You’re Not Imagining It: Social Media Is in Chaos | Hacker News Reader

You’re Not Imagining It: Social Media Is in Chaos

nytimes.com

12 pointsrajeck7 comments

I don't put Facebook on my phone. My friends there are a close circle of trusted family and friends that I want to keep up with. But it's a dumpster fire.

My feed is clogged with ads, suggestions, thirst traps, quintuple posts, and spam. Any content from a friend or a page where I willingly gave consent, that's lost in the noise. And yet I persist in trying to follow along. I doomscroll repeatedly through the same posts (there's no way to mark everything as "read") and sometimes the landscape looks a little different, so it's definitely got its addictive hooks in me.

I try not to engage with posts that are not something I've subscribed to. If you comment on weird pages, you are likely to get in some drama or get a creepy friend request from a bot.

I don't fall for phishing emails or common scams elsewhere, but at least twice, I've fallen for a Facebook scam where someone impersonated/hacked a friend's account.

I feel like I don't spend much time on Facebook because of this, yet I'm collecting "Top Fan Badges" from little pages where I just "like" their every post.

This may be a tangent to a tangent, but if your website or app has a "Message Center" or "Notifications", please ensure that it has features to manage those en masse.

My bank, payroll, and several other sites will send me private messages, or notifications, and these pile up over time, and if I go to clean them out, it's not even worth my time, because each message demands a four-step rigmarole to send it to the bitbucket, and there's no "Mark all as read" or "Delete all", and there's no selecting them in a group for a mass operation, either. At that point, I just hope and pray that they eventually expire on their own.

May I suggest:

https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#facebook

I think the world is in chaos, caused by the aftermath of what we did to the economy during COVID, and the upcoming AI takeover, which is happening very gently, not Hollywood style, although you see Hollywood went to strike because of it, basically. It's just taking jobs, and it's coming for whole companies and industries too, as we quietly whisper to one another that it's just making us more productive, and if we learn to use AI all will be well (as if there's anything to learn). The new equilibrium is something none of us can foresee. In fact I'm sure it's something none of us have foreseen. But it'll be weird.

Even Discord is a problem for me.

Its a great app for shooting the breeze with strangers (or real friends), but its an absolute nightmare as a forum, information repository, support board, subreddit replacement, media hub and such.

And I think Discord the company likes it this way, as the sheer inefficiency keeps users engaged longer.

Consider r/redditseppuku

Maybe removing the word "in" from this headline would be more apt.

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