- First they are new and cool. The young, hip and rich stay often.
- New becomes old. Shoddy carpet, old fixtures, bad music in the lobby but older people stay until they die.
- New hotels sprout up with cool carpet, music and fixtures. The cycle repeats.
The only way we can ditch them is to ban them and then they’ll go underground :(
What is dead may never die.
Seriously though, your comment gave me a great laugh this morning and made me think about how much of our communication is built off shared pop culture.
Social media often has this idea that it is “free” and so people don’t think about the massive amounts of time and privacy that is given up as the hours whizz by.
Pity really, I'd quite like to do some touring without having to pay!
It is not at all problematic to extract enough value from a conventional hotel visitor to pay for their room. The real puzzle is that a free room doesn't attract that kind of people. You get people who feel obligated to draw penises on the wall, shit in the sink and stab holes in your mattress. The normal audience you get, after making the reservations and/or picking up the key mostly wont be in the room because they don't need it.
Whatever plot one was to come up with to realize it it is almost guaranteed that it would work better if you charged extra for a room with such creative original features all this wonderful product information as the deeper the pockets the more valuable and less annoying the promotional circus.
Which is also why a lot of people are perfectly okay with, and use social media
I would actually not be surprised if that is a model in the future for hotels...
Next, people think “we need AirBnB! Not stodgy old hotels, but cool, real homes owned by real people, where individuals can provide hospitality to each other and everyone wins.”
Consequence: independent operators take on the soulless characteristics of hotels but without the accountability or reliability.
I can see us entering the AirBnB era of social networks soon…
It's "TikTok for Text!"
That’s basically Reddit, except Reddit also has images and video.
Not disagreeing you, just unable to follow the connection you are making.
Essentially:
Facebook = boomers Twitter. = genx insta. = geny ...
(but for some other shorter generational definition)
This comparison makes 0 sense
And 'proposition' is the right word to use, since its really just the promise of social networks that people like. In practice it has not worked as a means of connecting people to each other. Certainly not better than the alternatives it replaced. We should call the experiment a failure.
I'm all for getting rid of social networks, especially general-purpose ones. I don't see it happening though. Most people see them as a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes. If you're younger than 30, you probably don't have an intuitive feeling for what the world is like without them. I guess this is understandable, if sad.
I went off FB for a year or two, only to come back on when the pandemic started. I definitely missed the connections and conversations I had with family and friends across the world while I was gone. If I could have that without feeling like I was contributing to all the shenanigans, I would do it.
For work I created a Mastodon account, and so far it seems very nice. There are lots of cool people posting interesting stuff, and no ads. Unfortunately I'm not interested in the "public-only microblog" experience for my personal life, and fine-graned access control in a federated system is a tricky problem; and my experience with the systems that are attempting to address that issue haven't been very positive.
In any case, one of the core functionalities of most federated software is the ability to migrate your profile somewhere else.
My parents, for example, are much more connected to their relatives overseas. More so than they’re relatives, they’re connected to their relatives’ friend groups. The conversations that take place now when they visit are better. They’re more in touch with more lives.
The ads, the fomo, the general fakeness of it all is awful. But the benefits still outweigh the negatives.
It just doesn't happen.
Good luck with that. Social networks is an idea that is as old as the Internet. MySpace and Facebook were merely a step in a progression that included IRC, Usenet, email. Arguably hypertext itself. If you're not connecting people, what is the point of the Internet?
do you realize that using the mail service is optional? nobody forces you to write post cards.
do you realize that electricity is optional? you can get a shack in the forest and burn wood.
do you realize that water pipes are optional? you can dig for your own ground water.
the world is not made of solipsistic individuals. infrastructure encases, shapes, and forms the possibilities and constraints in which all of us live.
> "You realize they're optional, right?"
> "Technically so are roads and mail and electricity and water!"
so... are you saying we should ditch roads and mail and electricity and water? Your response is one of the sillier non sequiturs I've seen in a while, and I browse Reddit.
My mom didn't have a telephone, she had other friends without telephones, but having a telephone when she was a kid was fundamental to building robust social relationships. The reduction of social bandwidth generally results in fewer opportunities for social advancement, and most people would like to experience social advancement of some type.
That is not obvious at all. I think it's not even true.
Social networks are not valuable for me, and they would not improve my life. I don't want to use them, and I don't.
It's that simple, really.
Social networks today provide service beyond simply catching up with friends and family. They serve as front desks of companies' customer support, they provide easy means of feedback to important political figures... they became a public good and need to be recognized by the state as such.
> Should we go back to the days of communicating to each other via letters?
Or email, or phone, etc. There is no lack of other communications channels.
