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Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

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Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#141

Post by Aurornis »

steveBK123 wrote: post #122
Aurornis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition. If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what y…

> Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform. I think unfortunately for IG in particular, it evolved for a segment of people into a status flexing game more than genuinely keeping in touch.

> it evolved for a segment of people

Every social media platform has a lot of different segments of people using it for different reasons.

If one of your follows is posting content you don’t like, it’s so easy to unfollow them. If you feel obligated to follow for social reasons, Instagram even has convenient features to hide their posts so you can maintain the follow without seeing their content.

I’m not a heavy Instagram user but I’ve found it trivially easy to tailor my feed to the content I want to see (friends and family). That’s why I don’t find much interest in the pearl clutching about how some people post on the platform. I’m not there to judge and moralize about others.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#142

Post by xeromal »

UnreachableCode wrote: post #137
asim wrote: post #22

Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails. What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to…

> What's the alternative? I don't know. Real world connection and a strong foundation of core friends, perhaps?

My first step for this was joining a makerspace. Now I can complain about everything with my fellow nerds.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#143

Post by tannhaeuser »

everdrive wrote: post #27
asim wrote: post #22

Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails. What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to…

I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time mak…

The difference is the "algorithmic" timeline (meaning ads) you get with Facebook, Insta, and co compared to the strictly chronological timeline you get on the Fediverse equivalents (Mastodon, Pixelfed). That it's less addictive, or at least not in the doom scrolling type of way, is more a consequence. Aka the enshitification argument.

Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation.

For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#144

Post by baby »

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…

Twitter followed the same way ad well. All political rubbish now

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#145

Post by squidsoup »

Brog_io wrote: post #102
steveBK123 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me. For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years. Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casua…

You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/

Foto is good, provided you want a community exclusively made up of other photographers. If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option.

The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#147

Post by dev1ycan »

I would tend to agree with this, I vibidly remember when facebook had a feed on the top right that told you what your friends were doing, playing games, listening to music on soundcloud, etc.

That was social media, not whatever the hell we have today... it's antisocial and attention grabbing.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#148

Post by hotOrNot »

mmclar wrote: post #85
sitkack wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that mean exactly, how do you see that manifesting itself? Would we even be aware of these networks, sounds like email

Not email; social networking. Symmetrical just means the relationship is the same from both sides. Imagine a two-way "friendship" relationship (old-school Facebook) vs. a one-way "following" relationship (more recent Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc.).

A followers graph is much more stable. You can have 1m followers but you can't have 1m friends

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#149

Post by Seattle3503 »

squidsoup wrote: post #145
Brog_io wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/

Foto is good, provided you want a community exclusively made up of other photographers. If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option. The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.

> If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option.

Wasn't people wanting reach what supposedly ruined Instagram in the first place? Seems like wanting it both ways if you want reach for yourself, but not for "influencers"

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#150

Post by hotOrNot »

al_borland wrote: post #119
jwr wrote: post #101

Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see. As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet…

Facebook’s best feature, at its peak, was that everyone was there. My friends and family aren’t on Mastodon, and likely never will be. If the goal of a social network is to connect with people I know in real life, rather than follow various Internet personalities, it fails at this for me. This isn’t Mastodon’s fault, but it’s the reality of the situation. I’m not on Facebook anymore due to what the site has become, b…

Yup, feeling the same way. Mastodon needs to leverage a friends graph somehow
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