With old chat programs and forums I was talking to real people over a long span of time. On the modern platforms I’m just talking to the internet. It feels very different.
In 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years. We don’t talk as often anymore, but for many years we talked everyday. I probably talked to him more than anyone else I knew for a good 5-10 years. I don’t feel like that stuff happens when people are just blasting out memes.
That sort of connection making is happening in varying degrees of private discord servers today. You join the public discord it, you spend time with strangers, if you're likeable you eventually get told about less advertised public servers, or invite-only servers, and you go down a bit of a rabbit hole of loosely interconnected communities. Eventually you find communities that you settle into.
Good filters make for good communities. 20 years ago, being on the internet at all was pre-selecting for certain types of people. That's basically not true anymore. Today, the filters end up being invite systems.
20 years ago I'd be a brand new teenager with plenty of time, let alone energy to browse hundreds of random discord servers to dig through the mud to find the gold.
Fast forward a few life nut-busters, I now lack the time and energy to do such a thing. Is there a trick to break the cycle, or is this literally my first "old man yells at cloud" moment?
One thing that often gets overlooked is that 25 years ago, “the Internet” was essentially educated people from North America and Western Europe, with everyone else being a rounding error.
This made it very easy to connect on a level beyond just memes. Users had a lot in common personally, and that’s why they were able to engage on a personal level.
Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community. Beyond that lie vast cultural chasms that make any deeper interactions nearly impossible.
This is what I quite like about Mastodon, since it's not inserting random users' posts into my feed (only people I follow, and then posts that they boost) you tend to have that experience much more like the chat and forums of old where you find a reasonably small group of active users who you mostly interact with.
Of course, 'influencer' kind of people tend to not like it because it's a lot harder to amass a huge following, but I'm fine with that!
One of the interesting things about how people socialize is that we tend to be less honest with those we're closest to, and more honest with people who have no impact on our bottom line.
Counter-intuitively this means we end up having better conversation with strangers than our closest friends and family. Which makes platforms like Facebook a lost cause for connection.
I've had the same experience. Many of my best friends have been found on forums.
In the past reputation matters. Accounts like "Endwokeness" would never work, because people would just make fun of him. "Why is he so obsessed with trans people?" "Does he have a job?". His whole persona would become an inside joke. You also can't just spam low effort opening post, because it will just be removed, so if he for example wants to hate on gay people he needs to write whole essays about it.
i am tired of ads, algorithmic curation, public-ness, anonymity, and scale
i still crave social interaction but have moved to smaller private group chats with real people i either see in real life or have an ongoing connection with
Social media has long stopped being an actual social outlet and is filled with either bots or influencer types trying to be the loudest voice shouting into the void. I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting. That no longer exists anywhere on the major sites and trying for any kind of conversation is a dead end.
Eternal September combined with profit focused engineering has created a wasteland.
Facebook is next to useless. I'm on it for work. It continually boosts one person's posts on my feed — not someone I dislike but am not close friends with — and then tells me about people's birthdays and bereavements weeks after they happened.
Like YouTube, the promoted content seems to be designed to pull me in particular political directions I am not interested in.
AI has only made it worse. I stopped using instagram for a while but went back on it last week. The number of AI videos was just incredible. What happened to the place where I could see the photos from my friends? Why does Meta think I want to see AI slop instead?
Algorithmic curation is something I'm trying to avoid in all cases. I think it's not highlighted enough. The fact that youtube shows an infinite number of videos to choose from does its own sort of harm in a way that the specifics of the content cannot.
When the internet was brand new, it was very novel that I had to go out seeking the content and could look at it any time I wanted. It was different than TV. TV was enjoyed passively and you just watched what they showed you. The early internet was so much better it's hard to describe. It was a purely active experience. Algorithmic curation is a return to the TV model. Someone else decides what you should watch, and you passively observe it materialize in front of you. Try this for an experience. log out of youtube, install some filters in uBlock Origin which prevent all algorithmic results (even on the home page and in search results) and then try to think of what you'd like to watch. For some of you out there, I'll bet this feels like exercising an old, unused muscle. You used to do this kind of querying all the time. But scan your mind. What possibilities are there to view? It feels emptier than it should.
No matter how many of us on Hacker News are absolutely exhausted with social media… no, “we” as a society are as addicted as ever.
It is interesting to note, though, that over the years the “social” in social media exists almost exclusively in the comments. We used to have feeds heavily populated by people we actually know. Now algorithmic feeds pump influencers in many people’s faces 24/7. In some ways it’s not that different to old school media, it’s just finely optimized to addict us.
An extent presentation (IMHO) by Sam Vaknin on how the very way modern social networks operate even down to their form are deeply destructive. The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created by anti social deeply narssistic nerds.
I'm totally not tired of Facebook circa 2008 - a bunch of my friends, people I actually know, posting about our lives and having conversations. A fantastic way of reconnecting with old friends and staying in touch with people.
