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Not the end. Just the beginning.
Is this the end of social networking?
421–430 of 503 posts
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the GP’s point was that social relationships are increasingly becoming irrelevant to people. Having a personal relationship CRM seems cool, but this shift in society is happening not for lack of good social tools.
In my view this shift is happening because of social media. The social media short cut to having friends turned out to not really work, and now people are trying to figure out how to have friends again. It's the same with dating.
But why didn't it work?
Is it because it's impossible to maintain meaningful relationships over the internet? My experience in the online forum and gaming communities implies otherwise -- some of my most meaningful friendships started (and continue) in those communities.
I suspect, instead, that it didn't work because Facebook murdered it. They abused dark patterns, injected ads, suggested content, radicalized grandmothers, and hacked engagement to the point where relationships didn't just stagnate, they withered and died because they were hidden and forgotten.
I have a lot of chats and friends in Telegram, and it's very easy to maintain those chats over time because I have a chronological feed of interactions right in the app. Facebook hid and diluted an entire medium, their original focus, "posts from friends" in favor of content they thought you might engage with more. Facebook chat exists, sure, but app invite spam diluted that to hell just the same, so it doesn't have the same chronological list of meaningful conversations that I have in Telegram. And notification spam diluted the meaning of any new developments on Facebook -- comment replies, messages, whatever.
And now, Facebook pushes videos, "TV", reels, stories, and god only knows what else instead of just letting me see posts from my friends and family. I think it's fair to say that online social relationships can work... they just don't work in a hostile environment. It's kind of like maintaining your friendships only in the middle of Times Square, surrounded by ads, tourists, and costumed performers trying to scam you out of $20 for a picture. Not impossible, but eventually you'll get tired of it.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure continuous exposure to schadenfreude is any healthier than the more depressing topics, to be honest.
I mean I don’t actually revel in it, I was being a bit cheeky. I just wanted to reconnect with high school people during Covid so I friend requested a ton of people. It’s sad seeing a guy who was in the “gifted and talented program” with me is apparently now a janitor who posts pictures every day about what concert or sports game he’s at and he’s always alone. I was excited for him because he took a picture with a wo…
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Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#424"What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!" I really liked the article but am perplexed by the naive ending. Friends/family and the world are two very distinct use cases. Most people, young people incl…
> But how will you monetize instead? Some radicals might point out where the expectation, and need, for "monetization" is itself the root of the problem, and wonder if an extractive capitalist mindset could ever solve the problems which itself has created.
Capitalism or not, you need to monetize. Supporting a platform with billions of users requires a huge amount of resources. Resources are not free in any system.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#425"What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!" I really liked the article but am perplexed by the naive ending. Friends/family and the world are two very distinct use cases. Most people, young people incl…
> But how will you monetize instead? Some radicals might point out where the expectation, and need, for "monetization" is itself the root of the problem, and wonder if an extractive capitalist mindset could ever solve the problems which itself has created.
Even if you need at least some money to keep the lights on and power the servers you can make the pricing plain and simple (not "free but with ads and 3rd party data sharing").
Free service with 1GB of storage for family photos and movies and 3$/10GB yearly fee if going above that limit. Storage is very cheap if profit is not your main consideration. You don't even need software employees and just make it open source.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#426> [TikTok]'s addiction-based advertising machine is probably close to the theoretical maximum of how many advertisements one can pour down somebody’s throat. Well put. It's interesting that we pivoted in my adult lifetime from: 1. Myspace's emphasis on sharing things on your own webpage, essentially a hosted blog 2. Facebook's evolution from "hosted blog" to "friend update aggregator" to "chat client" to "friend upda…
IMHO Social Media is a toxic mutation of the capabilities offered by the Internet and is the opposite of federated, open communication. I don't consider blogs, forums, or IRC to be "Social Media". When you add the idea of followers and audience and attention seeking (both from participants and the platform) that's when you get "Social Media". We live in the Infinite September. Scale is not conducive to valuable or fu…
> There's no "good" social media and there never was.
As much as I hate Facebook/Meta and everything it stands for, I got a lot of value out of Facebook and Instagram during my teenage years. I lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere, not very walkable/bikeable but also without any other kids my age to hang out nearby. My school was really small (I graduated with a class of less than 30 people) and there weren't many like-minded students.
During the 2000s, Facebook was an absolute lifeline for me. It's where I lived. It's where I met new friends. It's where I shared (cringey) posts about my passions, my interests, books and TV shows and movies and games. And my friends talked about that cringey stuff with me on Facebook, over chat and in comments.
But that was a world before Facebook killed the chronological feed, before they introduced ads in the feed (remember sidebar ads? Not enough $$$ to pay tens of thousands of engineers, I suppose), before they started "recommending" content. They were still manipulative, but they provided a valuable service.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that early-stage simple social media was useful to many people, and that's likely why late-stage social media remains popular today -- people want that core functionality. I made lifelong friends on there, just like you did on blogs, forums, and IRC. At the early stage, it wasn't about influencers and ads. Just slightly-more-than-local attention seeking.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#427I think the "social" part of social networks just moved to group chats. All my friends share updates of their family events, kids' stuff etc.. over Whatsapp and Telegram. Strangers gather over topics that interest them and want to talk about it seem to have moved to discord, slack etc. The whole "broadcast yourself to the world" part of social networks just moved to Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram etc.. I think.
