An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour.
HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that.
But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money. It has no personality, it's not safe, and no one feels at home there. Why would you invest yourself in a space like that?
> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour.
> HN is like that.
HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging literally everywhere else, catpost half drunk and high, noone cares really, from the small subreddits and discord servers and fb groups to the big subreddits, discord servers, fb groups.
> But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money.
We must have a different internet, every other place I know is full of personality and total unique, people repeat the same sets of inside jokes over and over. HN is way the driest and most soulless.
My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN.
It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jokes and fun. One thing that keeps immature and rude people away is precisely the "dullness" that the post above speaks of. People get tired and move on, leaving the place clean and tidy for others to use.
HN has problems of course; downvote bullying is one of them. I'm not saying HN is perfect, but I'd rather not turn it into Reddit or Youtube. So I don't know where this leaves HN between the "pub" and "commercial street".
I come here because it is one of the very few places where you can have interesting discussions and read interesting comments from people with a similar intent and interest.
There are many very different kinds of humor. I think HN generally allows some "insightful" or "never thought of it that way" jokes. Which is probably a narrow subset of humor in general and often requires quite a lot of knowledge about the subject matter.
Only accepting humor if it's sufficiently serious is poser behavior. It reeks of insecurity.
Some of the most brilliant people in history also had an often juvenile sense of humor. Hacker culture was born out of puns and memes and Discordianism and Monty Python references.
But we don't do that here. We're serious people having serious discussions on serious topics. Look at how serious we are. Like that monocle guy meme, except replace the glass of wine with a can of Gamersupps mixed with adderall.
I think some of that stuff also works, if it is at least somewhat ambitious. Say, "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" is absurd and humorous but gets a lot of appreciation.
The café was the first pub-like place where people did mostly not drink alcohol. Reportedly, it was an inportant place for the enlightenment period of history. Let's not oversell HN here, though...
Central European cafes sell spirits, too. A cognac makes a fine accompaniment to a coffee. It is foreign franchise coffee places like Starbucks don't sell alcohol at all, and that is a major part of why they feel so foreign.
I prefer it this way. I would love to see original jokes on HN, but the issue is that if you allow "jokes" in general, there's a flood of low-effort repetition of popular phrases or comments where the only "comedic" value is that they've forced something into a cliche sentence structure. That feels more soulless than the way HN is, because comments get so samey. You see the same effect sort of start to creep in on certain political posts, where people feel that they can achieve a cheap sense of attention and comradery for expressing a trite idea instead of a joke (comments that mostly amount to "Elon Musk is a mean man! Who else agrees???")
On HN jokes are possible, but they've got to be quite good, and are typically best included as seasoning to a comment rather than as freestanding comments of their own. I've done this myself, notably in my Pompeii comment of a few years ago, which was well-received (better than most of my efforts):
Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything; with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff gets hammered particularly hard.
People complain about HN's humorlessness, and they're right to a point. The trouble is that with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor, and HN wants to optimize for signal/noise ratio. It's not that we're killjoys—we like jokes and laughing—it's that the signal/noise problem is hard.
There are no jokes in here, but HN definitely has a posting/comment "culture", a vibe, as the OP calls it, that's for sure.
For example I could never understood how come the rationalist thing was not derided to the moon and the back, especially after that crypto debacle with the Bahamas guy. But while there was a slight reaction shorlty after the fact that rationalist mindset has returned here in full force.
That’s the thing I appreciate _most_ about HN. The focus is on shop talk. Discuss science, tech, philosophy and other interesting topics without a constant stream of nonsense.
I find it very difficult to not reply on HN with a quick joke or pun or flame with no substance, but I don’t, usually.
I really like the high S/N ratio. It’s why I come here every day.
I see jokes here often enough, but they have to be tasteful, original and clever. What doesn't fly here is the lazy reddit style of joking where you just quote some lame meme or movie quip for the millionth time.
Sometimes I feel this way and then I come across a post where dang hasn’t gotten around to blowing away the low effort joke comments. Turns out it sucks
Much of this has to do with scale. In small communities, interactions are more likely to skew positive, meaningful, and desired. The discussions that rise to the top are those that are most interesting and relevant to the community.
In giga-networks like Twitter, you might get some vague sense of a belonged-to community, but the boundaries are fuzzy at best and when posts find their way beyond those boundaries, context is lost and you end up with scores of randos whose full-time job is seemingly to surf the service searching for posts to clout farm with by either replying to them with their entirely uninformed (often inflammatory) opinion or quote-tweet with similarly uninformed ridicule, which can turn disastrous for the quoted poster if it goes viral. The posts that rise to the top are the ones that are the most flame-baity and controversial. It's a much more negative experience overall.
Scale and boundaries yes. A community is participative. If everyone is just passing through, the community can't feel familiar and it can't self-police its vibe.
I have been on the internet for a while, and I always loved online communities because I did not have access early in my life to resources that I was interested in, and those communities gave me a sense of belonging and intuitive resources that fulfilled my life.
While this was great, for the last 6 years I have stuck to nurturing small communities with no more than 20 people because even gated communities (especially big ones in Reddit and Slack) are not fun anymore.
Several behaviors that I noticed in those small communities were:
- status game with participants receiving attention and dictating the "discourse" more based on social status than content
- Safeticism: tons of artificial rules that contradict even local and national laws
- Tons of non-contributing people are shitting on the water and pushing great contributors away.A lot of great contributors are leaving, creating the dead sea effect on the community.
I don't see any real difference between your "online pub" and globalized-entity "pedestrian street" examples.
They're both highly-controlled and highly-curated venues.
Environments like those just encourage conformity. That, in turn, results in interaction/discussion that's rather bland, homogeneous, and sterile.
I definitely find this site to be like that. The "showdead" setting very slightly mitigates it, but even then, I almost never find any sort of truly thought-provoking discussion here.
Those venues seem to exhibit a false sense of community to me. There's interaction, but the participants are either ruthlessly conforming, or they're walking on eggshells.
The only way communities work is if people engage in some level of self-policing with regards to their behavior. Sites that fail to keep the kind of community necessary for people to largely self-police end up requiring top-down policing, or descend into cesspits.
I think online communities aren't. A pub is a healthy, proper, community experience. Any human interaction that isn't face-to-face is injurious to your health.
That's just a ridiculous statement. My friends gathering on Discord to play some board games or video games or TTRPG is not any more injurous to your health than any other social leisure activity.
I very strongly disagree, without online interactions I probably would've gone crazy during lockdown. Even now that's all (mostly) over, I still rely on online interaction for communicating with most of my family.
Disagree, unironically physical world is discriminating, full of high educational adults, acting as big childs with wrong assumptions and nothing to talk about. Hackersnews is the opposite with smart individuals.
> Why would you invest yourself in a space like that?
Low barrier to entry. Convenience. Ease of use. Sign-up and now you can talk to your friends from across the world!
Now, you have to be force-fed shit ads along the way.
I don’t think anyone who values their social life would like it if you put it like that, but inertia and the gravity of network effects are a bitch.
The real problem is these private platforms have the power of public utilities, and we treat them like public utilities until they pull the rug from under us, and siphon our data to profit psychopathic overlords.
Furthermore, these companies don’t just throw ads at you, they also aid the surveillance state which can compromise your basic rights to privacy and fair elections. Malicious foreign governments use it to influence elections with false information and propaganda. Malicious domestic government can use it as a easy spying tool by buying or scraping data.
No one will be safe on these things until we get proper government regulation. The EU’s GDPR is a step in the right direction but more work needs to be done.
Although not exactly generic shopping streets you describe, but “anonymous” places also have been theorized and dubbed a “non-place” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place)
My soccer club's message board is exactly like this. Old school phpBB, lots of cantankerous regulars and useless back and forth chatter, just like a pub. Design wise it's completely unchanged from the 00s look except for a mobile friendly stylesheet introduced some years ago.
vBulletin/phpBB forums and IRC were for me peak internet.
I would maybe add early Facebook for the social, but not funniest part.
Some discord servers do a good job at recreating the vacuum of IRC (albeit every single one of them has always way too many channels) but the vacuum of forums is just not well replaced.
My Facebook feed is about 40% sponsored posts, 30% suggested posts, 30% group posts (usually from very large groups), and then maybe 1% actual friends (and it’s usually just something that they’ve shared or commented on, almost never actual content).
If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB more frequently and I’m sure most of my friends would too. Surely FB would make more money this way.
How did we end up like this?
I think once engagement dipped a bit, they started adding filler content just to keep us scrolling and seeing more ads. But that made things worse so they had to add more filler. Which made things worse. Repeat until it’s all just filler and ads and people don’t use it anymore.
The non-friend posts on social media are the root of all problems here. Once your engagement is with people you don't know IRL, bad things like ragebait and bots tend to win the global popularity contests. The simple "algorithms = bad, chronological = good" mentality was right all along. Explicit sharing is fine too.
How'd we get here, well the inflection point was removing the timeline and putting algo feed instead, which was probably a response to dipping engagement as social media became less cool. The cool places nowadays are group chats.
Social media companies focus more on investors than users these days, and the negative effects for users are painful. Crazy ad loads, totally irrelevant and vapid but popular posts to boost time-on-site and engagement metrics, and every other trick of the trade to keep those investors happy make users seek alternatives at scale.
Probably the nicest bonus feature of Mastodon is that I can subscribe to a friend's original posts but unsubscribe to their "boosts," which is Mastodon's way to quickly share content. This way I can follow artists that make cool stuff I want to keep up with, but I don't have to see their political reblogs and other interactions, which helps to cut down considerably on the noise.
It's great because it's granular at the friend level. Some of my follows do legitimately act as curators, infrequently boosting cool content that I do want to see. Some are more noisy, and I can pick and choose and tailor my own feed accordingly. It's a nice happy medium, one I'd like to see other platforms emulate if possible, but I suspect they won't because the algorithmic feed is much easier for advertisers to pay to manipulate.
I may follow a software engineer that writes books on functional programming but I just don't care about his stupid dogs or his alt right political ideas.
My Pleroma feed is not 100% actual friends of mine, but that's because I choose to follow certain organizations or public figures. The Fediverse is great because it's exactly what you make of it.
It is. On Facebook you can sort your feed that way and also on Twitter. Not sure about Instagram.
In my opinion, people are bored out of their mind also on a chronological feed from their friends. Not because they dislike their friends, it's just all very repetitive and time-consuming with very little to show for it.
By the way, the article doesn't even mention Mastodon.
I gave up social media owned by billionaires, Tweeter mainly, and I am very pleased with Mastodon.
Same for me. Lately my feed is full of Formula One and Debbie Harris of Blondie fame, neither of which is an actual interest of mine. And basically no content from people I care about.
This is my biggest frustration! For some reason, Facebook stubbornly thinks I'm into cars, into Hollywood drama and some other weirdly specific topics. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to indicate that I'm absolutely not interested in any of those topics.
