First-gen social media users have nowhere to go
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I didn't need to send a text message any longer, I could send an instant message or a post to a group of friends and family. Social media really hasn't got much better for my quality of life than that. It's now filled with crap, random videos, random influencers, eat this, don't eat that, you're not motivated because of x, read this/read that.
Having said that, for me it's more about attention span, these social media apps have grabbed way too much of my attention and continue to find ways to keep me opening my phone.
I can clearly see that these apps are trying to keep me looking at content and that's it, they aren't really adding value to my life, they're trying to make it my life.
Just the other day I was googling about a TRV and ended up in a German home automation forum. A new user started a thread posting a very specific question that was about the mechanical connection of the TRV to the radiator, they explained the issue well and included a photo. In the photo you were able to see the exact brand/model of the TRV. The very first reply was literally just "why are you using X? Aren't you reading this forum?" Like, this shit would get downvoted into oblivion ob sites like reddit, but since this was an old, well established user with a four-digit postcount, another two or three users chimed in commenting about the TRV sucking. Not a single mention why it sucks, or a Link to an according thread. This was German forums in a nutshell to me.
I used to be a staunch defender of FB on that basis - while everyone else was complaining of having hundreds and thousands of not-really-real friends and not finding any value, I was finding it useful to keep up with my actual friends in small ways. Friends who are all over the world and who may not see each other for quite some time. In those situations you often lose track of each other's day to day lives and the friendship slowly feels more remote and fades.
But they killed that. Step 1 was to take away all options that would allow me to see a chronological feed of what my friends are up to in favour of their algorithm. Step 2 was to insert more third party stuff whether I wanted it or not. No, I don't want to see short videos of the girl with the cleavage or the guy with the car or whatever it is that dog is up to. Please stop trying to make me.
Step 3 seems to have been to just flood everything with bullshit.
How would you like to follow this? This local group is suggested for you! This group that is not local too! How about one for nostalgia of a band you've never liked? How about 1500 variations on star wars meme groups? OK, maybe now one friend post. Now how about a cat thing? Or something about conservation? Here's a fan group for an old movie!
The number of IRL friend posts is now much smaller because people have moved off the platform as it becomes less useful. And it's harder to find the content they do generate because they're buried in shit.
By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users as they must be reporting favourable engagement metrics. But I'm pretty close to just giving up and its network effect feels to me like it's just in a death spiral.
I'm pretty sure 100% of their growth is coming from the developing world where they basically _are_ the internet.
It is still useful for one other thing - looking up opening times for local businesses that may not have their own website. But at that point it's not the social network part that's doing it, it's serving more like a geocities page...
There was a time I had a relationship issue that was pretty stressful; I discussed it with a few people (my family members) via FB messenger, the way the frontpage immediately became wall to wall 'walk away bro' 'she's cheating bro' 'man up bro' type memes and stuff that served only to spread alarm and despondency was ridiculous and so obviously keyed off of private messenger conversations.
I genuinely think it's a cyberweapon that should be destroyed and that anyone that works there has their hands literally dripping with blood, because I could easily see people who were less well grounded and less able to solve the problem directly (i.e. by talking face to face) being driven to severe levels of despair by such tricks.
Before engagement algorithms, influencers and news outlets everywhere … it was just what your friends did today. It was mostly stupid and sentimental but that’s what humans are anyway.
I’m sad the world now looks like a worse place.
Sure, in some ways it brought people together. But I think the net result is worse and has divided people and the world, and monetized relationships.
I wish we would collectively realize this, and just abandon these apps, and go back to real life connections.
But it’s too late for that, I’m afraid. The world is already addicted.
I will say that I find discord to be a breath of fresh air, but I haven’t really found a true community there, more like disparate groups of people who share common interests but rarely first names. The internet today is either terrifyingly closely related to your first and last name or a hall of mirrors hidden behind myriad layers of post-irony. The veil has been shattered: either you sign up for “real” talk with people you will never know or settle for a blanched façade of communication with real-world acquaintances who refuse to really show themselves for fear of what that might mean.
