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.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. At the very least, it should be used occasionally to post things as a kind of "public memory," not to expose your entire life just for likes and exhibitionism.
I wonder what would happen if: if I post 2 pieces of content, my friend would have to comment on the first one to see the next one.
I suppose the app will then mostly be full of throwaway comments in the form of "Cool" or "Wow". But maybe add a modifier that if the poster doesn't have any meaningful reply to a commenter's (let's name him Elon) comment, then the poster's next content will not be shared with Elon next time.
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.
I’m gonna break it to you bud, the people you see only once a decade or so aren’t your friends. Those are shallow acquaintances that you’re letting drag on for too long. They’re not a part of your life and you’re not a part of theirs.
At most, you can call them professional contacts whom you hope to get some value out of in the future, and in that sense I’d agree — social media makes it possible to keep in touch with people whom you have a transactional relationship with.
"Drag on for too long" Who are you to dictate how other people connect. The word friend is not well defined, but a person I know from my past that I'm able to keep in contact with, thanks to the magic of technology, that I want to have some communication with, is a something.
Everything is not well defined as long as you don’t think about it hard enough. With that attitude, you can dismiss any genuinely thoughtful question with potentially painful answers, which is why a lot of people like it.
They dont drag me. They add positive stuff to my life, once in a while, and that is super cool. And they dont ask much in exchange, just for me to not be a jerk in that situation.
And all of them are relationships with someone I already know, can ve safer around then random and some of them grow again into more active friendships in right situation.
And yes, that friendship happens again thing is real.
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)
2015 for me too. I wonder if there was some early day over juicing of the attention mechanism that put people off in that year, before they tuned it to reduce churn…
Tinfoil hat time but I think they definitely did _something_ at that time that "changed" the system. It's the Cambridge Analytica/Trump time and I believe that FB definitely "changed" at the same time.
After Cambridge Analytica, my "intelligent" friends basically abandoned the platform, while my distant conspiracy inclined uncles started posting baseless slop.
Yeah but I think it just took some year for ppl to notice.
2013-2014 the algorithm got more foused on non-friend posts aswell as making the prioritzation less about "likes" from friends and instead some opaque engagement metrics. Groups had to "promote" post to get their prior reach to subscribers.
Also videos started to be posted around that time?
I remember I left around that time too because they started aggressively trying to defeat adbockers. I'd rather just leave the platform completely than see a single ad.
It was a big year for the culture war. People who had previously been cordial suddenly needed to fight each other over politics and other controversies of the day. The rest of us watched this happen, then slowly backed away.
It wasn’t even that for me. No one was posting anything political right or left back then. Just one day the newsfeed went from chronological posts of friends to littered with the bs you see today. Why even post when no one is going to see it. And then of course the natural march of life where people have less time to bother with that and no longer care if Stacy from English class liked the homecoming photos or not.
2014-15 was when the news feed switched from static, human-written code to machine learning models optimized to maximize ad revenue[1], the models discovering "user attention time" was a far better metric to optimize for than clicks, likes or shares[2]. And what people spent the most "attention time" on was content that triggered raw moral outrage, fear and tribal hostility[3].
This switch does appear to have put off a lot of smart, thinking people as the newsfeed degenerated into a torrent of dopamine-spiking diarrhea. But those people don't tend to be the ones that click on ads.
I am currently building something where you can post once per day. If you want to post again within the 24 hour window, the prior post gets replaced with the new one and it also shows at the old post's timestamp in the chronological feed.
As for connecting to people, you drag and drop the connect button into a folder name which you want their posts to show in. For example, You can create custom folders for friends, family, coworkers etc. After that, you drag the connect button into that folder. And each folder creates a custom feed from only those people for you.
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.
It is pretty obvious, but as far as I can see, this article has not been disclosed as advertising or sponsored content. I'm in Europe, and I'm no expert on FTC advertising requirements, but this specific content arrangement doesn't feel super legal to me. My ad blocker did not pick it up either.
