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Slow social media

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Slow social media

#71

Post by haijo2 »

danboarder wrote: post #26

A lot of his ideas remind me of the BeReal app, it limits posts per day and is geared toward 'friends in real life' and with just a few friends on it I've stayed engaged. But it's sparse for me and can be a ghost town much of the time, but that may be just because my friend group isn't using it much. There needs to be sufficient network effect to maintain and grow it's reach as a network, which may be antithetical to…

Lol I dont know how to say this but BeReal is flawed from the start. IG is not about being real at all for the most part - hence its popularity. People enjoy being able to cosplay and show their best self, not revealing their true self.

Re: Slow social media

#72

Post by baubino »

bonoboTP wrote: post #56
giveita wrote: post #6

It exists: Whatsapp Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.

It's still possible to host a phpbb as well. Easier than it was in 2005, but harder than using a big platform.

I miss all the old phpbb forums. I occasionally toy with the idea of hosting one.

Re: Slow social media

#73

Post by MagnumOpus »

bonoboTP wrote: post #45
dahrkael wrote: post #42

back in 2009 in Spain we had what the author describes in Tuenti ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuenti ). at first it was invite only and by default people's profiles were private, you'd need to be friends to see their activity and pictures. your feed was just your friends statuses and new pictures in chronological order. later on it got some games and a realtime chat but it ended up dying because of newer social…

In Hungary, we had iWiW, one of the earliest "social media" sites. (=international who is who - though it never went really international, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWiW , started as WiW in 2002). It was also invite based and it was exciting to get an invite back then. It was more like a phone book, it had detailed profiles where you could specify your favorite things, introduce yourself, upload a few pictures et…

> people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates

Young people do care - but the "checking on friends" and "showing off my glamourous life/vacation" has moved to Instagram and Snapchat. Partly because Facebook is full of "old people" and thus less cool. As the Insta generation starts to have their own kids, those kids indubitably will look for another platform...

Re: Slow social media

#74

Post by haijo2 »

baubino wrote: post #68
pflenker wrote: post #40

I don’t want to be limited to „meaningful connections!“ I stay in close contact with those who are dear to me outside of social media. I want to stay connected to some random coworker I enjoyed working with in 2011, because I enjoy watching them from a distance, getting married, settling down, that kind of stuff, and occasionally comment on these things. This used to be a strength of social media before algorithms ca…

This desire to follow people’s lives from a distance without necessarily interacting with them in the world is the root of the very unhealthy parasocial tendencies driving social media. It seems quite innocent and benign on the scale of one person just wanting to keep up with the life of a cool coworker from the past, but it quickly adds up to a bunch of people passively following other people with very little actual…

Youre touching at something subtle and nuanced that most dont understand.

Re: Slow social media

#75

Post by ianopolous »

I love this. It is close to what we've built with Peergos [0].

1. People have to accept you as a follower, and the default is bi-directional.

2. There are no visible follower/friend counts.

3. Chronological feed which has an end (no infinite scroll)

4. No arbitrary character limit

5. No analytics (enforced by E2EE)

We don't have a max friends/number of posts per day though.

[0] https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media

Re: Slow social media

#76

Post by haijo2 »

joules77 wrote: post #3

> I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time. For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized. The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you re…

Yeah the government - the large and powerful institution designed to take care of its people - has to step in.

Lots of scamming behaviour takes place on those platform by means of acquiring wealth on the platform in the form of social currency (likes, followers and so on). And Meta is there to help them exploit - and perhaps hopes to dumb people down further - so they get hooked to the platform more.

Re: Slow social media

#77

Post by bonoboTP »

baubino wrote: post #69
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that being interested in the life updates of someone as being equivalent to a voyeur. There are people who fade out of one’s lives for various reasons, but it doesn’t mean that the relationship has to end at that. There are many schoolmates, coworkers, etc. who I wish l I had some idea where they were now, which I don’t have right now because of my general avoidance of social media. This is just a way of k…

Reading someone’s life updates and watching their videos is not keeping up a connection though. It’s a parasocial relationship that makes us feel like there is a connection whereas an actual connection would require interaction between people. As you rightly noted, one of the main outcomes of the parasocial relationship is that it replaces real life interactions - you no longer have to ask people questions about thei…

Yes, getting to know someone used to be a gradual process. During the time window when public posting about frankly quite private moments of life was common (Facebook ~2010s), it was weird how much you would see of a person upfront. You saw surprising overlapping acquaintances, prior vacations, party photos, hobbies etc... See photos of your teachers or profs with their spouse etc. I don't think it's normal. It was a weird phase.

Re: Slow social media

#78

Post by duxup »

bkettle wrote: post #12

I think modern social media is a huge problem but don’t see we can fix it without regulation. It’s clear that all the current incentives point companies towards engagement and rage bait and away from anything actually “social”, and I think it’s unlikely that any new social network that tries to fix these issues would achieve widespread usage. Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would tha…

I agree that regulation is likely the only option.

With the caveat that it is very clear people want this horrible social media we have. They consume outrageous content, they pass it on, they create it for these platforms.

A lot of proposed regulation frames it as big bad tech companies making people do things like they're victims. But without people participating there would be nothing on there and in reality the human factor feeds back into these loops ... and keeps them going.

I think a lot of the proposed legislation comes at it at the wrong angle and is unlikely to fix it because in the end the users are a key component, not just some terrible algorithm or creepy CEOs.

Re: Slow social media

#79

Post by duxup »

tayo42 wrote: post #31
bkettle wrote: post #12

I think modern social media is a huge problem but don’t see we can fix it without regulation. It’s clear that all the current incentives point companies towards engagement and rage bait and away from anything actually “social”, and I think it’s unlikely that any new social network that tries to fix these issues would achieve widespread usage. Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would tha…

I think banning algorithm based feeds is a start Getting rid of any non personal accounts also. So no companies, brands, or meme accounts, and accounts that exist for non personal content only.

I've seen a lot of algorithm type proposed legislation, sorting by date is an algorithm ... I kinda want that.

I think legislating what is good and bad math is going to be exceptionally difficult.

Re: Slow social media

#80

Post by duxup »

hboon wrote: post #8

What are people using now instead of Facebook (for broastcast and interaction with friends/family)? Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.

Nothing :(

Most everyone is on facebook that I know of and they're not going anywhere and I'm not. I actually missed that an old coworker had died recently. Frustrating.

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