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Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

businessinsider.com

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Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#181

Post by Gibbon1 »

ben_w wrote: post #31
quchen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not the same? It sounds exactly like I understand enshittification. Literally: > First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. (Source: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ ) Do you mean that the context here i…

My understanding is that enshittification is much more general (though perhaps this is just linguistic drift); an organisation that has done a hard thing, but now has to justify its continuing existence and expense coming up with things nobody needs and which add zero or negative value. This can be rent extraction (literal or metaphorical, no matter where on that spectrum advertising goes); and also it can be feature…

My accountant mom introduced me to the term goodwill which is an intangible asset. It's basically the extra value over assets minus liabilities. It's based on brand loyalty, established customer relations, etc.

MBA culture promotes the idea that it's advantageous to burn a companies goodwill to boost a couple of quarters earnings. MBA's love to do that because it's easy and MBA's are fundamentally lazy and incurious and will jump ship before it plays out.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#182

Post by systems_glitch »

mancerayder wrote: post #180
Liquix wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellently written. A nitpick on your final point: > Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term? This may be looking at it backwards. Rampant smartphone addiction and overuse begins to shape all things in a "medium is the message" type of effect. The less need there is to physically "Go to the Thing" -…

So you're saying we're allowing ourselves to be victimized by it via laziness ? That's certainly true, if that is what you mean. I guess the part I didn't speak about was: some people value independent thought more than others, and I think for those that do, the Things Come to You paradigm is even more frustrating. My concern is that children are growing up in the Come to You dynamic. Flip side: they can generate con…

Maps. We had FPS maps.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#183

Post by jwells89 »

nicbou wrote: post #49

An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…

Much of this has to do with scale. In small communities, interactions are more likely to skew positive, meaningful, and desired. The discussions that rise to the top are those that are most interesting and relevant to the community.

In giga-networks like Twitter, you might get some vague sense of a belonged-to community, but the boundaries are fuzzy at best and when posts find their way beyond those boundaries, context is lost and you end up with scores of randos whose full-time job is seemingly to surf the service searching for posts to clout farm with by either replying to them with their entirely uninformed (often inflammatory) opinion or quote-tweet with similarly uninformed ridicule, which can turn disastrous for the quoted poster if it goes viral. The posts that rise to the top are the ones that are the most flame-baity and controversial. It's a much more negative experience overall.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#184

Post by thefz »

Best definition of "content" I ever heard: https://youtu.be/kHe4wwF9O6Q?t=149

"content is a commodity that fills social media feeds so we can be sold as a collection of preferences [...] attention but not understanding, engagement but not exploration"

Every time I hear "content creator" I perceive it as Styrofoam. Filler used to convey a product.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#185

Post by nkjnlknlk »

mancerayder wrote: post #180
Liquix wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellently written. A nitpick on your final point: > Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term? This may be looking at it backwards. Rampant smartphone addiction and overuse begins to shape all things in a "medium is the message" type of effect. The less need there is to physically "Go to the Thing" -…

So you're saying we're allowing ourselves to be victimized by it via laziness ? That's certainly true, if that is what you mean. I guess the part I didn't speak about was: some people value independent thought more than others, and I think for those that do, the Things Come to You paradigm is even more frustrating. My concern is that children are growing up in the Come to You dynamic. Flip side: they can generate con…

Laziness is poor framing. Can the masses be "lazy" or is it pointless moralizing in the face of unfettered propaganda and behaviour manipulation?

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#186

Post by cdcarter »

margalabargala wrote: post #174
Root_Denied wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem with Discord is still more related to support communities (what would have previously been a focused forum or subreddit) moving there, and the subsequent lack of archival of topics and answers for future reference.

This has actually been fixed in the past ~6 months, and quite nicely. They added the concept of a "forum" channel, where you can have individual support questions, and each one has its own thread that addresses that specific question. Better yet; the search box and the "make a new post" box are the same box . So if you're starting to ask your question, as you type, it's filtering previous questions based on the words…

The Zig programming language community has a very active Discord, and they use the forum mode. I've searched for questions I feel "certain" someone else would have asked (like how to convert a `[]const u8` to a `[255]const u8`) and rarely can get Discord's search to find something relevant. Thankfully, the community answers quickly anyway.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#187

Post by VoodooJuJu »

nicbou wrote: post #49

An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…

I think online communities aren't. A pub is a healthy, proper, community experience. Any human interaction that isn't face-to-face is injurious to your health.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#189

Post by briffle »

mancerayder wrote: post #154

I've been observing a pattern that I've been trying to articulate here and I can best describe as a framework where stuff 'comes to you' whereas the Internet for a long time was an enabler of 'you go to stuff'. The pendulum swung back, thanks to ad tech, and centralization, that have or are trying to orchestrate a culture shift. Okay, here are some concrete examples. 1. Television/cable (absent a TiVo type device), t…

I miss pointcast, back in the day when T-1 lines were crazy, that downloaded full web sites of your favorite sites for you to look at later. Similarly, I miss Google Reader. I used feedly for a few years after readers' demise, and it worked okay, but many sites have gone to a super small summary in the rss feed, and you have to go click the link to read the article, so they can show you ads...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#190

Post by b800h »

sznio wrote: post #78
jiofj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know how to use twitter but you know how to use mastodon? Aren't they basically the same thing?

I never figured out how to find something interesting on Twitter. The algo feed doesn't surface anything interesting anyway. On Mastodon, since I picked an instance that fits my interests I can actually browse the local instance feed/trending and see things that do interest me.

I'm pretty sold on Mastodon now, but I am wondering what it's failure mode looks like. Everything eventually gets worse - how might this happen with Mastodon?
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