I was always perturbed by the shift from calling them "social networks" to "social media". It signalled a friends-to-famous shift (plus ads) that I didn't particularly want.
Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.)
They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)
That makes sense in the case where people are mindfully connecting with particular individuals or organizations, and paying for that.
Not for where algorithms select media for you. That's not a "networking service", even if that is one of its hooks. Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service".
"Attention media" is more accurate.
But that also describes traditional advertisement based "media". Which earned its keep via attention access, by including unintegrated ads as a recognizable second component.
A description specific to the new form is "surveillance/manipulation media" or "SM media".
Attention-access funded media lacked pervasive unpermissioned surveillance and seamlessly integrated individualized manipulation. Where dossier-leveraged manipulation, not simply attention access, has become the defining product.
The funny thing about Facebook is that it's got a perfectly good social network in there, I think the only one that exists. In the menu is "Feeds" which is what you want. It only shows friends and followed things. If they made that the default when you go to facebook.com I don't think I'd have any complaints feature-wise, though an ad-free option would be nice. It's a genuine social network.
Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.
Wow, I did not know about this Feeds page despite being a daily FB user for 20 years (yes, to the ridicule of most people, I know). Thanks for pointing this out. I wish this was the default homepage or at least a way to set it as default.
Each feed has a unique URL, so you can bookmark it in your browser. For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser.
Goes to show how much my 300 friends use Facebook, I had to scroll at least 3 pages before I found a post from my grandma in law about her dog, and that was all for the next few scrolls. Everything else was followed pages that I actually don't care about and ads.
Wechat moments show you the things that your contacts post. There are theoretically ads too, but ever since they forcibly converted me to a US-based account I don't get ads because no one is interested in advertising to me.
It's too bad; I liked seeing the Chinese ads.
Comments on wechat follow the Maplestory system where you can see comments (on anyone's posts) from your own contacts, but not from other people.
Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails.
What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.
I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time makes your life actively worse even if in the moment you feel good. Social media should be thought of through that lens -- if you think you want to preserve "the good parts," you're like an alcoholic who keeps finding a reason to continue drinking. "No, the problem was just drinking alone. Now that I'm drinking at the bar, socially, it's OK!" To an extent, but mostly it's harming you.
Alcohol is bad health wise but probably is used to reduce the harm of social imposed stress between people.
So, If I think about it "like alcohol", it would mean "what is the root cause of not being able to keep contact with people". It might be that common social mixing places are probably much fewer than hundred of years ago - be it the local bar, gathering after a day of work in the field, public bathhouse, etc. Many of activities in the modern world seem very individual - maybe that is the problem, and people being social try to replace it and get tricked into worse things.
The difference is the "algorithmic" timeline (meaning ads) you get with Facebook, Insta, and co compared to the strictly chronological timeline you get on the Fediverse equivalents (Mastodon, Pixelfed). That it's less addictive, or at least not in the doom scrolling type of way, is more a consequence. Aka the enshitification argument.
Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation.
For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.
I think the problem is that people are lonely in ways that the medium can't address well, but does address to some lesser degree, so it elicits lopsided engagement. You're this whole person but people only ever react to this quirk or that one because those quirks come through better online, and over time those two quirks become a larger share of your personality. We end up with things like looksmaxxing--because pictures go online well, and it happens at the expense of whatever other characteristics of that person don't go online well.
I've been imagining a social medium which finds temporary peers via one of your phone's radios--so it broadcasts and gathers rotating public keys as you ride the same bus with people or share an elevator with them--and then your feed contains whatever they're posting, but only for 48 hours or something (unless you decide to make the connection permanent). That way when you see something cool in your feed, you're well positioned to go be social in meatspace.
Like I get why you don't bring your guitar on the bus, same reason I don't bring my drums on the bus, but if a few hours later I saw a video of you making some music I might be like "hey lets get together and jam" next time I see you.