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.
This tends to run into problems with people not actually reading their email, especially when the messages are falsely classified as spam. That might not be a problem if all the members are on the same school mail server but it's problematic for general usage.
Many people don't read their email anymore. When I send an email I often have to send a text message to the person telling them I sent an email or they won't see it.
I don't see how that would work as in many jurisdictions, email is an accepted legal way to communicate between a company and a customer. So when you don't year your email that's like not reading your snail mail in the 90s. It might go well for some time, until you miss that one message about a late payment or something...
A large number of services that send various billing etc things via snail mail and email also send text messages. The other part of this is that almost everything is automated these days for most people. Bill payment etc happens automagically. Most necessary notifications occur via phone apps.
Ignoring email works just fine, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of people I know don't check email unless it is for their work. Zero impact on their lives. It is the same with snail mail. I think I check my snail mail 6-8 times per year mostly so that the letter box doesn't physically overflow with junk.
Unless they are chosing something super obscure and sketchy, most club members are going to be fine with the leader just saying, we're picking whatsapp, either join or dont.
Funny, every time I've joined a new group for dancing or art classes or DnD or anything it's always 100% of the time a WhatsApp group, no questions asked. (This is in Ireland).
Never occurred to me that Americans wouldn't have a common group chat app everyone uses. Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?
>Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?
I'm Irish and travel back and forth a lot. First, not everyone has iPhones, Android has 40% of the market.
Older generations use Facebook to manage their clubs. I'm increasingly seeing Whatsapp and occasionally Signal for younger and more tech-savvy social circles. Facebook is non-existent in sub 35 year olds. Its just taking longer to switch over (or away from) Facebook given how tech savvy older folks are here compared to Ireland.
Around 58% of American smartphone users are iPhone. It's a lot, but not enough to be universal. In my family there's 5 iPhone users and 4 Android users, amusingly similar to the national ratio.
Apple has famously made its strategy to use iMessage to enforce exclusivity. If you want to reach everyone, it's not iMessage. And Whatsapp in the US is worse, closer to 1/3.
What people miss about the US phone market is that while it's almost 60% iPhones, the vast majority of the top half of the income spectrum use them. I'm not sure if it's the same as it was a decade ago, but being excluded from iMessage group chats was a real exclusionary move for many teenagers.
That's a weird perspective. Certainly not everyone has an iPhone. As for other messaging apps, I also see widespread use of GroupMe for certain domains like sports teams. Some clubs also run their own Slack channels.
Americans primarily use iMessage/SMS/RCS. You only need one messaging app and everyone has it pre-installed on both iOS and Android.
WhatsApp does not solve any problems for the typical American user. Most Americans don't install WhatsApp unless they spend a lot of time overseas some place where it is required to do anything. Even international group chats seem to be more Discord-based in recent years.
SMS/RCS doesn't work for any group larger than a few people. You always end up with multiple parallel streams going that each include different subsets of the group, and sometimes other random people outside the group.
This is empirically false. I am on many groups that have (at least) several dozen people over SMS/RCS/iMessage. It isn’t ideal but it definitely works adequately.
I use Signal with some groups but that is a minority. I use WhatsApp daily but only people overseas use it. Many Americans have no idea what WhatsApp is.
The practical reality is that iMessage is a legitimately superior experience to other messaging apps, and the penetration is high enough in the US that many group chats never fall back to RCS or SMS. You can’t control that but as an observation that is commonly the case. Even when it does fallback to SMS/RCS, it mostly works for many use cases.
I’ve used every messaging app under the sun, having spent a lot of time overseas. But I totally understand why Americans don’t bother with WhatsApp (or Signal) even though I do. The value-add is non-existent in the US since almost no one else uses it and the alternatives just work.
at least in the US, most people are fine with iMessage/SMS since
* pretty early on the vast majority of phone plans started bundling unlimited text messaging, which IIRC was a big motivator for using messaging apps abroad
* because of the vast scale of the country, domestic coverage results in no roaming for the places Americans spend most of their time, unlike in Europe where there are multitudes of countries you'd be passing in a one to two hour flight. Roaming charges in the EU were only abolished in 2022, late enough that everybody has settled on apps as the best way to manage that now.
