Attention Media ≠ Social Networks
susam.net
susam.net
Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.)
They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)
Not for where algorithms select media for you. That's not a "networking service", even if that is one of its hooks. Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service".
"Attention media" is more accurate.
But that also describes traditional advertisement based "media". Which earned its keep via attention access, by including unintegrated ads as a recognizable second component.
A description specific to the new form is "surveillance/manipulation media" or "SM media".
Attention-access funded media lacked pervasive unpermissioned surveillance and seamlessly integrated individualized manipulation. Where dossier-leveraged manipulation, not simply attention access, has become the defining product.
sb should tell those linkedin folks this.
Journalist is more than a job title, and so is editor.
Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.
> For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser
Related (2025): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access
PS: I still recommend never installing Meta apps on your phone.
PPS: There are legitimate uses of this functionality, so as a web dev I'm happy the functionality wasn't silently blocked. This gives an opportunity to explain to the user why the permission is needed if the use is legitimate. Would be nice if it could be further scoped though.
Ctrl+D?
in europe
Wechat moments show you the things that your contacts post. There are theoretically ads too, but ever since they forcibly converted me to a US-based account I don't get ads because no one is interested in advertising to me.
It's too bad; I liked seeing the Chinese ads.
Comments on wechat follow the Maplestory system where you can see comments (on anyone's posts) from your own contacts, but not from other people.
For ages it was Top Stories vs Most Recent. Most Recent didn't even work, and of course it would always change you back to Top Stories
With all the potential of the internet, we got stuck with fucking Zuckerberg? We know what he thinks about people.
What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.
Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation.
For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.
So, If I think about it "like alcohol", it would mean "what is the root cause of not being able to keep contact with people". It might be that common social mixing places are probably much fewer than hundred of years ago - be it the local bar, gathering after a day of work in the field, public bathhouse, etc. Many of activities in the modern world seem very individual - maybe that is the problem, and people being social try to replace it and get tricked into worse things.
I do think there's some people who have fallen into social media bad habits and can fairly easily be helped to correct bad habits, other people seem to go to social media because it actually aligns with who they are. I've met several people (strangers) who seemed like they brought social media behavior into real life in a way that made me think social media gave them a platform for their personality, not the other way around. They were pretty jarring experiences that really stuck with me.
I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.
I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?
We know that fast food is bad for us. But fast food companies keep putting the things that we like into it. So a lot of people, when tasting actual, real, good-for-you, food decide that they prefer fast food. Other people are aware that fast food is bad for them and prefer real food. It's a choice that we leave up to the individual. Unfortunately we then allow the fast food companies to advertise so they can affect the choice.
We don't really have an answer for this as a culture. We should make the fast food companies responsible for the harms they're causing, but we don't have a mechanism for that. We could stop them advertising, as some countries have done, but that starts a whole process of questions about what the government can and can't do that ends up in bad places.
We do have gov. mechanisms for controlling what can be sold as food so it seems plausible, but those only happened after we went through a period of time where companies would literally put poison into bread as a filler, and the whole rotten meat packing industry thing. Maybe we are in that phase now but even so i dont expect there to be enough of a social movement to control these things (and as you say... how is tricky)
still "real food" might not have the reach of mcdonalds, but it does exit and thrive. maybe there is market for a healthy network? based on the comments here and a lot of anecdotes, I suspect there is some latent demand.
Don't start drinking or smoking, because with this logic you'll have a really hard time quitting
There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
Or how in a private group someone who was invited suddenly leaves the group membership, hops off the channel. Comparative to walking out of a meeting without saying a word and provide a reason. A simple "I enjoyed it here, but I have to spend my time elsewhere" is just simply a polite thing to do, and costs only 2 seconds of time.
Social media has strong parasocial tendencies.
The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.
But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.
Asking someone a question online does not obligate them to take time to answer it, or even explain why they don’t feel like doing so.
You’re not in a conversation with everyone who is online, so the comparison to in person conversations doesn’t hold.
> Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
People are doing other things while using their computers and you should not expect to be able to commandeer their attention on demand by tagging them. Again the comparison to in-person social norms doesn’t hold because you can’t see if this person is busy with something else.