The issue is the fantasy of social media doesn't convert well to reality. I've reached out numerous times "to jam" with people who have openly expressed a desire to, and... ...nothing. It's like a full conversation stopper. It's weird.
As far as I can tell the social anxiety takes hold, where someone might have their perceived fear of "being bad" exposed, so they recede back into their insular, online-only personas.
I take it you're a musician, and so I really think the only way is to take your drums (or guitar, or whatever) to the park or a local 'town square' and just get down to business. People will interact with you in whichever way they do, but at least it will be real, and possibly lead to real fruitful relationships.
> You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits
There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
Or how in a private group someone who was invited suddenly leaves the group membership, hops off the channel. Comparative to walking out of a meeting without saying a word and provide a reason. A simple "I enjoyed it here, but I have to spend my time elsewhere" is just simply a polite thing to do, and costs only 2 seconds of time.
> you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle
The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.
But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.
> Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response.
Asking someone a question online does not obligate them to take time to answer it, or even explain why they don’t feel like doing so.
You’re not in a conversation with everyone who is online, so the comparison to in person conversations doesn’t hold.
> Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
People are doing other things while using their computers and you should not expect to be able to commandeer their attention on demand by tagging them. Again the comparison to in-person social norms doesn’t hold because you can’t see if this person is busy with something else.
I find this sense of entitlement to other people’s instant time and attention to be very negative for any digital dynamic. Whenever someone with this attitude joins a group chat it leads to people turning their statuses to Do Not Disturb all of the time or even leaving the group because they don’t want to feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond to that one person every time that person drops a tag in chat.
I think the challenge is that the addictive formats will naturally outcompete the healthy ones because they’re, well, addicting. They exert a force pulling people into their orbit and starving anything designed for healthier (less frequent) engagement.
I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.
id say maybe marketing? make a "healthy" social network and frame the other one as really bad for you?
I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?
I would like to see social networks that facilitates real life, face-to-face encounters to a much larger extent that the current state of affairs. The Fediverse has the pieces to this puzzle, but I do not know of one project that combines them in the right way yet. We do have Mobilizon for events, we have Mastodon and all the other similar projects for sharing and commenting, but we need something that puts the pieces together in a new configuration.
I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.
But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!
VR/Group voice chat/Group messaging is fine too. For centuries, people have created and maintained meaningful relationships while physically and geographically separated. The circumstances of life do not always allow people to meet face-to-face. One of the worst sins of the post-pandemic "return to normalcy" was the wholesale firebombing of remote options for connecting with people.
The problem isn't whether the meeting is digital or not, it's whether the platform (a physical space or an app) facilitates high-fidelity person-to-person and small group communication consistently over time (the norm for healthy human community), or if it's set up to encourage unnatural para-social relationships and dysfunctional, anti-social communication styles.
When you say leave behind...do you mean you lose something by not interacting with them, or do you mean that you have some kind of duty to help get them un-addicted? I don't think you are obligated to go hangout at your local bar once a week just because alcoholics exist.
We have a duty to help them..and I don't think society gets this right in other places. We're not proactive about it. In religion and islam there's something called dawah, effectively preaching, but the idea is you're calling people to something with higher purpose and to eliminate all these bad habits. And I think it's the same whether online or offline. We need to help people. First you have to help yourself but then you have to go back and get everyone else. It speaks to a moral imperative we should all have to help our fellow man.
It’s not a small group of people that we can afford to “lose”. It’s widespread in an entire generation (at least), a fact that threatens our society as a whole.
Yeah the first three paragraphs of the article really resonated strongly and then the fourth was an ad for mastodon, which is only slightly less bad IMHO.
What we take for granted is it was always addicting, as far back in the 90s when we didn't call it social media. There was just a smaller privileged demographic frequenting it. That said, as much as it was the wild-west, it was probably "better" for us then than it is now.
Breaking an addiction is a personal journey not a problem to be solved at scale. I'd say it's potentially impossible to put the cat back into the bag. You can draw a corollary between obesity and social media. People will die fat because of their obesity disease, and I suspect the same might be true of their social media disease as well.