* many American plans extend unlimited messaging to Canada and Mexico, the two likeliest places that Americans would go to abroad
Exactly! Having to check 27 different places for messages (also add individual sites like linkedin, etc, where people message), it is completely ridiculous.
Just send me email. It's universal, standard, no corporation owns it (thus no corportation can shut me out unlike facebook or all the proprietary solutions).
I think we’re seeing a similar thing pan out with AI. When the barrier for something is too low, people realize that it’s not actually worth the other party’s effort to communicate it to them.
For me, physical communication is quickly becoming a signal that someone actually put effort into things.
The Zuckerberg movie was called The Social Network. At the time we saw the likes of Facebook as networks intended to build 1-1 communications.
Since then, it’s become social Media. It’s now about centralized structures broadcasting messages to subscribers and followers. The only difference from the past is who the broadcasters can be, but it’s no longer about building networks between people.
The blogosphere was all about random people writing whatever they felt like: blogging died after the professionals took over and tried to make money at it.
It died when google made it impossible to find those blogs. At some point, it stopped returning blogs that did not SEO hard and normal writing people just were not doing SEO.
Except AT Protocol can't do the very thing that made Facebook the commons: privacy.
There's a proposal to add privacy to the protocol (private posts, private groups), but I don't think anyone has solved the real root problem with trying to implement privacy in a federated system (as opposed to P2P), which is the bad administrator problem. The proposal I saw still relied on trustworthy app administrators to respect a post's privacy settings. And that's a huge flaw.
Friendica and Diaspora both have the same problem, and to my knowledge don't have a good solution for it. They both just sort of hand wave it away.
I'm waiting to see if someone comes up with a good solution for the unsafe admin problem, but so far I haven't seen one.
There's a guy that runs multiple sports teams at a local recreation center, in multiple adult divisions (wide age/culture rage), and he has been using email to great effect for over a decade that I have known him. I get 2-3 weekly emails about teams that need a sub for a game and those spots continue to fill up quickly. He probably has the majority of regulars (in the hundreds) at that sports center on his various email list. It just works. They tried chat groups once and that was a disaster.
I've never seen "group emails" working, even when amongst technical people.
Part of it is just how emails work, part of it is how each clients work, part of it is people not knowing/caring.
You'll have:
- the guy that don't use the group email address as recipient, but personal email address
- the guy that change the subject which starts a new thread/discussion
- the guy that include all previous emails in their answer
- the guy with a signature that takes two screens to scroll
- the guy with an awful text font/color
- the guy that CC their whole address book, including the group email address, for personal stuff
- ...
I can go on. I went through this mess many times during the years, in various contexts; always the same result.
For hackerspaces, tech meetups, book clubs, cycling clubs, city cleanup volunteer groups…
It works fine.
Don’t let your bad experience ruin it for everyone. Especially with an administrative backend, email-based distribution and comms works great for smaller groups!
I move into a neighbourhood of new houses in 2007. One of the guys there worked IT at a university and set up a mailing list of the neighbourhood. It was used successfully for all sorts of coordination, neighbourhood watch, internal news, etc.
There's always someone mis-using it, and the same applies to every other platform. There's always someone hijacking forum threads, or asking questions in comments instead of starting a new topic. None of this is exclusive to email.
Hijacking threads was a problem on our neighborhood mailing list (the most egregious example being hijacking a welcome thread to complain about trash pickup). The solution was pretty easy: auto-lock threads after a week of inactivity. We found that on-topic discussion settled after about that long. People are then forced to start new threads. If there is something new on an old thread, it can be administratively resurrected.
I've never seen anything else work as well as group emails.
