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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

#181

Post by boelboel »

hdhdhsjsbdh wrote: post #77
exabrial wrote: post #41

A new game: determine when you meet someone if they use tik-tok or not without asking them. People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.

What are the tells? Since COVID I’ve noticed that every new person I meet seems to harbor at least 1 or 2 oddball opinions. Conversation tends to veer into weirder places than it used to, creating a surreal sort of feeling of being in the world. I’ve felt that this is just a result of everyone being tuned by whatever personalized feed is amplifying or directing their base instincts.

I think what's more interesting is that the odd opinions don't mean anything anymore. Before someone with odd opinions tended to be either really crazy or they were intelligent and thought a long time about something. Nowadays they seem shallow, they saw something on tiktok but don't really know what they're talking about, just totally rehashing whatever they heard.

It might partially come from the fact that writing essays isn't deemed important anymore, when you hear people talk about how X or Y is good/bad they can hardly write down why. I've seen articles how we're going from a written culture to an oral culture and the sort of cranks you get with social media certainly fit with the latter.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#182

Post by hedora »

lenerdenator wrote: post #23

Friends haven't been a focus of social media feeds for almost 20 years now. There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations, engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division. Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge companies purely by prof…

Twitter was similarly bad.

A better heuristic is market share. We should reintroduce media ownership rules that cap audience share to something < 10% per distribution channel. Meta, Disney, Paramount, etc should not exist.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#185

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

joseda-hg wrote: post #171
malfist wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time. Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears.…

In defense of 'How money works' I don't think there's much in the way of positive anything to cover for his format/field, not for current times in particular His most famous videos are on the topic of bullshit jobs, the movie Wolf of wallstreet, various X is collapsing and a Money Laundering Explanations

There's lots of positive things to cover. He made a video 2 weeks ago about tourism, his first ever as far as I can tell, and there's plenty of interesting things a general Youtube audience could learn about how money flows around in the context of tourism. But he chose to instead talk about "The End Of Budget Tourism", believing (perhaps accurately!) that a negative framing would help get people to click on his video.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#186

Post by al_borland »

trollbridge wrote: post #61
estearum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious how old you are? There was definitely a sweet spot if you were in highschool or college in like 2004 - 2010 (so born something like 1986 - 1994?) where online social media was almost painstakingly manicured to mirror real-life social dynamics. Many people remember the drama of deciding who your "top friends" were on MySpace.

Yeah - MySpace accurately mirrored high school circa 2004, and Facebook accurately mirrored college circa 2007 (complete with it being elitist where it was hard to get into when it first launched, just like real colleges). But that was 20 years ago.

I worked at the IT help desk at my college when Facebook was first rolling out. We’d constantly get high school seniors calling up to try and get their college email address early, just so they could register with Facebook.

None of my friends at the time used it (or even MySpace) and I didn’t even have an account, so I found this very odd. The first time I realized it may have actually been popular was when a couple sorority girls came in and wanted me to make an account to friend me… not to actually be my friend, but because they had a contest on who could get the most friends. I did not make an account that day, and it told me everything I needed to know about how shallow the connections were. Those were in the glory days, 2004-2005, and it was already pretty shallow in certain circles. It only went downhill from there.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#188

Post by rpdillon »

stickfigure wrote: post #105
everdrive wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, I don't think most people who claim HN is social media are making a serious argument. They are taking two different things which have a few points of inter-comparison and using that as a basis to claim those two things are actually equivalent. This is done as a retort (eg, "you say you hate social media, but you're on social media _right now_") rather than in service of a larger argument.

I'm making it as a very serious argument. HN is social, it has an algorithmic feed, people upvote and downvote your content, hell it has a social credit score. The idea that HN somehow isn't "social media" is hard to take serious. This is Reddit for a niche audience. The main difference is that HN has a small and relatively high quality community, plus the traffic is low enough that it gets a fair amount of manual mo…

Sure, but deconstructing the platform to look at the engagement points is also useful. Some things that I think set HN apart in a good way:

The lack of any kind of personalization whatsoever on Hacker News is a huge differentiator. There are no notifications, so if you want to find out if somebody replied to you, you've got to go check. Everybody's front page is exactly the same. There are no direct messages. There are no in-line images or videos or even emoji. The feed is not endless. There is no targeted advertising. There are no reactions to posts other than upvote/downvote.

I guess you can lump HN in with Instagram and TikTok, but it just feels like a very different product, in ways that are relevant to the analysis of whether its existence is a net positive for society.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#189

Post by mbesto »

everforward wrote: post #141
mbesto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very critical of social media but this is far too of a myopic take. There is a ton of real life social benefit to these platforms. Simplest example - someone posts a picture/video of them in a city that I also am in and now I know they live there / traveling there and I can meet up with them.

This is bizarre to me, because anyone I know well enough to link up with on a trip also knows where I live and vice versa. That’s just a really odd relationship to me. Maybe it’s a social media thing. FWIW, I hear things like this but have never heard of any of my friends that use social media actually doing it. In the same way that you could use an Emmy as hammer, but nobody does.

> trip also knows where I live and vice versa.

Do those people also have access to your travel schedule? Mine don't.

Maybe you're just not as globally social as me? I've lived in 5 different countries and have friends all over the world and in probably 20 different US states that I can name off the top of my head.

Do I have close friends that I regularly contact? Do I send them a message when I'm in town to see if they are there? Absolutely. But it's not mutually exclusive with a cohort of people I will link up with when I'm traveling.

> well enough to link up

It seems bizarre to me that you only limit yourself to these people. I regularly try to meet up with people I don't know super well but want to get them or their city better. Social media has absolutely helped facilitate this.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#190

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

saadn92 wrote: post #167
twodave wrote: post #160

Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.

We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.

Not all problems have technical solutions.

We need a national conversation (which we seem to be having) about the corrosive nature of these algos.

I personally think they should be liable for much more than they are under section 230.

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