Comment by JDGM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JDGM | Hacker News Reader

My parents' generation would share holiday snaps or even host slide show evenings for neighbours after traveling somewhere. I think that photo sharing on Facebook etc. is just the modern version of that and as back then, we have people who find this obnoxious, interpreting it as a form of bragging.

I believe it may be a little bit bragging, but is mostly validation-seeking. Many people just seem to be wired in a way that craves a social response to their behaviour. Call it neediness, insecurity, whatever...I think the kindest thing is to simply identify it as a personality trait.

Back in the slide show days I remember being impressed by the stance my parents took which was to sit back and enjoy the holiday snaps as much as they could, because the person showing them was getting something out of that.

Today, I will act interested in a dream a co-worker wants to tell me, not because I am particularly gripped by how they "were flying, but also not, and everyone's face was Graham from accounts", but because it seems to make them happy to have someone listen. If simply clicking a "like" button or posting a thoughtful comment can give someone warm fuzzies (and we know it does) then I'll do it.

Are you sure these slide evenings were as entertaining and impressive as your remember?

I've never heard anything positive about them until your comment, up until now they've always been the subject of boredom jokes.

Spot on. I may have expressed myself unclearly - I am indeed referencing that trope of boring slide evenings, and likening them to the photos which flood our social newsfeeds, showing e.g. Asian Fusion cuisine, rock climbing, and pouting in nightclubs.

The point I'm making is that the boredom joke about the slide evenings was social etiquette and care for other people's feelings preventing intelligent, well-mannered people from being anything but polite. The joke was indeed always on the slide-shower, and it was a bitter-sweet empathic one. I see a modern parallel.

The big advantage of Facebook or Twitter over slide evenings is that it’s much easier to skip a FB update you don’t care about (or even skip all updates from someone) than it was to duck out of a slide evening.

Even better, you may have friends who are not overly selective about what they share, but still share something worthwhile every now and then. With social media, it’s fairly painless to pick our the worthwhile pieces. In a slide evening, I’d have been bored to death.

I can't really refute any of that, it's a good takedown of the analogy. I'm trying to draw parallels which help me understand what's happening and behave appropriately but yes, there are very relevant differences.

I suppose I would say two things, one serious and one silly:

The serious is that I actually do find it harder and harder "to pick out the worthwhile pieces" in social media. I'm adding more people, they're all posting more, and the feeds are getting messier and messier. I don't think slide evenings started as snoreathons, and there must have been a novelty period before it all got tedious. If there was a turning point then I feel we're not far from the equivalent one with our social media photo-flooding.

The silly is that at the slide evening I would be plied with wine and...well, in those days I suppose Twiglets? Right this second, I would gladly sit through an hour or two of Machu Pichu (OK, let's be realistic: Cornwall) in exchange for a comfortable chair and the quaffing of a few glasses ;)

The problem with the messy feeds is quite real for me too. I find that in Facebook, things tend to balance out reasonably well: Most friends don’t write a flood of updates, or particularly long updates, and the feed balancing algorithm seems to present me with a reasonable mix of updates.

I’m far less active in Twitter, where I seem to easily get overwhelmed by a flood of small updates, or G+, which seems to attract highly prolific writers.

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