Not sure if I see a bad thing in this. I'd like too know what old friends are currently up to and checking their social media has been a way to do so during the golden age of facebook.
Lately I feel more value in connecting with them personally, talking and letting them now, that I am still interested in what's going on for them.
That's great if you're cultivating a very small group of friends who are local.
Social media is how I keep vaguely aware of what's going on with my friends who now live scattered across the planet and get to see in person once per decade or so.
Social media mostly polarise people (both women and men, in different ways) and generally speaking what you post will be used against you at some point.
So yeah, no wonder that social media is dying. People are just catching up to the fact that the best way not to lose is to just not play the game.
Back to 2015, I stopped posting on Facebook when I noticed that it’s no longer about connecting with my friends, but a never ending stream of boring posts from groups and people that I don’t know or care to follow.
All my “social” life just moved to direct communication in WhatsApp (meta owned as well)
It would be better if it was that. It is like for any given topic there is a bullet point of a couple takes you will find anywhere about that topic. Just parroting bots I guess since that probably snowballs engagement from other bots.
To keep people engaged, social media platforms have shifted from showing you content from people you know to prioritizing viral content. The algorithms know viral content offers an endless stream of entertainment that keeps people scrolling longer.
"Viral content" got nerfed to oblivion in 2013-2014 something when Facebook made companies pay up for group exposure. (Promoted post)
Before that a popular article could be shared among different friends networks to like total exposure to like everyone logged in that were somewhat interested in the article.
I was kinda a journalist then it was a really obvious flip.
Fb is clearly hated by its owners, Meta. Its been monitized to the max and deeply neglected. They desperately want to move on to virtual reality or AI - ANYTHING to escape from having to make their money off fb.
Makes one wonder what it would be like if someone else had built and maintained it who really belived in the vision of connecting communities instead of sucking them dry.
I noticed last year that FB did some change to their recommendations engine, that they’ll show posts by random people based things you’ve searched. A friend was diagnosed with cancer last year, I searched extensively, and now I’m exclusively getting posts from random people with cancer on my feed.
It’s often very good at finding posts that I might theoretically want to read, except that I never want to read them on Facebook, because it would get in the way of seeing posts from friends.
I've noticed that a lot of my friends switched from text based status updates (Facebook) to image based status updates (Instagram stories). Personally, I got tired of going on Facebook because it was all rage baiting political stuff, and that was all from friends, not even ads.
Emotions experienced chart - that is insightful and matches my anecdata.
I think you get bad emotions when you have high expectations about social media and it is your main source of social life. Where positive happen when you have low expectations about social media and it is just addon to your life.
Example of gaps is being lonely, low self esteem, low self worth, no work network, no business network. So you stay glued to FB to build your life, to keep online friends, because you may have not many in life. Or you have no real work network so you need to stay current on LI because your next job is there.
Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor).
We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc.
Fast forward to today and the club is rebooting again. I asked the current club president "What social network is everyone on these days?" His response: "Really there is no one place where everyone goes anymore." I then asked him how clubs share their info etc and he says "The bulletin board at the student center?"
While social media definitely has its downsides (echo chambers, extremism etc) I do feel like it's a bit of a net loss to not have a "commons". That model makes it super easy to start up new organizations, get the word out etc.
Part of me hopes that we got back to the late 1990s dedicated websites/forums. That seems to be the Discord model but let's see.
I was in college at the time when people had stopped using Facebook to post random personal stuff and started using it for pages, groups, events, and messaging. I had avoided it before, but it was actually useful then.
> Part of me hopes that we got back to the late 1990s dedicated websites/forums. That seems to be the Discord model but let's see.
Dunno: people in my circles all have Telegram (Europe here but I think they have 1 billion MAU now: they're not just successful in Europe).
I've got Telegram groups depending on my interests.
I just got invited to try ball trap (clay pidgeon shooting) tomorrow. Then another group set up a beer after work on wednesday. And on thursday, another group, another after-work meetup. It's not because we don't use WhatsApp that we use SMSes: nope, we're all on Telegram.
People can lament Telegram is proprietary, russian (is it, I forgot?), etc. but at least it's not the Zuck's FaceBook/Instagram/WhatsApp exploitative ecosystem. And people love that fact.
