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

341–350 of 511 posts

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

#341

Post by PaulHoule »

toast0 wrote: post #262
PaulHoule wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

25 years ago, my italian grandmother was the same way. No command center, but still wildly anti-immigration; probably stoked by the news. She immigrated as a child, technically naturalized twice (she was naturalized through her fathers naturalization, but married an italian citizen in Italy and renaturalized through his naturalization... because the citizenship of a married woman was determined by her husband's citiz…

I think people are pretty ignorant of what the rules are and what the situation on the ground is (just try shipping homeless people from LA to pick fruit on farms in the central valley and see what happens)

On the other hand the "follow the rules" thing is pretty strong and you cannot fight it and win.

I got pretty mad riding the subway in NYC paying the toll and seeing turnstile jumpers hold the emergency door open to let people in.

There are all these rules you have to follow big and small that you don't agree with that you either follow resentfully or you disobey while taking some real or imagined risk.

To take one stupid example I've been through multiple toilets in one bathroom and haven't found one that flushes reliably. It's easy to blame the regulation in New York State that a toilet has a maximum flush volume and you'd better believe I am thinking about going down to PA to get a toilet and see if I have better luck. We all have these things that we could be resentful about and one thing that keeps it in check is knowing that other people are subject to this too: when we see people who seem to be "cutting the line" it makes our blood boil.

Now you can say it is not what people think, like really the chicken houses that hire 600 illegal immigrants wouldn't want to hire legal workers because then they'd have some protections, and that's all true. But the iron law of political psychology applies and if you want to change attitudes it would be a big help to move immigrant workers out of the shadows or to cut back on rules that make people resentful with little benefit.

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

#342

Post by wuliwong »

icepush wrote: post #292
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…

This is so different from my personal experience that I feel like one of those kids being told chickens used to be dinosaurs. I have an account on facebook, on which I am pretty active. If I attend some infrequent event (Which I do fairly often) I will take a picture of it and post it there, with a description of what it's about. That's pretty much the extent of what I put on facebook. Sometimes I see similar posts f…

So you infrequently post on FB, that is exactly in line with the article. You didn't mention whether or not the content you see in your feed is from people that you know in real life or not, so I can't evaluate if your experience is inline with the article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#343

Post by pseudalopex »

bee_rider wrote: post #210
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.

Social media grew out of social networking sites, as far as I remember. The distinct feature of social networking sites is that they are focused on… well, social networks, comprised of nodes of users and links of friendships. Your content feed is naturally “personalized” in the sense that you see the posts of your friends. Social media is the development that they can also use that personalized feed to show media, an…

People called social graph platforms social media before social graph platforms became engagement platforms.

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

#344

Post by wuliwong »

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.

I am going to push back without entirely disagreeing. Most of the people online are definitely caught in this social media as cable tv thing. But the number of people using the internet back in the early days is probably similar or even smaller than the number of people today that use niche areas of the internet, niches that still have that 'playground' experience and much less corporate overwatch control. Maybe?

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

#345

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

al_borland wrote: post #186
trollbridge wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - MySpace accurately mirrored high school circa 2004, and Facebook accurately mirrored college circa 2007 (complete with it being elitist where it was hard to get into when it first launched, just like real colleges). But that was 20 years ago.

I worked at the IT help desk at my college when Facebook was first rolling out. We’d constantly get high school seniors calling up to try and get their college email address early, just so they could register with Facebook. None of my friends at the time used it (or even MySpace) and I didn’t even have an account, so I found this very odd. The first time I realized it may have actually been popular was when a couple…

For me it was when Facebook sent the C&D order about the Whopper Sacrifice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whopper_Sacrifice

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

#346

Post by floren »

hunglee2 wrote: post #239

Does anyone remember Path? Limit circle social network, I think capped at 50 people. Beautiful app, and I remember it was a great place to spend time when you really just wanted to be with true friends. Time for someone to reboot this

I honestly liked the Google+ circles thing too, felt like a similar idea.

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

#348

Post by everforward »

mbesto wrote: post #189
everforward wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> trip also knows where I live and vice versa. Do those people also have access to your travel schedule? Mine don't. Maybe you're just not as globally social as me? I've lived in 5 different countries and have friends all over the world and in probably 20 different US states that I can name off the top of my head. Do I have close friends that I regularly contact? Do I send them a message when I'm in town to see if th…

> It seems bizarre to me that you only limit yourself to these people. I regularly try to meet up with people I don't know super well but want to get them or their city better. Social media has absolutely helped facilitate this.

It’s bizarre to me that you can’t find enough people locally to be inundated in events (unless you live somewhere remote, which is an aspect of social media I hadn’t considered).

I don’t even consider myself particularly social and I’m inundated with events and people I need to text because it’s been a while. I had to cut back because it was too much. Magic on 3 separate work nights with different groups, an event every Sunday with the locals from the bar, a family event most Saturday’s and friends if not.

And then trying to weave in the new acquaintances into existing stuff, because I’m a lush and 3 beers in I’m everybody’s friend and am setting up a grill out with a stranger to see if his jackfruit tacos actually taste like chicken so I can tell if he’s just a vegetarian or a vegetarian _and_ a liar!

There are something like a couple million people within a half hour drive of me, I really don’t have to use Instagram to find someone doing cool stuff around me.

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

#349

Post by fl4regun »

armchairhacker wrote: post #27

HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum. You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate). (But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the…

by this standard, isn't a public bulletin board even included in the term "social media"?

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

#350

Post by Timpanzee »

Aurornis wrote: post #240

This article has struck a nerve in the comment section. It's describing how traditional social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are not used for social features anymore, but for content discovery. The descriptions of how people are using Facebook to find new content anonymously are not that different from how we use Hacker News, which has reignited the debate about whether Hacker News is social media. I had to…

>Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site

As with all discussions of whether something does or does not fall into a specific category, the devil is in the demarcation. How you define a social site, or how I define it, or how the vague general consensus vaguely defines it, or how Hacker News defined it 15 years ago, or how Hacker News defines it now; changes the answer to whether it belongs in the category or not.

The same applies to whether AIs are conscious/sentient, whether a certain governing body is fascist/totalitarian, or even something as simple as whether something is good or bad, comes entirely from how those categories are defined in the context of the conversation. Without the same, agreed upon definitions, we're all just talking past each other.

Post reply on HN