My whole social life for about fifteen years was run almost entirely on mailing lists. Every group, neighborhood, event, and Burning Man project had a mailing list (and possibly a google spreadsheet) for coordination. I've seen everything from birthday parties to small festivals to months-long, highly technical art projects planned this way, and I've seen friendship networks containing dozens to hundreds of people maintain contact for years through persistent email lists.
I'm still subscribed to a couple of these lists, though that cohort has mostly aged out now and isn't getting out much anymore. I don't think younger folks ever picked it up: but the younger folks also seem to have much smaller social circles, so maybe they don't need it.
Yes, email is the absolute best for opimal reach. All the proprietary platforms are inherently fragmented and gatekeeped by their corporations. Trying to find a common denominator is hard. Email is standard, not owned by anyone and thus universal.
That doesn't track. As a recipient, checking one location for updates (my inbox) is easier than polling N websites for updates. If I had to recall all the various websites for everything I need updates for, I'd quickly miss updates.
South African here. Just about all notifications have moved to WhatsApp. Most school classes have a group for the parents, extended family group, immediate family group, residents association group, high school classmates group, gym class group, home town group ... the list goes on. Sounds like a lot but most groups tend to have few messages.
I have a WhatsApp account and the app on my phone with zero contacts in it. Nobody here uses it. But every time I leave the country I need it for some service or business or who knows what. It seems like the rest of the world all agreed to use this app and Canada (and I think the US) just said “naw thanks…” and have no common app or method.
If Canada is similar to the US, a mixture of SMS, Discord, and iMessage. The kids use Snapchat, your aunt uses Facebook messenger or iMessage, and occasionally someone might be into Telegram although mostly scammers. Teams or Slack for official workplace or college chat groups. GroupMe was popular for college groups when I was an undergraduate though that’s long since gone by the wayside.
Most importantly, if you show up as a “green bubble” person you will be lightly teased about it, including on a date.
Today it's discord, we just don't call it social media because it's private by default with no intent to force you into a networking & self-disclosure hell hole
There is nothing wrong with the bulletin board at the student center
It works
It's kinda sad that members of a club have to share their private details with some third party forcused on surveillance, data collection and targeting ads in order communicate with other members
The software companies that are (ostensibly) not focused on surveillance, data collection and targeting ads usually have expensive subscriptions
When used simply for communication, the benefits, if any, over the bulletin board at the student center are probably not worth the price
* Can send out updates quickly, e.g. changing rooms when you discover your secretary forgot to book the usual one that week 5 minutes before the club meeting.
* Folks can see/post updates without going in to the student center in person. This is particularly helpful if there's any club members who live further away and/or down come by the student center regularly and/or aren't highly engaged enough to go check a board.
* An archive of messages can be valuable. I have dug though club archives to find the name of a guest speaker from several years prior. Physical records make this difficult, especially in a college club where leadership changes frequently and papers get lost.
Of course... email can do all of that. The lesson is to be judicious with technology, not abandon it entirely.
Email really is the superior choice. You subscribe to the ads you want to see (then unsubscribe from them later). You are your own targeted advertiser with email. No need for a third party to collect my blood type to get me more relevant ads, just have every retailer have a little checkbox "would you like to subscribe to our ads?" at point-of-sale.