I hate to say it (not a doom and gloom kind of dude) but to the general population, social media either is, or at the very least appears to be, one of the only ways up and out of the deep, terrifying economic chasm that our societies have been carving to separate the haves from the have-nots.
Statistically, of course, the overwhelming majority of people who try to secure the bag from social media either fail, succeed and burn out quickly, or succeed BIG and lose their souls. And given that it's just a new form of old entertainment, I'd wager that the percentage of those that break through versus those that don't is probably in line with what it always was (slim, or short-lived)
Meanwhile in the real world, wages are stagnant, institutions have crumbled, safety nets blown away like a fart in the wind; we've legalized and lionized gambling on every single aspect of life, geopolitics are in upheaval, businesses are tightening up more than they have in years, information went from a daily newspaper to a debilitating firehose, prices are through the roof, and we're all left to fend for ourselves.
What do we do?
Shuck and jive on socials. Place leveraged bets on ephemeral concepts and world events on Polymarket. Plow into memecoins, tokenize all physical assets. Play the lottery, hit the casino. On and on, while cost of living goes L-shaped.
I think for the vast majority of people, social media is both dead yet completely inescapable... but I have a nascent, vague feeling that while people are sick and tired of being algorithmically manipulated and want to bail, if pushed far enough, become hungry enough, they'll come right back and spin the wheel from the side of a creator out of desperation, feeding the machine that we all hate LOL
Anyways. More optimism, less doomerism! It ain't gotta be like this long-term!
In a word, yes. I have many fond memories of forums and chats that have been abandoned in favor of platforms like Reddit and Discord (which I find to be bloated and grating).
I do participate in small iMessage and Signal chats. Email remains nice as well.
Large social platforms hold no appeal given the algorithmic curation that favors the platform owners and the pervasive advertising. I’ve never seen the appeal of TikTok short form video either, though I’ll willingly acknowledge I’m in the minority there.
I’ve never abandoned RSS and love the slow pace and small scale of Mastodon.
Absolutely. The worst part about this by far is the fact that you are virtually required to participate in at least one of these platforms if you want to exist in the professional world.
I find it interesting that the same process that played out in the forums to feed transition also took place in video games with dedicated servers to matchmaking. I joined a random Counter Strike server in 2005 and ended up becoming close friends with regulars on the server and I'm still in touch with some of them this day.
My wife has been on the same minecraft server for 15 years. We meet up with the other members fairly regularly; a few of them even flew out to Hawaii with us for vacation last year. This year we're going to Canada for vacation, and we'll probably have a group of 7-8 of the Canadian members meet up and go do stuff.
Lots of people talk about being tired of it but few do anything about it. The entrenched social media has become a sort of flypaper for the Eternal September keeping them off the newer, smaller, better options. Anyone discerning has left Twitter/Reddit/etc. But rather than try to replace those it's better to think of the newer places as off-ramps from social media rather than forming new dependence on them.
Text-based social media is cancer, the best example being X but also its derivatives, Facebook, Reddit etc. They are too susceptible to astroturfing, manipulation, political slop and outrage, bullying etc.
I get a lot of value out of Instagram despite its ongoing enslopification. It lets me keep up with old friends, share memes with my friends, and the reel algorithm never fails to put me in a good mood.
I'm 50/50 on HN, because even though it's a text-based platform it's not so bad compared to X for example.
I do think people will be drastically reevaluating their internet usage over the next decade tho, especially as the dead internet theory becomes more than just a theory and people return to the real world.
yo why do I need javascript to layout your web page when all the contents are right there and u could just turn that pre into a p and add a monospace font and make that gigantic photo of your face a little smaller
I'm fine with social media, but not with the illusion of it from Facebook, Instagram, etc. Those are ad delivery systems. I'm on Discord, Github, Substack, and Reddit.
> However after a while I realized that people just post into the void. Everyone has something to say or promote, yet no one wants to listen. It's like we're all having our booth on a crowded public space, but there are no actual receivers...
> Thus I concluded that people overall are tired of socializing.
I don't think people are tired of socialising. People are tired of the self-centered, propagandized publication that social media companies have addicted us to, both as consumers and providers. This makes people want to socialise less because:
a) They get more immediate satisfaction from consuming or providing content than actually socialising
b) Satisfying this (any) addiction takes a lot of time and emotional effort that might otherwise be used for socialising
Ironically, I think the author discovered exactly what social media ACTUALLY looks like without the addictive algorithms: lots of people yelling and nobody listening.
No, we are tired of "social media" demanding all of our free time and utmost attention - and for what, our eyeballs on ads. We've seen that it brings no intelligent discussion but rather maximalist thinking in bubbles and hatred towards others. We're divided into so many categories that we figured we might as well just spend time by ourselves. That's where the new LLM chatbots come in.
49 comments
[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 52.4 ms ] threadIn 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years. We don’t talk as often anymore, but for many years we talked everyday. I probably talked to him more than anyone else I knew for a good 5-10 years. I don’t feel like that stuff happens when people are just blasting out memes.
