301–310 of 378 posts
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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.
Is this not the nature of all social problems? If you have X problem, that is your problem. If Y% of population has X problem, as X grows large enough, eventually everybody is affected by the side effects of said problem.
I stopped posting frequently when I realized I was putting my name on a thing in a public database, and that most hiring processes these days involve putting my real name in google and looking at whatever pops out. I still post nowadays, but it's usually under a pseudonym, from a VM, through a VPN, over HTTPS. I should probably look into encrypting my DNS too. Nowadays when I'm posting in the clear with my real name…
I do not share anything digitally that would backlash if revealed. Also not in private digital spaces. Not in work chat. Not even on a private device in a note. Nowhere.
Digitally, I do not gossip. I have no political opinion on divisive topics. I have no nudes. I don't swear in game chat. There is no smoking gun to be found at all even if you get full access to my entire digital life.
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True. And Mastodon's paranoid safety culture is why they could have just used chat.
I think this is why Discord is doing great. You can easily find communities about specific topics where you can chat in real-time with people... and whatever you write in there feels somewhat ephemeral, instead of being permanently stored on the public internet.
Enshitification at work imo.
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…
The non-friend posts on social media are the root of all problems here. Once your engagement is with people you don't know IRL, bad things like ragebait and bots tend to win the global popularity contests. The simple "algorithms = bad, chronological = good" mentality was right all along. Explicit sharing is fine too. How'd we get here, well the inflection point was removing the timeline and putting algo feed instead,…
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My mastodon feed is 100% actual friends. That reality exists; it's just not evenly distributed yet.
Probably the nicest bonus feature of Mastodon is that I can subscribe to a friend's original posts but unsubscribe to their "boosts," which is Mastodon's way to quickly share content. This way I can follow artists that make cool stuff I want to keep up with, but I don't have to see their political reblogs and other interactions, which helps to cut down considerably on the noise. It's great because it's granular at th…
I may follow a software engineer that writes books on functional programming but I just don't care about his stupid dogs or his alt right political ideas.
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…
- Part of that is age, of course 20's people will have less time to microblog than their teenage counterpart.
- Part of it is novelty. We're far past the point where sending messages to people everywhere is a hot new thing. So we simply won't talk as much once that wears off
- And lastly, part of it is societal. We are also far past the point where people WANT to post everything for the internet's view forever. Hearing about job opportunities lost because of FB posts made over a decade ago or being cancelled online over some twitter flame war means that talking is dangerous. You don't want to leave everything in your mind out to the public. So you either close down your privacy settings, or talk less. Why take unnecessary risk on stuff you may not even stand by later on?
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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.
But it seems impossible given the incentives you touch on. They can only come up from a startup apparently.
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…
Facebook's VR bet was exactly this. Experiences come to you instead of you going to experiences.