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Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

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Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

#31

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

mantas wrote: post #24
mattikl wrote: post #15

When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.

And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers

It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends.

There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.

Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

#33

Post by Popeyes »

The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.

The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.

Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

#34

Post by riffraff »

3form wrote: post #25

It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense. It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.

Is Tumblr doing fine financially?

I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.

I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.

Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

#36

Post by benrutter »

Like most of the other commenters here, I agree that modern social media is often an echo chamber, and frequently surface level.

I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?

Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

#38

Post by awesome_dude »

Popeyes wrote: post #33

The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes. The point where social media failed was when the governmen…

> The problem is that people are addicted to tension

And some.

We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.

Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

#39

Post by matesz »

jbm wrote: post #16
ookblah wrote: post #8

unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflamma…

Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.) What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't chang…

> FB is a ghost town

I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.

Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.

It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.

Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.

Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

#40

Post by m_fayer »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31
mantas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers

It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends. There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.

Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
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