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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

#421

Post by UltraSane »

intended wrote: post #324
UltraSane wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People don't want to hear that fox news was created specifically to lie.

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

#422

Post by switchbak »

kachurovskiy wrote: post #389

I've stopped using YouTube and Reddit since early April and it's been a mixed bag. On one side my interest level has adjusted so that normal activities make sense again - like sitting in the garden or playing a game with my kid. I've also completed dozens of projects like replacing old silicon in the entire kitchen or updating the garden playground. On the other side I'm feeling more isolated and lacking information…

I'm a big YouTube addict, but I dropped social media well before that was cool.

I've felt quite disconnected from folks I knew, and I presume they feel like I've pulled away. Sounds like this is kind of similar, you end up feeling a bit disconnected? Doesn't sound all that bad, but I get what you mean - you feel isolated.

I've learned incredible amounts of things with YouTube - I curate it like a madman, but overall I'm still not sure it's a good thing. Corporations just tend to end up eating their customers eventually.

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

#423

Post by Quarrelsome »

red_admiral wrote: post #246
Quarrelsome wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sadly forces in the BBC also value "engagement". Idk how we got here, it never used to be like this. This is why cultural stories now are higher than before on the main site. It used to be the case that news was _just_ news. Politics, crime, economics, health, environment, etc. Now culture stories, like puff pieces about the royals or entertainment end up on the front page.

Because the BBC now has to justify its licence fee to the government, so they need engagement metrics and all the rest like what proportion of X demographic they're reaching. Back in the day, both the BBC and universities were funded by the government without the stereotype of a fresh MBA graduate in charge. Back in the day before MOOCs, the BBC produced programmes for the Open University because that was the way to…

> have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.

Yeah but not the BBC. There used to a be a line. :(

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

#424

Post by swed420 »

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.

> 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.

This is a good start for brainstorming:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

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

#425

Post by swed420 »

zerobees wrote: post #197
saadn92 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on. We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day. And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a…

> The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.

Only a subset. HN is not a monolith.

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

#426

Post by duderific »

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.

Remember when Fox was sued by the voting machine company for libel (or slander, can't remember which), after Fox supported and broadcast claims that the machines were rigged against Trump in 2020, and Fox argued that nobody should take what they say seriously, because they're merely entertainment.

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

#427

Post by rcoveson »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #382
trollbridge wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't social media. HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than…

I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't remember when HN first appeared? For anyone that was an adult in the "web 2.0" days it's hard not to see HN as "social media". The first wave of social media sites where defined by community news aggregators that allowed commenting and, most important, up voting of comments and submissions. Digg, Reddit, HN, del.icio.us (though it lacked formal 'up voting') were a…

I'm very confused by this comment. The era you're talking about is also the era that Facebook was released and it didn't have a voting system, not even likes/reactions. But that's when the term "social networking" really took off, and it definitely referred to Facebook and not Digg or Reddit or Slashdot, to name another that has a comment voting system.

"Social media" as a term comes even later, to capture Twitter and the social features of YouTube and other stuff like that. But it's all sites where most users are people using real names and real faces, and users generally produce content themselves and follow each other's content.

There's clearly a cluster there and HN/Slashdot/Reddit/Digg are clearly outside it. An umbrella that covers both HN and Facebook is almost meaningless; it's "all websites with user-generated OR user-supplemented content."

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

#428

Post by switchbak »

PaulHoule wrote: post #25
mbesto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very critical of social media but this is far too of a myopic take. There is a ton of real life social benefit to these platforms. Simplest example - someone posts a picture/video of them in a city that I also am in and now I know they live there / traveling there and I can meet up with them.

I fell out of touch with my relatives in New England and got back in touch because I got back on Facebook so something social does come out of it once in a while.

What annoys me is this is how a lot of people expect social interactions to happen - so if you want to stay off the corporate platforms to maintain your attention/mental health, etc - you get treated like you're snubbing them.

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

#430

Post by Karrot_Kream »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #382
trollbridge wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't social media. HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than…

I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't remember when HN first appeared? For anyone that was an adult in the "web 2.0" days it's hard not to see HN as "social media". The first wave of social media sites where defined by community news aggregators that allowed commenting and, most important, up voting of comments and submissions. Digg, Reddit, HN, del.icio.us (though it lacked formal 'up voting') were a…

> I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't remember when HN first appeared?

FWIW this site has an older demographic and I doubt that's the reason. More likely most people weren't aware of HN until recently. It only started populating in Google search results recently. My guess is most people these days stumble upon HN by seeing a search result, or a Reddit or Twitter comment mentioning HN. A lot of people only got exposed through social media with things like Facebook and Twitter and never socialized on the internet before that.

Agree with you on everything else. It was obvious at the time that HN was part of a wave of social media along with Reddit, 4chan, Digg, Kuro5hin, etc. At that time moderation was seen as a crucial bottleneck on scaling a social site and upvotes were meant to be an innovation that helped scale these sites bigger than the forums and Usenet lists of yore. Turns out that the true revolution in scale didn't come until things like Facebook and Twitter.

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