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The End of Social Media

miikavonbell.com

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Re: The End of Social Media

#71

Post by scollet »

donretag wrote: post #54

Here is my take: content creators are the problem. When Friendster, MySpace,Facebook, et al started, it was about connecting friends online. People that already had a connection. When you shared something, you wanted to share something personal with friends. YouTube was about sharing your home videos. Not for money, but for actually sharing. What a strange concept! Then people noticed you can monetize their content.…

Practically, it's an advertising apparatus. Creators probably fit a normal distribution for mass appeal, so your ire might be better directed at advertisers who enable and curate primarily profit-driven content.

Nothing wrong with making a few bucks off of your craft.

Re: The End of Social Media

#72

Post by xcfvbnkhnkjq »

crazy_horse wrote: post #2

I'm not sure how to phrase this without sounding rude, but what is this saying that adds insight to what I've been reading on places like HN for a decade? Is it true that people are getting dumber? Big claim, no evidence. Do paragraphs exist? I'm looking for solution. Saying nobody knows what the future looks like ain't it.

>Is it true that people are getting dumber? Big claim, no evidence. Do paragraphs exist? I'm looking for solution.

Are the grammar issues intentional?

Re: The End of Social Media

#73

Post by Kye »

whoooooo123 wrote: post #58
Gunax wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a bad example, since crocs and crocodiles are different words. But in some regions, 'croc' is used much more often than 'crocodile' in the same way that Americans say 'sitcom' much more often than 'situational comedy'. Even though it's an abbreviation, it's eclipsed the full word in frequency. But I think the author's general point isn't about the information being unavailable (even if croc was the whol…

Is there anywhere in the English-speaking world where people say "situational comedy" instead of "sitcom"? I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "situational comedy" once in my life, unless they were answering the question "what is sitcom short for?"

Useful data:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sitcom%2C+situ...

It looks like sitcom ran in parallel below situation comedy from the start, then sitcom took over with the boom in the 1980s. Situation comedy never went away, but it never came close once they diverged.

Re: The End of Social Media

#74

Post by lsalvatore »

Most instagram ads are more entertaining and insightful than this article. Advertising is actually about educating the consumer for many products, and I think we're moving more toward personal ads that don't feel like ads. Sometimes you come across an ad that helps you or even changes your life. Things like new games, books or ideas. This article has nothing to do with the end of social media.

Re: The End of Social Media

#75

Post by naravara »

nonameiguess wrote: post #66
donretag wrote: post #54

Here is my take: content creators are the problem. When Friendster, MySpace,Facebook, et al started, it was about connecting friends online. People that already had a connection. When you shared something, you wanted to share something personal with friends. YouTube was about sharing your home videos. Not for money, but for actually sharing. What a strange concept! Then people noticed you can monetize their content.…

Maybe at one point social networks were actually social networks, but that isn't what they are any more. They're poorly-moderated, poorly-curated entertainment distribution platforms. People who own data centers and URLs figured out you can cut out the middlemen of studios, editors, publishers, et al, and the quality of content may go way down, but the quantity will go way up and cost to produce will go way down, in…

> and engagement was never correlated with quality anyway.

Well it's a different style of engagement and a different standard for "quality" from what we colloquially think of those terms to mean. Traditional media needed you to engage with the media. Social media needs you to engage with the comment section associated with the media. The qualities the system is optimizing for, then, isn't the stuff we typically consider to be good for that medium. Instead it's the stuff that's good for making people talk about it.

This is almost certainly to blame for things always gravitating towards largely subjective evaluations of where something falls on some axis for a highly charged metric. Is this racist or not racist? Queer friendly or unfriendly? Liberal of conservative? Arguing about how to 'keep score' with which boxes any specific bit of media gets is a good way to say something about something topical that keeps people engaged and arguing.

Even in the days of the old blogosphere it was well known that you needed to have a comments section to get the page views. You can only crank out so many articles as an individual. But you can make your site "stickier" and encourage people to keep clicking the bookmark for it if you can get them engaged with talking about your article. It's not surprise that the most noxious elements of the modern Internet were more-or-less born on Reddit and Tumblr. These were two sites that basically thrived on creating selective pressure for this sort of content.

Re: The End of Social Media

#76

Post by mod50ack »

ramesh31 wrote: post #5

YouTube is the only "social network" that I can defend. I honestly think it's the very best thing to ever come out of the Web. The key to it though is using it without a Google login and with cookies disabled. This gives you the default algorithm free experience and forces you to engage your brain to think about what you want to see, rather than being spoon fed down a rabbit hole.

I just use it to watch my subscriptions and things I specifically search for. With an adblocker so I can tolerate it, and sponsorblock for good measure. On Android I use NewPipe + sponsorblock.

I'm not addicted to YouTube. I don't spend that much time on it. It's not my go-to source when I go online. Maybe I'm in the minority, but when you treat it only as a video hosting service where you can follow specific feeds, I don't think it's really problematic.

Re: The End of Social Media

#77

Post by asdff »

nonameiguess wrote: post #66
donretag wrote: post #54

Here is my take: content creators are the problem. When Friendster, MySpace,Facebook, et al started, it was about connecting friends online. People that already had a connection. When you shared something, you wanted to share something personal with friends. YouTube was about sharing your home videos. Not for money, but for actually sharing. What a strange concept! Then people noticed you can monetize their content.…

Maybe at one point social networks were actually social networks, but that isn't what they are any more. They're poorly-moderated, poorly-curated entertainment distribution platforms. People who own data centers and URLs figured out you can cut out the middlemen of studios, editors, publishers, et al, and the quality of content may go way down, but the quantity will go way up and cost to produce will go way down, in…

For the last paragraph it wasn't quite that simple, Nielson Media Research was aggregating audience statistics for market analysis since the radio days before TV.

Re: The End of Social Media

#79

Post by LOOKOUT »

One of the best features of a jailbroken iPhone is the ability to hide all ads on YouTube / Spotify / Instagram / Twitter / TikTok.

I feel impervious to social media advertising & you can too if you just go through the effort.

Re: The End of Social Media

#80

Post by asdff »

lofties wrote: post #67
pphysch wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, instead of linking to Minow's speech, you link to another "junk article" that reads like an ad for Harvard ("Hey look, this famous guy's daughter works at Harvard. Here are some random related facts." --the Harvard Gazette). The mind boggles.

The full speech[1] for those interested. [1] https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm

I was expecting a lot more damning points about TV but this legitimately reads like the man is a luddite rather than someone thinking about maybe the value of deep thinking. His cited evils on TV: "You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons." Yet in the paragraph above he gives the newspaper as well as the theater a pass, when you can see many of these tropes outlined in this quote from just Shakespeare.

Old Old media also was a "vast wasteland" of sponsored radio programs, poorly written syndicated stories meant to engage readers to see other advertisements in newspapers (literally the social media model), and billboards adorning theaters and most aspects of public life, even more than today. I was hoping he would get into something about devoting ones efforts towards improvements, personal or otherwise, rather than endless consumption that leaves you in the same place as beforehand, but that wasn't really his mark and probably not even in his capitalist head given the opining about 'tyrannical communism'.

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