When I started doing promotion of public events sponsored by a small nonprofit in rural Virginia (USA), I was handed several pieces of paper with notes like post office, banks, dry cleaners, lumber yard. Over time, I've built a spreadsheet of places to share event and other community information. There's churches, HOAs, social media groups, IRL locations, media outlets, and so on. I am constantly referring people to the list to use (share information and seek information0 and edit. I knew very few people would make edits but I expected a couple of folks to use it for outreach.
About a month ago, I started thinking that my small neck of the woods could use something other than FB to share info. I'd love for electronic discussion groups to fill the void. Of course there are downsides, starting with slow adoption. But I feel like it's a lift anyone can manage given that it's based in email.
Of course, what will be shared is stupid stuff and not what I want (public opinion on state and local policies) and particularly information relevant to people with low incomes.
Twitter and Reddit went hostile to their users in 2023 with their respective API and other changes. A small percentage of leaders sought out newer and better options and this time the followers stayed where they were, not wanting to start over again. But everyone talks about hating social media now and they're going slowly inactive. It's the most expected outcome.
I stopped using Facebook back in 2021 when the majority of my feed was reshared political content with 20+ comments from my friends fighting about divisive social/political issues. It wasn't fun, and it wasn't fostering community, so I left. A few years later I logged in again to see that most of my Facebook friends had also stopped engaging.
Probably a crazy though, but I sometimes wonder if the pandemic/lockdowns did a number on social media activity too. Maybe a lot of people got burnt out on the whole thing after spending 2-3 years stuck inside with social media as their only way to communicate with friends and family.
That seems to be the point where most communities and social sites I'm on lost a lot of their activity/enjoyment, and where people seemed to start fading away.
Of course, increasing polarisation, an increasingly aggressive/selfish population and worries about privacy probably hit hard too.
Social media companies became so obsessed about maximizing ROI on short form video content that they stopped being a platform to share with friends and turned into Temu Youtube. You won’t see your friends stuff on any of them because it’s designed to work that way. Group chats are the only way to have a meaningful conversation if you a casual non-technical Internet dweller.
Social media as it was born touched a novel point of contact that didn't quite exist before. It was a powerful shift from what we had before.
Social media allowed you to be in touch with people in a way that wasn't possible with phone calls, text messages, instant messaging, email, or domain-specific forums.
What I could do in Facebook in 2010 was stay "friends" with selected acquaintances such as old classmates with whom I never was in email terms, messaging terms, or any other terms except having known them in school (or at work or at a hobby or...) I could follow their life via their posts, and I could leave a comment, sometimes, without any expectation that we should ever talk, meet, chat, or become more than old classmates. I haven't sent email to anyone in my school that I didn't know outside of school, as a friend. I don't have their numbers and it would be awkward to even consider calling someone with whom we didn't necessarily even talk much in school. But it was perfectly okay to ask someone to be your friend on Facebook (like, Hey, I know you? and if he did remember he would accept) and follow their postings and maybe (re)kindle something with no pressure to grow it into anything more than that.
We had that. Now... we no longer do. Or we still have Facebook and we can send friend requests to old acquantainces that I'd like to follow but there's nothing to follow because they aren't posting and because Facebook wouldn't show me their posts. So we're back to the point where actually making contact with another person (on Facebook) basically requires sending them a message in Facebook. Which already goes beyond what's expected from an old acquantaince on Facebook.
I recall a site for classmates where you could register to your school years and see your classmates there. But that was before social media and there weren't any posts that you could comment. You could just see your classmates listed there, and one in ten might have written a few words in their profile. And that was classmates only, not ex-work colleagues or other people you've passed behind in your life. Facebook was really good at the time it became a thing.
We still have email, instant messaging, etc. but what's the platform today where I can keep in touch with people I'm not emailing or talking with? Is there one?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 65.9 ms ] threadLately I feel more value in connecting with them personally, talking and letting them now, that I am still interested in what's going on for them.
Social media is how I keep vaguely aware of what's going on with my friends who now live scattered across the planet and get to see in person once per decade or so.
So yeah, no wonder that social media is dying. People are just catching up to the fact that the best way not to lose is to just not play the game.
All my “social” life just moved to direct communication in WhatsApp (meta owned as well)
Before that a popular article could be shared among different friends networks to like total exposure to like everyone logged in that were somewhat interested in the article.
I was kinda a journalist then it was a really obvious flip.
Makes one wonder what it would be like if someone else had built and maintained it who really belived in the vision of connecting communities instead of sucking them dry.