No where in the comment is it suggested to "abandon" anything entirely
In fact the suggestion is not to abandon the bulletin board in the student center
As usual, there will be HN replies that adhere to "all-or-nothing", "black and white", etc. thinking, e.g., believing there is an "either-or" choice between use of a computer and another method
However it's possible to use a bulletin board in the student center and a computer. This is not an either-or choice, there is no requirement to choose one or the other
For example, getting contact details from the bulletin board then using a smartphone to make a phone call
Further, there is no suggestion in the comment that one or the other, bulletin board in student center or computer, is without benefits
In fact, the comment suggests the bulletin board is useful: "It works"
The question raised by the comment is whether the benefits of sending data to a remote third party, namely a "social media" company, outweigh the costs ("hassles")
This is obviously more narrow than "using a computer". We can use commputers without involving "social media" companies
The other big problem is, group notifications went from 100% success rate, to nearly 0%. I bought a budget model sainsmart/genmitsu cnc thing to goof around with, as a hobby/assist other hobbies, and 98% of their user community is on Facebook, but Facebook doesn't show me their posts most of the time, because sainsmart isn't paying to promote their group. This group would be a wealth of information every time I opened the fb app, but unless I explicitly remember to go visit their "community" by searching for it, I'll never see those posts. There's an enormous Cyclekart (vintage-ish go karts with proportionally correct wheels) community on fb as well but unless that's the ONLY thing you use their app for, they won't show you that stuff.
TL;DR FB is worthless for social networks, because if they showed you the groups you were there to check on, nobody would pay to promote their own things.
Once an avid user, I go 1-2 weeks at a time with the app uninstalled now unless there's something specific I need to check on.
I have Facebook and follow about a dozen of journalist accounts. Almost daily I'm asked "should we show you more of this" for their posts - darnit that's THE reason I'm here, why asking me continuously??? And what's the alternative, bimbos doing little content creator dances?
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. It was legitimately useful and not time-wasting back 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.
>> but not everything ought to be an always on chatterbox
Nothing deserves to an "always-on-chatterbox" unless the end-user truly chooses it because that is what they want or need.
This is part of the larger problem. How many "always-on-chatterboxes" competing for one's attention before it becomes close-to-impossible to concentrate on anything that requires some actual thinking.
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.
it still works in the web app - following -> recent - though I think I've got some browser extension to force that to be the default, otherwise it tended to revert to other tabs and ordering.
You don't get sorting options for that Feed. And depending on your luck that might be three clicks off the home page to even that (See More > Feeds > Friends).
Out of ten items on your feed, five would be adverts, three are reposts of some crappy influencer’s video or a meme or something, one is a friend’s marketplace listing, and if you’re lucky, the last one is a photo actually taken by a friend who you actually know.
All of that is intentional. There isn't enough money to be made connecting people. Revenue streams are driven by ads attached to media interaction. Connecting people is low engagement. We, as consumers, have rewarded this revenue model by proving that it works. If you don't want to contribute to it then don't use these large platforms.
I suspect there is plenty of money there, just not enough to support a multinational conglomerate.
The natural monopoly of networks is what brought us all to social networks, and I suspect it is why they will fail. Niche networks run by a small team (which is what social networks were when we were the early adopters) seem like they can trivially sustain themselves.
The explosion of podcasting is exactly this, but for nontechnical people.
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?
I consider Facebook to be the worst of all worlds. Frankly
They don't show you what your friends actually post. Someone saying "hey - I'm in the parking lot at some place, I need help moving this thing" 5 minutes ago? You might see it on your feed in a week
It's a company involved in lots of OTHER things which don't make it a good netizen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 (oh and their own cryptocurrency in Libra, that's fun)
Edit: You get banned at any time while the obviously horrible thing you report doesn't get taken down. That's not sustainable. It's not a thing where you can actually physically keep in touch with people, either nominally strangers or the best of friends
Meanwhile IG has hugely alienated -its- original target audience. My feed: "Reels. Suggested for you. Ad. Threads. Suggested for you. Ad. Followee. Ad. Threads." and 90% of it is short form video content, and even more annoying still content which is for some reason a 10s video.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 65.8 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.
I suppose the app will then mostly be full of throwaway comments in the form of "Cool" or "Wow". But maybe add a modifier that if the poster doesn't have any meaningful reply to a commenter's (let's name him Elon) comment, then the poster's next content will not be shared with Elon next time.
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.
At most, you can call them professional contacts whom you hope to get some value out of in the future, and in that sense I’d agree — social media makes it possible to keep in touch with people whom you have a transactional relationship with.