This only works very rarely, and I don’t think that it can work today anywhere. When my favourite subreddit had 5000 subscribers in 2014-2015, it worked. There were meaningful conversations, because every active people knew everybody else, and nobody was asshole with each other. Nowadays, I can’t find such communities, and of course the same subreddit now with 400000 subscribers is a terrible place. Even smaller ones behave like these larger ones now. People who want to achieve something, or simple assholes find these places too quickly, if it’s open in any way. I’ve also met people who behaved in real life like during a stupid political argument on an anonymous forum. That slowly becomes the norm for too many. Btw, game theory indicates that this should happen when most of your communication is with strangers.
Also politics, and state of the society in my original country definitely made people in Hungary more asshole. The society, how people behaved there 20 years ago, basically collapsed there to a depressive and anxious state (“conservatives”/alt-right/“classical liberalists” hurray!). This can be applied to most of the countries, but if you are lucky, just not that extreme way. That also doesn’t help to find any kind of community where there are no toxic people.
Which is why it didn't last. When there was a novelty to it, people tried posting things to see what happens. Being something new, they didn't know what to expect. But soon the novelty wore off and the stupid and sentimental revealed itself as being cringy.
As such, the people made it clear that if they were going to continue to produce, they wanted tighter and tighter control over who can see it. They wanted private chats and closed groups, not a global newsfeed for all to see. Which, indeed, Facebook delivered on, but that also destroyed the "what I did today" content for the casual observer.
So, that left Facebook to draw on professional (or wannabe professional, at least) content creators to fill the void. And here we are today.
> I’m sad the world now looks like a worse place.
There does seem to be a missing gap in news about regular people. Before Facebook you could read the newspaper to find out what your friends "did today". Seriously, look at newspapers from the last century. There are pages upon pages of stories like "Mr. and Mrs. John Smith invited Miss Jones from Nantucket to stay at their home this past week. A good time was had by all."
But maybe lacking that isn't actually worse. Perhaps there is something to be said about staying close enough to your friends that you already know what they "did today" without having to read an account in the news?
Until the 'like' button, you had to either start or contribute to a discussion. With the 'like' button, the door was open to zero-value 'engagement'.
Skinner tells us that rewards for any kind of conditioned behaviour are most effective if they are delivered on what he calls a ‘Variable ratio schedule (VR)’, meaning that the reward delivery should be proportionate to the stimulus response, but not predictably so. It’s like one-armed bandits in the casino - you put in 100 coins, you’re more likely to get a reward than if you put in 10, but it’s not predictable that every 50 coins you’ll win something. Or if you go and like 20 photos, then maybe someone will like one of yours back.
So I ended up 'interacting' more with likes, hoping for the social affirmation of a like in return. I ended up spending more and more time on Facebook, 'liking' this, and watching that, but I think the quality of personal interactions decreased. Once healthy friendships fizzled out into yearly birthday messages and the occasional like on a post.
But what was once a place to catch up on what was going on in the lives of my friends (even if it was just ‘anyone going to the pub tonight?!’) became reposts of recipes reduced to a minute’s play time. Opinions about divisive issues, boiled down into pithy quotes in curly writing on square backgrounds.
Without the 'like' button, would this have happened anyway? Maybe. But for me, the 'like' button was really the beginning of the end of Facebook.
I've more or less removed Facebook from my life by now, but I do lament the passing of the early Facebook—a platform for people to share and chat and be social, rather than a place where people compete for internet points that only win Facebook more money.
To which that quickly turned into "I don't mind Joe as a distant friend/acquaintance, but I don't really want him to know my every move." and soon "‘anyone going to the pub tonight?!’" posts went out the window, moving them, if still posted at all, to restricted regions where there is stronger curation of who can see it than just a general friend list (or the public at large, in some cases).
