lack of influence, because every time you apply for a job, the bosses know that you're no threat if mistreated--the fact that you only have 3,000 followers, as opposed to 100,000, proves that.
The internet and the web didn't fix capitalism; instead, to the detriment of all of us, it ended up looking like capitalism. The technology grew up too fast; our moribund economic system hadn't died yet (and still hasn't). This was bad enough, but if capitalism is still around when we see AGI (granted, I don't think that'll actually happen for at least a hundred years) we are properly and irreversibly facefucked.