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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group.

Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback).

The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.

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The over generalization of the term social media drives me bonkers. In the olden days we had things like message boards, forums, and chat rooms. Then came social networks. All of those terms reflect some sort of connection between people.

When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting self-promoters (for the lack of a better term) to an audience, not the other way around. As you said: the focus is on the individual, may that be a person or a business.

Perhaps we should be making an effort to distinguish between the two environments, to avoid associating connecting businesses and self-promoters to customers with connecting people to each other.

There's two distinguishing characteristics:

One: algorithmic feeds (etc) are engineered to addict you

Two: virality stats (views and likes) allow senders to hone message effectiveness based on structure (funny GIF, misspelling, "this you", etc), completely separate from content (white supremacy, authoritarian communism, etc)

This is why Reddit is maybe barely social media, and HN, other forums, IRC, etc, aren't.

The self-promoters, 90% of the time, are either operating an entertainment business, advertising products, or both. So we can still just call it connecting businesses to customers, otherwise known as marketing.

It should all be called social marketing, not social media, as it really just a thin veneer over the Google and Meta ad monopolies.

Your attention was once in other places and it moved onto the Internet. The ad monopolists figured out a way to turn the Internet into a marketing platform, by purchasing their competitors and then gradually changing the features their services offered. They then converted you from a human being into a unit of advertising inventory. Doctorow's reverse centaur aptly describes the phenomenon; the simian body is slaved to the ad machine brain and now follows its command through the magic of cheap psychological tricks.

> It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around.

A pet peeve of mine is when businesses reject the marketing channel they own (their websites) to adopt platforms like X or Instagram. Use them, yes, but do publish on your own site (and adopt RSS along the way).

except no one goes to their website or uses rss. it is unfortunately a waste of time for small niche group that finds it useful

What do you want as a business? The void of platforms like X? Or the actual people that took the time to goes to your website to learn more about your offering.

You want the most customers for the least effort, which is Instagram.

unfortunately… exactly this

The way I look at it: social media makes you aware of their presence. Actually conducting business usually happens elsewhere. That elsewhere may be physical or virtual.

Another way to look at it is that depending upon social media for anything beyond promotion leaves you at the whim of those companies. Facebook only let's viewers see a limited slice of information unless they log in. Places that used Twitter as a newsfeed ended up showing chaotic junk when Twitter became X, unless the user was logged in. I was doing a web search yesterday that turned up a lot of Yelp results. I didn't realize that Yelp was still a thing. Judging from the content, it probably isn't. The list goes on. As a potential customer, it leaves me with a very dim view of the companies that rely upon social media instead of supplementing their presence with social media.

> Another way to look at it is that depending upon social media for anything beyond promotion leaves you at the whim of those companies.

Another instance of that is when your account at these proprietary companies simply disappears for no reason. It is far too risky to depend on them.

A long-time friend, for example, has a decades old business which had a 15+ year presence on facebook. A few weeks ago the account just silently disappeared. Obviously any response from facebook is impossible to obtain.

Luckily they also have their own website with all the content.

> When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships

I agree entirely with this. I think that it's helpful to remember that "social media" arose to differentiate itself from "traditional media", the social piece is a descriptor not a function. Traditional media has been one-way, and the goal of corporations has been to make social media largely one-way as well but to make it feel like it's not. Social media exists mostly to serve influencers, brands, and celebrities and all of us are eyeballs to monetize.

For modern types of "social media", I prefer to use the more accurate term: Gossip Engine.

It tells you exactly what it does in a way that "social media" obscures. Nothing drives engagement like a Gossip Engine!

> The old social media was more like going out

>> [Social media] is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around

Originally there were no business accounts, ads, or news feeds on Facebook, for example.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35877603 :

> for the record, e.g. Facebook did originally require a .edu email address at an approving institution

What were the other pivots from that original - textual personal profile and you can only write on other peoples' walls - product to profitability?

Agreed. I consider traditional "virtual communities" (lie Usenet, IRC, BBSes, web message boards, etc.) to be something quite different from modern "social media", and I find the former to be far preferable to the latter.

"social media" is forums, IRC, blogs, etc, but through the lens of advertisers.

Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?

Neither does not have the same shared consistent group of participants.

A forum ultimately ends up a group of more or less known individuals with a focus.

Reddit and HN don't have that feel, chatrooms and such as Discord usually do, unless they get huge and overwhelm Dunbar's number.

The friend feeds like Facebook's are less anonymous, but they do not form topical discussions nor feel like hangouts with the person.

> Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?

Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page.

Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted before you, and before messages posted after. Everyone's view and message was equal, so pile-ons or hive-mind "this is the right way of thinking" seemed less common.

I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.

In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.

> I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.

> In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.

The following was built and deployed in Taiwan and proved to be very capable at sidestepping policy gridlock.

I've often wondered if some of the concepts that power it could be applied to help facilitate more generalized discussion and debate (which could also optionally tie into instances of the original political purpose it was built for).

https://www.plurality.net

https://github.com/pluralitybook

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...

You're right, but we also underestimated how easy it would be to game these systems and how the owners of these platforms would be incentivized to allow or even assist in gaming these systems. Voting solved a problem that existed, but created another one that is arguably worse.

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