Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
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Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
#2Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.
Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
#3Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.
Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.
And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.
Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
#4Given that even reaction videos from modern Jerry Springer figures with 20 million subscribers can attract 20,000 comments that all parrot their guru and demand doxxing of the target or worse, it is no longer a mystery how totalitarian states form.
Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.
Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
#5Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.
I 'member when facebook was campus only. For about 5 minutes my friends were friends.
10 minutes later it was just a frenzy of (trying to) poke people that I thought I might have seen at some point that year, and conversations about how many "friends" people had.
Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
#6Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.
It was quite social if you only added your actual friends instead of everyone.
Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see someone I know.
Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
#7I (mostly) stopped looking at Facebook around 2016. It just wasn't fun anymore; and at least for me, my feed was all political nonsense trying to manipulate me.
Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
#8And this is a revelation to the BBC? Who doesn't know this?
Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
#9Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims. Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with…
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Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
#10> What we're seeing is social media splitting in two [...] young people publish a lot of content but it's more funny parodies and remixes of existing material. The goal is to make people laugh, not to tell people about their lives. [...] Whether it's TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, we are a long way from the "digital town square" of personal interaction that social media was even just a few years ago.
I don't understand why this article has to play dumb. This is how most of the internet always was until commercial interest invaded social media. They yelled their billions of dollars worth of messaging so loudly for over a decade that it drowned out anything authentic.
Now that there's a political break away from all the tone deaf pseudoprogressive messaging and the money for it has dried up, what did they expect to see there? Most people never posted sincere "life updates" unless they had something to sell or were a naive part of the bandwagon.