Good filters make for good communities. 20 years ago, being on the internet at all was pre-selecting for certain types of people. That's basically not true anymore. Today, the filters end up being invite systems.
Fast forward a few life nut-busters, I now lack the time and energy to do such a thing. Is there a trick to break the cycle, or is this literally my first "old man yells at cloud" moment?
This made it very easy to connect on a level beyond just memes. Users had a lot in common personally, and that’s why they were able to engage on a personal level.
Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community. Beyond that lie vast cultural chasms that make any deeper interactions nearly impossible.
Of course, 'influencer' kind of people tend to not like it because it's a lot harder to amass a huge following, but I'm fine with that!
Counter-intuitively this means we end up having better conversation with strangers than our closest friends and family. Which makes platforms like Facebook a lost cause for connection.
I've had the same experience. Many of my best friends have been found on forums.
i still crave social interaction but have moved to smaller private group chats with real people i either see in real life or have an ongoing connection with
Eternal September combined with profit focused engineering has created a wasteland.
Like YouTube, the promoted content seems to be designed to pull me in particular political directions I am not interested in.
Well, there was also narwhal bacon and Streetlamp Le Moose.
Now they are from influencer pages.
When the internet was brand new, it was very novel that I had to go out seeking the content and could look at it any time I wanted. It was different than TV. TV was enjoyed passively and you just watched what they showed you. The early internet was so much better it's hard to describe. It was a purely active experience. Algorithmic curation is a return to the TV model. Someone else decides what you should watch, and you passively observe it materialize in front of you. Try this for an experience. log out of youtube, install some filters in uBlock Origin which prevent all algorithmic results (even on the home page and in search results) and then try to think of what you'd like to watch. For some of you out there, I'll bet this feels like exercising an old, unused muscle. You used to do this kind of querying all the time. But scan your mind. What possibilities are there to view? It feels emptier than it should.
It is interesting to note, though, that over the years the “social” in social media exists almost exclusively in the comments. We used to have feeds heavily populated by people we actually know. Now algorithmic feeds pump influencers in many people’s faces 24/7. In some ways it’s not that different to old school media, it’s just finely optimized to addict us.
Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU
I'm utterly tired of what it is now.
Statistically, of course, the overwhelming majority of people who try to secure the bag from social media either fail, succeed and burn out quickly, or succeed BIG and lose their souls. And given that it's just a new form of old entertainment, I'd wager that the percentage of those that break through versus those that don't is probably in line with what it always was (slim, or short-lived)
Meanwhile in the real world, wages are stagnant, institutions have crumbled, safety nets blown away like a fart in the wind; we've legalized and lionized gambling on every single aspect of life, geopolitics are in upheaval, businesses are tightening up more than they have in years, information went from a daily newspaper to a debilitating firehose, prices are through the roof, and we're all left to fend for ourselves.
What do we do?
Shuck and jive on socials. Place leveraged bets on ephemeral concepts and world events on Polymarket. Plow into memecoins, tokenize all physical assets. Play the lottery, hit the casino. On and on, while cost of living goes L-shaped.
I think for the vast majority of people, social media is both dead yet completely inescapable... but I have a nascent, vague feeling that while people are sick and tired of being algorithmically manipulated and want to bail, if pushed far enough, become hungry enough, they'll come right back and spin the wheel from the side of a creator out of desperation, feeding the machine that we all hate LOL
Anyways. More optimism, less doomerism! It ain't gotta be like this long-term!
I do participate in small iMessage and Signal chats. Email remains nice as well.
Large social platforms hold no appeal given the algorithmic curation that favors the platform owners and the pervasive advertising. I’ve never seen the appeal of TikTok short form video either, though I’ll willingly acknowledge I’m in the minority there.
I’ve never abandoned RSS and love the slow pace and small scale of Mastodon.
I get a lot of value out of Instagram despite its ongoing enslopification. It lets me keep up with old friends, share memes with my friends, and the reel algorithm never fails to put me in a good mood.
I'm 50/50 on HN, because even though it's a text-based platform it's not so bad compared to X for example.
I do think people will be drastically reevaluating their internet usage over the next decade tho, especially as the dead internet theory becomes more than just a theory and people return to the real world.
We should all dedicate 0 seconds of our life to this.
Seeing this recent comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469403) gave me the idea:
Check out the searches "We could" | "what if we could" | "people should" from HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Going forward, isn't there the potential right now to connect the right people together for the right reasons?
> Thus I concluded that people overall are tired of socializing.
I don't think people are tired of socialising. People are tired of the self-centered, propagandized publication that social media companies have addicted us to, both as consumers and providers. This makes people want to socialise less because:
a) They get more immediate satisfaction from consuming or providing content than actually socialising
b) Satisfying this (any) addiction takes a lot of time and emotional effort that might otherwise be used for socialising
Ironically, I think the author discovered exactly what social media ACTUALLY looks like without the addictive algorithms: lots of people yelling and nobody listening.