And all of them are relationships with someone I already know, can ve safer around then random and some of them grow again into more active friendships in right situation.
And yes, that friendship happens again thing is real.
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)
2013-2014 the algorithm got more foused on non-friend posts aswell as making the prioritzation less about "likes" from friends and instead some opaque engagement metrics. Groups had to "promote" post to get their prior reach to subscribers.
Also videos started to be posted around that time?
This switch does appear to have put off a lot of smart, thinking people as the newsfeed degenerated into a torrent of dopamine-spiking diarrhea. But those people don't tend to be the ones that click on ads.
[1] https://time.com/collections/the-cloud/3950525/facebook-news... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/facebook-... [3] https://www.supersummary.com/the-chaos-machine/summary/ - the whole "Chaos Machine" book is excellent
As for connecting to people, you drag and drop the connect button into a folder name which you want their posts to show in. For example, You can create custom folders for friends, family, coworkers etc. After that, you drag the connect button into that folder. And each folder creates a custom feed from only those people for you.
I am open to brainstorming more ideas.
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.
I don't see how that would work as in many jurisdictions, email is an accepted legal way to communicate between a company and a customer. So when you don't year your email that's like not reading your snail mail in the 90s. It might go well for some time, until you miss that one message about a late payment or something...
Ignoring email works just fine, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of people I know don't check email unless it is for their work. Zero impact on their lives. It is the same with snail mail. I think I check my snail mail 6-8 times per year mostly so that the letter box doesn't physically overflow with junk.
No one cares about the actual choice, only that it is made.
If the actual choice requires me to install an app then I care quite a lot and will probably decline to join in.
I don't think that I am the only one who feels this way.
Unless they are chosing something super obscure and sketchy, most club members are going to be fine with the leader just saying, we're picking whatsapp, either join or dont.
Never occurred to me that Americans wouldn't have a common group chat app everyone uses. Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?
I'm Irish and travel back and forth a lot. First, not everyone has iPhones, Android has 40% of the market.
Older generations use Facebook to manage their clubs. I'm increasingly seeing Whatsapp and occasionally Signal for younger and more tech-savvy social circles. Facebook is non-existent in sub 35 year olds. Its just taking longer to switch over (or away from) Facebook given how tech savvy older folks are here compared to Ireland.
Or just iMessage with fallback to SMS for those not on iPhones. Unlike most of the rest of the world, iPhones dominate in the USA.
Apple has famously made its strategy to use iMessage to enforce exclusivity. If you want to reach everyone, it's not iMessage. And Whatsapp in the US is worse, closer to 1/3.
WhatsApp does not solve any problems for the typical American user. Most Americans don't install WhatsApp unless they spend a lot of time overseas some place where it is required to do anything. Even international group chats seem to be more Discord-based in recent years.
I use Signal with some groups but that is a minority. I use WhatsApp daily but only people overseas use it. Many Americans have no idea what WhatsApp is.
The practical reality is that iMessage is a legitimately superior experience to other messaging apps, and the penetration is high enough in the US that many group chats never fall back to RCS or SMS. You can’t control that but as an observation that is commonly the case. Even when it does fallback to SMS/RCS, it mostly works for many use cases.
I’ve used every messaging app under the sun, having spent a lot of time overseas. But I totally understand why Americans don’t bother with WhatsApp (or Signal) even though I do. The value-add is non-existent in the US since almost no one else uses it and the alternatives just work.
* pretty early on the vast majority of phone plans started bundling unlimited text messaging, which IIRC was a big motivator for using messaging apps abroad
* because of the vast scale of the country, domestic coverage results in no roaming for the places Americans spend most of their time, unlike in Europe where there are multitudes of countries you'd be passing in a one to two hour flight. Roaming charges in the EU were only abolished in 2022, late enough that everybody has settled on apps as the best way to manage that now.
* many American plans extend unlimited messaging to Canada and Mexico, the two likeliest places that Americans would go to abroad
Doctors and services offices use SMS.
