Nobody goes on Instagram anymore, it's too crowded!
I understand this reference! Nice call back to dang.
Are we tired of social media? (2025)
11–20 of 93 posts
Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)
#12With old chat programs and forums I was talking to real people over a long span of time. On the modern platforms I’m just talking to the internet. It feels very different. In 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years.…
That sort of connection making is happening in varying degrees of private discord servers today. You join the public discord it, you spend time with strangers, if you're likeable you eventually get told about less advertised public servers, or invite-only servers, and you go down a bit of a rabbit hole of loosely interconnected communities. Eventually you find communities that you settle into.
Good filters make for good communities. 20 years ago, being on the internet at all was pre-selecting for certain types of people. That's basically not true anymore. Today, the filters end up being invite systems.
Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)
#13With old chat programs and forums I was talking to real people over a long span of time. On the modern platforms I’m just talking to the internet. It feels very different. In 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years.…
One thing that often gets overlooked is that 25 years ago, “the Internet” was essentially educated people from North America and Western Europe, with everyone else being a rounding error.
This made it very easy to connect on a level beyond just memes. Users had a lot in common personally, and that’s why they were able to engage on a personal level.
Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community. Beyond that lie vast cultural chasms that make any deeper interactions nearly impossible.
Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)
#14Algorithmic curation is something I'm trying to avoid in all cases. I think it's not highlighted enough. The fact that youtube shows an infinite number of videos to choose from does its own sort of harm in a way that the specifics of the content cannot. When the internet was brand new, it was very novel that I had to go out seeking the content and could look at it any time I wanted. It was different than TV. TV was e…
Agree. I also use Unhook/Brave to remove all recommendations plus my DeCasino to grayscale social media and put a clock over. I only watch subscriptions - clicking from subscriptions bar, not the feed. My phone is fully grayscale, no notifications and only has Brave with custom content filter that removes the main feed as well. It's almost impossible to watch anything on my phone but a video from a direct link. Sounds kind of crazy, but it's finally sustainable.
As a result, I have zero curated feeds, and I only follow people that I chose and started taking more word-of-mouth suggestions. I've noticed that I got much more interested in politics and my internet time is now all meaningful. Algorithms do steer us, they aren't neutral.
Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)
#15With old chat programs and forums I was talking to real people over a long span of time. On the modern platforms I’m just talking to the internet. It feels very different. In 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years.…
That sort of connection making is happening in varying degrees of private discord servers today. You join the public discord it, you spend time with strangers, if you're likeable you eventually get told about less advertised public servers, or invite-only servers, and you go down a bit of a rabbit hole of loosely interconnected communities. Eventually you find communities that you settle into. Good filters make for g…
I guess that’s sort of what happened with the forums. I was on a decently large one and eventually became a mod. Then a bunch of the mods and admins had their own smaller forums. I ended up being an admin on several of those. Over the years there were migrations and things.
However, nothing was “private”. Some of the smaller forums still had members who never found their way to the bigger hub forum.
I’ve never used Discord and the idea of starting that process and everything being like prohibition era speakeasies is more than I want to deal with at this stage of life. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always had the impression that Discord was for voice chat? I liked that forums didn’t required everyone to be online at the same time. Fun when they were, but still useful when they weren’t.
Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)
#16An extent presentation (IMHO) by Sam Vaknin on how the very way modern social networks operate even down to their form are deeply destructive. The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created by anti social deeply narssistic nerds.
Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU
Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)
#17I'm totally not tired of Facebook circa 2008 - a bunch of my friends, people I actually know, posting about our lives and having conversations. A fantastic way of reconnecting with old friends and staying in touch with people.
I'm utterly tired of what it is now.
Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sort of connection making is happening in varying degrees of private discord servers today. You join the public discord it, you spend time with strangers, if you're likeable you eventually get told about less advertised public servers, or invite-only servers, and you go down a bit of a rabbit hole of loosely interconnected communities. Eventually you find communities that you settle into. Good filters make for g…
I guess that’s sort of what happened with the forums. I was on a decently large one and eventually became a mod. Then a bunch of the mods and admins had their own smaller forums. I ended up being an admin on several of those. Over the years there were migrations and things. However, nothing was “private”. Some of the smaller forums still had members who never found their way to the bigger hub forum. I’ve never used D…
Discord is more analogous to IRC than voice chat. There's a constant set of channels/chats where people are chatting and then also voice/video channels.
Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)
#19[deleted]
Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)
#20I hate to say it (not a doom and gloom kind of dude) but to the general population, social media either is, or at the very least appears to be, one of the only ways up and out of the deep, terrifying economic chasm that our societies have been carving to separate the haves from the have-nots.
Statistically, of course, the overwhelming majority of people who try to secure the bag from social media either fail, succeed and burn out quickly, or succeed BIG and lose their souls. And given that it's just a new form of old entertainment, I'd wager that the percentage of those that break through versus those that don't is probably in line with what it always was (slim, or short-lived)
Meanwhile in the real world, wages are stagnant, institutions have crumbled, safety nets blown away like a fart in the wind; we've legalized and lionized gambling on every single aspect of life, geopolitics are in upheaval, businesses are tightening up more than they have in years, information went from a daily newspaper to a debilitating firehose, prices are through the roof, and we're all left to fend for ourselves.
What do we do?
Shuck and jive on socials. Place leveraged bets on ephemeral concepts and world events on Polymarket. Plow into memecoins, tokenize all physical assets. Play the lottery, hit the casino. On and on, while cost of living goes L-shaped.
I think for the vast majority of people, social media is both dead yet completely inescapable... but I have a nascent, vague feeling that while people are sick and tired of being algorithmically manipulated and want to bail, if pushed far enough, become hungry enough, they'll come right back and spin the wheel from the side of a creator out of desperation, feeding the machine that we all hate LOL
Anyways. More optimism, less doomerism! It ain't gotta be like this long-term!