Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out
bfi.uchicago.edu
bfi.uchicago.edu
I find this really interesting sociologically, because at the algorithms level, this means that political discussion in A Small Society is actually curated or influenced under-the-hood by a US-based Megacorp.
Basically, if you're not on FB in My Small Society, you're missing out a good deal of political discussion.
There have been attempts of building local, homemade online environments for political discussion in my country, but these haven't really taken off, because, well, everybody's already on Facebook, including politicians. My only hope is that FB will become increasingly annoying to use because of their ad policies, and maybe this would cause more people to abandon the platform and build homemade alternatives on their own.
IMO all kinds of decentralised Smolnet-like things might have good potential for political discussion in Small Societies, but maybe they're still waiting for their time. Quite possibly, simply waiting for the next generation of users -- that are more touchy about the technical, surveilliance and algorithm-level details of online discussions.
As adults realize more and more people are not daily Facebook users, invites has gone back to other platforms like eVite but overall, the lack of seeing the latest TikTok trend is much better mentally and productivity wise than endlessly scrolling through content I don’t care about.
I just struggle to see how your strategy makes any sense or what the purpose of it even is.
Because the top stuff on that is usually click bait trash and tabloid level celebrity shit and political garbage and sports.
I just don’t see anyone learning anything interesting from that. Main page Reddit is mind rot.
(extra credit for bussy, i'm only a decade out from zoomerdom and i don't know how to break that down)
That's not a dig at you. You're too busy doing stuff and getting along to actually have any idea what life is about. That has to be a biological necessity or you'd implode
Seems like you’re too unimaginative to consider a younger perspective imo.
2) The low quality content on the fyp is actually representative of the state of affairs for many youth. Media and data literacy is not a strong point of GenZ. The amount of ridiculous conspiracy theories(both left and right) going viral is a parallel universe of the infamous boomer political chain emails.
2) this is the kid of comment that makes me feel more confident. Like… shut up. No, you won’t better understand the youth by ingesting garbage and calling them media illiterates just talk to people and ask questions.
The point I was trying to make is that you are unable to imagine what browsing Reddit at 50 will mean to you; how important staying contextualised with pop culture will be to you.
Your Ego is ephemeral, in constant flux. You can't imagine yourself accurately. When you're young you know things will change but it's impossible to predict how those events —health, jobs, homes, children, deaths, friendships, hobbies, your politics, etc— will change who you are.
I'm also saying that's okay. As long as old.reddit.com still works in 30 years, we'll all be okay.
Or perhaps this is a deeply irritating conversation and insulting line of conversation despite claims otherwise.
I think it's a fine idea for a fundraiser.
When I was in middle school, we had an annual fundraiser for the American Heart Assoc. It was one of those "____-a-thon" style events where we all had to jump rope for as long as we could, and we gathered pledges from family members ("only 1¢ per jump, Aunt Sally!"). But this was only for an hour, and it replaced our normal PE period, so it wasn't a diversion from the normal course of schooling. And not everyone participated.
That's the kind of thing I had in mind when writing that comment, but now I'm realizing the parent comment was talking about the entire student body, for the entire school day.
I agree with you. My original take was hot... and bad. :)
1. Create a product that solves a problem
2. Sell the product to those affected by the problem
1. Create a "product" that creates a problem
2. Create a "product" that purports to solve that problem
3. Conduct surveillance and sell advertising services to someone else
That means the opposite. The disutility is really low and the network utility is positive. If I charged you $29 to have all your peers lose Tik Tok, you'd say no. $29 is too much because Tik Tok doesn't hurt that much.
Think about how much you'd pay for something that actually hurt. Would your ceiling be $28? I think not.
It's nice to know that you'd happily pay a sum of money you're capable of paying to ensure ambulances can't get their patients to a hospital, people can't drive their wives in labor to have the baby delivered, trucks can't transport medicine between cities, farmers have no efficient way to get their food distributed once harvested.
If you look at an average user's feed, it probably breaks down into 30% traditional advertising, 20% nontraditional advertising (via influencers and friends shilling for their employers and promoting their side hustles), 30% content by people they have no social relationship with (celebrities, etc.), 15% low-quality posts from acquaintances, and 5% content from legitimate friends.
That is a whole lot of junk to have to sift through just to get the occasional scrap of legitimate social interaction.
These are advertising networks first, and social networks a distant second, even though they ostensibly involve social graphs.
So I can understand the fatigue people feel about having to scroll and scroll and scroll just to stay in the loop with people they have an existing social relationship with and genuinely want to know what's going on in their lives.
So saying people use TikTok directly to keep up with their friends might not be the full picture. But I'd still say for many people TikTok plays a role in keeping up with your friends in that trading TikTok finds is a popular activity for many friends.
Actually I wonder if there’s a market for an actual social network that is restricted to only being social.
Maybe you can only have 100 connections and you can’t post links or rants. Just life updates and photos.
They used to be social networks until they got littered with short-term engagement boosting content and ads. Facebook in 2006/2007 was so awesome.
It demonstrably reduces happiness and life satisfaction. It’s just bad.
And it’s easy to quit. Really.
Even later the groups function was great for many.
On balance it’s been bad, but it has its moments in the sun.