I wish there was a social media all my friends were on that didn't try to show me anything. All I'd want is chronologic posts by friends and family. Also, no "so-and-so was tagged ...", no "so-and-so commented on" unless it's my post or a post I commented on, no "you're all caught up so here's a bunch of other stuff", No "shorts/loops", No more than 1 ad every 5 non-ads. I'd use it way more if that's all it was.
I recently finally quit Instagram because it was all noise, no signal.
All of this and more wasn't here when social media become a thing - we all had fun talking to each other and sharing funny, stupid and interesting stuff. Of course there were weird and dangerous people or communities around but they were keeping themselves at bay.
Personally, I believe that once social media become a collective virtual conscience it since then didn't do anything good for the whole society. On contrary - it seems it become a tool for various agendas, people who are trying to dismantle the known society and introduce some weird substitute propelled by ads and influencers. And they are giving us a false sense of happiness, engagement, commitment to causes - just as they artificially smile to us from these gaping youtube thumbnails.
Mastodon is way too niche to have the variety and the relevancy of X and Facebook is just way too cowardly to build a platform that's actually relevant to real life and not just wasting time while selling as many ads as possible.
I think the best way to be up-to-date with people is ironically to use messenger app stories, they are almost always encrypted and will show up to all of your contacts without any algorithms in between.
My best alternative so far is searching the HN archives at least for certain kinds of technical questions. Lots of firepower here despite it not being a Q&A site.
(Never used Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter)
Tangent, but: I've honestly never stumbled upon a question on SO that had been closed objectively unfairly. Not in 5 or so years, anyway. Can you maybe share a story?
Got closed because I was asking for recommendations (!) which was against the posting guidelines that I obviously had not read.
There was another ~1-2 years before that which got a few helpful responses/discussion and one or two that were off base. It got closed for attracting low quality responses.
Suffice it to say I wasn't lazily shotgunning SO but posted only when thorough research and experimentation hadn't gotten me over the hump.
There are many such communities alive and well today, on for example Discord.
Here's one I use often, for the Bevy game engine: https://discord.gg/bevy with 3100 users online.
The issue as I see it with reddit et al is they are too open and too large.
When there are too many unknown people around, users tend to treat each other as strangers and that can turn ugly fast.
I think this is related to tribalism [1], where you can have relations and "know" a couple of hundred people, but with too many people around you no longer feel the same connection with them, they are all strangers to you.
That's just my take, but I think there's something to it. Most if not all enjoyable groups I found, even on reddit and facebook seemed to be working because there were just a few hundred to thousand people, rather than a 500k subreddit. The same held true on older forums, where usually you have a few hundred active users.
Discord is also realtime chat/voice/video presentation and file share.
Unlike IRC all past discussion is available and searchable, so it's more like Slack / MS Teams in that regard.
https://www.chipford.com/list/list_life.htm
"Every list seems to go through the same cycle:
1. Initial enthusiasm (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot about how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).
2. Evangelism (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list, and brainstorm recruitment strategies).
3. Growth (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up).
4. Community (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other; newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone -- newbie and expert alike -- feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and sharing opinions).
5. Discomfort with diversity (the number of messages increases dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if other people don't limit discussion to person 1's pet topic; person 2 agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads themselves; everyone gets annoyed).
6a. Smug complacency and stagnation (the purists flame everyone who asks an 'old' question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies are rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor issues; all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited to a few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list).
-- OR --
6b. Maturity (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many people wear out their second or third 'delete' key, but the list lives contentedly ever after)."
I think the overgrowth phase in #5 is why social media doesn't work in scale. This is what I tried to address in the parent comment (the stuff about Tribalism).
It's not exactly the same, but it sure feels close!
As the opposite, more minimalistic approach, I started to create different thematic feeds in newsfeed (a terminal reader), and I quite like the result. I check different sources, but it demotivates me to spend too much time with it.
