Social seems broken in almost all services. Can it be fixed?
jeena.net
jeena.net
Want to have engaging and enriching discussions about a topic? There's probably a website for that exact topic. It has a forum or IRC chat room and probably a mailing list. It might have a twitter/facebook account, but those aren't the channels you use if you're really involved.
Want to find those places that have engaging enriching discussions about topics? Stop looking at Facebook, Twitter, et al. That's not where it's happening. And my money is on it never happening. That's not what they're for.
And who can blame them? Most of the 70k residents are already on Facebook. Anything else would have to be built from the ground up.
I don't use social media at all. I have dabbled in the past, but I just gave up relatively quickly. Do I miss out? No. There is useful stuff there, absolutely, but what I have found is that traditional media works as a sort of filter. So, I'm a F1 fan. Lots of F1 people twitter. But, anything important and useful appears in the usual traditional places. So, I have no need what so ever to follow any one on twitter. If something important comes up, it will appear on, say, the BBC's F1 sub-site.
So, these days, I would suggest that twitter, facebook, etc, are like a raw feed, with traditional journalists filtering the information for me. So far, I have not ever missed out.
Is that what's happening in general, or is that just me?
Another thing I have discovered recently is that live news is misleading knee jerk stuff, that in the end doesn't really help most people. The latest example I can think of is the attack in London. So much info was flying about, but most of it was inaccurate and contradictory. My missus was glued to 24hr rolling news and twitter, and frankly talking nonsense, with it changing all the time. In the end, I told her to turn it all of and watch the 10 o'clock new later on, by which time a more coherent picture would have emerged. Which is pretty much what I do now. Do we really need our new instantly? Or is it better quality a few hours later?
I would, of course, accept that this sort of raw live information is very useful to those involved in one way or another. But most of us aren't.
So you think. And I would agree that Facebook, Twitter, et. al. have failed miserably in serving their purported customers (their real customers are probably more than happy, but I won't get into that). But I think the whole reason those things were appealing in the first place was that traditional media had failed even worse.
At least with social media you have more control. Control over who you associate with and what you pay attention to. What can you do with TV or a newspaper? Turn them off or throw them away; at best you can scan through them while trying to avoid content (including ads) not relevant to you.
There are other alternatives though; take HN for example. It's not unfiltered, but it definitely gives you more (and most likely more relevant to your interests) stories. Aggregators such as HN, ./, et. al have been far superior to anything I've ever experienced from TV or newsprint. Much more relevant, much more in depth, much more accurate (not a high bar to beat), and most importantly, filtered to my interests (who gives two shts about the Hiltons or the Kardashians?). They're not perfect, but they are definitely a step in the right direction. I've discovered so many things via HN, ./ and other aggregators that I never* would have discovered via traditional media (or probably FB or Twitter for that matter).
You have places that are kinda nice. They are few and far between and short lived.
Either you have less than 500 subscribers and nothing happens ever. Or you have 20000+ subscribers and the herd mentality takes over. I think there is a cut somewhere between 10 000 - 20 000. It seems that the thoughtful flee after that, and only the loud and narrow minded are left behind.
Part of the problem is that if there is a subreddit that you find interesting and someone posts something about once a week it's probably buried by the bigger subs in your feed. Subs that are mediocre at best. You can unsubscribe from bigger ones, but you cannot make all of the subs you follow to have just single post on your front page every day. I admit the "res" functionality solves this to some degree.
There used to be periodic complaints how reddit is going worse. That died of as anyone who cared deleted their accounts and headed somewhere else.
Reddit does one thing very good and that is the red letter.
The difficult thing is that everyone has a different opinion of what makes the community and how it should act.
We need to keep a high-level framework of rules and enforce those rules, but for the most part let the community members hash it out.
I try to take a more hands off approach to modding simply because with our user base you're damned if you do, damned if you don't - and I don't want to censor any content per se...
But here's the real kicker: "Social" is just a badly made forum with an attachment feature. It's just that instead of the focus being on replying to threads, it's now new thread creation with a provision to vote, bookmark and subscribe to others' bookmarks. The more users you have in this forum, the more it gets used (the snowball effect; or rather the opposite of the "Empty Restaurant" problem mentioned by Spolsky).
For many people, having something that's pretty easy to use and lets them communicate with people that they already know is a really great thing.
Email really isn't designed as a social discovery tool. There are many other technologies (some of them built on top of email like mailing lists) that _are_ designed for those purposes, and several of them work perfectly well.
If what you're expecting is one tool that both fits and performs well at all possible use cases, then you're going to be severely disappointed.
Privacy issues very much accepted.
... I assume the author was referencing maybe video responses... the meaning can't be that YouTube comments are the best social community, can it?
Yeah, I see the irony of saying that in a comments section on the internet.
Instagramming the trail when I went for a walk last night^1 didn't make anyone smarter, but it allowed me to share a piece of beauty from my day that could quite possibly have made them feel happier.
That said, I disagree entirely with the idea that people are not more informed because of social media. The first reports of the raid resulting in the death of Osama Bin Laden came from a civilian in Islamabad who was live-tweeting about the sound of helicopters overhead^2. Say what you will about Twitter/Facebook, but they were both instrumental in the Arab Spring and helped revolutionaries topple numerous oppressive regimes.
The news is being broken and made on social media. It's a communication tool unlike anything humanity has ever had access to, so some people will continue to swing it wildly like a child who has just been given a toy hammer, but that does not negate its efficacy in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
1: http://instagram.com/p/aHyO-UgngM/ 2: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/05/02/osama.twitte...
As for the instagramming, here's a counterpoint:
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_a...
Sharing what makes you happy doesn't necessarily makes others happy.
And as convenient as social media was in speeding up the spread of news for the OBL raid and coordination for Arab Spring, it's also lead to witch hunts (Boston Bombings), and general spread of false information (politics anyone?).
You're right, some people suck and using social media, and others are very efficient at it. But I think for what purpose someone uses a tool is important.
The typical facebook wall post will host plenty of interaction. The typical glued-on comment section with spambot frosting? Perhaps not.
Lets chill for awhile and allow something to organically happen.
Seriously, would you or I die if we didn't use any of those social media channels for awhile, or would it create space for something new to evolve?