It was also a desktop experience so it wasn’t nearly as potent as it was when the smartphone showed up
There's a huge market for them. They're called private group chats, and they're popular everywhere. The problem is that you can't make much money off of that, precisely because they're socially valuable (i.e., they're strictly socially-driven, so there's no opportunity for in-line advertising, or recommending "new connections").
The problem I most often experience with group chats is that not everyone's on the same platform (excepting SMS) but old fashioned social media has that issue too. They also don't scale super well to large clubs or organizations, where I think having topic-oriented posts or threads as the default becomes valuable.
I consider the inability to do this a feature, not a bug. Group chats are socially segmented, with friction between those segments. That crazy uncle who loves conspiracy theories will be confined to just the group chats you have in common. You don't get insufferable loudmouths at scale, amplified by social media reward structures and algorithms.
I believe Path tried to do this too, and failed.
Many I’ve been exposed to wouldn’t know what to post if it wasn’t regurgitated content or rants.
We could go back to the early days of Facebook and Twitter: “I’m having toast! And it’s not burned!”
It could be an improvement.
Money is only a tiny corner of the issue.
When this kept happening I realised the only thing that matters in sales is... actually making sales. Everything else is window dressing.
A dozen catering trays of salad get tossed into compost.
All the fried chicken is gone in less than 5 minutes.
For instance, I think it would probably be fair for you to sell your car for the blue book value... but I'm not offering to buy your car. I don't need another.
Were you asking them to open their wallet and hand you 5 dollars and that's it, or were you asking them to go to an unfamiliar website, click around, enter their credit card information, and then spend time learning how to use the software, and do it all right now?
It's all really dumb and obvious in hindsight.
I wonder if the use of a Sales Website facade is more accurate about this -- by this I mean the practice of setting up a sales site before the product is ready, solely to count how much of your traffic converts. It's not an uncommon practice and I'm guessing it would give a more accurate estimate than simply asking "would you pay for this?" merely as a hypothetical.
Essentially the observation was the same. A person claiming they'd buy something is worthless information. He had some strategies for getting around it that I've long since forgotten.
It's apparently not on archive.org yet. I just dropped my copy into my next donation box. It'll be there eventually now.
The term he used was "pretotyping" that term will probably yield everything you need.
People always choose hypothetical money as it's a wildcard, even if in actuality they will spend ridiculous amounts of it on the thing you are testing in the first place.
The existence of hypothetical money in surveys screws them up terribly, as people are both willing to spend and accept hypothetical money in ways that often don't translate to reality.
Even the article's own title is somewhat baity so I've changed it to a more neutral version of the subtitle.
The price to delete forever and never look back will be higher.
$0 is my price.
I wonder why the 94% care so much about a phone that they do not even intend to own.
I can't help but think that this study simply shows that more people should mind their own damn business.
Either you care about owning status symbols or you don't, I don't think taking one of them off the market would make a difference.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
That said, I've read about the "blue bubble" phenomenon and it's truly a bizarre manifestation of consumerism. I'm European and the Android market share is really high over here, so I haven't witnessed it first hand.
Also, green bubble messages are not e2e encrypted, and their contents are sold en masse to (or simply slurped up by) surveillance organizations.
iMessage has none of those issues. Signal only has a few of those problems. Its bubbles are blue (not by Apple’s doing, but still, blue bubbles, cross platform, and it is not intentionally a royal pain in the ass like android messaging).
Since you are in Europe, you probably don’t use SMS, and are therefore shunning the green bubbles just as much as any iOS user.
Even counteractive techniques such as mindfulness, or gratitude journaling must first be acquired—and not "for free," either!
You insist, vehemently, that the fault lies with the insecure so, from whom are you trying to deflect blame?
Amongst my colleagues, like me it's a badge of honour to run an old phone. The last nokia standout only ditched it when they turned off 2G. He went with a minimalist phone which could do google maps acknowledging GPS was useful. He does nothing else. On the whole, chosing to run a phone with high MaH battery life and at least some commitment to update is a good choice. Apple actually can conform to this, because the older models are 7 years in, with software support.
Let me introduce you to the Garment District (Fashion Industry).
People spend thousands for clothes they only wear for a couple of nights out, over a few weeks.
It's a fairly wild industry.
Honest question: who cares if your iPhone is old? Maybe I'm in a wrong demographic but flashing top new smartphone in front of acquaintances stopped mattering around the time when everyone graduated and got a job (so everyone could buy one and it stopped being "cool").
Real opinion surveys are hard and you cant infer much from the results.
People around you see if you have the shiniest, most expensive toy or not. It's stupid to care about it — but we're stupid and that's nothing we can really do about it. Comparing yourself with others and caring about social status is something that's built-in very deep in our psyche by evolution. It's irrational to try to ignore or completely conquer something so foundational to our being; the best we can hope for is to channel it to something better.
Of course, HN is full of people on autistic spectrum or adjacent (me included) who may not feel the same emotions or psychological reactions as a neurotypical. But, once again, it's irrational to judge an average human being by yourself in this case.
It's irrational to expect humans to not have any irrational thoughts or inclinations.
Social media is a near zero cost good. Seeing the ratio of preferences indicates something about what buyer behaviors are driven by.
The iPhone example is likely a reference or contrast point.
Finally - marketing is industrialized poking your nose in someone’s business is, and selling them things.
I’m eagerly anticipating the first social media company to take money from every user in order to shut it all down and burn the code.