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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

#51

Post by OhioMan2943 »

matesz wrote: post #17

I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response. I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content onli…

If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.

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

#52

Post by atoav »

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.

When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.

This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.

The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.

The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.

Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.

Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.

I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.

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

#53

Post by pndy »

sedgjh23 wrote: post #10
austin-cheney wrote: post #2

> Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. It never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.

I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.

The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming. We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies. People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

CommenterPerson wrote: post #12
atleastoptimal wrote: post #6

The same problems people cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.

I went to NYC the other day. There was lots of diverse interesting stuff. Not full of people who looked just like me.

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by sprkwd »

riffraff wrote: post #34
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 activityp…

Now owned by Automattic.

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

#56

Post by anal_reactor »

3form wrote: post #47
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.

Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.

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

#57

Post by neiman »

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

I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great.

It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.

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

#58

Post by panstromek »

benrutter wrote: post #36

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?

I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested:

https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/

I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.

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

#59

Post by yoz-y »

benrutter wrote: post #36

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?

IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the “true” subreddits)
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