When 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 social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world.
I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!
But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.
What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.
Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the âsocially connected academic peer exchangeâ or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share oneâs 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 growing too fast though â it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
I do wonder if this is just a symptom of monetization. Free advertising with viral posts was possible for talented marketers until the early 2010s. Now you have to pay.
OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger. Meeting this person in person sometime later, it turned out this message was never delivered. They'd thought I was working for the company that sued them.
Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.
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 not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.
This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.
The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally nichĂŠ musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.
The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.
Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.
Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.
I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely.
Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others.
Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.
Yes, I try to do that. Publish my own ideas, feeling, etc in whatever style and mood I feel is right. That style changes. The mood changes. The writiny style changes with it. And that is fine.
But every now and then I find someone linking to one of my articles with some mean comment. And I'm thinking, do these people have nothing better to do than to thrash at other people?! Do they want to bring everybody down, like you've said about the same mean jokes?
Like it has been observed here countless of times, these small islands exist, but they have been drowned by the reddits of our time. It is hard to find them. Hard to build a following, as a writer. Hard to search for that something special that speaks from its heart.
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.
Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that arenât (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
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 weâve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly donât know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind, and it's not common for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves as they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall.
It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
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.
That's what Something Awful does and it's kept them going to this day against all odds. I don't think it would scale though, having to pay money every time you get banned wouldn't mix well with the opaque, inconsistent moderation of huge platforms, or their perverse profit incentives.
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 $1 on something non-essential.
Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and thatâs your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations.
In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification.
> It just sucks
I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.
When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.
That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)
Thereâs a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.
The algorithmic feed should be banned for all public discourse.
That is whatâs killing us (quite literally).
Let topics be searchable and people should find what they need.
Very simple algorithms such as âmost recent conversationâ may be allowed.
I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff.
I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
I would argue that financialization of the social media is what made it fail. Once thereâs direct dollar cost to your posts, ideas and etc., the incentives change from âfunâ to âcommercialâ. That started heavily around 2017ish, where every social media switched to algorithm-first, and heavily started tracking engagement/attention per post.
"The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.
> The problem is that people are addicted to tension
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they donât know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.
I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
I 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 content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
Mastodon literally has a trending feed. Is that not an "algorithm"? It has algorithmic popular hashtags, news feed, and user recommendations. Just a bog standard handful of algorithmic surfaces, so why are they still pretending like it's "algorithm free" is beyond me. "Absolute lack", right.
Not to mention "sort by most recent from accounts I follow" is an algorithm too.
I feel like the wording needs a bit of rewording/rework. I agree chronological order facilitates better discussions, but just saying that "Mastodon lacks algorithms" doesn't really help people understand things better.
Unfortunately, we discovered that people would rather be told what to watch, rather that self-discover their interests, because thatâs a lot of âworkâ.
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.
Businesses find a talking point, an angle, something that seems plausible to its potential users, as politics does to its potential voters.
Once hooked, it tries to keep the illusion with whatever means, as long as the org is profitable.
One company I worked for had this preposterous add on its career page. I joined and soon realized it was fake, half of the tech listed wasn't used on the project. But the add was still up, new people were still joining. If you bite, if you didn't ask the right questions, that's your problem.
I don't like it, but I have a feeling that that's the "dog eat dog" reality we live in. Might as well adapt to it than complaining.
I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.
Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the âtrueâ subreddits)
I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience.
I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.
I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.
I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response.
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.
Unfortunately it's an incredible tool, especially for industries which pray on people's insecurities like beauty - botox, fillers etc. This person I know puts instagram story and gets instantly booked for all free slots she has for the entire week.
She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".
If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.
Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this.
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
Doesnât this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your âeditorâ only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see.
And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, whatâs stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
The same problems people
cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.
Nitpick: Around 60% of the world population live in urban areas, and if a lot of people decide to live in a particular rural area, then it quickly faces urbanization.
Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute.
Triple that for families with small kids.
Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).
unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.
SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.
anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.)
