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Are we tired of social media? (2025)

danielbrendel.com

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)

#61
post #5

Social media has long stopped being an actual social outlet and is filled with either bots or influencer types trying to be the loudest voice shouting into the void. I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting. That no longer exists anywhere on the major sites and trying for any kind of conversation is a dead end.…

Facebook is next to useless. I'm on it for work. It continually boosts one person's posts on my feed — not someone I dislike but am not close friends with — and then tells me about people's birthdays and bereavements weeks after they happened.

Like YouTube, the promoted content seems to be designed to pull me in particular political directions I am not interested in.

Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)

#62

I hate to say it (not a doom and gloom kind of dude) but to the general population, social media either is, or at the very least appears to be , one of the only ways up and out of the deep, terrifying economic chasm that our societies have been carving to separate the haves from the have-nots. Statistically, of course, the overwhelming majority of people who try to secure the bag from social media either fail, succee…

I never been to Las Vegas, but social media makes me feel like entering a casino in John O’Briens Leaving Las Vegas (the book, not the film). Despite of all the glitz and glamour, just a desolate desert for those who have lost all the hope… And the way all these applications make you hooked works exactly like the coin machines in a Casino. Jean Pormanove was just a one poor soul, there’s literally thousands of them,…

Yep, I have heard social media etc compared to one armed bandits. Not far off. The trouble like gambling is that I'm not interested in the game unless I win.

However, I don't consider Australia's social media ban a good thing as it is government trying to gatekeep the internet.

Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)

#63

I'm totally not tired of Facebook circa 2008 - a bunch of my friends, people I actually know, posting about our lives and having conversations. A fantastic way of reconnecting with old friends and staying in touch with people. I'm utterly tired of what it is now.

Wasn't a fan of it back then. Saw people fighting on it the first day I was on there. Deleted my account. Now back on for work and limit my usage a lot.

Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)

#64

Text-based social media is cancer, the best example being X but also its derivatives, Facebook, Reddit etc. They are too susceptible to astroturfing, manipulation, political slop and outrage, bullying etc. I get a lot of value out of Instagram despite its ongoing enslopification. It lets me keep up with old friends, share memes with my friends, and the reel algorithm never fails to put me in a good mood. I'm 50/50 on…

X/Twitter is awful, but the difference is that I used to be able to follow channels I enjoyed, and there was often humour. Now I find I am seeing content that Twitter has selected for me rather than subscribed to.

Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)

#65

Lots of people talk about being tired of it but few do anything about it. The entrenched social media has become a sort of flypaper for the Eternal September keeping them off the newer, smaller, better options. Anyone discerning has left Twitter/Reddit/etc. But rather than try to replace those it's better to think of the newer places as off-ramps from social media rather than forming new dependence on them.

This all reminds me of back in the 90s with MTV. Everyone hated it - or, at least they said they hated it, but everyone still watched it.

I used to hear about MTV all the time, but didn't know anyone that watched it. The only time I spent watching it was at a hotel. Didn't have it at home.

Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)

#67

It's all ignorant bigots. Everywhere. Painfully stupid angry ignorant people yelling about conspiracies they read in a meme. We should all dedicate 0 seconds of our life to this.

Social media is designed to polarise people. However, the problem is that we do live in a world where most things go unreported and we get celebrity gossip on the news instead.

Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)

#68
1. The size of a healthy, general social network is limited by Dunbar's number, because this is the number of people an individual can get to know individually. For a social network to grow beyond this and remain healthy, it must become specific (e.g., an online forum with a specific focus), so that the effort required to interact with any given individual is minimised, because there are fewer points of difference.

2. People who pine for the good old days of the internet are university-educated elites who enjoyed those good old days because the only other internet users were other university educated elites. Social media didn't destroy online culture; it gave the Great Unwashed a reason to be online, and they changed online culture into something that resembled their offline culture.

3. We like to think of the good old days as a time without bubbles online, but in reality, it was just one big bubble.

4. Conventional social media platforms have just become media platforms because only a small proportion of their users - influencers - regularly produce anything interesting.

Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)

#69
post #56

Text-based social media is cancer, the best example being X but also its derivatives, Facebook, Reddit etc. They are too susceptible to astroturfing, manipulation, political slop and outrage, bullying etc. I get a lot of value out of Instagram despite its ongoing enslopification. It lets me keep up with old friends, share memes with my friends, and the reel algorithm never fails to put me in a good mood. I'm 50/50 on…

As soon as non-text gets integrated in any meaningful way, it all goes down hill. Text is fine. Text with some images that aren’t always integrated so well like forums are fine. Full on image/video media is just reptile brain fodder.

A lot of it is reptile brain fodder but I'd rather spend my time watching brainrot that makes me happy then read ragebait, political takes, etc which genuinely ruin my mental state.

Re: Are we tired of social media? (2025)

#70

Algorithmic curation is something I'm trying to avoid in all cases. I think it's not highlighted enough. The fact that youtube shows an infinite number of videos to choose from does its own sort of harm in a way that the specifics of the content cannot. When the internet was brand new, it was very novel that I had to go out seeking the content and could look at it any time I wanted. It was different than TV. TV was e…

If you subscribe to creators you like, and use the Subscriptions tab in YouTube, you will only see their content and not anything algorithmic AFAIK

The best way to subscribe to creators on YouTube is via rss. This way one doesn’t have to deal with YT at all.
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