The two I use for many years already are:
- https://miniflux.app (OS, Minimal, web interface and can be used with all clients that support Fever or Google Reader API)
- https://reederapp.com (iOS, Mac)
Well sorry, you can't just completely ignore the biggest up-and-coming social networks like that. I left Twitter for the obvious reasons, and the combination of Mastodon and Threads has been a pleasant replacement for me.
Eternal September is as absolute a law as thermodynamics. I don't even recommend Mastodon to people anymore. It's selfish, but in this day and age of algorithms, dark patterns, psyops, influencer culture and AI, all engagement must be considered toxic, although the dose makes the poison. The day Mastodon does "seize mass culture" is the day it becomes something unrecognizable and irrevocably cancerous.
Nothing come even close to that, mastodon is just a couple of small niches within tech and some news organizations, you won't find anything near to how Twitter works and you won't find anything even close to being relevant as it is.
I personally think most of the complaints that hacker News writes about Twitter, stem from who you follow.It really depends on who you follow, if you find the right people it's going to be your source for what's going on in anything you're interested in.
And unfortunately Elon doesn't seem to be interested in keeping that, he is just interested in milking every last dollar out of it and the result is the platform fighting against its own users.
Unfortunately he also proved something very dystopian while he's doing this:The network effect is so strong that even if you fight against your users، nothing is going to change.
This article explains it fully: https://stratechery.com/2023/threads-and-the-social-communic...
My comment on it is also relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684443
Really. It was a successful federated system in its day.
FB failed for me in the early years. Even though I only ever added friends I knew in the flesh,I didn't really care which coffee they picked at Starbucks or what cute thing their pets did.
When FB moved into the next phase as global forum I found that, just like with email, most of USENET, and pretty much any digital communication tool/platform, no one had the attention and/or capacity for reasoned, balanced, nuanced, irenic discussion of any length.
It's one reason why Twitter was "successful" at political/cultural/philosophical "discussion. Despite the complaints about character limit it's what people actually wanted. It's also why I couldn't use it.
For years I used to write family and friends email like I would a postal letter. I replied in-line instead of at the top (thanks MS for destroying that sane practice), but even if when printed the email would be a page, page and a half at 12 pt font, I got constant compliments about length.
I never used Instagram, quit Mastadon after it had its "Eternal September" as people fled Twitter to talk about nothing but Twitter. I never was able to find active IRC channels even in the late 90s. It felt like rooms with statues even when I asked a specific on-topic question.
Mid-90s USENET and Prodigy forums were the best social experience I ever had. Now I mostly use internal forums in the tilde/rawtext public *nix space, a little gopher and gemini.
Question: How do you feel about this, and how do you make use of the next-gen social media apps?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2019.1...
: Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence.
People used to have letters to the editor and billboards. Even in computers there were login messages, user signatures, and presumably notes taped to shared terminals.
And basically forever we've had dedicated gossips for social media 1.0.
I'm kind of with prmoustache. It becomes a thing when people start treating it like a thing, and said treatment involves the labeling.
When we talk about mountain bikes, we are talking about the bikes that directly evolved from the people like Joe Breeze, Chris Cunningham, Gary Fisher or Tom Ritchey who used to race against each other on old modified schwinn cruisers bikes in Marin County in the 70's.
That doesn't mean they invented mountain biking, that Fausto Coppi or Louison Bobbet weren't "mountain biking" at the Tour de France, nor erase the existence of a multitude of bicycle tourers in the dirt decades before, like the cyclo muletiers in France, the Rough-Stuff fellowship in the UK or kids building "Scramblers" in the 1950's. Same with the gravel bikes, people didn't wait for the industry to invent a name for it to ride bikes in the dirt yet the bike with drop bars we used back in the days were just called road, cyclocross, touring or randonneuse.
It is a term that is attached as much to the usage as to the period it started.
In those days, you needed an invitation!
