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Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

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Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#11

Post by adithyassekhar »

This might be controversial. Please disagree with me.

When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.

So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#12

Post by AdamN »

dhruv3006 wrote: post #10
PaulKeeble wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy is mostly a clone of reddit with a lot less people on it. That is to say it works fairly well and doesn't yet seem filled with bots, but its got the same issues as Reddit since its based on the same design.

What were the main issues of reddit according to you?

I'll answer - too many bots and most communities don't demand high quality comments. I still use it though - it's my only social network (although I don't think it's really a social network since I have no durable social connections with anybody there and I presume most other people don't either).

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#13

Post by blurbleblurble »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #11

This might be controversial. Please disagree with me. When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was tryin…

"We deserve it" is the tldr I gather from you here, just like people addicted to opiates are ultimately responsible for the way those drug companies systematically set them up for that, right?

I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#14

Post by hippo22 »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #2

"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. " It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I w…

Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#16

Post by ben_w »

keyraycheck wrote: post #5
PaulKeeble wrote: post #2

"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. " It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I w…

While number of active users still grows, one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots. The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.

> who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

Political activists, like a former partner of mine.

… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …

… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …

… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#17

Post by Almondsetat »

IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time.

To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#18

Post by wiseowise »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #11

This might be controversial. Please disagree with me. When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was tryin…

That’s nonsense. Nobody asked for algorithmic feed pushing schizo agenda on you.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#19

Post by SecretDreams »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #11

This might be controversial. Please disagree with me. When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was tryin…

> They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.

Imagine the government saw the fentanyl crisis and started making fentanyl to support the habits of its citizens.

Not every single trend humans take on should be encouraged. We can be dumb as individuals, as well as collectively. At least in bursts.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#20

Post by supriyo-biswas »

benjiweber wrote: post #3

This reminded me of this video from a more optimistic time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Thank you for posting this. Despite being an old video, I had never come across it, and it almost made me tear up. It showed me the hope that I wished the web would be, despite it never realizing that ambition, with businesses that only pursued engagement metrics, and governments who saw value in vassalizing tech companies to pursue their political goals.
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