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

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

#211

Post by alphazard »

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…

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back.

Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget.

In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.

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

#212

Post by hinata08 »

Insanity wrote: post #24
estearum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious how old you are? There was definitely a sweet spot if you were in highschool or college in like 2004 - 2010 (so born something like 1986 - 1994?) where online social media was almost painstakingly manicured to mirror real-life social dynamics. Many people remember the drama of deciding who your "top friends" were on MySpace.

I was in high school when Facebook took off in my country (2008). And fair enough, first few years were maybe more “social-ish”. I left the platform by 2012 though. Might also say more about me and my social behaviour than the social media platforms themselves, I never cared about it too much.

personal blogs, tumblr, forums, BBS, some kind of irc and platforms like Discords remained active throughout the 2010s to actually be social

a bunch of ppl turned to Facebook as it was just what the mob did, but it still required to be active in groups indeed

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

#213

Post by jermaustin1 »

stickfigure wrote: post #157
jermaustin1 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that HN is "social media", but I'm starting to wonder if Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/Reddit/YouTube aren't "social media", but instead a new category of media tangentially related as OP posted to cable news. Something like "attention media" where your attention is the point of it. HN, on the other hand, your attention matters less. They aren't paying for this platform using our "attention" necessarily. I'm sure i…

I suspect a big part of the reason you feel this way is that you don't see advertising on HN. Because HN itself is one gigantic advertisement.

That isn't true, because I don't see ads on YouTube either, but I know their algorithms keep leading me to staying on it as much as possible.

HN doesn't feel the need to keep my attention 24/7.

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

#214

Post by grey-area »

alphazard wrote: post #211
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…

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back. Now the…

> In theory AI should have helped.

Why would generative AI help stop enshittification? If anything AI has made low-effort slop far more common on the front page and sometimes it gets voted up because of a snappy headline and few people attempting to read it, particularly if long-form and initially convincing.

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

#215

Post by sph »

saadn92 wrote: post #167
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.

I’d rather ask the Amish how can we fix the internet than a bunch of Bay Area VCs and FAANG employees.

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

#217

Post by UltraSane »

walthamstow wrote: post #92
UltraSane wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"one of them always has a 24 hour news going " Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.

It doesn't matter which one. My mother mainlines BBC News which is state-owned, establishment-centrist, has no adverts or profits, but has the same effect of dialing up the viewer's fear of the outside world.

It matters very very much. Fox News is much much worse than most news channels. It was created specifically as GOP propaganda.

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

#218

Post by alphazard »

grey-area wrote: post #214
alphazard wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome. Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back. Now the…

> In theory AI should have helped. Why would generative AI help stop enshittification? If anything AI has made low-effort slop far more common on the front page and sometimes it gets voted up because of a snappy headline and few people attempting to read it, particularly if long-form and initially convincing.

I agree with everything you said. Most open source projects are limited by contributor labor. Generative AI does help with that problem, but it introduces a sea of vibe coded slop as a side effect. Truly a Genie/Jinn.

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

#219

Post by nehal3m »

microtonal wrote: post #31
Insanity wrote: post #2

Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.

For a window, it was really social, early to late 2000s (anyone in NL remember Hyves?). It was a great way for keeping up with friends as you went to different schools, when they were traveling, etc. There were a bunch of things that destroyed it: Ajax [1], async tech made it possible to continuously push new dopamine shots when viewing a page; the rise of smartphones, since before smartphones you could only check so…

I’d krabbel your HN profile if it let me. Respect!
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