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

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 378 posts

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

#241

Post by markdown »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #217
brap wrote: post #215

My Facebook feed is about 40% sponsored posts, 30% suggested posts, 30% group posts (usually from very large groups), and then maybe 1% actual friends (and it’s usually just something that they’ve shared or commented on, almost never actual content). If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB more frequently and I’m sure most of m…

My mastodon feed is 100% actual friends. That reality exists; it's just not evenly distributed yet.

> 100% actual friends

But no family because they'd never figure out how to use the damned thing, amirite?

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

#242

Post by logdap »

bmacho wrote: post #173
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…

> 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. HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging liter…

I see jokes here often enough, but they have to be tasteful, original and clever. What doesn't fly here is the lazy reddit style of joking where you just quote some lame meme or movie quip for the millionth time.

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

#243

Post by mancerayder »

nonameiguess wrote: post #218
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…

Some of this is knowing where to look. If you want medicine interactions, examine.com has everything there is to know about the published scientific data on dietary supplements, and the FDA itself publishes all of the drug inserts for actual pharmaceuticals with every know interaction and side effect discovered during clinical testing. Great video content still exists, too. I recently watched most of the Kurosawa bac…

Maybe the key is bypassing what we (rightly or wrongly) view as 'Guardians' like the Googles of the world

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

#244

Post by ToucanLoucan »

hgomersall wrote: post #240
brap wrote: post #215

My Facebook feed is about 40% sponsored posts, 30% suggested posts, 30% group posts (usually from very large groups), and then maybe 1% actual friends (and it’s usually just something that they’ve shared or commented on, almost never actual content). If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB more frequently and I’m sure most of m…

If we could go back to the days when there was no feed and Facebook was just a way of keeping track of your friends and sending a message, I might use it at all.

The problem is the incentives for any ad-supported profit-driven social network and the incentives on "what makes a social network good for users" are basically a venn diagram that's two circles that touch about 2% in the center.

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

#245

Post by markjonsona989 »

r00fus wrote: post #209
bmacho wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging liter…

> HN is way the driest and most soulless. Well if you are looking for memes and catposts, yeah, the S/N ratio here is quite low. Honestly I think of those things as noise, so I see S/N of HN as much higher. I can always go elsewhere for the vibes.

My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN.

It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jokes and fun. One thing that keeps immature and rude people away is precisely the "dullness" that the post above speaks of. People get tired and move on, leaving the place clean and tidy for others to use.

HN has problems of course; downvote bullying is one of them. I'm not saying HN is perfect, but I'd rather not turn it into Reddit or Youtube. So I don't know where this leaves HN between the "pub" and "commercial street".

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

#246

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

kouru225 wrote: post #177
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…

There was an early art collective called the videofreex that defined what you’re talking about in terms of channel direction. Basically they defined media in the 1980s as being one-way channels where there was no response from the audience whatsoever, and they saw this as a form of control that strengthened class divides. They were excited about creating a two-way channel communication network because they thought it…

> the amount of problems that would come from disinformation

When we used to say disinformation I imagined deep webs of false references, faking critical data.

Now I can lookup most "fake news" and find the truth of it, generally a too-broad take on quoting someone, within minutes. It's just that for partisan reasons people don't look, and when they have it pointed out they tend to say "yeah, that might be wrong but it's still mostly right in spirit" and keep on going.

It seems like hyper-partisanship or tribalism instead of being primarily based on bad data because the data so rarely comes into question.

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

#247

Post by acjacobson »

paganel wrote: post #234
brap wrote: post #215

My Facebook feed is about 40% sponsored posts, 30% suggested posts, 30% group posts (usually from very large groups), and then maybe 1% actual friends (and it’s usually just something that they’ve shared or commented on, almost never actual content). If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB more frequently and I’m sure most of m…

> How did we end up like this? Because sharing personal stuff privately, on group chats, groups made up of close friends, family etc., is the normal thing to do, sharing our personal stuff on FB, IG and the like was the exception. No, it was definitely not ok to share photos of one's unborn baby on FB/IG for almost anyone to see, that was creepy. Glad that things are returning to a sort of normal.

For a long time Facebook was friends only - so what you posted was only visible to people you knew. They slowly changed the default to friend of friends and then public and that changed the whole feel.

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

#248

Post by timeon »

brap wrote: post #215

My Facebook feed is about 40% sponsored posts, 30% suggested posts, 30% group posts (usually from very large groups), and then maybe 1% actual friends (and it’s usually just something that they’ve shared or commented on, almost never actual content). If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB more frequently and I’m sure most of m…

> How did we end up like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law

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

#249

Post by mulberry_seas »

koofdoof wrote: post #204
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…

Walter Benjamin wrote about this all the way back in the 1930s. He observed that early art like frescos painted on walls and sculptures in temples require the viewer to travel to them, but they gave way to paintings on canvas and busts that could travel to cities to meet audiences where they were. Technology continued to push this trend, reproducing art through photography and printing in books and newspapers let it…

Do you have a reference for where Benjamin wrote about this? I found this excerpt from "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it."

But wasn't sure if this was exactly what you were referencing, or some other piece.

Post reply on HN