Some people are moving back to anonymous communication with limited audiences. Twitter is anonymous, but 100% public. There is no way to limit your audience to a smaller group. FB is not anonymous and mostly public. Private groups do exist, but you still mostly need to have an actual name on your account. TikTok & Snapchat are mostly for people who show their faces, not anonymous. WhatsApp shows everyone everyone's p…
No, but you can limit the conversation to only the people you follow or mention. That reduces the discussion blast radius.
Interestingly, I mostly see this sort of limiting or disabling of discussion when the information in a tweet is clearly false.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like Tiktok has far fewer ads than other social media platforms. Less than 10% of things are ads. Instagram is like 30+% ads for me.
Yeah I was also surprised at that comment, TikTok has significantly less ads than FB/IG, so I don’t understand why it’s being criticized for that.
I suspect there's a lot more subversive ad content on TikTok -- influencers who are paid or gifted by advertisers to namedrop or show a product in a post that TikTok recommends to millions. The "ad" label feels inherently dirty, and people tend to tune out. But if an influencer sips a coke in a video, without even an explicit mention of the brand, I'm sure a lot of people start craving coke.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#429> [TikTok]'s addiction-based advertising machine is probably close to the theoretical maximum of how many advertisements one can pour down somebody’s throat. Well put. It's interesting that we pivoted in my adult lifetime from: 1. Myspace's emphasis on sharing things on your own webpage, essentially a hosted blog 2. Facebook's evolution from "hosted blog" to "friend update aggregator" to "chat client" to "friend upda…
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet. I don't have as much hope for such a thing. To me, this trend is also a reflection of perhaps the societal devaluing of IRL social connections. In a world where encountering "new people" was novel, and typ…
For me it seems that social media services encourage people to build huge social networks with people you barely know. I visit facebook, it suggests me to add to friends some people I worked with 15 years ago and barely talked to back then, but it detected that we had many common friends and assumes that I want to connect to those people.
Well, I don't. I don't care about them.
But I guess that most people do connect. When I inspect other people profiles, they might have 100 or even more "friends". I have may be 5 friends in my life and may be 20 people I barely know.
The solution is simple. Social network services should develop algorithms to reduce that clutter. Unfriend everyone, keep only those that you actively engage with often. People should keep their social circles small by default and social network services must encourage this behaviour. This is natural for human. Yes, I guess some people do have 100 friends in their real life, but that must be a rare exception.
Just because I know that guy name and he was introduced to me 10 years ago, does not mean that I want to have any connection to that guy in facebook. If facebook knows that we have friends in common, very well, present me that information when I stumble upon this guy. Like I saw his comment in some public community and next to his name add "1 common friend". But don't push that information to me without reason.
May be we should get rid of this "friends" feature at all. Just add ability to follow someone and that's about it. It must be asymmetrical and there must not be a way for someone to know whether am I following him or not. And, I'll repeat it again, never do not suggest me who I should follow. I'll find out it myself.
I think that messengers like telegram are winning because they follow this model. Telegram never asked me to add a "friend". I naturally have some chats that I'm interested with and that's better way to communicate.
Re: Is this the end of social networking?
#430> [TikTok]'s addiction-based advertising machine is probably close to the theoretical maximum of how many advertisements one can pour down somebody’s throat. Well put. It's interesting that we pivoted in my adult lifetime from: 1. Myspace's emphasis on sharing things on your own webpage, essentially a hosted blog 2. Facebook's evolution from "hosted blog" to "friend update aggregator" to "chat client" to "friend upda…
The problem of "who pays for this?" still remains. If it's free to the user, it has to be ad-supported (or I guess donation-driven; the Wikipedia/Guardian model, but I don't see that working so well for social media). If it's ad-supported that means the advertiser becomes the customer and the point of the thing gets subverted to maximise ad revenue. If it's not free to the user, then we have to educate everyone that…
That's easy, honestly. Give people an option:
- host your own instance, no limits on usage because you're paying your own way, hosting your own images and content, running your own server
- use someone else's instance, they can show you whatever ads they like (though preferably in a sidebar, not integrated into your main feed) and subject you to space limitations. In a truly federated environment where users can easily switch between instances, those instances can compete based on ad and space efficiency. Some folks, like myself, might shell out for their own instance and host friends and family with no ads and ample space just to be nice.
Facebook as of 2009 was damn near "feature complete" social media. Messaging, photos, videos, comments, chronological feed. It's not that complicated. You could run the whole thing as an open source + donation based project, like Wikipedia or Mozilla. You don't need tens of thousands of engineers and venture capital that forces you to employ dark patterns and inject more and more ads and growth. Hell, I think that governments could even donate to a project like this since it's essentially a public service and (compared to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok) an investment in public mental health.