I find this sense of entitlement to other people’s instant time and attention to be very negative for any digital dynamic. Whenever someone with this attitude joins a group chat it leads to people turning their statuses to Do Not Disturb all of the time or even leaving the group because they don’t want to feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond to that one person every time that person drops a tag in chat.
I am too.
A chat room is not equivalent to a face to face conversation. You’re not in an always-on social engagement with those people.
If you need to switch to having face to face conversational norms, you need to request a time for that.
It’s not reasonable to expect that someone’s online indicator means you are entitled to request that they drop what they’re doing and respond to you. Online does not mean not busy.
Another example. A project chatroom, and the agreement is that comms are async. But there are moments where multiple members are real-time in the chat. It may well happen that you say "Since we chatting now @JohnDoe, we have a decision to make on this and that". John Doe answers "For sure, let's do that", so you give a follow-up with elaboration. Only to suddenly find John unresponsive for 5 days.
That is a ridiculous situation if you depicted that to happen to you offline in a face to face setting.
I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.
But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!
The goal is not instant world domination, but a organically grown network, providing an off-ramp for those that have had enough and are ready to take some action. Facilitating real world meet-ups would help, I think!
The problem isn't whether the meeting is digital or not, it's whether the platform (a physical space or an app) facilitates high-fidelity person-to-person and small group communication consistently over time (the norm for healthy human community), or if it's set up to encourage unnatural para-social relationships and dysfunctional, anti-social communication styles.
how have we done that while separated for centuries?
Real world connection and a strong foundation of core friends, perhaps?
Also, depending on your interests, you may not want to meet people IRL right away. Talking to anonymous strangers is often a good way to learn more about sensitive subjects without taking too much risk.
But yeah, I'm with you, we rely too much on these services at the moment.
The synchronous nature of multiplayer games leaves most of this expression implicit rather than explicit, though, so for some people it doesn't fit the same need. It's a kind of role-play.
I think most people are, for lack of a better metaphor, blood-sucking vampires for honest, explicit, and carefully-crafted communication. People are pleased when I offer it, but they struggle to offer it back, so I learn to not bother. Most relationships degenerate into expressing things better left unsaid, or being entirely superficial.
I've been imagining a social medium which finds temporary peers via one of your phone's radios--so it broadcasts and gathers rotating public keys as you ride the same bus with people or share an elevator with them--and then your feed contains whatever they're posting, but only for 48 hours or something (unless you decide to make the connection permanent). That way when you see something cool in your feed, you're well positioned to go be social in meatspace.
Like I get why you don't bring your guitar on the bus, same reason I don't bring my drums on the bus, but if a few hours later I saw a video of you making some music I might be like "hey lets get together and jam" next time I see you.
As far as I can tell the social anxiety takes hold, where someone might have their perceived fear of "being bad" exposed, so they recede back into their insular, online-only personas.
I take it you're a musician, and so I really think the only way is to take your drums (or guitar, or whatever) to the park or a local 'town square' and just get down to business. People will interact with you in whichever way they do, but at least it will be real, and possibly lead to real fruitful relationships.
The alternative is you realizing social media is 'bad for you,' and taking steps to mitigate habitual dopamine release yourself, them smiling wryly at all the people compuslively checking their phones. It's all you can do, really.
i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them) ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations)
Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree.
In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.
I think the only pay most get, is that you get to enjoy the site content. But in the case of Youtube, they slap so many ads in front of it that you often end up paying for this free labor content just to get rid of the ads. HN doesn't do Ad walls, but is more of a sales funnel for YCombinator and harvesting whatever value they can from the data, so not so intrusive.
[1] Youtube does pay some of the more popular content creators
Facebook on the other hand has become too very bad.
Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.
PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.
Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.
Is it your intention to suggest that the highest possible form of commenting is humorous?
Sadly that is all that reddit is, now. Have a serious question? Expect multiple top replies to be some sort of [un]funny joke answer.
It's a wasteland and devalues the platform when everyone competes for Internet Points.
/r/aviation is just one example of being full of this crap.
