private messaging, i.e. telegram/discord seems to be where people are moving. I'm not surprised that Instagram copies TikTok for the algorithmically driven content, what I'm more surprised by is that WhatsApp is still pretty lackluster compared to Telegram given that Mark himself noticed that private groups seem to be what's next. Hard to overstate how much better their UX is compared to anything else.
Is this the end of social networking?
11–20 of 503 posts
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#12Ending this with "tweet your comment" and "discuss this on twitter" is amusingly ironic, given that Twitter has always been a place that's actively hostile to any kind of rich, subtle discussion, and has pivoted away from "keep up with people you want to follow" to an official stance of "keep up with the news" and an actual stance of "here is an endless scroll of engaging content, mostly things to get angry about, that we can slip ads into".
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#13I think that the only domain where social networks can be relevant is in the geoloc domain. Dating apps are quite an obvious example where it works very well, but dating is a very limited scope.
So of course, the single problem of anything geoloc is safety and privacy, which is not the strong aspect of any social network right now. Tinder and others work hard to make their users safe, and it's difficult because users are not aware of it.
Social networks always should have been used to meet people OUTSIDE of screens, for discovering other people and things.
I want to meet people through activities (board games, running, walking), (loneliness is a huge problem in the west!) and except bumble BFF, which isn't popular, there is no popular app to do just that. Of course there is meetup and other things, but those are too narrow.
Neighbor apps are nice too, but nobody use them because they're focused on services, which isn't fun.
Don't you think it's a huge contradiction that current social networks don't let people meet?
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#14Users of social media will learn how to deal with righteousness. Until we do, social media will suck big league.
Social Media strongly encourages Hot Takes, because those get clicks. I found myself examining how I comment on reddit, and what people call "The Hivemind".
You can't have nuanced discussions on social media, someone will infer what kind of asshole you exactly are, and that's the end of the discussion.
Some poisoned phrases:
Be Reasonable - "why can't you just be reasonable"
Both Sides - "there are good people on both sides"
Some Responsibility - "she bears some responsibility"
Nuanced Discussion - "you can't have a nuanced discussion on social media"
I'm sure there are some poisoned phrases you react instinctively to.
I think weak arguments are good, actually. You don't need to move someone from the swamp to the mountain, you just need them to get on dry land.
Now I'm sure someone has inferred exactly what kind of asshole I am, and they are correct. This is the kind of asshole I am. The kind that wants reasonable arguments to exist in the real world, even if I have to make them up.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#15Ending this with "tweet your comment" and "discuss this on twitter" is amusingly ironic, given that Twitter has always been a place that's actively hostile to any kind of rich, subtle discussion, and has pivoted away from "keep up with people you want to follow" to an official stance of "keep up with the news" and an actual stance of "here is an endless scroll of engaging content, mostly things to get angry about, th…
I think that’s entirely dependent on who you follow and if you’re not actively utilizing your blocked/muted accounts and/or muted keywords from your feed.
The amount of value I’ve gained from threads on people I follow on how to do something or learning something is insane and the “rich, subtle discussion” in those threads on that topic is sometimes just as good if not better than the thread itself.
No denying the default Twitter is loud, and just wants to suck you into mindless scrolling of ads and things to get you angry about, but you are in charge of how you curate your feed.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#16Probably. We ended up with a completely different internet than the one we still thought should be possible in 2004.
For a brief period of time, the internet genuinely subverted the corporate beetle-men and the gatekeepers who've always owned the "official" or real world. You could send an email to a well-known, accomplished person and there was a 75 percent you'd hear back. There really was a culture of punk equality... of course, we were quite harsh to people who used the platform to say stupid things (and, since I was young, I said stupid things a lot), because that's requisite if you want to stay relatively meritocratic. The internet was smaller in the 1990s and there were far fewer ways to make money from it, but it was legitimately subversive.
We've lost that, though. Twitter used to be a way for nobodies to gain a degree of influence. Now it's the opposite--instead, it measures and ratifies our lack of influence, because every time you apply for a job, the bosses know that you're no threat if mistreated--the fact that you only have 3,000 followers, as opposed to 100,000, proves that.
The internet and the web didn't fix capitalism; instead, to the detriment of all of us, it ended up looking like capitalism. The technology grew up too fast; our moribund economic system hadn't died yet (and still hasn't). This was bad enough, but if capitalism is still around when we see AGI (granted, I don't think that'll actually happen for at least a hundred years) we are properly and irreversibly facefucked.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#17> [TikTok]'s addiction-based advertising machine is probably close to the theoretical maximum of how many advertisements one can pour down somebody’s throat.
Well put. It's interesting that we pivoted in my adult lifetime from:
1. Myspace's emphasis on sharing things on your own webpage, essentially a hosted blog 2. Facebook's evolution from "hosted blog" to "friend update aggregator" to "chat client" to "friend update & ad aggregator" 3. Instagram's callback to simple update sharing (with pictures) and a chronological ad-free news feed 4. Snap's emphemeral sharing 5. Facebook's slow agglomeration and bastardization of all of the features that made Instagram and Snap distinct. 6. TikTok's addictive advertising machine that barely includes any friend connections at all.
Initially I was concerned that this would mean the death of real social media, just like the article initially suggests. But I really like the conclusion the article ultimately comes to: we basically don't have social media right now, we have advertising engines masquerading as social media. Better that Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat show their true colors and become disgusting advertising machines just like TikTok.
If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet. microblog seems promising, but I think even mastodon could provide the experience I'm looking for.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#18"And because it was never about “bring[ing] the world closer together”, they drop that mission as if they never cared. (That’s because they didn’t. At least MarkZ didn’t, and he is the sole, unaccountable overlord of the Meta empire. A two-class stock structure gives you that.)"
Ahahahaha! As if the normal shareholder of FB, or almost any other company, would tolerate them making less money than they possibly could. There is plenty wrong with Facebook, but the two-class stock structure is not the cause, because a single-class stock structure leads to equally pathological behavior.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#19I think that the only domain where social networks can be relevant is in the geoloc domain. Dating apps are quite an obvious example where it works very well, but dating is a very limited scope. So of course, the single problem of anything geoloc is safety and privacy, which is not the strong aspect of any social network right now. Tinder and others work hard to make their users safe, and it's difficult because users…
I think for dating/sex people are willing to leave their comfort zone and meet new people/take some risks. I not so sure about boardgames and walking... who wants to play a boardgame with a complete stranger ?
but hey, why not? someone should try with the hope to become the new meta in social networking.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#20No.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." The sweeping generalization refers to the poor journalistic practice of writing sensational headlines in the form of a question in order to compensate for the author's lack of facts.