Deep into the ad topics I managed to find a place where I could search for topics and indicate that I would not like to be targeted for those, and that seemed to have done something. But it replaced one topic with another.
It's crazy how they managed to ruin their own product. They're rapidly bleeding real users and it's totally their own fault. Facebook used to thrive with close social interaction mixed with some suggested content that seemed to be actually relevant. Now it's just anonymous filler content and they don't even show relevant posts anymore.
The only reason I'm still on Facebook is because our local town's official communication is through Facebook (sad, I know) and the neighborhood is active there as well. Otherwise I would have happily deleted my account a long time ago.
I tried something like this with the LinkedIn timeline, where they suggest a popular post from a stranger "Because you are interested in topic X". You can indicate that you are, in fact, not interested in topic X and tailor your timeline that way.
But the next day they will show you something "Because you are interested in Topic Y". Where Y is very closely related to X.
I religiously indicated I didn't want to see X, Y or whatever, because I am just not interested in posts from strangers at all. It took two weeks. Then apparently they ran out of topics for me and started right back at the beginning and showed me something for X.
Oh yeah, this is definitely a great observation. Once in a while FB decides I have a new interest and shoves A TON of suggested content in my face, as if it’s all I ever cared about.
And it’s usually the most random things. Dragon Ball Z. Gangsta rap. NBA. Race cars. Marvel. None of these things interest me yet for WEEKS they only showed me those very specific things.
Because sharing personal stuff privately, on group chats, groups made up of close friends, family etc., is the normal thing to do, sharing our personal stuff on FB, IG and the like was the exception. No, it was definitely not ok to share photos of one's unborn baby on FB/IG for almost anyone to see, that was creepy.
Glad that things are returning to a sort of normal.
For a long time Facebook was friends only - so what you posted was only visible to people you knew. They slowly changed the default to friend of friends and then public and that changed the whole feel.
Nobody in their real mind has more than 10, let's say 15 close-ish friends (with whom to share photos of your unborn baby, for example), as such Facebook was never really about friends, it was more about acquaintances.
Sure, however I want to follow what acquaintances are doing too. It's especially useful if they are in my city and I see that on social media and want to catch up with them.
If it's anything like my friend groups, the reality of the matter is that small groups aren't chatting 24/7. But a social media site never wants to look "empty". Gotta always keep them scrolling.
- Part of that is age, of course 20's people will have less time to microblog than their teenage counterpart.
- Part of it is novelty. We're far past the point where sending messages to people everywhere is a hot new thing. So we simply won't talk as much once that wears off
- And lastly, part of it is societal. We are also far past the point where people WANT to post everything for the internet's view forever. Hearing about job opportunities lost because of FB posts made over a decade ago or being cancelled online over some twitter flame war means that talking is dangerous. You don't want to leave everything in your mind out to the public. So you either close down your privacy settings, or talk less. Why take unnecessary risk on stuff you may not even stand by later on?
If we could go back to the days when there was no feed and Facebook was just a way of keeping track of your friends and sending a message, I might use it at all.
The problem is the incentives for any ad-supported profit-driven social network and the incentives on "what makes a social network good for users" are basically a venn diagram that's two circles that touch about 2% in the center.
I don't really believe it isn't possible to make the relatively small amount necessary to have a stable and useful business. The problem is VC forced drive towards enshitification.
Agree mostly. The problem is the trends all seem to favor short-form video and streaming now (I cannot express enough UGH but alas) and video is just the worst in every aspect for web development. Big files, big and fast storage needed, big content management tools, big applications to support it, big fat internet pipes to move it out, and none of that comes cheap. To make a social network that's going to ding the mainstream, you basically need VC money and a shit-ton of it at that.
Personally if I and the rest of people like me could just get a nice Facebook circa 2010 somewhere to chill on while the rest of the internet burns these sites down over and over on the altar of wanting to stream video, that'd be lovely.
Spot on. It’s ironic because a social network that stayed true to users will presumably ultimately crush those that wander off into profit-chasing, as ultimately their currency is user engagement.
But it seems impossible given the incentives you touch on. They can only come up from a startup apparently.
FB has a friends-specific feed, but it is buried a bit. EDIT: just browsed it a bit and I was refreshed to see things that are at my scale and about the people I care for. I wish this was still the main thing with FB.
People are also probably way more active in middle or high school as well and age out. Without the fodder ad content filling the feed, you’d probably only need to check facebook once every two months to be current, maybe even with less frequency.
To be contrary; It seems like many of the posts on facebook / twitter (that aren't marketing / influencers) are people without social outlets; People join for nextdoor style posts or untactful political posts, or to be heard.
In one of my community groups; it's 90% business, but then someone decides to post an unrelated meme or political message (neither allowed by group rules) as if they don't have any actual friends to share that to.
I think this is an eternal cycle. Maybe related to what has been called "enshittification", but not the same:
Users will flock to a platform, make it their own. The platform will grow. Then the advertisers, professionals, and hucksters will swoop in, do their thing, and slowly overshadow the old "normal" users. Then old users will leave, leaving a wasteland of ads and glossy shiny.
It’s not advertisers that keeps users from posting. Plenty of people doom scroll on Facebook and instagram. ads hasn’t scared users away all that much.
It’s that the platforms have been invaded by professionals coupled with an expanded “suggested for you” posts with a little bit of platforms pushing users to grow their graphs endlessly.
This creates a combination where posting isn’t really for your friends, it’s for everyone and do you really want to share with everyone? While at the same time the platforms are pushing towards being a content delivery platform and not a content creation platform.
>It’s that the platforms have been invaded by professionals coupled with an expanded “suggested for you” posts with a little bit of platforms pushing users to grow their graphs endlessly.
It really shows the hubris and lack of humanity in social media platforms. Instead of letting people naturally figure out who they want to talk to and hear from, social media empowers randos to butt in on private interactions, by design.
It is not just that. At this point, most people know that their online presence is scoured by entities that may be unfriendly for one reason or another, or maybe is gathering information about you ( say HR people looking at your recent Linkedin posts ).
Honestly, if that is true ( and I have no real way of knowing ), I think that is a good thing. People are finally adjusting.
You don't have to be scared away. It just needs to be shit enough that you're going to use a second social medium alongside. Then it's just a normal "use the fun one more, use the shit one less" until you realise the shit one just makes you feel like shit and you stop using it entirely.
And of course, there'll always be a segment that never gets to that realization, keeping the corpse animated.
What was remarkable is how Facebook's Threads app jumped straight to being full of advertisers and hucksters - they didn't think that maybe the right way to bootstrap a social network would be to make it full of authentic conversations, at least to start with.
> they didn't think that maybe the right way to bootstrap a social network would be to make it full of authentic conversations, at least to start with.
I doubt that any social media platform owner wants authentic conversations - even initially.
Instead of giving arguments, I refer to Paul Graham's essay "What you can't say":
If people were really authentic in their conversations, they would be in real trouble quite soon - and the social media platform on which these really authentic conversations are posted would be, too.
So, what social media companies do is enforce some kind of "editorial policy" (moderation) which makes the conversations that don't become censored still feel "somewhat authentic" to many visitors, so that this bluff only gets busted after some time in which the platform's owners can make sufficient money.
There's a lot of middle ground between the stilted language of a corporate ad-read and people screaming slurs in a COD lobby. If you can't speak authentically without running afoul of the bare standard of human decency that is generally expected, the world's probably better for it if you don't speak at all.
I had forgotten about that essay. Quite appropos in these times (probably in all times, but there are a few current topics that immediately spring to mind).
Because it was seeded from Instagram, a platform which promotes people who look good (like myself, of course) not necessarily people with anything interesting to say. "Authentic conversations" was never a possibility.
Lol, I think their plan is to still federate with Mastodon specifically to pad out their vapid platform with content. They were just too much of a self imposed rush to capitalize on Musk and his stupidity, to do it before launch.
Facebook doesn't care about the tiny amount of content on Mastodon. And it's the wrong type of content anyway. Mastodon is for misfits, nerds, anarchists, Tumblr-style far-left politics, doomers, weirdos and very bad artists.
Instagram and Threads couldn't be more different. It's commerce. Beautiful people. Beautiful places. Shopping. Mainstream pop idols. Grifting influencers. Celebrity gossip. Lifestyle. Fashion. Interior design.
Facebook prefers the latter group as this is where advertisers thrive. The typical Mastodon user would have an anxiety attack when they see an ad.
How is this not the same? It sounds exactly like I understand enshittification. Literally:
> First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I see the difference in that "enshittification" is what the platform owner does. "Glossification" is what the users do. Of course both are closely related.
To elaborate, with an example: ebay has once been a platform to find things non-professional people would sell from their attic on the cheap, as an auction. Then professional sellers came in, first with auctions (either more expensive ones, or by using sockpuppet accounts to drive up the bid). That was glossification. ebay then of course went through enshittification, with fixed-price offers, selling preferred spots, etc. But interestingly, they currently seem to try to revert some of that, because glossification and enshittification affect their bottom line, so now non-commercial sellers get zero fees and their own classifieds' platform
Yeah, they're two related yet distinct issues. Take Medium or Quora for example. The whole 'login to view any content at all' issue would be enshittification, since its the platform owners trying to screw over users for their own benefit. The flood of low quality, crappy articles and answers by people trying to make a quick buck would be this other phenomenon, since its the users trying to make a buck at everyone else's expense.
I'd say in one case it's a strategic corporate tactic: you intentionally build something to attract people with the understanding that you'll slowly boil and eventually gouge them if you're successful, peeling away freedoms and adding fees in some form.
In the other case, it seems like something is a victim of its own success. A product or service becomes so successful it draws attention of the lifeless leeches of society who swoop in to try and acquire and/or exploit it knowing there's opportunity there. There was no strategic plan to do this (other than the fact all leeches are drawn to blood as an inevitability). Also, in many cases, exploitation occurs from user space: we don't own this thing, only have the abilities of everyone else using this thing, but there's a lot of potential money there so how do we grab some?
My understanding is that enshittification is much more general (though perhaps this is just linguistic drift); an organisation that has done a hard thing, but now has to justify its continuing existence and expense coming up with things nobody needs and which add zero or negative value.
This can be rent extraction (literal or metaphorical, no matter where on that spectrum advertising goes); and also it can be feature creep, mission creep, scope creep, bureaucratic bloat.
I think they were a brand known for fairly high quality equipment that had a good reputation. They capitalised on their brand by producing increasingly inferior products
Reminds me of the interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about large companies not caring about product because of their market position. Soon all that really matters is sales and marketing, so all the people that were good at making good products leave or get drowned out by bad decisions
What we need is a way to objectively quantify the reduction of quality over time so that people will have a clear idea of what they’re actually buying rather than relying on a hazy and outdated idea of the brand’s reputation. People would know that the drill B&D is selling in 2023 is a 40% drill, not the 80% drill they were selling in 1993.
Reducing quality and coasting on goodwill isn’t really alpha, it’s actually just stealing. They used information asymmetry to sell the customer less drill than they thought they were getting and it shouldn’t be allowed.
