Funnily enough, I just [wrote a blog post](https://sidnutul.substack.com/p/the-thought-industry) echoing this sentiment around how the algorithms have fractured our shared perceptual reality:
Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
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Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#72Just because something is bad, that doesn't that these are its last days.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#73Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc. Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where an…
My fingers are not fully compatible with touch screens so I'm not a big phone guy, so I can't speak for them, but I've been trying to make my computer more task oriented, to make choices more explicit.
I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities.
It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront.
My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#74I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm. Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed…
Mastodon and fediverse despite not running on algorithms sadly aren't free of spam and bots - probably nothing nowadays is. Last year in February there was a flood of messages attacking less populated instances, with... Spam can image in message body.
What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.
Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#76> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. ... I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually stati…
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. No one goes to the beach anymore—there are too many people there.
Yeah, I think that's also why it's an odd argument to me. If the users spend all the attention on your platform anyway, is it really dead?
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends. There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.
> It seems like paid communities
Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account.
It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential.
Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#78When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.
When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of…
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Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#79When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.
Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought. We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was…
Please continue
Re: Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
#80Like most of the other commenters here, I agree that modern social media is often an echo chamber, and frequently surface level. I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?
Search for "bridging based ranking". The X community notes algorithm does that. I think it should be applied to all content.