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.
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.
I'd like to call it "glossification".