The alternative is you realizing social media is 'bad for you,' and taking steps to mitigate habitual dopamine release yourself, them smiling wryly at all the people compuslively checking their phones. It's all you can do, really.
I've known many people who met through games. They offer something similar, in the sense that you can meet new people and learn about them.
The synchronous nature of multiplayer games leaves most of this expression implicit rather than explicit, though, so for some people it doesn't fit the same need. It's a kind of role-play.
I think most people are, for lack of a better metaphor, blood-sucking vampires for honest, explicit, and carefully-crafted communication. People are pleased when I offer it, but they struggle to offer it back, so I learn to not bother. Most relationships degenerate into expressing things better left unsaid, or being entirely superficial.
The problem is social, not technical. But we've created a subsection of the populace who can only see things through the technical. They go out with their hammers looking for nails.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, and started to poke around with implementing something, I have more ideas but a bit of a chicken and egg problem, if people use it I'll keep working on it and trying to improve it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672734 - the end goal is very very very little/specific discoverability on the platform, even narrower than I have implemented today.
I will admit, one thing the crowd attention model does exceptionally well is surface the best comments on content. Whether it's HN, Instagram, YouTube, etc... the top comments are usually the "best", depending on how best is defined in the given context. On the silly Instagram meme videos my algo serves up, the top comments are invariably hilarious, often funnier than the actual content, and as you scroll it's impressive how the ordering by like count matches hilarity quite well.
This works on platforms like HN, Less Wrong or niche subreddits, which
i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them)
ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations)
Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree.
In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.
reddit lacks consistent moderation and the worst is location based subreddits, where all dissenting takes are effectively hidden.
Yet one can imagine a limited set of filters that could in theory fix this:
- eliminate obvious bots
- eliminate low content / metoo / naysaying
- eliminate memes
- detect and promote high quality controversial posts equally to unilaterally upvoted ones
And perhaps let subreddits conditionally opt in or out of each of ^, but have to declare which. We know at least half of ^ is easy, and now LLMs open new doors to potentially new automations, but its likely not cost effect yet.
still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.
Excepting small communities: if you're looking for anything but humor, sort by best typically ruins the comments.
Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.
PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.
Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.
This is a way to tell if something is social media or attention media.
"Surfacing the best comments" is only a problem at scale. And attention media demands scale whereas your social circles break down at scale. Commerce sites (like Yelp or Amazon) also demand scale, so they also have a "surfacing the best" mechanism.
> depending on how best is defined in the given context
That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).
"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.
Slashdot let you rate content across multiple dimensions.
I see no specifics about the scoring in the wikipedia article, but a search revealed that it was a simple, single five star rating scale. The same as on Amazon, and formerly Netflix?
"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. "
It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.
Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me.
For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years.
Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.
It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
> Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form
Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.
If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.
However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.
For anyone who doesnt know: unlike in Facebook you can switch off/pause random strangers posts in your feed by going to "content preferences" in your settings. Of course being Meta this reenables every 30 days, but makes for a way cleaner feed in between.
I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.
It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.
“Who is left on Facebook besides dopamine junkies and bots?”
“I only use it in this limited circumstance”
You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.
> who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
Political activists, like a former partner of mine.
… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …
… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …
… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
The cognitive dissonance in some of these posts is strange.
> one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
> The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
How are you confused about who still uses Facebook in one sentence and then immediately in the next sentence you describe yourself as a user and explain why it’s useful to you and the people you know.
The growth is across the family of products (inc Instagram and WhatsApp) not Facebook itself. Facebook itself is a zombie, and I don't believe they have a way to innovate out of it. I'm not going to predict the end of Meta, they have more than enough products, but agreed that it's actually quite difficult to understand who's really left.
There are some apparent niche communities both on Facebook and Instagram. Heavy metal and hardrock music fans is one group that hasn’t migrated anywhere else yet. I both play in a band and promote events, and both are still required in my geographic area to reach out.
it's like wondering why pubs or restaurants exists if I'm not visiting them everyday, but they do because they have other businesses (birthday parties, company events etc.). Look at Facebook for business.
Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.
It’s the worse. The algo will feed anything that makes you cheer or infuriates you. No middle ground. And God forbid if you dig to some disunion and you “like” something or stop scrolling in the “wrong” tweet… you’ll be getting similar content for months.
hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.
The funny thing about the friends feed is that it highlights for me who is extremely active on the platform. People resharing stuff all the time. And, it's one of the few feeds you can't endlessly scroll through. It will tell you to "check back later" once you get to 3-4 days of updates. No money in showing people their friends feeds, so why let them endlessly scroll.
It's literally what got me off Facebook for good. I used it less and less over the years, but would still log in once every couple weeks or so. At least it was always 100% content posted by friends or friends of friends, or at least something that was interacted with by someone I know. Then it seems like overnight they flipped a switch and it was 10% content from people I know and 90% completely irrelevant slop. I logged in one more time after that, and then never again.
It’s funny how everyone experiences their own Eternal September. Remember that there are 1.5 billion Indians. They’re on FB too and influencing the algorithm with what they want to see.
I’m quite literally experiencing a physical reaction whenever I need to browse some algorithmic timeline. Even YouTube, what used
to be a couple of related videos is now a wall full of “recommendations” - the unskippable ads on every video are more relevant than the actual videos…
Mastodon and related (for me Loops mainly) are a breath of fresh air and I wish more people can (re)learn to enjoy that.
YouTube recommendations are very well tuned for me. You need to mark videos "not interested" and downvote stuff you don't actually like, as well as stopping videos when you've decided you're not interested. This and other aspects WILL improve your recommended feed. So if your recommended feed sucks, well that's on you there bud, you can influence it completely.
Do you use youtube intending to be drawn into watching things you never intended to watch? I don't want a feed but the people operating these sites do not care that they are destroying people's time. Go to twitter, click on "following". Next time you sign in, somehow it's on "For you" (the algorithmic feed).
Thankfully on Youtube I can completely disable recommendations on the site and I use it purely as a source of information, not as a dopamine addiction funnel.
I just get the same videos recommended over and over. I liked it when the YT feed would recommend stuff new and different i might find interesting. Now its just hyperoptimized to get me to click on ads.
IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time.
To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks
I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me.
Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
> the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time
I guess you joined a crappy instance. The Explore feed on my instance is freakin' awesome and full of a constant stream of interesting and enjoyable posts by cool people. Mastodon isn't very optimal when you join the biggest instances on the network (like mastodon.social or similar). The tech is best experienced with invite-only communities of people who agree on a basic set of standards for their social experience.
This might be controversial. Please disagree with me.
When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.
So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
"We deserve it" is the tldr I gather from you here, just like people addicted to opiates are ultimately responsible for the way those drug companies systematically set them up for that, right?
I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.
I appreciate your comment, and how you argued your disagreement. Yet I think you missed something in GPs post.
First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on.
I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted.
Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature.
Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things.
I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.
Between the history of crack cocaine in inner cities, safe injection sites and the current trajectory of American governance, I’m flummoxed by your incredulous posture here.
Of course we did. We all switched from early social media sites that didn't employ such algorithms to those that did, and when new social media platforms came around we progressively moved to more algorithmic ones. Hell half the reason I switched from myspace to facebook was the opportunity to do all the facebook quizzes which were just "let's see how much information I can feed the algorithm". We all want a steady stream of content we find personally interesting and engaging, why wouldn't we? Our issue with most of these sites is when the algorithm fails to give us what we want, and we complain "I didn't ask to see this" but the fact is we are asking to see something, and we receive it often enough to stay on these platforms.
I think your experiment was valid, even if anecdotal. This article from January 2009 was talking about the phenomena of what it actually meant to have friends on facebook. Are you a "loser" or a "social slut"? This was at least a few years before most of the algorithms that we perceive as dangerous and enshittifying became core to the platform. The specific study they referenced (new link below) argued that there is genetic components in how we perceive our social networks.