My accountant mom introduced me to the term goodwill which is an intangible asset. It's basically the extra value over assets minus liabilities. It's based on brand loyalty, established customer relations, etc.
MBA culture promotes the idea that it's advantageous to burn a companies goodwill to boost a couple of quarters earnings. MBA's love to do that because it's easy and MBA's are fundamentally lazy and incurious and will jump ship before it plays out.
They are definitely related. The social media 'enshitification' is a subset of all tech/industry 'enshitification'
Think the Doctorow 'Enshitification' was more broader than just social media, and was all technology, even non-social apps eventually turn bad as the goals switch from being focused on the user and providing value, to corporate greed trying to extract money from the user.
It's an annoying word in itself, and yes, it's simply business as usual in startup land. Invest aggressively at a loss to accelerate growth, then later monetize, if you get that far.
Can't we do better? Have a stable business, organically growing and profitable from the start?
No. Tech is winner takes all. You need to be first and grow the fastest or somebody else will.
HN loves to complain about Discord (with good reason), but Discord is anti-gloss.
Small Discord communities can generate a lot of discussion, a lot of user generated content. Discord is also a poor place to do stealth advertising; if you post fake messages about how good your product is, those messages will just get buried and will never show up in a search result; it's not very effective.
Things changed this year. We saw the rise of LLMs and the fall of Twitter and Reddit and the rise of federated social networks. I think the Twitter / Mastodon format is more robust for both small and large user bases; the Reddit format is dying. Real-time chat rooms still have a place, especially with the right tooling / notifications. LLMs threaten to replace all of them and end the online network effect altogether.
My biggest problem with Discord is still more related to support communities (what would have previously been a focused forum or subreddit) moving there, and the subsequent lack of archival of topics and answers for future reference.
This has actually been fixed in the past ~6 months, and quite nicely.
They added the concept of a "forum" channel, where you can have individual support questions, and each one has its own thread that addresses that specific question.
Better yet; the search box and the "make a new post" box are the same box. So if you're starting to ask your question, as you type, it's filtering previous questions based on the words in the question you're trying to ask.
The Zig programming language community has a very active Discord, and they use the forum mode. I've searched for questions I feel "certain" someone else would have asked (like how to convert a `[]const u8` to a `[255]const u8`) and rarely can get Discord's search to find something relevant. Thankfully, the community answers quickly anyway.
As I type a message in Discord, a pop up appears next to my cursor with some disabled Emoticons, prompting me to pony up my credit card and upgrade to Nitro... so I can include these in my message.
I've never seen an ad on Discord, but I have seen them trying to sell premium features. When I talk about Discord being "anti-gloss", I mean all live-chat formats, Discord, Matrix, IRC, etc.
Using matrix.org to post in public/private chat rooms is practical, and can chose any client to CRUD content, or subscribe to rooms (feeds). Element allows export of room contents (with attachments) to JSON or XML. https://libli.org/libli-news:matrix.org
It is also an age/generation thing.
FB was cool until your aunt was there. Then IG was cool until the same. TikTok probably well through that cycle. etc.
I think my aunt is great and much cooler than my peers.
I object to this weird anti-family culture. I don't give a shit what is "cool". It's a made-up concept, unlike family. Family has my back, and I have theirs. But I guess on "social" media being social isn't cool.
There's nothing more natural and important than socializing with your family.
Eh, family is overrated. I choose my friends, acquaintances, and peers, because I enjoy their company, and they enjoy mine. Family is a luck of the draw situation. Luckily for me, my family's alright, but I have a far closer bond with my life-long friends than I do to some kid who happens to have come out of some person who came out of the same person as the person I came out of.
Yep. It's how 'you'tube became 'corp'tube. Remember when the selling point of youtube was 'you'?
> Then the advertisers, professionals, and hucksters will swoop in, do their thing, and slowly overshadow the old "normal" users.
It's more insidious than that. Corporations demand special treatment, favorable algorithms and censorship. In the past, when breaking news occurred, I checked youtube, reddit, etc to get more raw news from ordinary people. Now it's all censored on these platforms. Similar to how 'you' can't use bad words on youtube, but corporate entities can. The scales have been tipped overwhelmingly to one side. But I guess that was inevitable.
The problem is engagement-driven algorithmic feeds. Without them, none of that would happen. Enshittification doesn’t happen with traditional web forums. It’s entirely a function of how the platforms are set up.
My brother told me there was an FBI study concluded about Reddit over some recent foreign policy related matter that the percentage of botted posts on the site exceeded 60% in total volume. Seems pretty insane. I wonder what percentage of them cluster in the politically charged subreddits.
I left when I realized the platform is controlling what I see, is pitting me against my friends and aquaintances to generate negative interactions, and is filled with bots and fake users pushing politics.
Someone deeper in the comments posted https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths , which describes the phenomenon well. Many years ago a similar lifecycle issue was noticed with "MUDs", the ancestor of MMOs: they lasted for a couple of years then users would gradually migrate elsewhere as the old place became "stale".
Social media is both a platform and a set of communities using it. If the health of public communities is not good, people will migrate away. I do think that the past decade of intensification of the "culture war" on social media has contributed to its destruction; people are simply exhausted, and new users (kids) who've grown up in a high-surveillance environment are less keen to post about themselves because it's an attack surface.
Sure. Like how a neighbourhood with low rent, cheap cultural non-corporate restaurants (pho, tacos, gyros), full of students, young professionals, immigrants and all the character those things have is like a young platform. Then because it's a cool place to be, brands move in (hello Starbucks), rent goes up, and the people that made it interesting in the first place are pushed out.
Most niche subreddits are still good. Just avoid big/default subs and anything related to politics and culture wars.
That's what disappointed me when I tried reddit alternatives. Politics and culture wars were there too, but niche subs were nowhere to be found. They don't seem to understand what made reddit worse in the first place.
The niches basically succeed because they aren't worth it to marketers and "influencers" to shit up with "content." It's awful when a nice community gets too big, because once it does it's now worth money to do that.
I also think this is the magic that forums used to have, and Reddit is basically a convenient platform for forum hosting.
The problem I have with Reddit is every subreddit seems filled with amateurs posting the same starter questions daily, never looking at the feed to see these questions have been asked and answered daily.
That is not only Reddit issue any professional forum will get that problem.
That is basically what stackoverflow solves by aggressive moderation and closing duplicates also aggressively.
But then you get “people on this site are bad and don’t like me” where only thing they do is dealing with amateurs.
So for me it is interesting problem to solve and I hope GPT will be able to solve it by dealing with amateurs questions and leaving forums for professionals to have better space for discussion.
A niche sub equivalent succeeding on, say, Lemmy would either require the existing reddit sub to close and migrate there or for the Lemmy active user count to grow to the point where a critical mass of users interested in that niche want to discuss it there. There needs to be some way on Lemmy to promote those forums as well. A couple of niche forums I'm subscribed to are gaining a little traction, but I only found out they existed when they were mentioned on the reddit subs they're based on.
s,subreddits,events, and s,/default subs, festivals, in your first paragraph and it is still valid.
Saying that because I noticed this effect as a young festival goer. As the size of the event grew, the number of people I'd much rather not be around also increased. I am suspecting something similar is also at play here, in addition to the bot-effect...
I don't remember the correct term, maybe someone can help, but this is what happens to "scenes".
Cool kids do their own thing (art, music, whatever), some people notice and like what they're doing and enjoy it genuinely. They spread the word and more people join the scene. Then posers come in and try to imitate the cool kids, but can't really capture the same spark.
Scene grows and an eternal September commences where the original intent of the cool kids and genuine interest of the original fans is lost, as newcomers are there just to be part of the scene. Eventually they dominate the scene.
Finally advertisers and capitalists see a money making opportunity and they monetize the whole thing, ruining it for everyone.
I've been observing a pattern that I've been trying to articulate here and I can best describe as a framework where stuff 'comes to you' whereas the Internet for a long time was an enabler of 'you go to stuff'. The pendulum swung back, thanks to ad tech, and centralization, that have or are trying to orchestrate a culture shift. Okay, here are some concrete examples.
1. Television/cable (absent a TiVo type device), things come to you (ads and programming were fixed and you had to conform to their schedule back in the not-so-old days). Early 2000s, we could download content (illegally), we could pay for Netflix to send us DVDs of our choosing, and the algorithm was benevolent: its recommendations were superb.
Russian and French directors I positively rated -- ratings 1 through 5 stars plus a written review were permitted back then -- opened my world to suggestions for other movies that I got to select. Today, Netflix/HBO/etc display a limited UI set of options, highly hyped shows and movies shown repeatedly, and it now Comes To You. You have a tiny bit of choice, but not much.
2. Google search. Before, it was a resource for you to customize and find what you wanted: information about medicine, a product, or a store. Now, it Comes To You. You search for thing X, you end up in a rabbit hole of Y and Z topics or things, and a lot of things seem algorithmically generated or manufactured to steer you rather than help you.
There are many many patterns like this, from news searches to even tech problem searches and articles. Don't even get started on product comparisons. It's scary I can't even search on medicine interactions (I add reddit to the search field).
I should add, web sites all have their own mobile app so you get trapped, they can steer you, and you can't control ads, the UI, cut and paste, and so on. Thanks, world in which Things Come to Us now.
Such as it is: a heavy weight on pulling and steering us, and new generations growing up on phones not knowing it could be different.
Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?
Walter Benjamin wrote about this all the way back in the 1930s. He observed that early art like frescos painted on walls and sculptures in temples require the viewer to travel to them, but they gave way to paintings on canvas and busts that could travel to cities to meet audiences where they were.
Technology continued to push this trend, reproducing art through photography and printing in books and newspapers let it move even further to meet people in their own homes.
These current patterns you are seeing are an extension of this, the relationship between art and viewer has inverted, art is now expected to come to us, the focus has moved to within ourselves.
Marshall McLuhan also expanded on this and the idea of technology as extensions of us with his work "Understanding Media: The Extension of Man" if you'd like to read more.
Do you have a reference for where Benjamin wrote about this? I found this excerpt from "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it."
But wasn't sure if this was exactly what you were referencing, or some other piece.
Yes, thats the piece I was referencing. There are some other relevant sections too:
"a situation which Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into
our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so
we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and
disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” "
"technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into
situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it
enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a
photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be
received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an
auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room"
The whole essay is great, I'd really recommend reading it and Benjamin's other works.
Late response, but: there are some interesting symmetries and contrasts in various informational concepts.
One is what you and Benjamin are highlighting: the distinction between message traveling to audience and audience traveling to message.
Generally a forum or theatre are both examples where an audience assembles to receive or view a message. Similarly for museums or in situ* attractions. It's possible to appreciate the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon in person only by visiting those places. Flagship performance venues such as La Scala, the Bayreuth Festival, Lincoln Center, or New York's Broadway also attract audiences from around the world.
