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

Social Quitting

locusmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 121 posts

Re: Social Quitting

#101

Post by 411111111111111 »

sph wrote: post #87
ipaddr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to agree with your ideals but there are 1,000x more people who read and rarely share. The viewed stat on a top rate hn submission is probably 50,000 views on average where comments are measured in the hundreds.

The problem is who are you listening to. If you talk about anything in a public place, say in a pub, it won't take long to hear a differing opinion. We've worked so hard to create closed communities on the Internet, that you're not exposed to opposite ideas unless you work hard at looking outside your bubble. Social media with its very smart recommendation algos will try to keep you firmly in your echo chamber. Yeah,…

Bubbles are definitely an issue, but the original point is pretty far off from reality as they said.

You'd have to respond to every second comment if people held to the 2:1 ratio on the internet.

Re: Social Quitting

#102

Post by CaptainFever »

sph wrote: post #87
ipaddr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to agree with your ideals but there are 1,000x more people who read and rarely share. The viewed stat on a top rate hn submission is probably 50,000 views on average where comments are measured in the hundreds.

The problem is who are you listening to. If you talk about anything in a public place, say in a pub, it won't take long to hear a differing opinion. We've worked so hard to create closed communities on the Internet, that you're not exposed to opposite ideas unless you work hard at looking outside your bubble. Social media with its very smart recommendation algos will try to keep you firmly in your echo chamber. Yeah,…

Social media algorithms might not be the only thing keeping people within a bubble. For example, Fediverse instances or Reddit communities (infamously known for the “hivemind”).

People might simply be tribal in nature, however this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t improve.

Related: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Re: Social Quitting

#103

Post by p1esk »

simula67 wrote: post #62
p1esk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? What’s so unique about Whatsapp?

Not much, but it has become the default way to share information for many groups: churches, friend/family groups, study groups, and even some government associations. If you do not have WhatsApp it has become very difficult to navigate life. For example, I had uninstalled it before going to college but had to reinstall it when I realized it might stop me from graduating.

Strange. I’ve never used it, and never needed to use it. Though I regularly use Telegram, Discord, Skype, Slack, and Viber. All conversations with relatives happen on imessage/facetime.

Re: Social Quitting

#104

Post by nailer »

btheshoe wrote: post #48

It seems to me that the deaths of Twitter and Facebook are being greatly exaggerated (by this article, and by the vibes generally). A decrease in users is not the same thing as a mass exodus. And I'm frankly skeptical of any claims that Twitter is facing an existential decrease in users.

> Twitter got bought out by a low-attention-span, overconfident billionaire who started pulling out Jenga blocks to see whether the system would fall over, and when it did, we all got crushed by the falling blocks.

I’m not sure how consistent application of moderation rules, refocusing on actual user safety like CSA instead of preferred pronoun use, and transparency when it comes to government manipulation of political conversation is ‘pulling out the jenga blocks’ but Musk can certainly done a better job with Twitter than Doctorow did with Boingboing.

Re: Social Quitting

#105

Post by ogre_battle »

411111111111111 wrote: post #101
sph wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is who are you listening to. If you talk about anything in a public place, say in a pub, it won't take long to hear a differing opinion. We've worked so hard to create closed communities on the Internet, that you're not exposed to opposite ideas unless you work hard at looking outside your bubble. Social media with its very smart recommendation algos will try to keep you firmly in your echo chamber. Yeah,…

Bubbles are definitely an issue, but the original point is pretty far off from reality as they said. You'd have to respond to every second comment if people held to the 2:1 ratio on the internet.

What's the ratio? 1:9:90? or something along those lines.

1:2 is amazing engagement.

Re: Social Quitting

#106

Post by thecrash »

btheshoe wrote: post #48

It seems to me that the deaths of Twitter and Facebook are being greatly exaggerated (by this article, and by the vibes generally). A decrease in users is not the same thing as a mass exodus. And I'm frankly skeptical of any claims that Twitter is facing an existential decrease in users.

As Doctorow says, the permanence of these institutions is taken for granted until it starts to unwind - and very quickly downfall becomes obvious and inevitable. It's not obvious to everyone yet, but he's saying it soon will be.

"Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies." https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition-an-...

Re: Social Quitting

#107

Post by nokya »

Just finished reading the article. I already started disagreeing with the author while reading the first line. Mass exodus? What is he referring to? How does he differentiate mass exodus from being simply out of touch with users' needs? Mass exodus from social networks looks to me like a typical low-signal-high-noise opinionated clickbait, not fact-based journalism.

If there was a mass exodus, I think we should observe it from our own eyes. In my case, nobody around me is (finally) leaving WhatsApp and nobody is quitting Twitter. I don't have thousands of "friends" but I think I can assume that I would actually see these platforms bleed out if there was a mass exodus in progress, and more particularly, I'd see where they are going to.