Where FB and Instagram are to blame is not just being aware of the psychological impact but amplifying it make it worse, especially onto a teen audience that has no capability of distinguishing the real world from social media. To them, it's the exact same. Your online social circle may be all you have in real life, not to mention the cyber bullying, unrealistic body standards and all the other awful parts that come when you gamify and reward capturing people's attention.
I won't deny that individuals are also responsible to guard themselves and especially parents, but these platforms have been accused (and are currently in US court) over the fact that they knew about the addictive potential of their platforms and made no safeguards over improving that. As a platform owner, you are responsible for all aspects of its success and failures, its highs and lows.
Readit News
Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.)
They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)
Not for where algorithms select media for you. That's not a "networking service", even if that is one of its hooks. Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service".
"Attention media" is more accurate.
But that also describes traditional advertisement based "media". Which earned its keep via attention access, by including unintegrated ads as a recognizable second component.
A description specific to the new form is "surveillance/manipulation media" or "SM media".
Attention-access funded media lacked pervasive unpermissioned surveillance and seamlessly integrated individualized manipulation. Where dossier-leveraged manipulation, not simply attention access, has become the defining product.
Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.
Ctrl+D?
in europe
For ages it was Top Stories vs Most Recent. Most Recent didn't even work, and of course it would always change you back to Top Stories
With all the potential of the internet, we got stuck with fucking Zuckerberg? We know what he thinks about people.
Wechat moments show you the things that your contacts post. There are theoretically ads too, but ever since they forcibly converted me to a US-based account I don't get ads because no one is interested in advertising to me.
It's too bad; I liked seeing the Chinese ads.
Comments on wechat follow the Maplestory system where you can see comments (on anyone's posts) from your own contacts, but not from other people.
What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.
So, If I think about it "like alcohol", it would mean "what is the root cause of not being able to keep contact with people". It might be that common social mixing places are probably much fewer than hundred of years ago - be it the local bar, gathering after a day of work in the field, public bathhouse, etc. Many of activities in the modern world seem very individual - maybe that is the problem, and people being social try to replace it and get tricked into worse things.
Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation.
For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.
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I've been imagining a social medium which finds temporary peers via one of your phone's radios--so it broadcasts and gathers rotating public keys as you ride the same bus with people or share an elevator with them--and then your feed contains whatever they're posting, but only for 48 hours or something (unless you decide to make the connection permanent). That way when you see something cool in your feed, you're well positioned to go be social in meatspace.
Like I get why you don't bring your guitar on the bus, same reason I don't bring my drums on the bus, but if a few hours later I saw a video of you making some music I might be like "hey lets get together and jam" next time I see you.
As far as I can tell the social anxiety takes hold, where someone might have their perceived fear of "being bad" exposed, so they recede back into their insular, online-only personas.
I take it you're a musician, and so I really think the only way is to take your drums (or guitar, or whatever) to the park or a local 'town square' and just get down to business. People will interact with you in whichever way they do, but at least it will be real, and possibly lead to real fruitful relationships.
There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
Or how in a private group someone who was invited suddenly leaves the group membership, hops off the channel. Comparative to walking out of a meeting without saying a word and provide a reason. A simple "I enjoyed it here, but I have to spend my time elsewhere" is just simply a polite thing to do, and costs only 2 seconds of time.
Social media has strong parasocial tendencies.
The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.
But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.
Asking someone a question online does not obligate them to take time to answer it, or even explain why they don’t feel like doing so.
You’re not in a conversation with everyone who is online, so the comparison to in person conversations doesn’t hold.
> Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
People are doing other things while using their computers and you should not expect to be able to commandeer their attention on demand by tagging them. Again the comparison to in-person social norms doesn’t hold because you can’t see if this person is busy with something else.