A contrast is tours in which some object or performer(s) travel a circuit over which two or more audiences are assembled and performances take place. There's some localised travel, but in large part it is the message which travels to the audience. Classic film-based cinema scales this up further, with physical film spools touring through projection rooms, traditionally beginning in larger and wealthier markets before hitting secondary and rural ones (there was a time when films might open in New York and Los Angeles weeks, or months, before even large Midwest cities such as Chicago). Digital distribution has made simultaneous openings much more common.
Broadcast, cable, and Internet transmissions take this concept even further where a performance is delivered directly to the home, business, desk, or hands of the audience via radio, television, desktop computer, or mobile phone. And of course books and printed materials afforded a similar service centuries earlier (though the true fall in prices and rise in volume began only in the 19th century, and in many ways was a 20th century phenomenon).
Generalising:
- Networks distribute messages.
- Spaces (or venues) assemble audiences.
There are hybrid forms as well:
- Media Channels combine distribution with an assembled audience.
- Tours visit a series of audience across a travel path.
- Archives gather records to spaces which readers can visit and access large quantities of information at little marginal cost (effort, time, distance, energy).
There's another symmetry I've noticed between records and signals generally:
- Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time subject to noise to a receiver potentially creating a new record.
- Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space subject to decay to a reader potentially creating a new signal.
Interesting. You describe something I've noticed myself, but haven't thought about in terms of the push / pull dynamics of tech products.
> How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?
As you touched on your yourself this was probably the default before the last couple of decades. There was a short period around 2010 where people (especially the youth) were quite divergent in interests and political views.
Today it seems people increasingly have shared opinions and interests. This is is a shift that's been quite alien to me since I grew up during the early internet when it was the norm for people to play different games, watch different films and listen to different music. There was no social media network effects and little to no recommendation algorithms or ads online.
Today this seems to have changed. Try finding a Gen Z who doesn't have an iPhone and isn't wear a pair of Nikes, for example. They are the result of the trend you describe, I believe. They like things not because they sought them out neutral platforms but because these things were pushed on them either by the network effects of social media or the recommendation algorithms and ads that litter the internet today.
A similar concept is whether something is a "tool" or not.
Tools are things that you use to accomplish tasks. They behave predictably, and you can become skilled in using it more effectively.
Non-tools are things that try to adapt to you. They're optimized for first-time users, or to create an "experience". You cannot go fast with them, even with familiarity. They don't act in your best interests.
A hammer is a tool. Excel is a tool. Google search used to be a tool, but it's been more non-tool for the better part of a decade.
Sometimes people want non-tools. It varies with person and task. But in general, long-term users tend to prefer tool-like uses.
But a tool for the most part is open source, a screw driver is a screw driver, if you turn a screwdriver to the right it pushes a screw into the wood. It doesn't take notes of the type of wood you are using and then strongly suggest that you buy walnut from Home Depot.
Content you go to has to be good enough to justify your effort. Or advertised to make it good enough.
Content they feed you just has to be enough to keep you from leaving.
The first category is what every "channel" invests in but hates to do so. It's expensive, the creators get expensive, and diva-ish. The second category is what all the execs love to successfully get away with making.
Comic book movies are perfect second-category content.
It's strange that TV / Streaming seems to produce better content high points than movies these days, considering you have to physically go to the initial screening of movies.
I miss pointcast, back in the day when T-1 lines were crazy, that downloaded full web sites of your favorite sites for you to look at later. Similarly, I miss Google Reader. I used feedly for a few years after readers' demise, and it worked okay, but many sites have gone to a super small summary in the rss feed, and you have to go click the link to read the article, so they can show you ads...
There are some places where I still experience "Things Come to Us". The open library on the internet archive is one. Worldcat is another although I still have to reserve/pick up the items. Using RSS and w3m to read news is another. You can use something like UserLand to run w3m on a phone, and the terminal program is pretty slick.
I've been reading older books on computing on open library, like "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" written in 1984 by Sherry Turkle and it's fascinating to see the questions people were asking back them. My favorite quote from that so far is this:
"That question is not what will the computer be like in the future, but instead, what will we be like? What kind of people are we becoming?"
Excellently written. A nitpick on your final point:
> Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?
This may be looking at it backwards. Rampant smartphone addiction and overuse begins to shape all things in a "medium is the message" type of effect. The less need there is to physically "Go to the Thing" - whether the thing is the television room, office, movie theater, mailbox, rental store, newsstand, grocer, etc - the more natural it becomes to sit in place and let Things Come to You. If we accept everyone using their phone all the time as "the way things are now", the vicious cycle will continue.
So you're saying we're allowing ourselves to be victimized by it via laziness ?
That's certainly true, if that is what you mean.
I guess the part I didn't speak about was: some people value independent thought more than others, and I think for those that do, the Things Come to You paradigm is even more frustrating.
My concern is that children are growing up in the Come to You dynamic. Flip side: they can generate content and release it in the wild, something that couldn't be done even in the 90's prior to IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
That's a pretty interesting question, the tough as nails salesman closing deals everyday would consider nearly the entire population is lazy as all heck, whereas the hermit fisherman would consider the opposite, that nearly all are needlessly agitated.
Placing the bar at the 50th percentile isn't very inspiring for the passing reader though.
Yes but roughly half the population will always be below average in terms of laziness, assuming it's normally distributed. So saying that is just a tautology.
>they can generate content and release it in the wild, something that couldn't be done even in the 90's prior to IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
In the mid-90s I was creating content and releasing it to the wild on my own website that was hosted for free on one of the myriad free website hosting platforms back then. Frankly, the website sucked, but it was my content.
I've watched Nirvana perform on local public access TV (ironically on Youtube) in 1989, so some level of public distribution was possible.
Similarly 50 Cent sold mixtapes of his music out of his car trunk to get the word out in the pre-Soundcloud era.
In the mid-00s, Kevin Hart (comedian) would maintain his own email lists when he toured, and would send out email blasts when he returned to those towns College bands used to do this as well, especially as email was adopted earlier there.
Good points, and I've made/discussed/seen these elsewhere as well, but one thing to add explicitly: it is still possible to get 'you go to stuff'. I don't have the impression I changed how I do that. But: it does seem to get harder and harder and I'm actually not sure it will remain doable in the future (except perhaps by a small subset of hacker-ish people) because it gets indeed not pushed at all.
Examples are things like LineageOS on your phone and/or not actevily using it as an extension but as a tool, illegally downloading content (still thrives), it actually seems a lot easier these days to download music from lesser known to virtually unknown bands (even if it's just via YouTube) and I still find this like I used to i.e. mainly by going to shows or looking at who's playing and finding related bands like that, choosing anything but Google/Bing/... as principal search provider and using multiple search engines, ...
So, I'm personally not heavily affected by that steering but I do indeed fear that it might become a lot harder in the future. On the other hand we shouldn't forget that for a lot of humanity out there the previous decades they just got their information from 1 or 2 TV channels, radio, cinema, and a newspaper. If they wouldn't actively seek value they'd be basically in almost the same boat. Except that today's boat is a lot more pushy.
Some of this is knowing where to look. If you want medicine interactions, examine.com has everything there is to know about the published scientific data on dietary supplements, and the FDA itself publishes all of the drug inserts for actual pharmaceuticals with every know interaction and side effect discovered during clinical testing. Great video content still exists, too. I recently watched most of the Kurosawa back catalog recently, which I should have done years ago, but now most of it is on HBO Max. Every studio having its own streaming platform now at least means virtually every great film ever filmed is at your fingertips now, but you have to put up with the reality that you still need to explicitly look for it. They're never going to put this stuff in the trending recommendations or whatever.
It's like the world needs librarians again and maybe all the nerds who used to staff video and record stores, poorly paid but passionate purveyors of information who had no incentive to sell you anything because they were going to get the same shit wage no matter what. Except I guess we need to figure out a way to also pay them.
FWIW, I’ve always seen it best described as push vs. pull. You’ve expanded the idea a bit but I think it’s still a good distinction and useful for what you’re getting at.
Overall I think this is related to a personal choice to consume or create. Of course with DVDs/streaming or social media, a lot of it is naturally going to be consumption no matter what. But the medium kind of steers you towards one or the other. Social media seemed like a way for you to express yourself, to create and share, but the algorithms nudged everyone into endless consumption scrolling. Creativity is only rewarded if it helps the money-making machines.
I don't want to push a value judgement upon creativity vs consumption, but I do think people should take it upon themselves to look critically at their own values, and what they want to spend their life doing - particularly how much of a balance they want between bringing something into this world vs. taking what they can get from it.
In creative pursuits, you want to "go" to the stuff that will be a tool or enabler of what you aspire to do. (And sure, you'll want some inspiration to "come to you".) You have to decide for yourself if you value "the machine" bringing everything to you more than you might value some individual pursuit.
>Google search. Before, it was a resource for you to customize and find what you wanted: information about medicine, a product, or a store. Now, it Comes To You. You search for thing X, you end up in a rabbit hole of Y and Z topics or things, and a lot of things seem algorithmically generated or manufactured to steer you rather than help you.
This is because "recommendations" are a big business. For example YouTube generates billions of views from recommended videos and God knows how much revenue. But I think recommendation algorithms are counterproductive from the business point of view because you will sell less ads if your platform content creators figured out how to get recommended by recommendation algorithms.
On the other hand recommendations are good for users because they will hopefully discover new content that they like. Platforms just need to be more flexible and offer their users tools to tweak recommendation algorithms according to their preferences.
There was an early art collective called the videofreex that defined what you’re talking about in terms of channel direction. Basically they defined media in the 1980s as being one-way channels where there was no response from the audience whatsoever, and they saw this as a form of control that strengthened class divides. They were excited about creating a two-way channel communication network because they thought it would break down the social hierarchy.
I think what you’re talking about is sort of like the recreation of the one-way channel within a two-way channel. Technically we can respond, but the amount of power our voice has has been lessened dramatically over the years.
I talked to one of the members of the videofreex recently (which is how I know about them), and his attitude was the classic “bittersweet nostalgia for my overly idealistic youth” attitude. He still thought he had a point, but he also felt like he underestimated A) the amount of problems that would come from disinformation and B) the amount of control that the old powers would still retain. I think he saw the structure of the media as reinforcing the social hierarchy, but now it’s looking like the structure of the social hierarchy was what was reinforcing the structure of the media… or maybe just a little feedback loop between the two… anyway the point I’m making is that just cause the media changed doesn’t mean the social hierarchy has.
> the amount of problems that would come from disinformation
When we used to say disinformation I imagined deep webs of false references, faking critical data.
Now I can lookup most "fake news" and find the truth of it, generally a too-broad take on quoting someone, within minutes. It's just that for partisan reasons people don't look, and when they have it pointed out they tend to say "yeah, that might be wrong but it's still mostly right in spirit" and keep on going.
It seems like hyper-partisanship or tribalism instead of being primarily based on bad data because the data so rarely comes into question.
The article touches upon this. You can phrase it as social media becoming just "media" again. A small group of heavy posters is responsible for the content backed by an algorithm that broadcasts it.
