Until they add a real following only feed I don't see it replacing any existing social media platform.
I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
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Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I used threads for a few minutes and quickly discovered that’s it’s just not a product that caters to me… yet. Right now I think it’s probably only great if you’re really into the e-celeb scene. But this is Meta/IG we’re talking about, I’m sure they’ll get their near-freaky level of algorithmic content targeting precision in there soon enough and my feed will become full of stuff I care about. I’ll check back i…
> But this is Meta/IG we’re talking about, I’m sure they’ll get their near-freaky level of algorithmic content targeting precision in there soon enough I keep hearing this. "Oh! The Algorithm gets me so well! It's so freaky!" about TikTok, IG, everything really... But let me tell you how my IG feed goes: I get 3 posts at the top, posted by my friends. I like all of them – even if I didn't like it. I'm just pleading t…
Twitter unambiguously separates out the feed of people you're following and the algorithmic feed ("For you") in separate tabs (plus you can pin separate lists as tabs). It also opens up the feed you last used when you open a new session. Plus, the algorithm for the "For you" feed is open source[0]
Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
#93Slight twist on dead internet theory. It's not that the internet is full of bots, it's that the internet is full of self promotion. Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand". Similar to the Black Mirror episode about social credit score.
Or a dead society theory. The less people need each other for creating value, the more of their communication goes down to attention seeking and identity pandering.
Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
#94Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
#95Half hour of blocking and I have no problems at all. No brands or big celebrities. This is not rocket science.
Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
#96If you have to put that kind of work into a platform to make it usable, I would suggest putting it into a platform that aligns with your values. I just can't understand why anyone, even "normals", would be so eager to jump into bed with Facebook again after the last decade.
I started onto Threads. I really tried to make Mastodon work for me, but the lack of discoverability killed it. As somebody with trans people in my family, getting away from Musk's Twitter is a priority. But Twitter is where I get a lot of news and entertainment. I would rather have seen Mastodon win, but their product just isn't good enough.
Mastodon seems like nice people, but it's not well designed. So far, it seems people are posting stuff in the void and creating little conversation because everything rolls past you unless you are looking continuously. Even notifications are poorly designed as it keeps posting your content repeatedly for favorites, etc., so you have little overview of your interactions. I think it could be designed better but apparently, few changes are made to make it more usable.
Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
#97Slight twist on dead internet theory. It's not that the internet is full of bots, it's that the internet is full of self promotion. Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand". Similar to the Black Mirror episode about social credit score.
I think there's a good bit of truth to that. Even the platforms where self promotion is a rule violation such as Wikipedia and Reddit tend to be dominated by cliques of unpaid mods with an agenda either ideological or related to the interests of a government's national security apparatus.
The main reason why I'm pessimistic about the prospects for Threads to be a success is because it seems to be leaning very strongly towards LinkedIn on the scale of authenticity vs inauthenticity and that is death for a social media platform unless people literally use it to find jobs. I don't think most actual human beings want to use a platform dominated by corporations and people trying to turn themselves into a "brand". They're basically attracting all of the spam accounts from Twitter and amplifying them which might be a good way to attract advertisers but it isn't a good way to attract users.
Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
#98If you have to put that kind of work into a platform to make it usable, I would suggest putting it into a platform that aligns with your values. I just can't understand why anyone, even "normals", would be so eager to jump into bed with Facebook again after the last decade.
I saw some posts urging people to “get in on the beginning” in order to take advantage of the primitive ranking and go viral. Everyone wants a chance at that. Just like the promise of pump and dump crypto’s or the still private startups that told me “you just don’t understand how equity works, we are about to IPO soon, take our lowball offer”
It’s 2023, and people are still grasping for Internet Points?
Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
#99Slight twist on dead internet theory. It's not that the internet is full of bots, it's that the internet is full of self promotion. Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand". Similar to the Black Mirror episode about social credit score.
I’m not commenting on your theory, but what I love about HN is that, for the most part, people comment purely to talk about a topic. There’s very little self promotion. It’s very nice.
Unless you're posting a show HN, in which case every brother and their mother chimes in with "this is nice but here's my cloud service that does a similar thing but better" sideswipes
Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
#100Slight twist on dead internet theory. It's not that the internet is full of bots, it's that the internet is full of self promotion. Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand". Similar to the Black Mirror episode about social credit score.
> Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand".
Humanity breaks into three groups: originators, amplifiers, mimics.
Probably 95-97% of humanity or more are mimics. They will never produce much of anything original, that includes writing long-form blog posts or original media content (eg YouTube). They have little to no interest. This is backed up by stats on pretty much every platform, including Reddit and HN (the extreme majority are voyeurs not contributors). It's one of the reasons TikTok was so successful, it enabled the mimics to easily participate and pretend they were creating something new (while they were actually doing nothing but copying what someone else created, and getting a mental reward for it via likes/watches/followers). It's also why modern cameras in smartphones are so popular for the masses (+ Instagram), anybody can take a photo and feel at least ok about it (you don't have to be an expert photographer, you don't have to really create anything interesting and or new).
It doesn't matter what you do or what you change, the extreme majority will never meaningfully contribute. Even on services like TikTok and Instagram the masses have little to no interest in meaningful contribution, they produce a couple of videos or photos and then largely stop; the same holds true on Facebook, most people don't contribute very much into the network. They don't want to. They lack the desire to put in the time and effort (people are tired after work, have children/lives to tend to, etc etc), and they lack the creativity to originate persistently (the feedback isn't there because what they're producing won't get much attention).
Everybody isn't the same. Everybody isn't Picasso or Hunter S. Thompson and can't be. So what you're mostly left with are the people desperately seeking attention/self-promotion and the rare slice of originators.
You have to specifically build a platform to cater to the smaller slice of originators and intentionally block/disrupt the aggressive self-promoters that often don't contribute much new value. And if you do that, your platform will never be overly popular (which isn't what most VC backed services aim for obviously).