That said, I'm not in favor of banning these services. I just think society in general, and people in particular, would be better off if they stopped using them.
I haven't used social media for several years, and my life is in no way poorer for it. I miss out on nothing.
I'd argue so. People put more thought into letters, since producing and sending them involved expense of time and effort. Laziness was its own spam filter.
How are you going to communicate with a group of peers who all need to know everyone's responses to your messages... by mail? Do you realize how long this will take and how cumbersome it will be?
How would you make it possible for others, who weren't part of the conversation to come later and rediscover your entire conversation letter by letter?
Letters aren't a good replacement to social networks if you are thinking about a pre-digital age. Newspapers that publish paid advertisements are probably a better replacement... but they also don't quite fit because they lack the function of private messaging...
I don't think we have an equivalent to social networks in pre-digital world.
One of the best politically served groups in the US are elderly evangelical Christians - this doesn’t come from being on social media.
In contrast I'm finding that elected officials, aside from some gaffes here and there, are mostly receptive at the local level to the things we're asking for. If people spent the time they spend ripping on each other on social media instead navigating the bureaucracy and talking to the people that work there they could probably effect some meaningful change.
Specifically, the mechanism by which customer support is communicating with customers on social networks provides a lot of value to the customers because companies cannot gaslight individual customers. This works a lot better than even if you had a lawyer on your side, willing to work for you w/o compensation because the company might just hire a better lawyer.
I've literally been in this situation before: I had intermittent connection problems and had to call ISP to look into the cabling. Once the technician finally came, he found that a squatter took over the entrance to the breaker room on the roof, so he could no longer get access to the switch the company installed there. Because he wasn't able to do anything w/o police intervening and breaking into squatter's illegal construction, he just left... I still had no Internet connection, so I decided to terminate my subscription early.
Well, the ISP wouldn't have it. I had to jump through a lot of hoops, including closing and opening a bank account just to prevent the ISP from charging me for service they did not provide. I did it on principle, even though it would've been cheaper to just pay them few months. Come the end of my contract period, I get a summons to a court because the ISP hired a lawyer to go over cases like mine and try to intimidate individual customers into settling the arguments by paying the ISP (of course, by that time they tried to scare me with a fine that was about ten times the money I'd owe them on the contract).
So, I had to search for lawyer organization which volunteered to provide customer protection, but due to them being an NGO, they had a requirement that they would only provide their services if I could show that my yearly income was below X, which, unfortunately, it wasn't, and so I had to pay a lawyer from my own money to deal with this case. In the end, the ISP backed off, but nobody compensated me even for the lawyer I had to hire. Needless to say that it's not possible to compensate the time spent on this.
This was before social networks were popular enough to do this:
----
I had a very similar situation, which was simply due to me moving into another apartment which didn't have a coaxial outlet, so, I couldn't continue my contract with the ISP. They decided to pull the same trick. It was a single post on their Facebook page describing the situation that got me a phone call from their customer support department and my contract was terminated. Without charge.
Social media is a natural progression of society. It has all the same positives and negatives of an local social structure.
Humans didn’t evolve with access to semiconductors, but the social dynamics in social networks have always been there. They’ve just been augmented by semiconductors.
I doubt anyone here would disagree with me that it’s better having more ways to communicate with relatives overseas. That’s all I’m really saying. These new methods of communication come with serious baggage, but they’re still inherently positive I think.
I love the concept of forums and little communities here and there, hell even the little post count and quirky username colors based on seniority meant something to me in those days. But as soon as those things are turned into mega money making machines, the incentives are no longer with the users.
Usenets were the first social networks, but their monetization scheme didn't allow for mega international companies to exist: they were paid for to ISPs and ISPs only pay other ISPs for traffic, they don't pay for individual services.
Email used to be the same way... sigh.
Web became the platform that enabled for advertisement to be mixed into the product. I cannot tell if Hotmail or similar saw the promise of ads on the Web, or did they "accidentally" succeed -- whichever the case, it's the Web that took over other Internet applications because it made it possible to monetize it in a different and a more scalable way.
Ideally, we'd have an Internet application for social networks, instead of it being a Web application. So that we pay our ISP for usage. We just really don't have that kind of application (yet?) And, I'm not sure ISPs are thrilled about this (will the effort be worth the revenues?). Definitely, companies like Meta aren't interested in that, as that would undermine their core business.
But then, who knows... ad spam seems to be able to find its way no matter the technology. You can think about SMS as being similar to an Internet application, and you do get spam ads over SMS too.
Another problem of social network as Internet application would be the search. Search works better when it's governed by a single entity which cares about indexing the data in various ways. If it's distributed, that'd be very challenging to implement, especially because it wouldn't be clear who's responsible for storing the indices and who pays whom in the end.