I think the cognitive effects are already visible. We become lazy, addicted, complacent, distracted and anxious.
Quality > quantity ("the Internet is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is.", i.e. small niches are big enough)
Not every company needs to be a unicorn, and you don't get closer to people with 10000s of followers vs. 100s who genuinely care.
2. When I started moving my content from instagram to potato.horse I noticed that suddenly content selection and adding captions to images became so much easier. It's so hard to escape the performative/"screaming into the void" frame of mind when using algo driven social media. Now, I still syndicate to IG and Reddit, but I have templates with comments redirecting users to potato.horse, where I can do whatever the f*ck I want with my content.
There is a bit of nuance in how these two are different and I'd say Mastodon feels more like early Twitter or early Facebook. On the consume side, that means your home feed has no algorithm.
Practically, it means you only see what you want and you only see it linearly. You never wonder "why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?" (e.g. Elon constantly in my feed for some reason) Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles. The home feed is linear like the early days of FB.
Early FB was great; I used it as a news feed as I only "liked" sources I wanted news from. Today? The feed is algorithmically assembled and full of content that is indistinguishable from ads (because of course, both FB and X make their money from ads and algorithmically enhanced engagement). Am I seeing this because someone paid to boost the views? How do I get this feed to behave? (Hypothetical question; maybe it's possible with a lot of tuning and config -- Mastodon just does exactly what I want/expect out of the box: follow these tags + follow these people = see this content in a linear flow)
To me, this simplicity makes it much more approachable on the consume side.
On the publish side, it lets you see the activity level of tags in the past week. This makes it easier to decide "how should I tag this content?".
One other aspect that I think the HN crowd can appreciate is that you don't have to figure out the platform settings for privacy and opt out of ads, tracking, and so on. Yes, there are still some privacy settings to toggle, but Mastodon isn't an ad platform and doesn't make money from being able to track you across the web and feeding you ads.
More intuitive on both the pub and sub sides, IMO. If you liked early FB and early Twitter, you'll instantly find Mastodon more pleasant and intuitive to use.
If I recall from the algo weighting dump they did last year, Elon is hard-coded to be basically the absolute most important thing to the sorting algo with a pretty long decay time. When he posts, it's effectively guaranteed to be in all Twitter users' feeds, and that's how he wants it.
Then again, I don't know first-hand; I quit Twitter many months before it got this version of Billionaire Buffoonery as an owner.
The other comments explain this better than I could.
In short:
I can post the same message on Twitter and Mastodon and get a thoughtful comment on the latter vs. no engagement/shitpost on the former.
Twitter feels like a bunch of angry people screaming into the void, whereas Mastodon is like screaming in a small cave filled with friendly weirdos. I like that. Eventually you lower your voice and start chatting.
I never figured out how to find something interesting on Twitter. The algo feed doesn't surface anything interesting anyway. On Mastodon, since I picked an instance that fits my interests I can actually browse the local instance feed/trending and see things that do interest me.
I'm pretty sold on Mastodon now, but I am wondering what it's failure mode looks like. Everything eventually gets worse - how might this happen with Mastodon?
I had Twitter around ten years ago to talk with content creators, like youtubers or writters. Outside that is mostly a politics and celebrities echo chamber.
Our personal websites are so similar! (https://nicolasbouliane.com) I thought "wow that font is beautiful" then realised that it was also EB Garamond. The art really brings it together. I wish I sketched as often or as well as you do.
Potato.horse is a work of art. How do you syndicate to Instagram and Twitter? I'd love to do something similar. I like your art and the way you chose to present it.
I also met a lot of people through my work, including close friends. I love when people reach out and I try to reward it whenever it happens. What you describe seems like being a participant in a small community, instead of a person on a soapbox.
Wow, that's uncanny. Your site looks lovely. Random remarks: I also used a fleuron as a decoration on my site before I replaced it with a little doodle (I call him Janusz). And, I'm even working on a recipes section for my own site at the moment! Also, hope the little subheader with the pronunciation of your name works.
Yeah, EB Garamond does the heavy lifting for me design-wise. I use it in Enso (enso.sonnet.io) and Sit. (sit.sonnet.io). I also have an alternative "brutalist" font stack (e.g. butter.sonnet.io), which I use in less serious/"louder" projects. I think I picked it up from a Germany based writer IIRC.
> How do you syndicate to Instagram and Twitter?
Instagram is hard. I don't know if even Buffer supports it without any manual steps. For Twitter I used their API. A GH Actions CRON job would query Contentful for the most recent posts, then push them to Twitter using the twitter NPM package. Recently it's been quite janky.
> I also met a lot of people through my work, including close friends. I love when people reach out and I try to reward it whenever it happens. What you describe seems like being a participant in a small community, instead of a person on a soapbox.
It does feel like this. Sometimes I manage connect some of the people I meet this way, but it happens rarely. I entertained the idea of having a small forum (like ponder.us).
Hello :) I just wanted to let you know that I intend to reach out and say hi to you soon. Your website resonated with me and I think we'll click in our conversation.
I'm travelling for a week come tomorrow, but when I am back in town I'll book something.
> "How does a brand show up in somebody's DMs or Discord server if they're not invited?" Haberman said. But in many ways, that's the point. People can still go on Instagram to check on their favorite celebrities and influencers, but young people don't want brands and marketers infiltrating the closed communities where they spend most of their time.
All people don’t want brands in their closed communities!
Anecdotally I strongly agree with the article. I pretty much only use Discord and group texts anymore among friends and family (though I do self host and share on Mastodon/Pixelfed/Lemmy it’s a fraction). Any time I poke around on traditional social media it just feels like a wasteland, 90% ads/curated content. Fine if you want to go read a magazine for a bit I guess but a shell of what it was like a decade ago.
The main thing for me is that I don't want everything I share with my friends and family to be public.
If I e.g. comment on a photo that my brother posted, I absolutely don't want any of his other random acquaintances to also see that. And also the other way around, if my friends comment something on my photo I don't want my brother to see that.
Private groups are the only way to avoid that. Or maybe a system like G+ had with the Circles, so I could e.g. share tech things only with my techie friends without bothering my aunt with it.
We can keep reinventing the wheel or we could just realize its all pointless anyhow, right? Why scroll to see the off chance Kevin went on vacation? Just shoot him a text and see what he’s been up to if you care. You don’t need a board or whatever to keep up with the people in your lives. Thats just a lazy way to do it which inevitably invites the ads in, so other ads we are exposed to in society makes us feel its necessary, but its not. Grandma isn’t active on facebook yet she keeps up with everyone she thinks about just fine with the good old land line, probably with a far more deeper connection than a laughing face emoji. Maybe something to think about before looking for the next online refuge.
> All people don’t want brands in their closed communities!
Since you can't avoid having these ads/brand placed in your preferred social media platform (the users are the product (to be sold to advertisers) and not the customers), the next best thing that you can do as a user is to subvert the undesired brands that you see in your social media stream (e.g. by posting something that makes fun of an ad that you see) to make the social media platform a less desirable place for the respective undesired advertiser.
Social Media started it's down fall ~2008 when the teachers and parents joined facebook.
I remember when facebook was _only_ the fellow kids you knew. There were inside jokes, offensive stuff, lots of pure text posts. It was _way_ different.
Parents and teachers joined, a couple kids got in trouble for what they posted on facebook, and everyone stopped using it freely.
I remember the exact moment that happened to me. I was sitting with an old friend, and we were looking at Facebook friend requests from my mom, and we looked at each other silently, and realized that everything was about to change.
No i disagree has nothing to do with that. The downfall is when it became a way for people to make money. Monetizing social media ruined it plain and simple. Now it's just full of people spamming the same trends and posting anything to go viral. The fact we literally have a generation of people of average people who do cringey dances and cringey voice overs as a job is insane.
It was more than the public, it was authority itself. So many people were grounded. Then came the ads shortly after the parents and then it really was over as it was.
"content is a commodity that fills social media feeds so we can be sold as a collection of preferences [...] attention but not understanding, engagement but not exploration"
Every time I hear "content creator" I perceive it as Styrofoam. Filler used to convey a product.
A good chunk of the use of the word "creator" is the lack of a word to capture the work of someone who uses multiple platforms to distribute their work. Someone can be simply a YouTuber, but if they also do Twitch streams, they have no choice but to be a "content creator". If they're primarily one or another, they can call themselves a YouTuber or a Twitch streamer, but not if they do both. If you add Substack, Twitter, podcasting, and TikTok into the mix (often with significant cross-posting), you really don't have a word except for "creator". And what captures all the things you're creating - "media" or "content" or something equally nebulous.
No doubt a lot of it is filler. But a lot of it isn't. I spent last night learning a bunch of cooking techniques on YouTube. Quite valuable for me!
I've heard content creators either say explicitly in videos, or in text under videos, things along the line of "Sorry I made a mistake here but I need to get this video out". Imagine reading an essay where the author tried to pull something like that.
YouTube penalizes video creators who don't post regularly. So it's hard for them to take breaks. If a video takes a week to make, how will you have enough of a backlog built up to take a two week vacation?
It might not be for everyone, but I'm posting more on social media than ever and seeing more engagement than ever... it's on the fediverse where smaller and safer communities are leading to much higher valuable engagement.
I'm also finding it a lot more common for people to have multiple profiles / personas... the social one, the work one, the furry one, whatever is how you want to present yourself and to whom, without needing to try and contort yourself to be everything to everyone.
Nah that's more like Threads now. Though that's quietened down enough that the 'this is so much nicer/better than Twitter' talk has at least calmed down a tad.
TBH i don't get the point of mastodon. Social media is primarily "media", broadcasting, so they must be megaphones, which by necessity includes large scale commercial and entertainment activity. Mastodon's purpose of small cozy chats is better served by ... chat which is more self-selective and fit for the niches or countercultures
> large scale commercial and entertainment activity
I think you're redefining "social media" (which I think was previously called "social networking" once upon a time) as "broadcasting" and "megaphones" so naturally your definition doesn't fit.
But socializing online is about sharing information, interests, and building a (small, or the size you prefer) network of people you consider online friends.
Discord does seem to work well for chatting about those same things with the people I know, and I can easily see how others use it for the same usage but with online-only friends. But whenever I visit my corner of the fediverse, I see lots of like-minded people sharing content that's relevant to me (the hashtags I follow), and I've engaged and enjoyed the experience.
There was and is no reason why any of that requires "large scale commercial and entertainment activity", and, in fact, those things seem antithetical to building up a community of people you want to communicate with online about your interests.
Whatever starts as 'social networking' i think it is inevitable that it will end up becoming 'social media', because people add friends but don't delete, and by the central limit theorem users will become average, that can easily be substituted by an ML model. Even if mastodon is OK now, it will end up with the same situation as it grows.
I still prefer when the world was divided in forums, not friend groups.
A full on chat program is more of an active pastime, whereas mastodon I choose to browse now and then throughout the day, and don't expect replies or reactions to be necessarily the same day, just 'whenever'. Perhaps that's why it skews so Gen-X older.