Oddly enough, I don't see it as much in gaming subreddits, even the more generic ones.
Yet one can imagine a limited set of filters that could in theory fix this:
- eliminate obvious bots
- eliminate low content / metoo / naysaying
- eliminate memes
- detect and promote high quality controversial posts equally to unilaterally upvoted ones
still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.
This is why it's a good idea to make the switch to federated alternatives like Lemmy/Piefed. The more people who do this the more people will see it as a viable alternative, making it easier to get away from the ad-driven model of social media.
That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).
"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.
I see no specifics about the scoring in the wikipedia article, but a search revealed that it was a simple, single five star rating scale. The same as on Amazon, and formerly Netflix?
"Surfacing the best comments" is only a problem at scale. And attention media demands scale whereas your social circles break down at scale. Commerce sites (like Yelp or Amazon) also demand scale, so they also have a "surfacing the best" mechanism.
It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.
The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
Political activists, like a former partner of mine.
… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …
… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …
… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
For example, so far as I know my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?
Probably so you can suggest it to your partner.
There is some percentage of the world-wide population that would find interest in both ads simultaneously.
“I only use it in this limited circumstance”
You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.
> You let me take my own damn car
> To Brooklyn, New York, USA
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/20110...
> Take a 2002 Times/CNN poll on the eating habits of 10,000 Americans. Six percent of the individuals surveyed said they considered themselves vegetarian. But when asked by the pollsters what they had eaten in the last 24 hours, 60% of the self-described "vegetarians" admitted that [they] had consumed red meat, poultry, or fish the previous day.
Vegetarian = no meat, no chicken, no fish, no crustaceans, no dead animals, no meat/fish broth, no lard. Nothing derived from a dead animal. Or as my little sister used to ask: “did this have a face?”
But that’s what “vegetarian” means to me. I guess that’s a “strict vegetarian”?
In any casual poll like this, every number has a large margin of error. When 6% of respondents select an answer, some of those were mis-clicks, people who misread the answers, or people who were just clicking through randomly. The latter happens a lot when bad UX means the only way to see the results is to take the poll.
So the more likely explanation is not that people were calling themselves vegetarian but also eating meat recently, it’s that around half of those reporting vegetarians were either mis-clicks or people blindly clicking things. It happens a lot in online polls.
No, you're just making things up. For one thing, these are telephone polls, not online polls.
If you have the actual study please share it. Right now, I doubt the veracity of psychology today's claims.
In fact I've done more digging since posting this and the only other people talking about this survey is citing psychology today as their source. I can find no primary sources.
You can find other Time articles that cover their methodology, which involves paying a polling (or consulting) firm to run the poll.
> It links to several studies but not the one they're writing about.
Which one do you think is "the one they're writing about"? The Psychology Today piece opens with a description of the current state of affairs.
You might or might not have noticed that immediately after the mention of the Time poll, Psychology Today links to a survey published by the USDA finding that, among self-described vegetarians, 64% reported eating meat within the last 24 hours. Why do you doubt the Time poll?
I'm sorry, but science doesn't happen in the dark. "Trust me" isn't the path to data
- Older folks.
- People using marketplace
- People exchanging inter-personal tips and info: best stroller, contractor, etc.
Not saying FB is best for those things but it doesn’t seem dead at all.
> one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
> The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
How are you confused about who still uses Facebook in one sentence and then immediately in the next sentence you describe yourself as a user and explain why it’s useful to you and the people you know.
I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.
https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat...
Warning: truly disgusting
Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.
It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.
Wasn't people wanting reach what supposedly ruined Instagram in the first place? Seems like wanting it both ways if you want reach for yourself, but not for "influencers"
It’s OK to believe both 1) social media can be a useful service for connecting with friends and interesting people, and 2) social media has feedback mechanisms that reward unpleasant and abusive behavior.
Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.
If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.
However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.
I think unfortunately for IG in particular, it evolved for a segment of people into a status flexing game more than genuinely keeping in touch.
Every social media platform has a lot of different segments of people using it for different reasons.
