Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 464 posts

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#191

Post by 9dev »

ImPleadThe5th wrote: post #125
captainmuon wrote: post #77

Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more add…

I know it will never happen, but I would love a resurgence of micro-blogs. All this talk of decentralised social media and all these new solutions, just to full circle back to self-hosted personal blogs. I feel like in the tech circle they never left, but they aren't consumed by the general population.

I don’t think self-hosted will ever happen. Centralisation wins for consumer services. This has been proven even with the crypto shitshow, which revolves by and large around a few centralised platforms.

On the other hand, are micro-blogs so different from TikTok stories, other than the format of the content (text vs. video)?

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#192

Post by eezurr »

askafriend wrote: post #36
timeimp wrote: post #19

I've heard (anecdotally) that the attention span of all the younger users has taken a dramatic shift south. Educators and employers are noticing they cannot keep students / new employees engaged. Makes me wonder what damage is happening, long-term, with all these short bursts of dopamine that TikTok gives it users.

Why default to blaming the students/employees? The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees. I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers ar…

When you see a polished video clip on the net, it's the cumulated result of an hour or more work for less than a minute of your time. Simply put, it doesn't scale.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#193

Post by bumbledraven »

For Twitter, however, arguably the most important event of 2009 was not these publicity bonanzas but the introduction of the retweet button... As with Facebook, the larger that Twitter’s social graph grew, the more attractive the network became. Pretenders to the short-message throne, such as Parler or Gab, struggled to get traction, as their networks lacked sufficient size and numbers of influential users to compete in a battle for attention. By 2011, Twitter, following in Facebook’s footsteps, passed the milestone of a hundred million users.

While discussing the time period from 2009-2011, the article claims thats Gab and Parler "struggled to gain traction", but those services didn't launch until 2017 and 2018.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#194

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #118
captainmuon wrote: post #77

Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more add…

> And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant A quick dismissal of the fact that this data collection was and is happening and has already had massive effects on society. Just because it is in the interest of "old" media to point this out doesn't mean they're wrong.

“Old media” suffered far more from the competition by Craigslist and eBay, which drove away almost all their income in classifieds, which made up around a third to half of all income at average newspapers.

And yet… there just wasn’t any criticism of those companies at any scale comparable to what Facebook gets.

That’s evidende against this theory that journalists are somehow working for the commercial interest of publishers. Which was always quite silly anyway: if there’s one thing a journalist will always brag about, it’s how they screwed over their publisher with some story.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#195

Post by goodpoint »

klodolph wrote: post #32
timeimp wrote: post #19

I've heard (anecdotally) that the attention span of all the younger users has taken a dramatic shift south. Educators and employers are noticing they cannot keep students / new employees engaged. Makes me wonder what damage is happening, long-term, with all these short bursts of dopamine that TikTok gives it users.

People have been saying that for centuries or longer. Kids these days have shorter attention spans. People said it about millennials, about gen-x, about baby boomers. There’s a record of people complaining that kids are ruined by their reliance on writing things on paper, rather than slate. There’s a record of Socrates complaining that the written word is ruining people’s memory. The record exists because Plato wrote…

If you cherry-pick anecdotal complaints from the last 3000 years you can claim "People have been saying that for centuries" for any topic you want.

The reality is that there is a huge dopamine industry trying to fuel additive consumption including social networks and video games.

There is ongoing sociological and psychological research showing that decreased attention span is real.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#196

Post by walls »

tenpies wrote: post #161
freshpots wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really trying to compare a dictatorship state to America? And I say this as as foreigner....you are creating quite the false equivalency here. But muh both sides....People need to stop looking at things in black and white.

[flagged]

No post body was provided.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#198

Post by gilrain »

pessimizer wrote: post #179
gilrain wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This common phrase is not literal.

No, it is literal. It means that there exists every form of difficulty that you could enumerate in competing with them, except impossibility. It's possible in the way it's possible to shoot a bullet through a wall without either being damaged if their atoms are arranged in the right way at the right moment. It's not only literal, but very precise (and hyperbolic in that precision.)

So, when used, the phrase always literally refers to situations where precisely every possible difficulty is present aside from any that result in impossibility? You believe that??

Live by literal interpretation, die by literal interpretation.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#199

Post by ghaff »

desindol wrote: post #186
slategruen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006 I disagree with this one. They might be afraid of sharing their data explicitly i.e. sharing everything happening to them for everyone to see (even strangers). The trend now is sharing content to people they only have very close relationships with. But them being afraid of big tech collecting and analyzing their data? I don't think so.

I believe the world is way more anonymous now when I grew up you could basically take the phone book look a name up and just call them. That's now mostly impossible.

Well, that's one specific communications channel. You mostly don't socially call people out of the blue outside of a very tight circle of friends and family--and cell phone numbers can't be looked up in general. However, many people--especially professionals--have LinkedIn profiles. And many in general can be searched on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Given someone's name and maybe a little more information about them, you can often look up a lot more than a phone number and address.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#200

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #182
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are in for big problems. I graduated from college in 2017 and my adult classmates couldn't even pay attention in class. If adults are hooked then children stand absolutely no chance.

You're assuming they could in 1987

I'm assuming it was easier.
Post reply on HN