Another challenge would be the connection between user's identity and their ISP... well, there are a lot of things that would need work, but I don't think it's not possible overall. In legislative terms, we'd need to recognize social networks as a service similar to postal service, and regulate it accordingly...
Not all posts are equally important. If someone only has time to read 5 posts then they should see important life updates from their friends and what they are interested in and not just show you 5 posts from them same person about how much they enjoyed their dinner and how good it looked.
Everyone on the Web who used ads wanted to know your profile and wanted to manipulate the contents they provided to you based on it (and the wishes of those who pay for the ads).
Again, the problem is not the social media. The problem is the Web.
Why do "we" need to ditch anything? People are building it because they want to, and will use it if they want to. Or not.
They're there for a reason. It just so happens that this current implementation of entertainment is particularly popular. Is that because they lack other options or because this is actually prime entertainment? Or is it because it's essentially free and mildly fulfilling and socially useful for people?
Either way I doubt a "solution" is to essentially "make it illegal."
The trap is exactly what you just said: "it's essentially free". Which of course it is not. Time is one's most valuable resource, I guess it is up to you what you value it. Mental well being has value. Privacy has value. I really don't know that many people that walk away from FB or IG or Twitter and say "that was fulfilling". Maybe I am really off base there.
Facebook started off GREAT! I singed up almost as soon as it was available to the general public (remember it was just open to university students at first).
At that time my timeline was basically text only and the content came from only my friends. It was like a fun online party -- not unlike online chat systems from the old days.
Then mysteriously all the people I enjoyed interacting with, disappeared from my timeline. Then I started getting content vaguely unrelated to my friends. Then meme photos I didn't want, ads and now basically just videos I hate and am bored of.
So the original concept is fine. It's just where we ended up that is mind numbing and alienating.
It's not new (we've been doing that to young people since media was invented) but the level of pervasiveness is.
Also meeting people in person is often annoying and damaging. I jest but, also not. :p
I'm glad early fb was a good experience for you, but studies have found that when fb was just opening to universities, lower grades and higher demand for mental health services would follow.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
Full disclosure: one of my research areas in university was adolescents, and working exactly with these types of studies.
Anyways, the main theme which keeps coming back in this material is that the actual change begain in the EARLY 2010s, which is exactly what I'm saying. My assumption is that basically as social media started to focus more on visual content (photos and videos), people started getting weird feedback about how awesome everyone ELSE was, but you were not. Etc.
Keep in mind that teens are notoriously hard to study, and alot of this material is self reported. Many teens are basically always depressed and suicidal, and or become so for some small reasons such as the results of a report card or other such factor. This is why they are a higher risk group for this sort of stuff than say the average adult. At the same time you can't really shelter them too much, because it's the experiences they gain in adolescence that allow them to build their life toolkit.
Also keep in mind this is just US teens. The rest of the world is -- well -- the rest of the world, so the data cannot really be extrapolated to more than this country.
Moxie at Signal was right when he said the real “social network” is just your phone contacts.
Yeah, they probably do…
Back in the before times people would keep up with their “Social Networks” by running into them at parties or whatever and “Update their Status”. Sometimes people would even “PM” each other over dinner and drinks outside of these “Group Chats”.
Hard to believe, I know, but somehow the human race managed to keep going.
If so then they got it from some one else outside the network because it never appears in my conversations and I use the networks exclusively via a web browser.
People just started using instagram as a first means of contact because it felt less personal. It allowed for more “escape hatches” if it turns out that you don’t like the person so much.
If phone numbers allowed for varying levels of trust like instagram, it would work as a social network today like it once did in the past
You aren’t locked into social networks. Don’t use them.
Consumers vote with their dollars.
The constant noise of “Paywall” is why so much is ad based.
So, if you’ve got a better idea, build it and see if they come.
[Updated]
Clarified that I meant successful companies.
Note how circular this is. You say "consumers", not people. Who is a consumer is also defined by said companies.
You aren’t locked into Heroin. Don’t use it.
Consumers vote with their dollars.
So, if you’ve got a better idea, synthesize it and see if they come.
Do you really think social media and heroin should be regulated at all similarly?
It’s only social media.
We’ve gone way too far in needing others to help us.
“Someone help me stop using [favorite social media company]”
This isn't at all true. If it were, WeWork and Uber and Doordash would all be profitable and wouldn't need eye-watering levels of subsidies. Companies build whatever the purse strings holder is comfortable with them building.
I suppose I should have said “successful companies”
AFAIK uber/doordash are profitable on a per unit basis in most developed markets, it's just a combination of marketing spend in new markets and extravagant developer salaries that make them lose money.