If one of your follows is posting content you don’t like, it’s so easy to unfollow them. If you feel obligated to follow for social reasons, Instagram even has convenient features to hide their posts so you can maintain the follow without seeing their content.
I’m not a heavy Instagram user but I’ve found it trivially easy to tailor my feed to the content I want to see (friends and family). That’s why I don’t find much interest in the pearl clutching about how some people post on the platform. I’m not there to judge and moralize about others.
Let's ignore the things that upset us even more easily, while maintaining the required social appearances even harder!
Ah, such progress!
Speechless, except obscenely.
It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.
I agree with this 100%, on top of what you said remember that Instagram launched in 2010 as an iOS exclusive during a time where Apple was not particularly focused on camera quality, ignoring Android where there were numerous devices with substantially better cameras. IIRC someone was even selling one with an optical system in the ballpark of a low-end mirrorless. They also limited image resolution to 640 pixels square until 2015.
I gave up about 4 years ago as I was seeing 1 post from a friend, 3 ads, and then lots of random stranger posts.
My friends gave up too.
I have tons of private groups chats and share stuff with people I care about there.
They clearly work for advertisers, and that's all that matters.
It’s crazy how bad it has become.
Mastodon and related (for me Loops mainly) are a breath of fresh air and I wish more people can (re)learn to enjoy that.
Thankfully on Youtube I can completely disable recommendations on the site and I use it purely as a source of information, not as a dopamine addiction funnel.
To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks
Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
How do you discover new people? I'd say some people I followed I discovered them thanks for the feed
I guess you joined a crappy instance. The Explore feed on my instance is freakin' awesome and full of a constant stream of interesting and enjoyable posts by cool people. Mastodon isn't very optimal when you join the biggest instances on the network (like mastodon.social or similar). The tech is best experienced with invite-only communities of people who agree on a basic set of standards for their social experience.
When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.
So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.
First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on.
I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted.
Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature.
Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things.
I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.
Speak for yourself. I was quite content with the separation of social life and video platforms/engagement media. And don't make it sound like poor Facebook was forced to invent algorithm because of users.
Imagine the government saw the fentanyl crisis and started making fentanyl to support the habits of its citizens.
Not every single trend humans take on should be encouraged. We can be dumb as individuals, as well as collectively. At least in bursts.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/200901/faceb... https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0806746106
Where FB and Instagram are to blame is not just being aware of the psychological impact but amplifying it make it worse, especially onto a teen audience that has no capability of distinguishing the real world from social media. To them, it's the exact same. Your online social circle may be all you have in real life, not to mention the cyber bullying, unrealistic body standards and all the other awful parts that come when you gamify and reward capturing people's attention.
I won't deny that individuals are also responsible to guard themselves and especially parents, but these platforms have been accused (and are currently in US court) over the fact that they knew about the addictive potential of their platforms and made no safeguards over improving that. As a platform owner, you are responsible for all aspects of its success and failures, its highs and lows.
An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.
What's left?
Hacker News itself is all about reading articles, and then discussing the articles with others. "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Which reminds me of Kitman's Law: Pure drivel tend to drive off the TV screen ordinary drivel.
From Marvin Kitman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Kitman#Television_criti...>
Cited in Arthur Bloch, *Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Things Go Wrong!" (1977) p. 30.
<https://www.scribd.com/document/672553711/Arthur-Bloch-Murph...>
What I absolutely do not want is the platform having any of its own agency. I want a social network that ideally works as a dumb pipe. I especially don't want my content surfaced in front of the kinds of people who would've never found it through their own exploration.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I have a lot of faith in the fediverse.
Truth though is that today's Internet is vastly different from that experienced in the 1980s (when I first came online), '90s, aughts, or even the teens. Scale is a huge piece of this, though broadband, mobile devices, advertising, attention merchants, clickbait, and AI have all had their impacts. The Internet (or proto-Internet) of the 1990s and earlier was very limited in access, with soft-but-imposing barriers to entry (selective research universities, some government agencies, some tech firms), which made the experience both "open" and closed. Yes, there was exposure to a large audience, particularly as contrasted to immediate physical space or mass media of the time (print, including early small-scale copiers, amplified audio, radio, television, and telephones). But the total online population would be considered a minuscule social network by current standards --- a few thousands to a few millions of souls in the 1980s and 1990s.