What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.
It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.
(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)
I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.
Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.
It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.
Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.
FB is not a ghost town, you think that it is because no "thought leader" of the stuff you are interested in (tech, finance, business, stock market etc.) has their major presence or main channel of distribution of content on FB as they are mostly on YT and Twitter.
reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).
everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.
I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.
The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming.
We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies.
People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.
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You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start.
There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.
It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash.
Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...
By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).
The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.
HN is the same echo chamber though. This same topic posted here every single week from random blogs to The Guardian, everyone posts their anecdotes, group hug, taps on the back and back to nothing. Rinse and repeat next week. You could just copy paste the top comments from the previous posts if you want some free karma.
Tangentially 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 and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
> someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
Itâs is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I donât think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.
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).
The problem is that ultimately it connects people around ideas because it isnât taking place in the world, and everyoneâs ideas are tired strange remixes of things we happened to grow up around
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit â 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 statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.
Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.
What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit â we have exhausted the capacity to care.
No one goes to the beach anymoreâthere are too many people there.
When 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 social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world.
I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!
But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.
What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.
Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the âsocially connected academic peer exchangeâ or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share oneâs 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 growing too fast though â it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
Ironically, searching "scape web app" today shows "Scape | AI-native CRM that captures all your conversations" which felt very on the nose.
Please continue
Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.
I do wonder if this is just a symptom of monetization. Free advertising with viral posts was possible for talented marketers until the early 2010s. Now you have to pay.
OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger. Meeting this person in person sometime later, it turned out this message was never delivered. They'd thought I was working for the company that sued them.
Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.
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 not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.
This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.
The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally nichĂŠ musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.
The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.
Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.
Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.
I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely.
Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others.
Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.
Yes, I try to do that. Publish my own ideas, feeling, etc in whatever style and mood I feel is right. That style changes. The mood changes. The writiny style changes with it. And that is fine.
But every now and then I find someone linking to one of my articles with some mean comment. And I'm thinking, do these people have nothing better to do than to thrash at other people?! Do they want to bring everybody down, like you've said about the same mean jokes?
Like it has been observed here countless of times, these small islands exist, but they have been drowned by the reddits of our time. It is hard to find them. Hard to build a following, as a writer. Hard to search for that something special that speaks from its heart.
Anyway.
And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers
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.
Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that arenât (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 weâve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly donât know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
> to me the difference is plain to see.
Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind, and it's not common for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves as they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall.
It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.
Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
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.
That's what Something Awful does and it's kept them going to this day against all odds. I don't think it would scale though, having to pay money every time you get banned wouldn't mix well with the opaque, inconsistent moderation of huge platforms, or their perverse profit incentives.
> 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 $1 on something non-essential.
Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
> Would serve as an automatic "You're 18"
You donât need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).
https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/
https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a...
And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and thatâs your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations.
In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification.
> It just sucks
I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.
When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.
That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)
There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars
I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
I never heard of the Meow Wars, but I do remember antiorp, a net-art mailing list disruption organisation:
https://everything2.com/title/antiorp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)
EDIT: clarity
I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great.
It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.
Thereâs a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.
The algorithmic feed should be banned for all public discourse. That is whatâs killing us (quite literally). Let topics be searchable and people should find what they need. Very simple algorithms such as âmost recent conversationâ may be allowed.
I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff.
I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
I would argue that financialization of the social media is what made it fail. Once thereâs direct dollar cost to your posts, ideas and etc., the incentives change from âfunâ to âcommercialâ. That started heavily around 2017ish, where every social media switched to algorithm-first, and heavily started tracking engagement/attention per post.
"The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.
> The problem is that people are addicted to tension
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they donât know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
Is Tumblr doing fine financially?
I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.
I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
Now owned by Automattic.
I 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 content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
Mastodon literally has a trending feed. Is that not an "algorithm"? It has algorithmic popular hashtags, news feed, and user recommendations. Just a bog standard handful of algorithmic surfaces, so why are they still pretending like it's "algorithm free" is beyond me. "Absolute lack", right.