I think the author's vision appears to be constructed on the premise that he perceives social networks as all-powerful businesses ("Today, it’s getting harder to believe that these networks will last forever."). I think he is sharing his own delusion about social networks with the public and trying to find an escape to the dissonance that ensued from the decline of their stock price. For more than 5 years now, Facebook has been offering nothing more than a worldwide directory and a stalking service to its users in exchange for their data, in my opinion. If we do the analogy with a milk company, he is basically surprised that cows are leaving the farm because they don't get anything valuable in return (the actual customers are the buyers of milk).

What surprises me though, is the fact that he seems to miss an elephant in the room. It seems to me that these companies are failing simply because they are engaged in a very expensive operation that doesn't generate a lot of revenue anymore. And the reason for this decrease in revenue cannot be simply explained with users exodus or attrition: Meta still owns Instagram, TikTok is doing very well and many social networks are reporting massive users intake. What is happening in my opinion is just pure simple and raw competition.

Finally, he also seems to neglect the potential behind Meta's investment in metaverse tech. I wouldn't dare betting on this: there are thousands of signals worldwide that show that metaverse technologies could disrupt society the same way Internet and touch screen smartphones disrupted our daily lives. Nobody knows whether Zuckerberg is at the "right place, right time" for the moment, he may as much as he may not be. But if he is...

Re: Social Quitting

#108

Post by dibt »

onion2k wrote: post #86
dibt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty sure you could pick literally any account... > All twitter users are like this. That's the point. Cory isn't like all users. He has 480k followers. The reality is very few of his followers engage with the tweets. He previously had engagement, he no longer has that engagement, and thinks Twitter is dying. It didn't help that he told his followers to go to mastodon. I really think he doesn't play to the pl…

So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter, or 1% is fine, but if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%? That doesn't seem particularly reasonable. If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.

> So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter

Ratio between 0.05% - 1% shows good engagement. I rarely see it above 1%. Those are 'viral' tweets. I've never seen 2% or more.

Ratio regularly dropping below 0.05% without lots of replies/retweets is bad. A low ratio could mean high views from bots (e.g. Musk) or other non-follower sources, so replies/retweets help to indicate there is healthy engagement. Cory doesn't have that.

> if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%?

The 480k is his _potential_ reach.

You aren't entitled to reaching all 480k of your followers. They follow other people. Their feed has limited space.

Similar to how Youtubers tell people to subscribe AND enable notifications. Doing so shortcuts the algo. You can do the same on Twitter. If the small % of followers that see your tweets don't engage, the feedback loop of getting to more of your followers never kicks off.

This is obvious with well-liked accounts. More obvious when these types of accounts are private because the like/view ratio is a higher signal (ie no fly-by views).

> If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.

Not a problem. It's the nature of the beast. Only a small % engage. The likes create a feedback loop that gets more views, but rarely breaks above 1% likes/views ratio. You see the same limits to conversion rates in other areas (e.g. advertising or eCommerce sales).

Re: Social Quitting

#109

Post by comte7092 »

sph wrote: post #89
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing about the internet is it gives everyone a voice. The worst thing about the internet is it gives everyone a voice.

Everyone has a voice outside the internet too, but your spoken word carries social and physical consequences, which tends to teach one pretty quickly not to run their mouth. Social media won't improve until there is a button I can click to slap the person who wrote it, paraphrasing that famous bash.org quote. Mind you, I'm not talking about government laws. In the real world, moderation is highly distributed: anyone…

>outside the internet… your spoken word carries social and physical consequences, which tends to teach one pretty quickly not to run their mouth.

I see this written a lot on the internet, but it diverges pretty strongly from what I see in real life, i.e. people run their mouths all the time.

The difference I see is that, on the internet, pretty much every interaction is with a stranger you’ll never talk to again, so there is no point in trying to build a rapport.

Re: Social Quitting

#110

Post by moe091 »

411111111111111 wrote: post #101
sph wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is who are you listening to. If you talk about anything in a public place, say in a pub, it won't take long to hear a differing opinion. We've worked so hard to create closed communities on the Internet, that you're not exposed to opposite ideas unless you work hard at looking outside your bubble. Social media with its very smart recommendation algos will try to keep you firmly in your echo chamber. Yeah,…

Bubbles are definitely an issue, but the original point is pretty far off from reality as they said. You'd have to respond to every second comment if people held to the 2:1 ratio on the internet.

If the response counts as a comment, then that ratio is impossible to fulfill - although in that interpretation it'd be impossible to fulfill IRL as well, so I don't think we can use comments vs replies as a metric, unless you only count root-level comments as "talking" and sub-root comments as "listening", in which case I feel like the ratio does hold true
Post reply on HN