Interested what people think but early days, hopefully will be a place with more interesting and useful AIs that can help us instead of trying to scam us like Facebook lol
1) Briar. What can I say? Briar is well built and hardly hiccups. It's annoying that the desktop client is in forced upgrade beta still, no single-profile on multi-device, and there will likely never be an iOS version (iOS' fault), but aside from that for Android users it is bar none number 1. Where it lacks voice/video, it has groups, forums, blogs, and is modular with its transports (Tor, LAN, Bluetooth, Sneaker Net). It will absolutely work in a zero internet situation; for emergencies at minimum android-owning families really ought to install it and add each other. It will work with no internet!
2) Session. Session started as a fork/clone of Signal which did not require an associated phone number to use. It has since evolved to use Oxen (Lokinet, an onion network like Tor/I2P) for messaging. Session has multi-device profiles. Unlike Briar, Session has voice and video (and it is stable most of the time, over mullvad vpn). Voice and video rely on a clearnet Oxen introduction server still (this will eventually change) and the two participants stream p2p; if anonymity is desired then a trustworthy obfuscator is a must for voice/video. Session can be used metadata free if voice/video are avoided for the time being and Slow Mode is selected (no push notification services used). Session is my second because it is more feature rich for normies, works on iphone (that abomination*), and is quite stable.
3) Tox. Tox makes the list as #3 for being around a while and having a lot of client choices. Tox seems a little less stable, but that's more the fault of the various clients being buggy sometimes. It has voice and group voice (I think). Tox is not anonymous, so an obfuscator will be needed if anonymity is desired.
4) Jami. Jami is a GNU project application (formerly Ring) which I think could substitute for Zoom potentially. It can be a bit buggy sometimes dropping calls or video not working right sometimes [though I haven't used it enough to say it's not PEBKAC here at this point]. I make mention of this because it underwent heavy improvement during COVID to try to offer some competition to the dismal (proprietary, China) video conference landscape. It too can do multi-device profiles.
All of the above are short listed because they are easy to install, really quick to generate a locally stored and used set of identity tokens, and then trade strings with friends to link with them. Honorable mention because it's not a messenger but it is in the same vein as the rest spiritually: SyncThing. Ditch the cloud, sync headache-free! (MS should have used this to replicate their windows domain controller file stores IMO, no joke!)
We are soon entering the age of The Basilisk... except The Basilisk will be leashed, tethered to men who dictate upon whom The Basilisk gazes. Stop being an NPC when it comes to your data and privacy habits, and start acting like a strategic player... always practice all of the Safe SECs!
(* Disclosure: I daily drive Qubes OS and GrapheneOS.)
OTOH I haven't met anyone through FB, twitter or instagram either.
It's the only one that is truly decentralized -- no DNS, no WebPKI, no Tor "authorities". Its DHT is rock solid, second only to bittorrent's. And Tox's NAT-holepunching capabilities are amazing, due to the way they're integrated with the DHT.
Tox was being used for a lot of the stuff that people think Tailscale invented -- five years ago.
It could also be based on the social circles those person haves. I had never been big into social medias but when I moved in another country and divorced 5 years ago I found myself with a completely reduced social circle apart from my coworkers. Most locals are very welcoming but also very superficial/hypocritical: you will meet people in a bar and most they will act like a long time friend and give you their number but past that first encounter most are either not reliable or will decline all invitations because they already have a big enough social circles and stacked agenda and don't care inviting you. So you are mostly stuck with meeting other expatriates who are more keen to build relationships and for that it is easier to enter organized events (otherwise you just meet tourist that leave the week after). Most social events where I would have the possibility to encounter people are now only announced on social medias so I ended up using facebook for a 2-3 years at fourty-something despite not liking that platform.
Disaffected social media addicts are way too loud of a minority. The world goes on.
I don't feel particularly bad that my children likely won't have the same social media experience that I have. They'll probably have a much better one, refined by a few extra decades of free market practices figuring out better ways of getting people what they really want it out of it. It's entirely possible that in a decade or so meeting people first online, then irl will be much more common than it is today. I don't think that's a bad thing in the slightest.