Some of my family and friends use Signal (on my pressure).
THe boomers use Facebook Messenger
With the younger people they use Snapchat.
Almost everyone else in the country uses Whatsapp.
Online communities for tinkering and foss projects require Discord.
Exactly! Having to check 27 different places for messages (also add individual sites like linkedin, etc, where people message), it is completely ridiculous.
Just send me email. It's universal, standard, no corporation owns it (thus no corportation can shut me out unlike facebook or all the proprietary solutions).
https://www.beeper.com/
For me, physical communication is quickly becoming a signal that someone actually put effort into things.
The Zuckerberg movie was called The Social Network. At the time we saw the likes of Facebook as networks intended to build 1-1 communications.
Since then, it’s become social Media. It’s now about centralized structures broadcasting messages to subscribers and followers. The only difference from the past is who the broadcasters can be, but it’s no longer about building networks between people.
Social media is about “generating content”. Social networks were about connecting with people, not about consuming the content they generated.
Heck, the original version of Facebook didn’t even have content. The only interaction you could have with someone else was giving them a “poke”.
But that doesnt help with building 1:1 connections.
There's a proposal to add privacy to the protocol (private posts, private groups), but I don't think anyone has solved the real root problem with trying to implement privacy in a federated system (as opposed to P2P), which is the bad administrator problem. The proposal I saw still relied on trustworthy app administrators to respect a post's privacy settings. And that's a huge flaw.
Friendica and Diaspora both have the same problem, and to my knowledge don't have a good solution for it. They both just sort of hand wave it away.
I'm waiting to see if someone comes up with a good solution for the unsafe admin problem, but so far I haven't seen one.
Well, thanks for lobbying, that's got regulated away. One must be mad today to run a forum.
There's a guy that runs multiple sports teams at a local recreation center, in multiple adult divisions (wide age/culture rage), and he has been using email to great effect for over a decade that I have known him. I get 2-3 weekly emails about teams that need a sub for a game and those spots continue to fill up quickly. He probably has the majority of regulars (in the hundreds) at that sports center on his various email list. It just works. They tried chat groups once and that was a disaster.
Part of it is just how emails work, part of it is how each clients work, part of it is people not knowing/caring.
I can go on. I went through this mess many times during the years, in various contexts; always the same result.For hackerspaces, tech meetups, book clubs, cycling clubs, city cleanup volunteer groups…
It works fine.
Don’t let your bad experience ruin it for everyone. Especially with an administrative backend, email-based distribution and comms works great for smaller groups!
There's always someone mis-using it, and the same applies to every other platform. There's always someone hijacking forum threads, or asking questions in comments instead of starting a new topic. None of this is exclusive to email.
My whole social life for about fifteen years was run almost entirely on mailing lists. Every group, neighborhood, event, and Burning Man project had a mailing list (and possibly a google spreadsheet) for coordination. I've seen everything from birthday parties to small festivals to months-long, highly technical art projects planned this way, and I've seen friendship networks containing dozens to hundreds of people maintain contact for years through persistent email lists.
I'm still subscribed to a couple of these lists, though that cohort has mostly aged out now and isn't getting out much anymore. I don't think younger folks ever picked it up: but the younger folks also seem to have much smaller social circles, so maybe they don't need it.
Yes, email is the absolute best for opimal reach. All the proprietary platforms are inherently fragmented and gatekeeped by their corporations. Trying to find a common denominator is hard. Email is standard, not owned by anyone and thus universal.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse
Email is a push technology. And the receiver has to manage their inbox for the sender’s enthusiasm.
2-3 weekly emails
A web page could update in real time. It would be more work for the sender. And less work for everyone else.
I have a WhatsApp account and the app on my phone with zero contacts in it. Nobody here uses it. But every time I leave the country I need it for some service or business or who knows what. It seems like the rest of the world all agreed to use this app and Canada (and I think the US) just said “naw thanks…” and have no common app or method.
