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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

#431

Post by duderific »

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.

For me, the central entity of "social media" is a person or personality.

The central entity of forums, such as HN or Reddit, is topics.

Sometimes there is crossover between the two types of entities, and of course there are exceptions to the rule, but I find it to be a useful way to discern what is social media and what isn't.

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

#432

Post by Karrot_Kream »

rcoveson wrote: post #427
crystal_revenge wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

There were many attempts at this time to figure out how to scale forums. The bottleneck on forums and chatrooms was always human moderation. But a forum could only get so many mods and mods eventually burned out because moderation just really sucks. Moreover quality between forums was quite variable. One forum on Beets might be good, but the forums on Fantasy novels was run terribly and full of flamewars. Having a large social site of good quality would be a lot easier to manage than 30 different sites of varying quality.

Gaia Online was famously a large forum with a huge moderation staff, and the sheer amount of effort that went to running Gaia Online was incredible, and despite that it was popularly thought of as being a pretty low quality forum.

Reddit tried the upvote and downvote. HN tried upvotes only. 4chan tried full anonymity (rather than the pseudonymity of forums/usenet.) Facebook tried real names. Tumblr had the reblog (which became quote tweets when Twitter took the feature and is widely thought of now as a fairly controversial feature due to toxicity it can produce.) Twitter tried hashtags for discovery. It was a period of experimenting with how to build social spaces.

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

#433

Post by sethammons »

fl4regun wrote: post #349
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"?

Social media started in the early 1500s if we squint with this logic.

Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were the OG forum post that went viral, and required a printing press.

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

#434

Post by oliculipolicula »

PaulHoule wrote: post #208
carlosjobim wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News are for news worthy things - which are things that deviate from everyday life. Wars, disasters, crime, in short things of concern. As well as political struggles, economic struggles, and any kind of conflict. So all is well in that aspect. That's how news have always been, since the first pyres were constructed to light fires to alert neighbouring communities of enemies arriving. But the sickening aspect of cabl…

Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgJgTL5JmE I can say circa 1990 people in my pod noticed this phenomenon that "ruling class" people who get interviewed on TV as well as many TV performers (new anchors!) seem to show a kind of asymmetry of facial expression that you don't see so much in ordinary people. Today we might blame the botox but it's widely thought that this is a sign of emotional suppression https://www…

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

#435

Post by suburban_strike »

saghm wrote: post #380
somenameforme wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started to form. Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% fore…

> history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself Every time in US history that there's been an influx of immigrants, there were people spouting essentially identical arguments to the ones they're spouting now (stealing jobs, lack of assimilation, etc.), and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the long run. I've long had the opinion that most of the people vehement…

[flagged]

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

#436

Post by dredmorbius »

Anthony-G wrote: post #413
dredmorbius wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great song. And long before that, Yellow Journalism: Journalism historian Frank Luther Mott used five characteristics to identify yellow journalism: 1. scare headlines in huge print, often sensationalizing minor news 2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings 3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts 4. emphasis on full-color Sunday su…

Upvoted your comment but my inner pedant can’t help but point out that’s more an example of whitewashing rather than greenwashing (which itself is a derivative of whitewashing).

Fair point ;-)

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

#437

Post by BLKNSLVR »

squidsoup wrote: post #412
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.

Capitalism subsumes all culture, even counter culture, destroys its essence and commodifies it.

Well said.

I think the only reason I remain staunchly independent is because I've never found anything that has had enough common ground with enough people to allow me to profit (to any degree whatsoever) in such a way as to corrupt the core of "me". Oddly I find that the less my venn diagram overlaps with others, the more I like my venn diagram and the more committed I am to it. If other people start agreeing with me, I tend to question where I might be wrong.

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

#438

Post by suburban_strike »

ryandrake wrote: post #308
malfist wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a very strong hive mind there. It takes very little to grassroots a subreddit. Just like at the biking subreddits and tire recommendations. It's almost always the GP 5000 that is recommended. Which, don't get me wrong, it's a great tire. But it isn't always the best, and there are tires out there that beat it. The community has just latched on to the one true tire and that's all you'll ever see recommended. M…

Reddit is a pretty extreme example, though, where mods are basically subreddit dictators. For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods, to the point where a handful of like-minded mods can enforce in great detail what is allowed to be discussed and what isn't. Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the reason for the "circling around a particular brand…

> For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods

It's been "bad" since the 2010s, but censorship went into overdrive once OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit a few years ago (2021?). The mods do the dirty work of aggressively sanitizing all future training data for "safety" so the entire site is curated to align with ChatGPT now.

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

#439

Post by BLKNSLVR »

saadn92 wrote: post #173
supertroop wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re just learning how small minded people are? In the US there was an attempted insurrection filmed live. We elected the guy who led it who then pardoned 1600 jailed criminals. Now he is trying to creat a slush fund to give them millions as reparations. 33% of the country is delighted by this. These are Plank sized brains.

yep, even people I thought educated voted for this fool. seriously, they have college degrees, but apparently get their news from random social media accounts

College degrees aren't the differentiator they used to be (and I'm not sure if they used to be either).

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

#440

Post by BLKNSLVR »

baggachipz wrote: post #118
AlfredBarnes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could very quickly sus out what was on FOX news last night by the conversations my coworkers have.

> sus out Intentional typo as a good pun?

"sussed it out" = "worked it out" is a fairly normal slang-ish phrase where I'm from (Australia).
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