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

321–330 of 511 posts

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

#321

Post by nitwit005 »

Facebook just isn't a social media site anymore. They pivoted, and did so multiple times.

Remember when they were going to be a games platform, where Farmville was their big hit? They eventually abandoned that and then wanted to be a video and streaming platform. Then Metaverse VR was going to replace everything. Now they're some sort of AI company.

People long ago started migrating to Whatsapp, Discord, and similar groups for actual socializing. They did seemingly panic a bit at that trend and bought Whatsapp.

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

#322

Post by somenameforme »

anal_reactor wrote: post #264
malfist wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time. Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears.…

I've noticed that I watch much less funny shit and much more "you should be afraid" but I really don't know how to change this.

Is it not also possible that you should be, at least figuratively speaking? I think it's fairly obvious that not only are we at an inflection point in society, but we're at numerous inflection points happening all simultaneously - geopolitics, economics, tech/social media/"AI", fertility/sustainability, and much more. We're even at presumably happy inflection points like with progress into space.

But the point of this is that in a relatively short period of time, the world is going to look far different than the overwhelming majority might ever expect. This is because most expect the status quo, in some form, to indefinitely persist, yet of course it never does. And it seems we're on the cusp of major shifts across many different domains, all at once.

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

#323

Post by Ray20 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #200
malfist wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time. Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears.…

One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on and a few TVs and it drives me nuts when he watches Fox News and they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success. YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suc…

> they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success

Where is the contradiction here?

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

#324

Post by intended »

UltraSane wrote: post #217
walthamstow wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, pointing this out is not fun. In general, everyone assumes that there is little actual difference between CNN and any Murdoch enterprise. The difficulty in disabusing this position in a few short sentences, is one of the reasons there is such a chasm in American politics.

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

#325

Post by cloudshock »

anal_reactor wrote: post #264
malfist wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time. Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears.…

I've noticed that I watch much less funny shit and much more "you should be afraid" but I really don't know how to change this.

[dead]

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

#326

Post by PaulHoule »

dottjt wrote: post #260
malfist wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. It's a very thin line to go from "just pointing out a problem" to "everything is a problem" to "everything is broken" to "nothing I can do will change anything" and then people disengage in the process and politics and everything else becomes the domain of whoever can shout the loudest with volume, rhetoric, or money. To quote Mon Mothma in Andor: I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe w…

I think the "nothing I can do will change anything" is actually a predominant theme that's emerged over the past decade. I don't know if you've watched any of Adam Curtis' documentaries, but his documentary HyperNormalisation explores this in great detail (most of this documentaries have a similar theme I've found). Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts…

God that guy pushes conspiracy theories I haven't heard anywhere else!

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

#327

Post by intended »

alphazard wrote: post #218
grey-area wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This was always going to be the case, no genie situation at all.

Information sharing networks with humans in it can only track so many things, or spend limited time on consumption. The more stuff on the network, the harder it is for things to be seen. The stuff that gets seen is content that is evolved to gain attention, or is resourced to gain attention.

This is as inevitable as sunrise.

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

#328

Post by whateveracct »

haunter wrote: post #256
whateveracct wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums came before social media. It's a forum.

Forums don’t have algorithmic front page and upvote/downvote system You can’t bump a thread to the top of HN so everyone sees it

I don't think that quite makes it social media though.

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

#330

Post by lenerdenator »

hedora wrote: post #182
lenerdenator wrote: post #23

Friends haven't been a focus of social media feeds for almost 20 years now. There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations, engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division. Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge companies purely by prof…

Twitter was similarly bad. A better heuristic is market share. We should reintroduce media ownership rules that cap audience share to something < 10% per distribution channel. Meta, Disney, Paramount, etc should not exist.

In a way, I'd argue Twitter was the thing that motivated social media to take the path it's currently on.

Facebook was originally about people you were acquainted with in real life. You had a pre-existing reason to engage with them. That engagement wasn't as lucrative as SV investors wanted, but it was there.

Twitter never had that premise, or lost it very early on. You screamed into the ether, and people either responded or they didn't. One way to increase the chance of receiving a response is to say outrageous things. Once people figured that out and how to put ads adjacent to the outrageous thing, there was at least some pressure on Facebook (later Meta) to do the same thing, because we're here to make money, not friends.

And really, there are elements of that in old media, too. Their business model was to have captivating programming on TV and radio that would keep you tuned in to see what was happening in the next part of the show after the ad break. Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, every 24-hour news channel, etc. were all very good at this, coarsening of the discourse be damned.

Regardless of who owns it, if you introduce a motive to constantly and eternally increase the value of a media company, you will see a move towards slop content at some point if you have a long enough timeline. It's inevitable.

Post reply on HN