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.
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").
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> "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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
(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.
>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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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?
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)
> 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.
> 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 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???")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
376 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threaddisclaimer - i'm not on tik-tok. just based on videos I see shared and posted everyn now and then
"Nobody comes here anymore, its too crowded".
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.
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.
Thanks a lot for sharing.
<https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths>
The bots are like tourists. The population of Venice is in steep decline, but the streets are congested.
Social media is 15 years old now. Watching what your friend had for dinner or some other mundane non-event is just not that exciting anymore.
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.
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 :)
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".
> 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.
(Source: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/)
Do you mean that the context here is not user/business, but personal/curated?
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
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.
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.
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.
A.k.a Welching. Gettin' the juice out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
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.
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.
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?
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.
Honestly, if that is true ( and I have no real way of knowing ), I think that is a good thing. People are finally adjusting.
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.
And of course, there'll always be a segment that never gets to that realization, keeping the corpse animated.
Early Digg was pretty good.
Early Reddit had a lot of good help guides and interesting perspectives.
Now on HN. And crossing fingers.
(Slashdot seemed to go through the cycle, bottom out, and is ok again?)
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.
So I went back to reddit.
I also think this is the magic that forums used to have, and Reddit is basically a convenient platform for forum hosting.
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...
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.
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.
https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/225933-2017-09-22-faceb...
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.
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":
> http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
As a user (in particular as a non-paying one), you never make the platform your own. This feeling is pure entitlement.
If you want to make a platform your own, set up your own web platform.
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.
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.
Quite infuriating especially on a lengthy thread. There's a 5 year old feature request that nobody ever bothered to respond to.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600320...
This is the forum replacement. Right. :\",
Why would you post something you’ve made yourself when you are competing with big budget production companies or well funded creative marketing teams?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hence, silence.
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.
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.
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'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.
As much as the Reddit website and app and overall experience is garbage the communities can be good
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.
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.
Also, it smells of a marketer's perspective. Of course if most posts are fake people will stop being interested in the platform.
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.
(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.
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.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rembrandt-Wolpert/publi...
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.
I still prefer when the world was divided in forums, not friend groups.
1. Most of my online social interactions come from people interacting with my work (writing, code, drawings) through:
- my say hi calls (https://sonnet.io/posts/hi) - Mastodon
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.
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.
Then again, I don't know first-hand; I quit Twitter many months before it got this version of Billionaire Buffoonery as an owner.
1) block the brain parasite,
2) disable half of the UI using an ad blocker,
3) condition yourself to click the "Following" tab without noticing it, and
4) voila, now you have a semi-pleasant Twitter experience.
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.
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.
(psst just checking out your carbonara recipe, here's my cacio e pepe with black garlic: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OUytE9oUnmnwf5BPqt79vqi_...)
> it was also EB Garamond.
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).
Let's talk some time! (https://calendly.com/hey_hey)
I'm travelling for a week come tomorrow, but when I am back in town I'll book something.
Cheers
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?
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.
> 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.
Well if you are looking for memes and catposts, yeah, the S/N ratio here is quite low.
Honestly I think of those things as noise, so I see S/N of HN as much higher. I can always go elsewhere for the vibes.
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.
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...
Some years ago, a friend introduced me to caffè corretto - espresso with grappa. Pretty good stuff, too.
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.
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.
Is the theme of our online pub
Jokes regularly get upvoted here, the bar just happens to be a bit higher than inane Reddit pun threads.
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.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133112>
Dang's written on this many times, typical:
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.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696013>
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.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7503356>
He's specifically pointed to a take of scott_s from 2009 several times:
people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289>
Right, that's the vibe. And it's fantastic.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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