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

471–480 of 511 posts

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

#471

Post by Nursie »

ffsm8 wrote: post #142
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.

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.

I tend to think it's probably doing OK as it gets heavy criticism from both the left and the right.

From the left, it gets accused of cow-towing to right wing interests, not holding conservatives and corporatists to account and generally being far to easy on the like of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.

From the right it gets called all sorts of names, my dad (unfortunately a convert to GBNews in his 70s) rails at it for being lefty garbage that won't speak the truth about immigration and other 'issues' he has been programmed to care about by the ragebait he watches. Of course part of the hate from the right is to do with Murdoch and his belief that it constitutes unfair competition.

Me, I listen to Radio 4 from overseas and generally the coverage is pretty neutral AFAICT, if a little prone to 'bothsides' arguments where one side is clearly nutty as a fruitcake.

(Sidenote - it really is sad to watch an intelligent man who was impressive in his globe-spanning career now get angry in front of 'news' services featuring smug, lippy anchors who tell him immigrants in boats are coming for his stuff. They couldn't afford the price of entry to his leafy London-outskirt suburb in the first place...)

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

#472

Post by keybored »

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.

Don’t listen to the defeatists. This is like post-modernism. Post-modernism as a phenonemena is a very real thing, studied and documented extensively, critiqued extensively. And when you read about it it seems hopeless. Like everything is destined to be a pastiche. But once you stop reading about it you realize that there is no Matrix that you’re trapped in. The biggest Matrix is your own mind. People had problems disciplining their minds a millenium ago. They do today as well. It’s marginally more difficult today, yes. But smart phones are just addictive like bad food. Not like a ahrd drug.

We also, thankfully, don’t need a clique of very smart people to save us. We’re all in this together. (Except the psychopaths wanting to enslave us.)

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

#473

Post by happosai »

vitally3643 wrote: post #233
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.

Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes. But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure"…

As far as I see the "problem" with mastodon is the lack of addiction mechanics. The first time someone has an negative mastodon interaction, the close the app and because it isn't that addictive, they don't come back.

Meanwhile on Facebook people get angry every day on something they see on the feed yet come back in hour "just in case the are is something interesting this time"

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

#475

Post by lou1306 »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #351
spking wrote: post #64

If this subject interests you, and you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

There is also a book called Infinite Jest that touches on this subject Its a breezy novella you can finish over a lunch break

Well the size of IJ is itself a statement: 1. there's an awful lot to unpack once you start exploring the intersection of capitalism, addiction, and entertainment; 2. can you even _manage_ to go through it all without switching to mindless consumption every 5 minutes?

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

#476

Post by trumpdong »

overgard wrote: post #357
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…

Maybe the useful distinction isn't "is it a social site?" but rather "is the content curated or user created?". Anything that's user created is going to have the issues described I think, whether you consider it a social network or not.

HN has curated content, since dang has a heavy thumb on the scale.

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

#477

Post by malfist »

thatmf wrote: post #338
toast0 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many 1st gen immigrants have the pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you attitude. My grandparents (also Italian) certainly did. Everyone wants to imagine they did it the "right way" and that their struggle is the most unique and deserving one. Which made it even funnier when I discovered that they never actually legally naturalized. Many such cases.

My abortion was also the only moral abortion

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

#478

Post by trumpdong »

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 most powerful force in the universe is not gravity, or the strong nuclear force - it's the prisoner's dilemma.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you could have avoided this. If you didn't, any one of the other ten million people would. You didn't choose for it to happen, you chose to be the one who got the money from it happening.

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

#479

Post by trumpdong »

happosai wrote: post #473
vitally3643 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes. But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure"…

As far as I see the "problem" with mastodon is the lack of addiction mechanics. The first time someone has an negative mastodon interaction, the close the app and because it isn't that addictive, they don't come back. Meanwhile on Facebook people get angry every day on something they see on the feed yet come back in hour "just in case the are is something interesting this time"

The problem with mastodon is that people think it's mastodon dot social.

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

#480

Post by trumpdong »

rich_sasha wrote: post #259
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.

The article made me reminisce. I was a young adult when Facebook crept in. I felt the constant pressure to do cool stuff so I could put it on Facebook and get likes. I used to browse through friends walls, look at their carefully manicured photo albums, no doubt driven by similar anxieties. Sad as it was, at least the incentives were somewhat aligned with a healthy social life. Seek out cool things in life, preferabl…

I wish I felt that pressure. lcamtuf has an awesome blog with cool projects like homemade resin-cast gears and demos of AFL. I wanted a cool blog like that but I never felt motivated enough to do anything like it. I guess I was already stuck in consumption-mode by that time.
Post reply on HN