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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

#131

Post by safety1st »

II2II wrote: post #121
skydhash wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group. Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention…

The over generalization of the term social media drives me bonkers. In the olden days we had things like message boards , forums , and chat rooms . Then came social networks . All of those terms reflect some sort of connection between people. When I see the term social media , I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting se…

The self-promoters, 90% of the time, are either operating an entertainment business, advertising products, or both. So we can still just call it connecting businesses to customers, otherwise known as marketing.

It should all be called social marketing, not social media, as it really just a thin veneer over the Google and Meta ad monopolies.

Your attention was once in other places and it moved onto the Internet. The ad monopolists figured out a way to turn the Internet into a marketing platform, by purchasing their competitors and then gradually changing the features their services offered. They then converted you from a human being into a unit of advertising inventory. Doctorow's reverse centaur aptly describes the phenomenon; the simian body is slaved to the ad machine brain and now follows its command through the magic of cheap psychological tricks.

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

#132

Post by ktosobcy »

The problem is - it's not "social" and it's pure "media" at this point. It's almost impossible to have social aspect on the platforms where you only have real people with sane number of connections that interact with eachother. Rather you have a bunch of huge "pages" that simply push their news publications...

IMHO it would be awesome to have again sane, SOCIAL-media. Probably with the correct regulation it could be done… And the current SM platforms could use the regulation as well (force viewing only what one follows, make it transparent like other media - i.e. if someone has more than 10k "followers" it's just a media so put same requirements: full ID disclosure and having to respond to the takedowns immediatelly…)

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

#133

Post by weregiraffe »

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.

>connect like-minded people around the world

Traditional forums still exist.

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

#134

Post by proactivesvcs »

pxoe wrote: post #108
proactivesvcs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Trending feature is not pushed into the home (or any) timeline. In the Web UI it sits unobtrusively in the corner of the window and on some apps simply does not exist. It can also be easily disabled. In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people. Nothing about any of the Fediverse services is designe…

If you're not logged in, the evil algorithmic trending feed is literally the first thing you'll see being pushed onto you. (seems like it's a default setting, because it's that way across several different instances.) So what's the truth? Seems like an incoherent position to me, especially given how mastodon itself advertises it as "no algorithms". It doesn't hold true when you can immediately see algorithmic feeds,…

You seem to be purposefully mixing the two opposing uses of the word "algorithm". On the non-abusive platforms, an algorithm is a fairly simplistic set of criteria that are designed to be useful to the human beings that use a service. If you want to, you can inspect the code used to generate them; the likes of Mastodon don't hide how these work because they aren't trying to harm anyone.

I think this is the part of Mastodon's code that calculates the Trending page: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/tree/main/app/models/tr...

These sorts of algorithms tend to promote posts or people that have recently been popular for the purpose of being useful to folk. On the likes of tiktok, facebook and twitter they are the culmination of very large sums of money and an ocean of professional psychological collaborators with the aim to purposefully harm and addict people, e.g. to manipulate public opinion and democracy, incite the suicide of transgender people and the perpetration of genocide. For money. I find it difficult to believe that you're arguing, in good faith, that the two types of "algorithm" have much in common.

I am not sure how it is "evil" showing recently-popular posts on a social media server's home page to logged-out people, and how that's pushing anything. It's not an agenda, it's not a series of posts that are picked because they are likely to addict and enrage people. I do suspect that there's some ragebait that shows up, because some people are still having to unlearn the indoctrination they're suffering from.

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

#136

Post by proactivesvcs »

diggan wrote: post #103
proactivesvcs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Trending feature is not pushed into the home (or any) timeline. In the Web UI it sits unobtrusively in the corner of the window and on some apps simply does not exist. It can also be easily disabled. In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people. Nothing about any of the Fediverse services is designe…

> In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people. But I feel like it misses the point. What about a service where you can design and use your own "algorithms", and it's built into the platform? Such a platform would have thousands of algorithms, but none of them designed for chasing money or engagement, j…

That's not something that I have any interest in, but I'm not opposed to it as I know other people have asked about it.

A very quick peruse of the Mastodon issue tracker came up with information about this on the ActivityPub level (albeit in an old toot): https://mastodon.social/@reiver/113668493283013849 and someone kindly rounded up similar feature requests here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/33098#issuecomme...

I like the idea of it not being related to a platform or implementer, but baked into the spec ala a feature of ActivityPub.

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

#137

Post by Telemakhos »

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.

Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem?

Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.

Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.

Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.

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

#138

Post by skydhash »

II2II wrote: post #121
skydhash wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group. Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention…

The over generalization of the term social media drives me bonkers. In the olden days we had things like message boards , forums , and chat rooms . Then came social networks . All of those terms reflect some sort of connection between people. When I see the term social media , I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting se…

> It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around.

A pet peeve of mine is when businesses reject the marketing channel they own (their websites) to adopt platforms like X or Instagram. Use them, yes, but do publish on your own site (and adopt RSS along the way).

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

#139

Post by latexr »

diggan wrote: post #99
latexr wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws). https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a... And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whene…

> You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws). Yeah, I had one of those myself when I was under 18 too, I think it was called Maestro or something similar. However, it didn't work like a normal credit card (which I think only 18+ can have), platforms were clearly able to reject it, as most things I wanted to buy online didn't work at the time with it (t…

> Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block?

Nope, there’s nothing “youth” about them, they’re more like safety features. The cards I’m talking about act as real credit cards. Plus, I forgot to mention but there are also services (even provided by the banking networks in the countries themselves) which allow you to connect an account (or deposit some money in) and get temporary credit card numbers for online payments. I’ve used them and know multiple people (also adults) who still do.

> Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.

My point is that maybe that’s enough in the UK (is it?) but you probably wouldn’t be able to rely on it for every jurisdiction.

To be clear, I like your idea in general and would not want to discourage you from it—quite the contrary—I’m just alerting to the fact it might need further though so you don’t end up sinking time on something which wouldn’t work.

> Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs.

I wasn’t aware that’s how they worked. I’ll have a read. For anyone else curious:

https://lobste.rs/about#invitations

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

#140

Post by Retr0id »

diggan wrote: post #103
proactivesvcs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Trending feature is not pushed into the home (or any) timeline. In the Web UI it sits unobtrusively in the corner of the window and on some apps simply does not exist. It can also be easily disabled. In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people. Nothing about any of the Fediverse services is designe…

> In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people. But I feel like it misses the point. What about a service where you can design and use your own "algorithms", and it's built into the platform? Such a platform would have thousands of algorithms, but none of them designed for chasing money or engagement, j…

Such a platform is not a hypothetical: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
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