Social media is no longer social | Hacker News Reader

Social media is no longer social

bsky.app

34 pointsfrereubu16 comments

I've been telling people this. I went through the exercise of unfollowing everyone on Instagram that wasn't a real person that I actively interacted with in the past year. Lo and behold, turns out none of the 100+ people that remained EVER posts anything, except for stories. Why do we have this entire 'social' platform if only 10% of the screen (the tiny 'stories' bar) is dedicated to actual social interactions?

Real answer: we've normalized and deified placing greed above literally everything else in life.

> studying social media like it's 2010

Social media wasn't social in 2010 either.

It was mostly. You still had mostly posts from your social group. it changed in 2014

What exactly was this big shift in 2014?

I dunno what he's referring to but the big changes for me for Facebook were:

1. They let non-uni students on there. Suddenly my crazy aunt was sending me a friend request and they had no option for "be polite but I don't want to have anything to do with her". That diluted the amount of stuff I wanted to see.

2. They allowed sharing posts. This just gradually turned it into shit Reddit.

Pretty sure non-uni students were allowed on Facebook way before 2014

Yeah I didn't mean those happened in 2014.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/facebook-audience-network-...

It also purchased whatsapp

For me it was:

- most posts I saw on Facebook were from my friends

- Instagram was full of photos from my friends

- on Twitter I mostly saw tweets from people I knew in person or open source contributors I followed

Then my Facebook feed started having more and more „suggestions” then pages and groups, more brands than people. Instagram started showing me influencers and over time moved from photos to videos to counter TikTok. Twitter also started showing algorithmic feeds with more and more „suggested” people rather than those I followed. I stopped replying, commenting, eventually posting, social media turned into consumption-heavy media

Everyone I know can't make discussion with me for five minutes before pulling out their phones. We need to fix this.

Not that the ‘social’ part was ever very good in the first place, but they are right, it’s not social anymore.

the social part was phenomenal back in the day. when facebook took off I reconnected (and stayed connected) with a lot of people. my “feed” was nothing but posts from my friends and family that I cared about. I extensively used DM to talk to my friends privately. everyone got hooked on it purely because it was as social as it gets outside of real life

Perhaps it’s just me. I’m not a very social person, and it seemed like I had to reconnect with people I had gladly forgotten, or ended up having arguments with people I barely knew but had somehow ‘friended’, or with their friends. I first deleted their app from my phone, then I unfollowed almost everyone and eventually I deleted my account some 3-4 years ago, in what was perhaps the best decision of this century for me.

Direct pre-print link: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6nue7_v1

holy

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