Most importantly, if you show up as a “green bubble” person you will be lightly teased about it, including on a date.
and you’re upset?
Bulletin boards are awesome. Physical assembly is awesome.
In that sense it was a smart decision of meta to buy it.
Most of my friends are on Instagram too but nobody really communicates there. The chance of missing something important is way too high.
GroupMe (Skype) is popular for sports
There is nothing wrong with the bulletin board at the student center
It works
It's kinda sad that members of a club have to share their private details with some third party forcused on surveillance, data collection and targeting ads in order communicate with other members
The software companies that are (ostensibly) not focused on surveillance, data collection and targeting ads usually have expensive subscriptions
When used simply for communication, the benefits, if any, over the bulletin board at the student center are probably not worth the price
* Can send out updates quickly, e.g. changing rooms when you discover your secretary forgot to book the usual one that week 5 minutes before the club meeting.
* Folks can see/post updates without going in to the student center in person. This is particularly helpful if there's any club members who live further away and/or down come by the student center regularly and/or aren't highly engaged enough to go check a board.
* An archive of messages can be valuable. I have dug though club archives to find the name of a guest speaker from several years prior. Physical records make this difficult, especially in a college club where leadership changes frequently and papers get lost.
Of course... email can do all of that. The lesson is to be judicious with technology, not abandon it entirely.
In fact the suggestion is not to abandon the bulletin board in the student center As usual, there will be HN replies that adhere to "all-or-nothing", "black and white", etc. thinking, e.g., believing there is an "either-or" choice between use of a computer and another method
However it's possible to use a bulletin board in the student center and a computer. This is not an either-or choice, there is no requirement to choose one or the other
For example, getting contact details from the bulletin board then using a smartphone to make a phone call
Further, there is no suggestion in the comment that one or the other, bulletin board in student center or computer, is without benefits
In fact, the comment suggests the bulletin board is useful: "It works"
The question raised by the comment is whether the benefits of sending data to a remote third party, namely a "social media" company, outweigh the costs ("hassles")
This is obviously more narrow than "using a computer". We can use commputers without involving "social media" companies
TL;DR FB is worthless for social networks, because if they showed you the groups you were there to check on, nobody would pay to promote their own things.
Once an avid user, I go 1-2 weeks at a time with the app uninstalled now unless there's something specific I need to check on.
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.
Nothing deserves to an "always-on-chatterbox" unless the end-user truly chooses it because that is what they want or need.
This is part of the larger problem. How many "always-on-chatterboxes" competing for one's attention before it becomes close-to-impossible to concentrate on anything that requires some actual thinking.
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.
On the desktop version of the website, click on the "Friends" "Feed" (and there might have been a sort by date as well you had to then click on).
You don't get sorting options for that Feed. And depending on your luck that might be three clicks off the home page to even that (See More > Feeds > Friends).
Out of ten items on your feed, five would be adverts, three are reposts of some crappy influencer’s video or a meme or something, one is a friend’s marketplace listing, and if you’re lucky, the last one is a photo actually taken by a friend who you actually know.
The natural monopoly of networks is what brought us all to social networks, and I suspect it is why they will fail. Niche networks run by a small team (which is what social networks were when we were the early adopters) seem like they can trivially sustain themselves.
The explosion of podcasting is exactly this, but for nontechnical people.
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?
They don't show you what your friends actually post. Someone saying "hey - I'm in the parking lot at some place, I need help moving this thing" 5 minutes ago? You might see it on your feed in a week
They engage in reputational decay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1775182 (see also, photo tagging)
They've cut off access to your friends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
It's a company involved in lots of OTHER things which don't make it a good netizen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 (oh and their own cryptocurrency in Libra, that's fun)
"Dumb fucks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
Edit: You get banned at any time while the obviously horrible thing you report doesn't get taken down. That's not sustainable. It's not a thing where you can actually physically keep in touch with people, either nominally strangers or the best of friends