I think you get bad emotions when you have high expectations about social media and it is your main source of social life. Where positive happen when you have low expectations about social media and it is just addon to your life.
Example of gaps is being lonely, low self esteem, low self worth, no work network, no business network. So you stay glued to FB to build your life, to keep online friends, because you may have not many in life. Or you have no real work network so you need to stay current on LI because your next job is there.
We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc.
Fast forward to today and the club is rebooting again. I asked the current club president "What social network is everyone on these days?" His response: "Really there is no one place where everyone goes anymore." I then asked him how clubs share their info etc and he says "The bulletin board at the student center?"
While social media definitely has its downsides (echo chambers, extremism etc) I do feel like it's a bit of a net loss to not have a "commons". That model makes it super easy to start up new organizations, get the word out etc.
Part of me hopes that we got back to the late 1990s dedicated websites/forums. That seems to be the Discord model but let's see.
Dunno: people in my circles all have Telegram (Europe here but I think they have 1 billion MAU now: they're not just successful in Europe).
I've got Telegram groups depending on my interests.
I just got invited to try ball trap (clay pidgeon shooting) tomorrow. Then another group set up a beer after work on wednesday. And on thursday, another group, another after-work meetup. It's not because we don't use WhatsApp that we use SMSes: nope, we're all on Telegram.
People can lament Telegram is proprietary, russian (is it, I forgot?), etc. but at least it's not the Zuck's FaceBook/Instagram/WhatsApp exploitative ecosystem. And people love that fact.
I have some extremely useful Discords and Signal group chats, but not everything ought to be an always on chatterbox.
When I started doing promotion of public events sponsored by a small nonprofit in rural Virginia (USA), I was handed several pieces of paper with notes like post office, banks, dry cleaners, lumber yard. Over time, I've built a spreadsheet of places to share event and other community information. There's churches, HOAs, social media groups, IRL locations, media outlets, and so on. I am constantly referring people to the list to use (share information and seek information0 and edit. I knew very few people would make edits but I expected a couple of folks to use it for outreach.
About a month ago, I started thinking that my small neck of the woods could use something other than FB to share info. I'd love for electronic discussion groups to fill the void. Of course there are downsides, starting with slow adoption. But I feel like it's a lift anyone can manage given that it's based in email.
Of course, what will be shared is stupid stuff and not what I want (public opinion on state and local policies) and particularly information relevant to people with low incomes.
That seems to be the point where most communities and social sites I'm on lost a lot of their activity/enjoyment, and where people seemed to start fading away.
Of course, increasing polarisation, an increasingly aggressive/selfish population and worries about privacy probably hit hard too.
That's why my only social media is WhatsApp, if that's a social media.
Social media allowed you to be in touch with people in a way that wasn't possible with phone calls, text messages, instant messaging, email, or domain-specific forums.
What I could do in Facebook in 2010 was stay "friends" with selected acquaintances such as old classmates with whom I never was in email terms, messaging terms, or any other terms except having known them in school (or at work or at a hobby or...) I could follow their life via their posts, and I could leave a comment, sometimes, without any expectation that we should ever talk, meet, chat, or become more than old classmates. I haven't sent email to anyone in my school that I didn't know outside of school, as a friend. I don't have their numbers and it would be awkward to even consider calling someone with whom we didn't necessarily even talk much in school. But it was perfectly okay to ask someone to be your friend on Facebook (like, Hey, I know you? and if he did remember he would accept) and follow their postings and maybe (re)kindle something with no pressure to grow it into anything more than that.
We had that. Now... we no longer do. Or we still have Facebook and we can send friend requests to old acquantainces that I'd like to follow but there's nothing to follow because they aren't posting and because Facebook wouldn't show me their posts. So we're back to the point where actually making contact with another person (on Facebook) basically requires sending them a message in Facebook. Which already goes beyond what's expected from an old acquantaince on Facebook.
I recall a site for classmates where you could register to your school years and see your classmates there. But that was before social media and there weren't any posts that you could comment. You could just see your classmates listed there, and one in ten might have written a few words in their profile. And that was classmates only, not ex-work colleagues or other people you've passed behind in your life. Facebook was really good at the time it became a thing.
We still have email, instant messaging, etc. but what's the platform today where I can keep in touch with people I'm not emailing or talking with? Is there one?