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Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

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Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#171

Post by balamatom »

Aurornis wrote: post #141
steveBK123 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Inst…

>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.

Let's ignore the things that upset us even more easily, while maintaining the required social appearances even harder!

Ah, such progress!

Speechless, except obscenely.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#172

Post by Gooblebrai »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #21
Almondsetat wrote: post #17

IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time. To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless…

I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me. Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.

> Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.

How do you discover new people? I'd say some people I followed I discovered them thanks for the feed

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#173

Post by throwaway270925 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #54
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…

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…

For anyone who doesnt know: unlike in Facebook you can switch off/pause random strangers posts in your feed by going to "content preferences" in your settings. Of course being Meta this reenables every 30 days, but makes for a way cleaner feed in between.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#174

Post by Dystakruul »

dhruv3006 wrote: post #10
PaulKeeble wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy is mostly a clone of reddit with a lot less people on it. That is to say it works fairly well and doesn't yet seem filled with bots, but its got the same issues as Reddit since its based on the same design.

What were the main issues of reddit according to you?

I think one of the main flaws of Reddit is that upvotes that happen on a user's front page and upvotes that come from 'within' the subreddit are treated equal (at least as far as I know).

It degrades the "does this post fit the subreddit's theme/topic?"-signal and makes the average user work against the moderation team rather than supporting them.

This was exacerbated when they started showing posts from subreddits that the user is not even subscribed to on the front page rather than just ranking posts of subscribed subreddits.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#175

Post by jjk166 »

wiseowise wrote: post #18
adithyassekhar wrote: post #11

This might be controversial. Please disagree with me. When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was tryin…

That’s nonsense. Nobody asked for algorithmic feed pushing schizo agenda on you.

Of course we did. We all switched from early social media sites that didn't employ such algorithms to those that did, and when new social media platforms came around we progressively moved to more algorithmic ones. Hell half the reason I switched from myspace to facebook was the opportunity to do all the facebook quizzes which were just "let's see how much information I can feed the algorithm". We all want a steady stream of content we find personally interesting and engaging, why wouldn't we? Our issue with most of these sites is when the algorithm fails to give us what we want, and we complain "I didn't ask to see this" but the fact is we are asking to see something, and we receive it often enough to stay on these platforms.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#178

Post by Forgeties79 »

Gooblebrai wrote: post #172
Forgeties79 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me. Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.

> Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know. How do you discover new people? I'd say some people I followed I discovered them thanks for the feed

Why do I need to discover new people? If I like your podcast or your art or whatever, I will find you on the platform. Other than that, I only want to follow friends and family

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#179

Post by lukeschlather »

The funny thing about Facebook is that it's got a perfectly good social network in there, I think the only one that exists. In the menu is "Feeds" which is what you want. It only shows friends and followed things. If they made that the default when you go to facebook.com I don't think I'd have any complaints feature-wise, though an ad-free option would be nice. It's a genuine social network.

Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.

Re: Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

#180

Post by Aurornis »

rapnie wrote: post #75
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…

> You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to…

> Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response.

Asking someone a question online does not obligate them to take time to answer it, or even explain why they don’t feel like doing so.

You’re not in a conversation with everyone who is online, so the comparison to in person conversations doesn’t hold.

> Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.

People are doing other things while using their computers and you should not expect to be able to commandeer their attention on demand by tagging them. Again the comparison to in-person social norms doesn’t hold because you can’t see if this person is busy with something else.

I find this sense of entitlement to other people’s instant time and attention to be very negative for any digital dynamic. Whenever someone with this attitude joins a group chat it leads to people turning their statuses to Do Not Disturb all of the time or even leaving the group because they don’t want to feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond to that one person every time that person drops a tag in chat.

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