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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

#61

Post by weinzierl »

"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.

At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like

"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".

Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?

"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.

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

#62

Post by dr_dshiv »

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.

Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.

We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.

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

#63

Post by UmGuys »

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.

Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.

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

#64

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

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.

It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.

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

#66

Post by marginalia_nu »

acd wrote: post #35

Social media is actually anti social. Meeting real people and making real connections is social.

I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.

Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.

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

#67

Post by thrownawaysz »

HN is the same echo chamber though. This same topic posted here every single week from random blogs to The Guardian, everyone posts their anecdotes, group hug, taps on the back and back to nothing. Rinse and repeat next week. You could just copy paste the top comments from the previous posts if you want some free karma.

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

#69

Post by coffeebeqn »

neiman wrote: post #57
mantas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.

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

#70

Post by Timwi »

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 found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience.

I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.

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