I continue to use some smaller networks today (HN, Mastodon, Diaspora*), and find that they tend to retain at least some of the feel of the forums I was familiar with in the 1980s and 1990s: small, intentional, generally motivated. Ironically, their limited size and the fact that those who are there want to be there is something of a feature. A significant problem isn't so much people leaving as dying, which seems to happen with regularity. (An older population amplifies this, though I've noted previously that mortality at FB/Google scale is likely on the order of tens of thousands of accounts daily.)
The platforms I mention also largely lack agency, which as you note is quite refreshing. I'll note that HN is somewhat an exception, but it's mediated mostly by humans (member flags, moderator actions), as well as some automated rules, though those are largely guided by HN's mission of "intellectual curiosity" rather than attention-mongering.
Factors other than scale alone include broadband (enabling graphics, audio, video, and interactive content, all of which have considerable downsides), mobile devices (making for more distracted and far less nuanced discussion, as well as quite brief responses contrasted with physical keyboards), and the pernicious first and higher-order effects of advertising, manipulation, algorithms, AI, and the like.
I've toyed with the notion of a set of interrelated scopes, some limited and personal, some more widely open, though arranging that formally and as part of a designed system has yet to emerge. I have hopes for that though.
There's also the distinction between a pure social graph and a highly-curated specific discussion or forum. I've tried the latter from time to time with stunningly good results, especially at modest size (< 50 participants generally).
(This comment, as most of mine, was composed at a keyboard, and edited several times.)
I can see why the big networks moved away from that: pushing "content" has a lot more friction when relationships are symmetrical. What I don't understand is why there is no upstart trying to bring that back.
In addition, I’d say limit the number of “friends” a person can have. Maybe cap it at 200 (Dunbar's number plus a little extra). This eliminates celebrity, news, and meme accounts. It also eliminates people playing the silly game of seeing who can get the most followers or bragging about follower counts.
These are your actual friends, who also consider you a friend. Even if a celebrity were to join, the site would be useful for sharing with actual friends, not their fans or casual acquaintances.
Facebook started out similarly, but I don’t think it ever had a friend cap. I remember some sorority girls try to get me to make a Facebook account around 2004/5, because they had a contest to see who could get the most friends. I thought this was stupid and said no. Since this happened almost instantly after launch, I think those friend limits are important to make people use it for actual friends and not a popularity contest. Facebook went the opposite way, leaned into it, and created the Follow option. It was all downhill from there.
The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else.
I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.
As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me.
Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.
This isn’t Mastodon’s fault, but it’s the reality of the situation.
I’m not on Facebook anymore due to what the site has become, but I found the same emptiness on Mastodon, as my friends aren’t there. I’m not influential enough to get everyone to move to a new platform just for me.
When I joined Mastodon, I ended up following a bunch of developers, but ultimately felt like a fly on the wall to a friend group I wasn’t part of, as a lot of these people had been real-life friends or co-workers. I guess if your friend group is all geeky enough to join Mastodon, it can work. I have very few real-life connections that fall into that bucket, which I think is the case for most people.
The people I know who still use social media seem more than happy with Meta’s products. The others just stopped using these things all together and don’t seem to care about finding an alternative.
The content (that shows up in HN) is also good. Since I am on mobile device, I cannot tell the exact font used, but seems like Georgia to me. While https://github.com/susam/susam.net hosts the actual source code of the website.
Another remark: Would be really nice to have a same theme adaptation for BearBlog and similar places.
It was a good idea, but it seems to have withered.
It degrades the "does this post fit the subreddit's theme/topic?"-signal and makes the average user work against the moderation team rather than supporting them.
This was exacerbated when they started showing posts from subreddits that the user is not even subscribed to on the front page rather than just ranking posts of subscribed subreddits.
I remember when social networks were at the very least portrayed in the interest of “connecting people from around the world”.
I’ll often hear something along the lines of these services being engineered to pin us all against each other. Jaron Lanier’s “ Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” likes to claim this, but I never see any actual evidence.