I think this is why Discord is doing great. You can easily find communities about specific topics where you can chat in real-time with people... and whatever you write in there feels somewhat ephemeral, instead of being permanently stored on the public internet.
True. Chat feels alive. Quite different from posting on social media where next you have to wait whether anybody even saw it at all (usually not) and can be bothered to like it (which does nothing) or respond to it.
>I'm posting more on social media than ever and seeing more engagement than ever... it's on the fediverse where smaller and safer communities are leading to much higher valuable engagement.
Precisely, it's signal vs. noise imo. There's an illusion that with more viewers you're more likely to find interesting people, but in practice it's mostly a distraction.
(I never was a fan of Twitter, and I use mastodon like I use Twitter : only when I'm bored, every months or so).
You have to find a feed/subreddit that interest you.
Hell, I even spend more time on stackexchange than I do on YouTube now. It's about niche, and small communities, where read is free but write not so much.
It's not social media anymore. In their feed, people are bombarded with ads, news, jokes as regular "content creation" and group posts where strangers with a narrow interest in, say, collectible figurines are posting pictures of their new purchase.
Twitter doesn't show me the people I follow, and instead show people I "might like", in no particular time order. When I do interact, almost noone of my followers can see my post because I'm not an advertiser / paid user. Same from Facebook. So it's not worth "building an audience" if you can't communicate with it, and your audience can be taken from you at will.
I feel this misses just one adjective: "nobody interesting comes here anymore, it's too crowded". A similar feeling I get from overtouristed places, initially they are interesting because of some attraction: the nightlife, the art scene, the food scene, or any combination of these (and other factors I'm too lazy to list) with some quirkiness that attracts people who are interested in the twist. Over time it becomes attractive to more people because they hear about it from others who experienced it, then it goes downhill where people will flock to a place but nothing that made it initially interesting is there anymore, it just becomes a self-perpetuating meme.
It feels it's a pattern that develops in social media, tourism, products, etc., something fresh appears which gets overextended and bores us out in the end, the laggards missed the magic. Rinse and repeat.
I can resonate with this, the same applies to cities that are small and friendly. As they grow bigger, crime and scams rise, people are not friendly and more, stores that where quirky and odd close due to competition from low-cost big-store brands..
Woah. I had never crossed paths with this, it's great. It describes really well an experience I had with a few subcultures... And it hurts I can see it happening in real time to a subculture I've been part of since the early 2000s.
It used to be my friends. Now it's a bunch of **s trying to piss me off for engagement clicks, or scam me.
I feel worst for the vulnerable - older or less cynical people, who get caught in the layers and layers of bullshit that constitute the poisoned well. There are people who live and die warped by it.
An alternative worth pondering: maybe social media just has a shelf-life of 5-10 years. You get into it during your hyper-social teen years, and then you get bored of it. That doesn't mean it will die. So long as we keep having young people there will be a market. But the social media apps are definitely delusional if they keep projecting that the entire human population will keep using social media all the time.
I know that this doesn't align with the article, because the article says that Gen Alpha prefers private messaging apps, but I still think there is something to this idea.
A lot of us here are the first generation of mass computer and internet usage and I think that clouds our long-term perspective about what computer usage will be like for future generations born into a world where computers always existed.
The private messaging apps are modern social media. Social media is a service a group of people who know each other in real life communicate about things happening to them in real life. I know that a lot of people take issue with that definition but that is only because the well-known social media companies stopped focusing on social media and started doing publishing.
Posting on Facebook and Instagram is down because people discovered a significantly better social media service: group text threads. Those took off because they have a critical feature that Mark Zuckerburg doesn't believe in: privacy contexts. Good UI and lack of ads also help. So critical is this new social network to young people that adults on HN complain that their kids say that not having an iPhone (and thus a rich texting experience) would be "worse than death."
I don't intend to disagree with your points overall. Indeed, young people like social media more than old people.
They are also part of the first generation of mass computer/internet usage, like us. And they were often slower to adopt a smartphone. So they could very well be going through their "first 5-10 years of internet" experience. The fact that they're old right now might just be a distracting factor.
Or maybe it is indeed a hint that social media is more likely to be used by certain age brackets and we can think of it in waves:
Old people move slowly. They meet fewer new people, they get less enthusiastic about the next big thing, they're less interested in new things, hell, they tend to walk slower, too.
So when a new phenomena springs up, say, a new type of social media, the fast moving teenagers and young adults get in first. The feedback loop between people joining and existing members convincing more people to join blows up the popularity. Once it's popular enough, if it can be easily translated to appeal to older people, the older people will move in. (I say "if", because SnapChat managed to hit the massive growth curve part without ever really getting the old people on-board). The old people being on the site is a downside, so eventually a new novelty springs up to attract young people. The older people, who are slower moving, get left behind.
I posted a lot on facebook in high school. Had maybe 50 friends there, like my classmates, soccer team etc. Posted at least once a day what I was doing, same did everyone else, and we discussed in during lunch next day. Or I would post a general "going to the soccer field, just join in", and we'll be a group there. Then joining university and getting new groups of friends, it didn't feel relevant to "spam" everyone with these things anymore. And then friends and family joined. Then I got a job and new groups, and suddenly there's 500+ friends on there I don't want to tell everything to...
And the opposite problem with people I follow on social media. I care about your tech writings, or your sport performances or whatever. But not everything else you post. I want a slice of you, not everything.
This makes me wonder if something like Google+ "circles" or the idea of maintaining a finsta could translate into a way to bring back posting on social media.
I think what Google+ got wrong is that connections are a 2-way street, you may not realize your new friend _wants_ the day-to-day updates and soccer game invites, because to you they may just be someone you met at work.
Imagine if you could have a list of feeds to follow, personal, professional, etc. And when adding someone you could follow whichever feeds you wanted, and unfollow certain ones at any point. Some could be private, so you'd have to be approved to follow.
Then I wouldn't feel the need to remove old acquaintances from fb, I would just unfollow their feeds. I would feel comfortable posting stuff related to my job/networking because I know only people following my professional feed would see it. And I'd be comfortable posting personal stuff to my personal feed if it was locked and I was the maintainer of who could follow it.
They could pretty easily implement this in facebook and I could imagine it breathing life back into the platform.
I remember the circles concept working for about 2 weeks.
I'm into photography and people started creating "best photographers" circles, one of them had 700 posters in it. You could follow the entire circle with a single click after which your feed is pretty much done.
A handful of circles would be massively followed which means whoever was lucky to get in early, ruled the platform or niche.
My idea is that a profile should indeed be sliced. Personal, professional, specific niches (cooking, tech, whatever) and that we have a reliable labeling system that accurately detects the "channel", preferably fully automated. The signal to noise ratio would improve drastically and you could once again get value out of a social network.
Likewise I propose the same for moderation. Let me pick my comfort level. Ranging from "give it to me raw" to "I need to call my therapist because I saw a micro aggression" and everything in between.
Why not remove these persons you don’t feel close to from your friends list ? When I was using facebook, after I moved in life, say going from highschool to university and my list grew with my new university acquaintances there, I pruned it from the acquaintances of the past life, high school people I knew didn’t matter so much to me once they were not part of my life anymore.
So my friend list organically went through cycles of growth and shrink and probably stayed roughly constant, with the only long term growth being people that "sticked around" in my life.
Because I kinda want to keep up with their big events. Like kids, marriages, jobs, a new house or whatever. And I see some of them occasionally when "back home" and then it's nice to have kept somewhat superficially in touch. And fb works for that. It's just all the day-to-day stuff no one posts anymore.
There's also the unspoken norm that un-friending someone is rude. I frequently prune my following lists and then I run into someone I've met and imagine them getting slightly upset that I have unfollowed them. Maybe that sounds silly, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of my peers would say similr things.
The way that we describe the action, "un-friending", probably influences the notion that it's a serious / rude thing to do. We need some kind of UI that emphasizes that it's not a big deal whatsoever and is not a rude thing.
This is why I love subreddits on Reddit. I want a slice of you, like say I was to discuss topics like cloud hosting or vinyl records. I don’t really care what else you’re into I want to connect on these topics we have in common.
As much as the Reddit website and app and overall experience is garbage the communities can be good
If social media means a way to communicate with friends, family, and extended community online, it's pretty clear Meta and Tiktok don't want their products to be that. They've made sure you can't get a feed of just your friends.
It's natural the people who want that sort of thing will go elsewhere.
Meta and I'm sure TikTok as well, would be MORE than happy to follow wherever users want to take the platform. The problem is, time and time again, users do not want what they say they want.
What you mean to say is that time and time again, users do not want what causes them to maximize engagement levels and click on the most ads. "Users said they wanted this feature, but we implemented it and engagement didn't go up," doesn't mean that the users lied about what they wanted, it just means that they don't want to use the product in a way that requires a lot of wasted time.
TikTok users say all the time that they want the option to see a feed of videos from people they're following, in reverse-chronological order. They're not lying. The issue is that the reason they want that is so that they can use TikTok for a short (30 minutes or less) session to check for updates on things they actually care about and then close the app, which would be entirely contrary to TikTok's fiscal goals.
I think they saw engagement dipping as people got bored with it, so they started filling it with algo stuff instead. If they went back to pure friends, I'll bet it wouldn't work.
Social media seems to be pushing a bunch of content that isn't the people that I actively follow. Twitter, I mean X keeps switching me back to the "For You" tab, and Facebook changed their page/group interface that switches my profile out every time I don't pay attention for a second and I see a feed of random. I can't speak for any of the rest as I generally don't use much else.
Given that case, of course I'm less likely to engage on social media. I'm much less there to interact with random strangers. Of course so many people don't go out and do anything anymore, don't engage with people around them when they do, and may be put off if on the other side. It's a really weird time to be alive to say the least. And that doesn't even get into culture issues that most people don't care about, but those that are active in social media are nearly obsessed about (including myself at times).
I've seen a lot less engagement with my Facebook posts in the last couple years, and been shown a lot fewer posts from my friends compared to groups, ads, and "suggested" posts. I used to wonder if it was primarily because Facebook was openly downranking news and politics, and my friends and I posted about those things a lot more than your average users.
Now I think it's just because most of them have silently stopped using the platform -- but I think a big reason for that is we figured that if no one is going to see our stuff, then why post it at all? In other words, anticipating the algorithm led to a kind of chilling effect on our usage in general, at least for my own behavior.
Not that Internet political arguments have gone great with the current platforms and their incentives, but I don't like the idea that they might not happen at all, especially at a time that seems as important to discuss as this one.
Massive thanks to Reddit for going ahead with their API changes and killing Apollo. Since then, I waste probably no more than 10 minutes a day on there, and I don't doomscroll anymore.
I've been predicting this trend for years, and it's validating to see someone else say it. It isn't even just messaging apps. Discord and Twitch are also killing social media usage. It's any walled community where people within the community get to decide who is in and who is out, and the reach of casual sharing is limited. Social media can't counter this trend, because it's not in line with their incentives (massive sharing and virality).
