Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slow social media

herman.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 148 posts

Re: Slow social media

#81

Post by qwertfisch »

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…

But if I had the possibility of being updated in someone’s life, or even just having a contact option, would help me evaluating if this relation is worth being kept or refreshed or terminated.

Example: I was an employee with my first fulltime job for nearly ten years. After I quit the job I instantly lost contact to all people. I would have needed to actually go the company building to chat with them (or calling at work), which I didn’t because it was Covid time. But on XING (LinkedIn-like platform for Germany) one former colleague left his private phone number for me, and I messaged him (after some years, because I was in a depressive phase), and now we meet every two or three months.

So it’s not about voyerism for me but keeping contact or at least give me some hints if any relation might be worth pursuing. I don’t want (or need) people in my list just for being a watcher of their life.

Re: Slow social media

#82

Post by hboon »

duxup wrote: post #80
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.

Facebook just mostly show me ads now. I don’t have many friends active on it anymore. I did find out a few years ago that a coworker has passed away though. It’s really useful, pity there isn’t a similar viable alternative

Re: Slow social media

#83

Post by kashunstva »

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.

> What are people using now instead of Facebook

Email, phone, text.

I have a few friends who won’t communicate outside of Meta products and I just don’t interact with them any longer.

Re: Slow social media

#85

Post by thenobsta »

Goodreads/book discussions -- the best class of social media.

Requires some (significant?) investment to have an opinion on a book. It's often pretty obvious if someone hasn't read a book and is commenting on it. The interval between comments is hours/days because users are off reading the book.

Re: Slow social media

#87

Post by amigacommodore »

I agree for the most part here. The biggest barrier to this sort of platform is that people love convienence and low effort use, but that's not what social interraction is about. I really think going out of your way to do things in a more difficult way (inconvience) is the secret to living in the real world again. That's why I prefer DIY to whatever standard solution to any given problem there might be already.

Re: Slow social media

#88

Post by HankStallone »

haijo2 wrote: post #70
asukachikaru wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never thought about it but banning non personal accounts sounds like a good start. I doubt such social media would gain any meaningful popularity though.

Lol it would be dead. IG is running off of the fact that people utilise its platform to make money... I dont see how this is going to be practical.

It's not, that's why people want a regulatory body to do it. The only way to get people to use such a system would be to regulate the current ones out of existence.

Re: Slow social media

#89

Post by mklyons »

I agree with a lot of what you say here. I’ve been running a 3h daily time boxed social media site for the past 6 months and even though traffic is now a crawl compared to the initial burst of activity when I started it, there are users who check in daily and it ends up being a lovely experience I think.

I am working on mobile apps and redesigning and reengineering a lot of the site and I love your thoughts on a blog focus. I’d love to let people host a small blog on the site that would also connect to their actual blog. I’ll add that to the roadmap.

Definitely stop by some time! https://seven39.com/

Re: Slow social media

#90

Post by j-wags »

I was recently inspired on this front by an interview[1] with a recommender system engineer that explored the idea of a "good" recommender algorithm:

> It feels like smartphones have saturated the available time. It's like the famous quote from the Netflix CEO: "Our main competitor is sleep." There aren't many more biological hours in the day to capture. At this point, it's mostly a war between recommender systems for your attention, as they've already consumed roughly all the available time.

...

> For me, the big issue with recommender systems isn't that they will destroy our minds, though that is a possible risk. It's the incredible waste of potential. Billions of hours of human time will be allocated today, guided mostly by clickbait incentives. The goal is to entertain people, not in a joyful way, but to help them dissociate.

> You have such an opportunity. There's probably a video on YouTube right now that, if I watched it, would inspire me to call my dad, talk to a stranger, or start a new relationship. Google could probably introduce me to a good friend, a co-founder, or my future life partner.

> They have the data, but they aren't using it that way. Instead, they're optimizing for a few more cents of advertising revenue, which is a colossal, civilizational-level failure.

...

> That is the crux of the incentives problem we've been discussing. One thing that gives me hope is we're no longer in the era of free software. Paradoxically, now that intelligence is cheap enough, people are willing to pay for software. It's more reasonable to charge for a subscription now because you can provide measurable value to someone's life. Paying $10 or $20 a month for a social media service that actually helps you live according to your goals is a much less crazy proposition than it was 10 years ago.

[1] https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/forecasting-the-future-of-r...

Post reply on HN