Either way, when I visit social media site these days, people are definitely nastier. There’s more snark, a need to ridicule others for not knowing niche little factoids. “You still use tea bags?” something something cast iron pans and dish soap.
There’s a lot more capitalizing through hoarding trivial information. They know something you don’t, and they love it.
It’s like joining an MMORPG and realizing you have to put more time in to reach the same level as everyone else.
The problem isn't the feed, it's that people actually use "social" networks instead of just talking to actual friends. Just close the apps, lol
That's fine. I never liked Twitter anyways, but I do think it's interesting how two faced we can be about this.
The engagement hackers found a market and met it. Not good, but true.
Is there something about it (it's architecture or the company behind it) that is fundamentally different than other social networks? If not, it is doomed to follow them all eventually.
Which is broken for 2 weeks now. The small drop down to change it to "most recent" have been disappeared for a lot of people both on web and iOS/Android so you see ALL tweets from accounts you follow, even replies you don't care about.
It supports general chat plus comments and reactions linked to posted media. It's exactly what I wish social networks became... Something like the "circles" idea that Google abandoned years ago.
Now with several thousand images and videos and comments we're hitting the limits of what Google seems to have designed for with however shared albums sync.
This community feature though is the only reason I haven't self hosted all this stuff...
Looking back, the incentives have changed. Back then, there was some openness, rawness, and genuine curiosity about people and things. And of course, the signal-noise ratio was much higher.
Influencer culture ruined everything, consciously or subconsciously. I still use Insta for photography. But, it's a sinking ship. Insta could have made a different app for reels.
https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagr...
That was social media, not whatever the hell we have today... it's antisocial and attention grabbing.
I like this and will use it from now on, reserving "social network" only for Usenet, Mastodon and IRC and such.
A chronological feed has a "stop" point. You catch up, you feel satisfied, and you close the app. Meta’s revenue depends on you never feeling caught up. That’s why the "Feeds" tab is buried three menus deep—it’s there so they can say it exists, but hidden so you stay stuck in the algorithmic slop.
Even if they made it the default, you’re still left with the trust issue. You aren’t the customer; you’re the data being mined. At this point, the brand is probably too far gone for a simple UI tweak to fix the underlying rot.
Looking back I am realizing that the techno elite did not coopt something that used to be nice. This whole narrative control and private information funnel was designed from the beginning with what it became today already on their crosshairs. We just went through the phases and ate all of it up.
Personally, I never got into Twitter. I'm on the Fediverse now, and check in on it occasionally, but it never draws me in. I don't connect with people on that kind of platform.
Some forums work for me, mostly because there's a small enough number of participants, or, importantly, there's a place I can go to read content from specific people. Even if we don't become friends (or IRL friends), I still feel like I know them to some degree. The people matter.
Twitter / Fediverse / Bluesky seem to be about topics, and as such, I lose interest quickly. Because no matter how much I like photography, birding, cars, board games, computers, software, etc... I don't really care what the masses have to say on those topics. I want to know about Alice, Bob, and Carol have to say on things that interest me.
Early Facebook was, as described in the article, people you knew, who held some sway in your life, sharing their life events (however inane), or their opinions. I care more about that than I care about a celebrity or complete stranger declaring some thing as good or bad or interesting.
But the network effect was always going to matter. LiveJournal/Xanga/MySpace all had some network effect where some of your friends were there, and you wanted to be there, too. But Facebook figured out monetization, and they still seem to hold the greatest network effect despite how terrible the experience has become. I can post photos there, and dozens will respond, all people I know. If I post in literally any other place, I will get less than dozens of responses, and almost none of them will be from people I know.
There is no new place like early Facebook, or even current Facebook. But of course what I want is a place where I can share with the people I know, and no one has to pay for it, but the monetization doesn't drive the service towards enshittification. This isn't a very realistic desire. Discord has been the closest for me, where I have dozens of contacts in a shared space, and very frequently get interaction with people I know about things I care about. But it also feels like enshittification of Discord is also inevitable even though there's a paid subscription option.
The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok.
The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.