Social media companies are going to have to react to this eventually. If I had to guess, they're going to go harder into content production.
After a certain point, social media has become a source for recycled garbage. It's costly to create original content and content creators aren't being properly compensated for their efforts. AI will only further this decline as content creators will have a cheap source of unoriginal content.
Social networks put engagement before everything else and alienate their products. I moved away from Facebook to Instagram when it stopped being about my friends, and did the same when Instagram tried too hard to be TikTok.
And I like these services independently. I watch short content, I like following what my friends do and I follow(ed) strangers on Twitter. But the moment everything is crammed into one app the experience becomes dull.
I wish they'd spin up new apps instead of adding more and more layers to the existing ones.
I've been using WhatsApp groups for sharing with my friends and some Telegram groups too. Everybody has WhatsApp and actively uses it here anyway, so there is no extra app to install. No need to use Instagram, Discord, TikTok or whatever. It crosses all age groups.
IMHO this article shows a clear misunderstanding of what social media is.
Humans are culturally used to interacting with limited sized communities, probably even evolutionary idk.
When social media was new it was still limited sized, even through it was global, due to filter and it not yet having been adapted everywhere. (note: the term "limited sized" is a bit oversimplified, through I think most people will know what I mean)
Then it tried to add many more ways to uphold the illusion, e.g. by adding better filters and similar.
Then people moved to mainly consume social media platforms which do not create the dynamics of a more limited sized community, sure.
But they never did stop posting on social media which did have that property!
For example discord, which was fundamentally build around the idea of having limited sized communities with only some limited degree of cross community features.
Similar that family group you might have on WhatsApp, Telegram, Threema or similar _is still social media_. Sure it might be a bit more private but that doesn't make it not social media. And it can be semi public, too. And people post there "social media content" all the time.
Facebook is also still in use a lot, even through more in the background by older people.
In the end platforms like TickTock and Instagram focused on making people consume media, instead of creation of more natural feeling social cycles, but jumping from there to "no one is posting on social media anymore" just misses the core of the issue: There are many different kinds of social media with different dynamic.
Social Media is a word that means less than the sum of its parts. It is not just the word Media modified by being Social; it was invented to describe algorithmic feeds like Facebook and Twitter. Discord is not social media. Discord is a forum, a type of thing that existed before social media.
Social Media's organizational principle is the user page, while Forums are organized by community and discussion topic. Reddit is also not social media, despite having some algorithmic features, because it is organized by community/thread, not by social network. You go to a subreddit to read the posts there, not to a user page to follow them.
what you describe is not the definition of social media which I see commonly used, especially in a legal context
technical details like weather it uses threads in the end IMHO doesn't matter for weather is social medi
social media is internet media used is used for socializing
which means that while classical forums are most times not social media but they can be
discord is not a form, it gained forum functionality somewhat recently, but the most common use case people have for discord is to socialize, hangout and chat in small communities. Does't mean it doesn't also get used as a forum, still it's more used for social interactions then anything else.
Reddit on the other hand is in between a classical forum and social media, though increasingly more social media in recent years and saying it's not social media just IMHO isn't right.
So you think that even IRC and text messages on your phone are social media? Can't agree. Being a chat room is not enough. The social in "social media" stands for social network, not just any kind of social interaction at all. The key innovation with social media is using technology to leverage your social network for discovery and recommendation systems. You can't have social media without a social network platform through which it gets distributed.
EDIT: On reflection, the key point is that social media is an alternative to traditional media, like newspapers and magazines. The term refers to a way of publishing and distributing content. So I change my position that Reddit is indeed part of social media, not because you socialize on it, but because it is a platform primarily used for publishing/distributing content. Places where you just hang out with your friends on the internet are not content distribution platforms, however. (Unless the only interaction you have with your friends is sharing and discussing internet media.)
I propose this definition: Social Media is the practice of leveraging social network and community platforms to publish and distribute media.
While communication platforms like Discord might get roped into the social media ecosystem, sharing liking and subscribing is not its primary purpose. For something like Reddit and HN, it's easier to say that media distribution is the primary purpose, but not 100%. Going a step further, platforms like Youtube and Twitter are used for both publishing and distribution, so they're not just communication platforms, they're the end-to-end social media platforms.
I and my friends 3 years ago switched to closed group on Signal. We switched from our makeshift mail group we used for 10 years (we all were just using "reply to all" to the infinity). Thanks god Signal has mute option. The emails always waited for me not knocking on the doors like Jehovah's witnesses!
The funny thing for me is that my FB feed is nothing but user-generated -- no glossy productions. While I've tried instagram at the instigation of my partner and the opposite appears to be true.
And twitter, which I've never really liked, is still for me at least small things written by humans.
I kinda understand this because in the first 10 to 15 years of the commercial internet people were eager and hyped to get connected and share everything what they do and think. Later on this backfired with security and privacy issues like numerous hacks, leaks and privacy fiascos and now they seek more private space to get connected. Nowadays only influencers, content creators and "public personas" want get as much exposure as they can plus private businesses and public institutions.
Ordinary people "hide" behind pseudonyms or rarely post with their real names unless I will say it again, they are aspiring content creators/influencers or whatever they want to become in their professional life.
Even the public personas are having a rough time. Twitter is falling apart and then there is Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and just generally a very fractured yet crowded space where you're up against dirty tactics of your peer influencers.
I don't feel sorry at all for commercial grifters, but there's also genuine publishers. Institutes that just want to share a message and get it out to the public, as a service. That model is now quite broken.
Yea Twitter is falling apart but brands, companies and public people have other huge platforms to reach massive audiences like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube and since recently very popular TikTok. From what I see and understand if you sell something no matter how big or small you are, first thing you need to do is create your Instagram account and get presence over there because people like visual.
When Zuckerberg talks about Twitter not fulfilling completely its role as a text based social network, I would like to remind him that the biggest social network in the world is the global e-mail network not Facebook and yea e-mail is primarily textual. E-mail as a protocol is powerful but features around it are very much stuck in time. Facebook started like Zuckerberg described it as "a directory of people" and then he built around that concept adding features to connect with other people in that directory and share content. But the problem with Facebook is; it's a walled garden and if you are not in it, you are completely out of touch with other people. On the other hand virtually all people who use internet have an e-mail account and e-mail being an open protocol you can connect with anybody without much hassle.
When people think about text-based social networks, they need to think again about e-mail and how we can improve e-mail experience and build more powerful features around it and not invent new protocols which are barely getting any foothold.
Seems like one solution could be to limit the transition from everyday users using for social reasons to brand/content creator users using it for monetisation by capping or limiting the social graph (e.g. a cap at 150 followers/following/friends/whatever you call them). Brands and content creators would have no incentive to join and devalue the network with constant marketing and high-effort posts when they can only reach a maximum of 150 people.
I thought I vaguely remembered a similar idea, and a quick Google search only returns a brand called Path (no longer operational). Maybe there would be renewed interest in the idea.
I stopped posting frequently when I realized I was putting my name on a thing in a public database, and that most hiring processes these days involve putting my real name in google and looking at whatever pops out. I still post nowadays, but it's usually under a pseudonym, from a VM, through a VPN, over HTTPS. I should probably look into encrypting my DNS too.
Nowadays when I'm posting in the clear with my real name I usually stop and think "Would someone hire me if they read this?" and then delete everything I wrote and just move on with my life.
I do not share anything digitally that would backlash if revealed. Also not in private digital spaces. Not in work chat. Not even on a private device in a note. Nowhere.
Digitally, I do not gossip. I have no political opinion on divisive topics. I have no nudes. I don't swear in game chat. There is no smoking gun to be found at all even if you get full access to my entire digital life.
I have an addiction to Twitter, but I am the first to admit that top-quality tweets are one in a million in my timeline.
The big advantage is that I follow so many different kind of people at once that there is a HUGE diversity of infos.
On the contrary, I follow very specific topics on Reddit. And as far as I am concerned, the quality of info is top-level, and the signal/noise ratio is VERY good.
Regarding Facebook, I mostly only follow [dedicated] groups now. And once again, the signal/noise ratio is much better.
Conclusion: apart from Twitter, social media are all back to being fancy Usenet clones :)
I took a 2 year break from Facebook. It just got to be too much. I just rejoined, as kids' schools send messaging and announcements regularly there and other groups of local interest use it to coordinate. Outside of that, no one is posting anything but meme reshares that echo 1990s email forwards.
""How does a brand show up in somebody's DMs or Discord server if they're not invited?" Haberman said. But in many ways, that's the point. People can still go on Instagram to check on their favorite celebrities and influencers, but young people don't want brands and marketers infiltrating the closed communities where they spend most of their time."
For some reason, it takes people a long time to figure this out. There is no room for advertising in peer-to-peer networks which is the OG design for the internet. I have been experimenting with running private L2 overlay networks since 2008, pre-Wireguard. The networks are small, managaeable, there are no strangers, no large audiences. If marketers, advertisers and so-called "tech" companies want to try to hack into each and every one of these private networks, then let them. It will be a ton of effort to do on a mass scale, and for little reward. If they are caught I think we can sue them.
The open web, walled gardens and "app stores" will always be around for marketers, advertisers and so-called "tech" companies. If anyone wants to communicate person to person or person to small group through a third party's website/server, say, "Mark Zuckerberg" or some other person they don't know, they certainly can. Unless it's HN, advertisers, "creators" and "influencers" will all be there.
That's why I think Twitter would've died anyway (or deflated).
It was quite hard to consume niche information without posts from outside the community to pop out. The solution to this was to only read tweets with hashtag you wanted to follow, and not what was 'trending', but Twitter interface got a bit in the way. The new Twitter version have a sightly better interface, but much worse content imho (on the hashtags I followed). Also I can't read discussions without login in, and that's just a killer point.
I know there's a lot of Musk stans in here, but he really did destroy Twitter, possibly at the behest of the Saudis, and it is now a late night Fox News like ads space full of scams.
I loved Facebook during 2010-2014. Everyone would post their silly photos or some super inside joke that only people in our classroom could relate to. It was soo refreshing. Crush liking your photo etc. Now I don't even remember my Facebook password and the last time I logged in I remember it was just some shitty hyper local meme/news page with crass content. And I dont have an instagram account. Feels good to just connect one on one with people directly on Whatsapp nowadays.
-Post on 4Chan from a few years ago. I cleaned it up a little (removed retarded and autist).
The crux of Social media....
The need for attention, validation, to fit in, and be seen fitting it. Its encourages the worst traits of old internet forums. The upvote/downvote system is a compounding factor on all of this because it gives direct feedback. Violating the group think is instantly punished. Conforming to the group think is instantly rewarded. They are thereby programmed to attempt to appease the group constantly. They live for the rush of validation and dopamine when the upvotes start ticking.This shit becomes such a powerful feedback loop that they really have grasp on reality at all.
