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

bbc.com

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

#461

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt »

rvshchwl wrote: post #265
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…

Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case. I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time o…

I've read thousands of HN posts and comments, "just in case" it'll be useful someday, but I'm not sure if my life would have been meaningfully worse had I lived under a rock instead.

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

#462

Post by pants2 »

overgard wrote: post #364
rvshchwl wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case. I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time o…

I'm old enough to remember life before internet/social media (40ish). One thing that's weird now, to me, is that it's very rare that I'm outright bored, but it's like that boredom just became diffuse into everything, almost everything in life is sort of boredom-tinted (probably just because I'm so flooded with too many dopamine-reward-signaling low-value things) A couple weeks ago, I had a power outage, and instead o…

One of my favorite memories was a power outage that lasted the entire day. Neighbors came out of their homes to BBQ together before meat went bad. People checking on neighbors and helping old ladies open their garage doors. Kids playing in the street and grown ups shooting the shit. I played board games by candle light with my neighbors until like 2am, no distractions.

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

#463

Post by somenameforme »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #383
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…

People aren’t, and will not, have as many kids going forward. We are seeing this in rich countries and poor countries. Right before the baby boomers are fully retired is a heckuva time America decided it wants to contract its population by prioritizing keeping the working adult out.

Fertility is one of the best examples of a self correcting problem. Fertility causes populations to contract dramatically faster than most appreciate. The formula for the change between generations is a factor of fertility_rate/2. So if a country has a fertility rate of 1 (which is where many countries are trending, if not already lower than), then each successive generation will be 50% smaller.

A generation is proportional to the the practical fertility window of a given era, so somewhere around 20 years. The deaths (and subsequent population change) will lag behind generations by about 50 years, but become largely unavoidable because female fertility collapses rapidly after ~40. And so when there is a shared fertility rate amongst a population, each ~20 years the population will change by the fertility factor.

So you end up bleeding people fast once the death phase kicks in - you're talking about losing 50% of your population each 20 years. This is why places like Japan will still look to today as the 'good ole days'. They're currently only losing about 11% of their population per 20 years, but with a fertility rate of 1.2 they'll trend towards losing around 40% per 20 years.

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Anyhow, the point of this all is that there simply are not enough people in the world to make up for this sort of loss. And that's if you're willing to accept an adult male with no education and who may not even speak the language, which isn't exactly the foundation of a great society. When you speak of wanting skilled English speakers, both male and female, then yeah - it's really not happening.

So countries will be left to increase their fertility rates or die. Though even that statement kind of misrepresents what happens. Rather the higher fertility subpopulations within society will gradually come to dominate those societies. So in some manner speaking, perhaps the Bible was write and the meek will come to inherit the Earth. An America made of Amish? Pretty funny to imagine, but not really out of domain of possibility at all. Fertility is going to radically reshape the face of Earth and it's difficult to predict what that will look like other than very different.

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

#464

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#465

Post by boomlinde »

stronglikedan wrote: post #226
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…

> HN is social media I haven't posted any personal pics, or stories about things that I've done in my life or am currently doing, so how can it be social in the same way that social media is? To me, there's a clear distinction between a news aggregator and discussion forum like HN, and a social media site. Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news t…

> Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social interaction.

Discussion is of course a kind of social interaction. You've posted this, which discusses a topic that is only tangentially related to the news item if at all. You can talk about framing all you want, but it ultimately is what it is: spontaneous social interaction between users on the kind of winding paths "unsupervised" discussions naturally take.

I'd be surprised if half of people supposedly discussing the "news to be discussed" have RTFA. That doesn't stop interesting discussion on a wide range of topics from happening here.

It's not "social in the same way", but Twitter and Facebook aren't "social in the same way" either.

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

#466

Post by rapnie »

overgard wrote: post #364
rvshchwl wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case. I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time o…

I'm old enough to remember life before internet/social media (40ish). One thing that's weird now, to me, is that it's very rare that I'm outright bored, but it's like that boredom just became diffuse into everything, almost everything in life is sort of boredom-tinted (probably just because I'm so flooded with too many dopamine-reward-signaling low-value things) A couple weeks ago, I had a power outage, and instead o…

I've had my firefox browser crash twice recently and I lost the couple hundred open tabs that I must really process for their valuable information. Found through dilligent social media communication in my circles. Guess what, that was a false feeling, I felt huge relief and burden lifted from my shoulder, and I never really missed those lost tabs. The valuable information is around always, and you can collect just-in-time what you need. I now have a more casual approach to them. Sticky notes where it is okay if they fall from the fridge.

As for social media, I am using the decentralized alternatives, fediverse and atmosphere. It is all parasocial. People talk about friends networks and how cozy it all is, but you only exist as long as you produce content and engage. And content that fits the in-group at that. Produce what they want to hear. It is superficial, shallow, but you can easily be deluded it is more than that. It is not that your peers online want it to be that way, it is just that the tools we use are insufficient to forge richer and more intricate social relationships. Even while the fediverse has no algorithmic feeds, it is Twitter-like and you must stand on your soapboax, sell your warez, to get heard. It is far from social, as we understand it offline.

Note that there is value to it all. It just serves one well to be aware of the social dynamics and adjust expectations accordingly.

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

#467

Post by somenameforme »

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…

The problem you run into here is that each time there was a sufficiently large threshold of immigration growth, the government did respond by sharply curbing immigration. So we don't really know how things would have turned out without that. And that was also during times of significantly higher fertility rates, so higher rates of immigration would have had a relatively smaller impact on society. There were also much higher rates of self employment (a quick search suggests ~50% in 1900), so there'd be less concern over the job market and instead even a benefit to be gained from more consumers and even laborers - the same reasons that corporations tend to support immigration in contemporary times.

So in modern times the situation is quite a bit more different and relatively unprecedented, at least if we continue along with anything like the former status quo. But I'd wager that the former status quo is probably dead, even after the current administration leaves office. The DNC is showing good predict market rates for a win in 2028 and I'd wager that they'll run on a much more moderate platform for immigration, far away from both Trump and Biden.

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

#468

Post by ffsm8 »

galangalalgol wrote: post #176
ffsm8 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm not American, calling bbc centrist in 2026 is just objectively false. It was centrist in 2000s, but it hasn't been in at least a decade.

Whose interests does it serve now? That is the main thing to understand of you are to get anything out of news.

That question is more about identifying propaganda by various actors.

While that's a related issue, it's something different to being centrist... Eg it's possible to create propaganda while being centrist, it just can't be left/right wing political.

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

#469

Post by Nursie »

m463 wrote: post #273
torben-friis wrote: post #83

If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-friends (and ads). It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.

> It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. what if your friends used it too? would there be more content (as they seek to connect to real peopl), or less (as they leave)?

Most of my friends have already gone from fb, and I don't post there any more really either. Still check it most days in case I have messages.

If the "you might like" "why not follow" "reels" and other crap was gone, I guess there could be some sort of revival. But it might be too late.

Because instead we've splintered into various discords, and those sorta-aquaintanceships that old fb was quite good at keeping alive have basically fallen away.

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