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Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

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Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#41

Post by llm_trw »

criddell wrote: post #19
sph wrote: post #12

Of course not. Social media is shouting at the void at best, but usual self-contained rage bait. People open Twitter/Mastodon to doomscroll and post their thoughts, and could not care less about linked content. I have seen the same exact pattern with trying to mention my latest blog posts on Mastodon or other social media: no one cares. I had much more engagement posting on Linkedin, though one would believe that wit…

> Social media is shouting at the void at best At best, social media is an additional way of keeping in touch with people you know and care about.

When social media came online in the 00s it was just a way to keep track of your friends. That's it. You made friends, you added them to your network.

It's insane to me that we're still using social media to mean whatever the fuck we have now.

Today social media, including facebook, is all about a few broadcasting their messages to billions. Mastodon isn't much better.

What happened to the social graph? Everyone is on the feed getting shit shoved down their throats because the algorithm decided they should.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#42

Post by ghaff »

0ckpuppet wrote: post #22
ghaff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn still matters quite a bit for commercial/professional stuff. X still matters some. But anecdotally, X is far less relevant and used in my circles post-Musk. (And Mastodon hasn't replaced it for most people.) I think Musk was the impetus for a lot of people to dial down their social media use.

honest question, does that say more about your circles or about X?

I don't know. Hence my qualification. I suspect the political angle of Twitter/X could be as active as ever. But there's been a huge dropoff in use across tech as far as I can see.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#43

Post by williamcotton »

weinzierl wrote: post #16

I find it interesting, that social media and messaging apps are kind of thrown into one pot increasingly. My mental model has always been like: - Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon - Slack, Discord, Zulip, IRC - WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix - Zoom, Teams, Jitsi With mass communication to individual communication from top to bottom (and increasing freedom roughly from left to right). It seems these distinctions get blur…

I like this, and I think there’s a third axis if we want to include many-to-many moving towards the one-to-many of prior electric media. Something something broadcast AM radio, something something HAM radio…

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#44

Post by [deleted] »

altdataseller wrote: post #33

Nobody would care if you own just a personal site, but if you’re a company (and not well know ) I sometimes check to see if you’re on LinkedIn, or have posted recently on Twitter. Because if you haven’t, that might be a sign you might be going out of business Maybe that’s unfair. But I would think twice before relying on your product for anything important

[deleted]

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#46

Post by Lucasoato »

mrtksn wrote: post #39

I don't know if views are a good measure of anything anymore. I find that narrative control from position of authority is much more interesting. So, on Twitter I have a very small following(~470 followers) and rarely anyone interacts with me but I also have a large-ish account on a prominent but relatively obscure Turkish social media website Eksi Sozluk with even less followers but that website has strict account cr…

> [...] that website has strict account creation procedures(it can take years to have your account accepted and your posts becoming public) and as a result it is viewed as a "reference" since spam floods are harder to organise as you will lose your hard earned account [...]

It's curious that making a social network harder to access can (apparently) boost the quality of its posts.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#47

Post by internetter »

Last month, I had ~100 daily views. This month (rolling), I've had 23k a day. In the past week, I've had 700k views. What caused this? Social media did... Specifically, Mastodon.

I had 150 mastodon followers. I'm not famous, I'm still not. I have 1/5th the followers of this guy. Around the 15th, someone posted my article[0], which got me a good 30k views and a hundred followers, which set the scene for what happened next:

When I heard about XZ, I posted about it[1] on Mastodon. I did no promotion other than that, aside from posting to HN (the HN post was killed, presumably dang wanted to have only one article about it on the home page). Now my article is linked to by NYT, Wired, Ars, NIST, The Verge, and a whole plethoria of other outlets. I'm convinced Mastodon was the catalyst.

Maybe, I got lucky twice this month, and I'll never get lucky again. Maybe though, there's something else to social media.

[0]: https://hachyderm.io/@cvennevik/112100333787925276

[1]: https://social.coop/@eb/112180540086255196

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#48

Post by dezsiszabi »

outime wrote: post #37
weinzierl wrote: post #16

I find it interesting, that social media and messaging apps are kind of thrown into one pot increasingly. My mental model has always been like: - Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon - Slack, Discord, Zulip, IRC - WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix - Zoom, Teams, Jitsi With mass communication to individual communication from top to bottom (and increasing freedom roughly from left to right). It seems these distinctions get blur…

I find it funny that if I were to read your comment outside of this website, I could most likely identify it as a HN comment because it mentions barely-used sites popular in HN (such as Bluesky, Signal, Jitsi, IRC, etc), but skips mentioning actually popular ones everywhere else (like Snapchat, Facebook/Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, etc).

From these I barely heard about Bluesky and never used it. I have no clue about what Jitsi is, first time even reading this combination of letters :)

The rest I know. And I do read Hacker News...

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#49

Post by weinzierl »

outime wrote: post #37
weinzierl wrote: post #16

I find it interesting, that social media and messaging apps are kind of thrown into one pot increasingly. My mental model has always been like: - Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon - Slack, Discord, Zulip, IRC - WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix - Zoom, Teams, Jitsi With mass communication to individual communication from top to bottom (and increasing freedom roughly from left to right). It seems these distinctions get blur…

I find it funny that if I were to read your comment outside of this website, I could most likely identify it as a HN comment because it mentions barely-used sites popular in HN (such as Bluesky, Signal, Jitsi, IRC, etc), but skips mentioning actually popular ones everywhere else (like Snapchat, Facebook/Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, etc).

Oh, I agree so much, but I am not sure about your examples either:

Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It had its time, but personally I don't know anyone still there.

Same with Facebook Messenger, which has completely been replaced by WhatsApp in my (non-nerd) circles.

I thought about including TikTok but it would be more in the

- YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, PeerTube

category. To me, these are borderline social media and more akin to television - pure consumption, heavily discouraged participation. Just look at the comments on any of these for a proof.

I'd give you Instagram, it seems immensely popular and intensively used as a communication platform.

If we disregard our own bubbles and go strictly by popularity we should have considered WeChat and Douyin too, I guess.

Re: Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

#50

Post by nonrandomstring »

What I've noticed from working on the Cybershow over the past year is that the digital world is split cleanly into two realms that never touch each other.

I avoid social media, and have never gone near Facebook, Linked-In or that stuff. But I do recognise and respect the audience out there who should not be ignored. So Helen does the "social media". I do the old fashioned web, email reaching out to other bloggers, publishers etc.

We see practically no correlation between these worlds. Helen will say "We're trending on platform X" and I look and see nothing in the web stats. Maybe 2 out of 2000 hits cross over from Facebook or Twitter. Conversely, we can get on the front page of a big website, but have no activity on social media.

I hadn't realised that SM platforms basically no longer allow links and that everyone on the web has given up on "sharing" to social media.

They're literally two separate worlds now, right?

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