I've had the misfortune of talking to some IRL hardcore "social media people" face to face. They're socially inept in an entirely unique way. They're capable of basic social graces that an actual crazy/freak isn't, but they still lack critical self awareness. They don't know how to differentiate between the internet b.s and real life b.s. They're gullible and will believe anything from another person who is even half way agreeable to them. Its tragic. They're virtually lobotomized. Genuine NPCs.
Circles was a great idea. But not really good enough. I'd have liked an "ignore" circle, like banning users on other platforms, just quietly, like the shadowbans some implement on a personal feed level.
Also, Circles was the only good thing about Google+. The rest was average to bad, and the forced integration into all kinds of Google services, the forced realnames, and the lack of third-party integrations killed any kind of goodwill/benefit-of-doubt anyone might have had.
I think what people sometimes miss is that circles was a good feature for users, but a bad feature for the platform. They interrupt vitality and outrage, since all messages are potentially more contained.
I think its reputation of killing products would still have been a factor in avoiding using it. Maybe not a factor for everyone but at least in some... uh, circles.
In its current form, it would look pretty pathetic compared to other offerings. But that's because they haven't had to innovate due to their virtual monopoly status. If they launched a new Gmail with modern tech and design, however, it could be pretty attractive.
Anecdotal data of 1 but I still post to FB and Twitter (uh, X) fairly often. I never got into IG (too superficial, and I actually prefer discussion). Tried Threads for a couple days and it never latched. Reddit (arguably accidentally) permabanned me across all my accounts after I accidentally used a different login to post to a sub I had been (debatably, mods can be jerks) banned on 1 of my accounts in a long while back (this literally flags all of your accounts, which they determine via ML fingerprinting, as "ban evasion accounts" which leads to a permaban across ALL of them... I wish I was joking), so mostly out of pure disgust I haven't been back even to view the read-only bits on a multireddit, and there's no one I can contact there who will respond fairly, so f**** Reddit (which is saying a lot, especially since I've had an account there since it was brand new!)
I've started checking out https://lobste.rs/ since I finally got an account there, but they literally make you wait 90 days before you can invite anyone else (I guess this is "anti-hockey-stick" development?)
They didn't delete them. They banned them from interacting with the site in any way except read-only. As soon as I posted to a subreddit I was banned on 1 account from, via a different account (I honestly forgot at that point, this was months later), Reddit itself detected this and banned ALL accounts they could associate with me via some kind of machine-learning fingerprinting which is, I have to say, quite effective.
It's absolutely NOT difficult. I've been a Reddit user for decades (I think 2006 was my first account)... if I was actually an asshole, I would have gotten banned a long time ago, instead of 2 months ago.
Step 1, have multiple Reddit accounts for anonymity (hey, look, I don't want everyone knowing my medical problems that I seek help on, for example). Step 2, encounter 1 mod on 1 subreddit who misinterprets 1 comment (or you violate TOS without realizing it, by accident) and bans you when you seem insufficiently apologetic (I can show you the conversation evidence here, apparently "I'm sorry I made a mistake" is insufficient). Step 3, accidentally post anything to that subreddit (even something tame or supportive) with a different account months later. Reddit, via fingerprinting, will detect this, and now you are irrevocably a Ban Evader(tm) and all your accounts (as well as any new ones you create, which will now automatically be considered "ban evasion accounts") will be locked in turn as you log into them, making it impossible to interact whatsoever with the site except Reddit admins themselves, and good luck reaching them.
I've even bought Reddit Gold (and had plenty of credits remaining). Doesn't matter.
Deleting every Reddit cookie, blocking ads and changing your IP? They'll still figure it out somehow, and now you will be even MORE guilty of "ban evasion". It's ridiculous. There's no way to appeal it. It's guilt via mere suspicion.
Systems without enough humans suck.
Anyway, it's bad enough that your accounts are not actually anonymous there and that Reddit can actually associate all of them with each other. That's enough of a privacy violation on its own to merit not going there.
how do you violate the TOS on accident? are you alleging that multi-accounting results in a fingerprinting ban? because that isn’t the case. you’ve given plenty of indication and hinted you were actually banned for something else - if you got a ban and then attempted to circumvent it, that’s a very obvious site-ban on any site that’s run remotely sensibly and your grievance is pretty silly.
Because it's been months since you've read it, and you're a human who makes mistakes?
> are you alleging that multi-accounting results in a fingerprinting ban
Multi-accounting where just 1 of those accounts was banned from 1 subreddit results in a fingerprint ban across all accounts if any of those accounts is found posting to that subreddit. There is no warning, and I was not banned for something else (except originally, from the 1 subreddit, which was based on a highly debatable mod decision). Not sure what part of "I actually experienced this" you're failing to understand.
> if you got a ban and then attempted to circumvent it
Again, you're not understanding the problem. IT CAN LOOK LIKE I was "attempting to circumvent" a ban, when I simply forgot that I had been banned from 1 subreddit on some other account. I was not "attempting to circumvent" anything, I simply failed to unsubscribe from that subreddit across all my accounts. And AFTER THAT POINT, when Reddit has already "warned" you or whatever, you sign in with another account, it is IMMEDIATELY flagged as a "ban circumvention account" and then THAT account gets banned. It is a runaway explosion, basically. And if you try to at least leave a single account unbanned by removing cookies, etc. then those actions are seen as adding further guilt, which is hilarious because you're actually trying to avoid violating the ban any further but being penalized simply for using another account to not step on the same toes!
Feel free to peruse my comment history on HN, which is pretty representative of my online presence in general, and see if you can detect any personality flavor that is worthy of a sitewide ban. Remember that on HN, I can't delete past comments, so I can't now game my history to try to misrepresent myself.
Social media companies can get some of the people all of the time, or all of the people for some of the time. For a while Facebook and Twitter managed to be in the second group, which is an hugely profitable group to be in, and they both thought it would last forever.
When thinking about Internet platforms, the lens I like to view things through is one of power. As a user what power do I have if any, to control my experience? To control what I see when and from whom. If I have little or no power, or the power is only shallow or superficial, if the power isn’t very granular, then this all counts against the platform. It may surprise some (younger) members of HN, quite how much power the individual user had on early “primitive” platforms like USENET or closed user groups or chat systems, compared to the big, modern social networks of today.
This seems to follow the same laws that Christopher Alexander outlined about communities.
The bigger they get, the less personal they get. A regression to the mean.
For example, if your town has fewer than 7,000 people, you'll often see strangers waving to each other, conversations happening at the general store, etc.
Once you cross over 7,000, that disappears. Waves turn to nods, and then nothing.
Warpcast is the online equivalent -- it has (I think) only 20,000 DAUs, so feels much more friendly and intimate
""How does a brand show up in somebody's DMs or Discord server if they're not invited?" Haberman said. But in many ways, that's the point. People can still go on Instagram to check on their favorite celebrities and influencers, but young people don't want brands and marketers infiltrating the closed communities where they spend most of their time."
Young people? That's why I left Facebook. Your brain getting chewed up by ads and alt-right trash.
I revived my instagram account that was dormant for 5 years and I'm surprised how little my network posts. With ~100 followed I see about 3-5 posts per day before "I'm all caught up". I see about 10 "stories" per day.
The rest is just a sea of ads and public posts that I absolutely don't care about.
Will social media use AI to post content in order to keep attracting advertisers, showing that "stuff" is happening on their platform? Advertisers who should only trust One Metric: the correlation of the actual sales with an online advertisement campaign.
That metric is never important. Brands have always lost money advertising. Spending on ads is seen as burning extra budget to stay ahead of the curve and remain relevant
They are simply digging trenches for survival and domination. That is why I believe brands with profits above average should be banned from spending on ads. They polute the market and decrease competition
A few years ago I heard an interesting description of social behaviour on a radio program interviewing a sociologist.
They compared human social interaction to the way an actor can be on stage or back stage, and would behave very differently in the two situations, even though we wouldn't consider it dishonesty. Likewise, it's completely normal that a food service worker interacting with customers would behave very differently to how they do in the staff break room or outside of work.
In the back stage context, for example, you can try on new ideas and then discard them after discussion, secure in the knowledge it'll soon be forgotten. Or you can speak plainly about topics where opinions differ, knowing how the people you're talking to will feel. Or you can be a bit boring, a bit derivative, a bit cringe. And of course, how public the discussion is doesn't just impact you - it also impacts who'll reply, and with what.
I can well believe people have found there's much more authenticity in group chats than there is on the major social media platforms.
The trust of a small, private group goes a long way, but I also wonder whether we've internalized the idea that things you say on the internet can last a long time. Even if the UI claims to be ephemeral, someone in your close group can screenshot what you posted and distribute it anonymously.
I was recently telling a friend that I find it so much more meaningful to directly exchange pictures and articles / thoughts with people individually and get their individual reactions
I just wish there was a good and decent messaging app. All the high security E2E encryption apps not run by tech companies that are spying on me have no usable chat history.
The moment social media became mostly corporate, I lost interest in it. We're supposed to socialize between each other, not between ourselves and the ads that abuse us
"Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution" (2015)
[A]s soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.... The muggles who invade and ruin subcultures come in two distinct flavors, mops and sociopaths, playing very different roles. This insight was influenced by Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle,[1] an analysis of workplace dynamics. Rao’s theory is hideous, insightful nihilism; I recommend it.... The sociopaths ... work out how to monetize mops—which the fanatics were never good at. With better publicity materials, the addition of a light show, and new, more crowd-friendly product, admission fees go up tenfold, and mops are willing to pay.
When I see a headline making an absolute statement like this I immediately dismiss it as an exaggeration. A variation on Betteridge's law [1] perhaps. Their are other social media than the big ones.
I'm not really sure on your definition of "authenticity" but it seems to me that TikTok users are optimising for the algorithm, for engagement and for advertising revenue just like on every other platform. If anything, TikTok seems to give users the power to be even more annoying and repetitive, between the computer-generated voiceovers and the same few songs being used over and over again ("oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no").
If you watch any food videos you’ll see the advertising soon enough though, usually in the form of rage bait or similar. Like using fast food as ingredients to recipes or way too much Velveeta in their recipe.
> "It's really bizarre to me that everyone's gone to this place in their mind that content has to be so curated," Bruening told us. "So curated that you can't show what you're cooking for dinner, because that's not cool enough."
Uuuuuh what? Everyone is doing the thing you want to do, but everyone else is doing it better, so you're complaining. If you were number 1, would you be complaining as well? Sounds like you're just a bitter loser.
I don't see how that's possible, I have been a Twitter users for years and last time I checked my feed was basically a ghost town. I don't even bother logging in because I know the people I liked talking to are now either on mastodon or left social medias entirely.
The link you provided is from April. When I click on the article, then click on the cited Twitter stats “visits to Twitter.com”, then scroll to “Total visits in last 3 months” (for Twitter of course), the report appears to indicate that traffic is up 1% MoM and currently at a high for the trailing 3 month period (which is all they provide). It is just shy of Instagram (which I was surprised to see).