Not to mention "sort by most recent from accounts I follow" is an algorithm too.
I feel like the wording needs a bit of rewording/rework. I agree chronological order facilitates better discussions, but just saying that "Mastodon lacks algorithms" doesn't really help people understand things better.
Unfortunately, we discovered that people would rather be told what to watch, rather that self-discover their interests, because thatâs a lot of âworkâ.
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.
It didn't "promise" anything, to be fair.
Businesses find a talking point, an angle, something that seems plausible to its potential users, as politics does to its potential voters.
Once hooked, it tries to keep the illusion with whatever means, as long as the org is profitable.
One company I worked for had this preposterous add on its career page. I joined and soon realized it was fake, half of the tech listed wasn't used on the project. But the add was still up, new people were still joining. If you bite, if you didn't ask the right questions, that's your problem.
I don't like it, but I have a feeling that that's the "dog eat dog" reality we live in. Might as well adapt to it than complaining.
Social media is actually anti social. Meeting real people and making real connections is social.
I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.
Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's going away.
So long as the same incentives stay in place, we're going to get the same results. Change the names yet it's all the same.
Just like drugs, but most people understand you should have respect for them.
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:
Like 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?
IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the âtrueâ subreddits)
I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience.
I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.
I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested:
https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/
I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.
Search for "bridging based ranking". The X community notes algorithm does that. I think it should be applied to all content.
I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response.
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.
Unfortunately it's an incredible tool, especially for industries which pray on people's insecurities like beauty - botox, fillers etc. This person I know puts instagram story and gets instantly booked for all free slots she has for the entire week.
She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".
If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.
I love the term "semantic sludge"
Just because something is bad, that doesn't that these are its last days.
Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this.
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
Doesnât this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your âeditorâ only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see.
And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, whatâs stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
The same problems people cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.
Nitpick: Around 60% of the world population live in urban areas, and if a lot of people decide to live in a particular rural area, then it quickly faces urbanization.
I went to NYC the other day. There was lots of diverse interesting stuff. Not full of people who looked just like me.
Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute.
Triple that for families with small kids.
Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).
These "internet is dead" articles are coming across as more robotic than actual robot content these days.
unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.
SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.
anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.)
What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.
It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.
(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)
> FB is a ghost town
I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.
Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.
It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.
Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.
> > FB is a ghost town
FB is not a ghost town, you think that it is because no "thought leader" of the stuff you are interested in (tech, finance, business, stock market etc.) has their major presence or main channel of distribution of content on FB as they are mostly on YT and Twitter.
reddit has a lot of sick puppies of all sorts and kinds. that is not a place of wellness in any sense ime.
reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).
everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.
> Social media was built on the romance of authenticity.
It never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.
I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.
The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming. We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies. People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.
Subscribe and hit that bell notification button for more content.
Facebook died with the like button. Twitter died with retweets.
You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start.
There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.
There was no algorithm in the original Facebook and Twitter.
The echo chamber you got was the same you get in real life: your friends and family may share your pov and bias.
It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash.
Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...
By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).
The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.
HN is the same echo chamber though. This same topic posted here every single week from random blogs to The Guardian, everyone posts their anecdotes, group hug, taps on the back and back to nothing. Rinse and repeat next week. You could just copy paste the top comments from the previous posts if you want some free karma.
Tangentially 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 and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
> someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
Itâs is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I donât think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.
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).
The problem is that ultimately it connects people around ideas because it isnât taking place in the world, and everyoneâs ideas are tired strange remixes of things we happened to grow up around
eh, I'd say monetization/gamification was the issue.
bet a social media without likes, organized in circles, would be way less toxic.
More regulation and mandatory cool-downs to whatever is called âsocial mediaâ because AI slop and bot-girls? Sounds reasonable /s
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit â 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 statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.
Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.
What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit â we have exhausted the capacity to care.
No one goes to the beach anymoreâthere 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?