Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 511 posts

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

#161

Post by hedora »

Tangurena2 wrote: post #113
everdrive wrote: post #3

Social 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…

Social media was first (that I know of) weaponized in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate Facebook users to vote for Brexit & Trump. I'm surprised that the article left those totally out. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

That incident was definitely ahead of its time, but before that, targeted ads for scams were propping the industry up. For instance, Experian used to spend $$$ to funnel people into credit card scams -- one year, they stole our CC#, and I called our top 5 US bank to dispute the charges. The bank fraud department rep said Experian drove most of their case load, to the point where they had a special flow to block just Experian affiliates because physically reissuing stolen cards was too expensive. You can back estimate how many predatory ad dollars that involved. Of course, there was also a long tail of smaller companies that wanted to sell supplements, useless other useless services, etc.

Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major search engines except early Google, which basically just broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail, but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target things only mentioned in private correspondence).

LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini, alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the open weight models will be the last ones to fall.

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

#162

Post by hedora »

supertroop wrote: post #101
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.

You’re just learning how small minded people are? In the US there was an attempted insurrection filmed live. We elected the guy who led it who then pardoned 1600 jailed criminals. Now he is trying to creat a slush fund to give them millions as reparations. 33% of the country is delighted by this. These are Plank sized brains.

billions; 30%. (His approval rating is finally starting to drop below the historic floor).

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

#163

Post by robgibbons »

austin-cheney wrote: post #127
close04 wrote: post #70

Why is nobody here defining social media, put down the clear criteria? "I say this, I am tired of people saying that" isn't productive if everyone has their own interpretation of what's being discussed.

My personal criteria to specifically identify social media apart from other online interaction: * The platform is a closed garden with a goal to own the content, user submissions, and any personally identifiable data or relationships thereof. * User interaction is primarily limited by a terms and conditions policy as opposed to a code of conduct. The goal is to impose constraints upon user rights as opposed to user b…

What about Mastodon or other federated platforms? If someone created a new Facebook, but it didn't have these corporate terms, it would still be social media.

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

#164

Post by al_borland »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #95
wussboy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a forum in the early 2000s.

The fact that they intentionally include a rightthing/wrongthink button and keep score is a fundamental difference between modern "social media" and legacy BBSes and forums where there was no score keeping. Perhaps keeping score of rightthink is not enough to make HN social media, but it's certainly enough to not put it in the same bucket as forums and BBSes

Having some sort of recommendation algorithm seems to also be a defining feature of modern social media, which is something old school forums didn’t have.

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

#165

Post by kelseyfrog »

armchairhacker wrote: post #51
titzer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see pictures and videos directly on the site. It's text links and text comments and discussions. In the minimal sense of the word, even printed text is media, so it's technically true that HN is social media, but I think it's more like a news aggregator and discussion forum.

How does being text only make it not social media? Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343

Because the people who think HN is social media and avoid social media aren't going to see this and respond. It's a selection bias.

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

#166

Post by Insanity »

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.

Yeah this is my feeling as well. I have a handful of friends in different countries, when we are near each other we just send a quick text.

I don’t need Facebook to tell me someone I vaguely remember from high school is in my area to then meet up with them. If I vaguely remember with them I hardly care.

And if I am actually close with someone, I don’t need Facebook either as we’d be in contact over text or discord.

That said, social behaviours do differ so YMMV. For me personally, I’m glad I’m not on social media as it seems like a huge waste of time with more downsides than upsides.

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

#167

Post by saadn92 »

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.

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

#169

Post by hedora »

jdw64 wrote: post #125

i have cut off social media related to my actual career, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Because people laughed at me for becoming a programmer. So I created my own homepage, and for communication, I mainly read posts on large Chinese tech communities, Hacker News, or dev.to. However, when I try to communicate through GitHub or something, I wonder if I'm just using another form of social media. My main dai…

My bar for "is it social media?" is "is the sole benefit network effects?"

Now that GitHub's availability has hit one 9, I consider it just a social network. Any code I put there is just for marketing. Real work stays far away.

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

#170

Post by austin-cheney »

robgibbons wrote: post #163
austin-cheney wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal criteria to specifically identify social media apart from other online interaction: * The platform is a closed garden with a goal to own the content, user submissions, and any personally identifiable data or relationships thereof. * User interaction is primarily limited by a terms and conditions policy as opposed to a code of conduct. The goal is to impose constraints upon user rights as opposed to user b…

What about Mastodon or other federated platforms? If someone created a new Facebook, but it didn't have these corporate terms, it would still be social media.

People generally do not consider IRC social media, but its much more engaging and active than something like Facebook or Twitter.
Post reply on HN