I know there's a lot of Musk stans in here, but he really did destroy Twitter, possibly at the behest of the Saudis, and it is now a late night Fox News like ads space full of scams.
Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
191–200 of 378 posts
Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes Early Digg was pretty good. Early Reddit had a lot of good help guides and interesting perspectives. Now on HN. And crossing fingers. (Slashdot seemed to go through the cycle, bottom out, and is ok again?)
Slashdot will never be okay again. I go there every so often to check, and it's still a dumpster fire.
I tried soylent for awhile. But then realized the people who lit the dumpster fire at SD were there too.
Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
#193Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That's a pretty interesting question, the tough as nails salesman closing deals everyday would consider nearly the entire population is lazy as all heck, whereas the hermit fisherman would consider the opposite, that nearly all are needlessly agitated.
Placing the bar at the 50th percentile isn't very inspiring for the passing reader though.
Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
#195I'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…
Good points, and I've made/discussed/seen these elsewhere as well, but one thing to add explicitly: it is still possible to get 'you go to stuff'. I don't have the impression I changed how I do that. But: it does seem to get harder and harder and I'm actually not sure it will remain doable in the future (except perhaps by a small subset of hacker-ish people) because it gets indeed not pushed at all.
Examples are things like LineageOS on your phone and/or not actevily using it as an extension but as a tool, illegally downloading content (still thrives), it actually seems a lot easier these days to download music from lesser known to virtually unknown bands (even if it's just via YouTube) and I still find this like I used to i.e. mainly by going to shows or looking at who's playing and finding related bands like that, choosing anything but Google/Bing/... as principal search provider and using multiple search engines, ...
So, I'm personally not heavily affected by that steering but I do indeed fear that it might become a lot harder in the future. On the other hand we shouldn't forget that for a lot of humanity out there the previous decades they just got their information from 1 or 2 TV channels, radio, cinema, and a newspaper. If they wouldn't actively seek value they'd be basically in almost the same boat. Except that today's boat is a lot more pushy.
Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
#196An 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 don't see any real difference between your "online pub" and globalized-entity "pedestrian street" examples.
They're both highly-controlled and highly-curated venues.
Environments like those just encourage conformity. That, in turn, results in interaction/discussion that's rather bland, homogeneous, and sterile.
I definitely find this site to be like that. The "showdead" setting very slightly mitigates it, but even then, I almost never find any sort of truly thought-provoking discussion here.
Those venues seem to exhibit a false sense of community to me. There's interaction, but the participants are either ruthlessly conforming, or they're walking on eggshells.
Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
#197Best 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.
"TV programs are interruptions of commercial blocks" was the quote that stuck with me back in the day.
Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH i don't get the point of mastodon. Social media is primarily "media", broadcasting, so they must be megaphones, which by necessity includes large scale commercial and entertainment activity. Mastodon's purpose of small cozy chats is better served by ... chat which is more self-selective and fit for the niches or countercultures
> large scale commercial and entertainment activity I think you're redefining "social media" (which I think was previously called "social networking" once upon a time) as "broadcasting" and "megaphones" so naturally your definition doesn't fit. But socializing online is about sharing information, interests, and building a (small, or the size you prefer) network of people you consider online friends. Discord does seem…
Whatever starts as 'social networking' i think it is inevitable that it will end up becoming 'social media', because people add friends but don't delete, and by the central limit theorem users will become average, that can easily be substituted by an ML model. Even if mastodon is OK now, it will end up with the same situation as it grows.
I still prefer when the world was divided in forums, not friend groups.
Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
#199Best 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.
I've heard content creators either say explicitly in videos, or in text under videos, things along the line of "Sorry I made a mistake here but I need to get this video out". Imagine reading an essay where the author tried to pull something like that.
Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
#200I've seen a lot less engagement with my Facebook posts in the last couple years, and been shown a lot fewer posts from my friends compared to groups, ads, and "suggested" posts. I used to wonder if it was primarily because Facebook was openly downranking news and politics, and my friends and I posted about those things a lot more than your average users.
Now I think it's just because most of them have silently stopped using the platform -- but I think a big reason for that is we figured that if no one is going to see our stuff, then why post it at all? In other words, anticipating the algorithm led to a kind of chilling effect on our usage in general, at least for my own behavior.
Not that Internet political arguments have gone great with the current platforms and their incentives, but I don't like the idea that they might not happen at all, especially at a time that seems as important to discuss as this one.