I find this sense of entitlement to other people’s instant time and attention to be very negative for any digital dynamic. Whenever someone with this attitude joins a group chat it leads to people turning their statuses to Do Not Disturb all of the time or even leaving the group because they don’t want to feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond to that one person every time that person drops a tag in chat.
I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.
I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?
Don't start drinking or smoking, because with this logic you'll have a really hard time quitting
I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.
But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!
The problem isn't whether the meeting is digital or not, it's whether the platform (a physical space or an app) facilitates high-fidelity person-to-person and small group communication consistently over time (the norm for healthy human community), or if it's set up to encourage unnatural para-social relationships and dysfunctional, anti-social communication styles.
Real world connection and a strong foundation of core friends, perhaps?
The alternative is you realizing social media is 'bad for you,' and taking steps to mitigate habitual dopamine release yourself, them smiling wryly at all the people compuslively checking their phones. It's all you can do, really.
The synchronous nature of multiplayer games leaves most of this expression implicit rather than explicit, though, so for some people it doesn't fit the same need. It's a kind of role-play.
I think most people are, for lack of a better metaphor, blood-sucking vampires for honest, explicit, and carefully-crafted communication. People are pleased when I offer it, but they struggle to offer it back, so I learn to not bother. Most relationships degenerate into expressing things better left unsaid, or being entirely superficial.
i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them) ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations)
Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree.
In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.
Sadly that is all that reddit is, now. Have a serious question? Expect multiple top replies to be some sort of [un]funny joke answer.
It's a wasteland and devalues the platform when everyone competes for Internet Points.
/r/aviation is just one example of being full of this crap.
Oddly enough, I don't see it as much in gaming subreddits, even the more generic ones.
Yet one can imagine a limited set of filters that could in theory fix this:
And perhaps let subreddits conditionally opt in or out of each of ^, but have to declare which. We know at least half of ^ is easy, and now LLMs open new doors to potentially new automations, but its likely not cost effect yet.still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.
Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.
PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.
Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.
"Surfacing the best comments" is only a problem at scale. And attention media demands scale whereas your social circles break down at scale. Commerce sites (like Yelp or Amazon) also demand scale, so they also have a "surfacing the best" mechanism.
That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).
"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.
I see no specifics about the scoring in the wikipedia article, but a search revealed that it was a simple, single five star rating scale. The same as on Amazon, and formerly Netflix?
Facebook on the other hand has become too very bad.
Is it your intention to suggest that the highest possible form of commenting is humorous?
It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.
Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.
It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.
If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.
However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.
I gave up about 4 years ago as I was seeing 1 post from a friend, 3 ads, and then lots of random stranger posts.
My friends gave up too.
I have tons of private groups chats and share stuff with people I care about there.
It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.
The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
“I only use it in this limited circumstance”
You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.
Political activists, like a former partner of mine.
… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …
… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …
… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
- Older folks.
- People using marketplace
- People exchanging inter-personal tips and info: best stroller, contractor, etc.
Not saying FB is best for those things but it doesn’t seem dead at all.
> one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
> The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
How are you confused about who still uses Facebook in one sentence and then immediately in the next sentence you describe yourself as a user and explain why it’s useful to you and the people you know.
It’s crazy how bad it has become.
I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.
They clearly work for advertisers, and that's all that matters.
Mastodon and related (for me Loops mainly) are a breath of fresh air and I wish more people can (re)learn to enjoy that.
Thankfully on Youtube I can completely disable recommendations on the site and I use it purely as a source of information, not as a dopamine addiction funnel.
To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks
Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
How do you discover new people? I'd say some people I followed I discovered them thanks for the feed
I guess you joined a crappy instance. The Explore feed on my instance is freakin' awesome and full of a constant stream of interesting and enjoyable posts by cool people. Mastodon isn't very optimal when you join the biggest instances on the network (like mastodon.social or similar). The tech is best experienced with invite-only communities of people who agree on a basic set of standards for their social experience.
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When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.
So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.
First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on.
I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted.
Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature.
Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things.
I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.
Imagine the government saw the fentanyl crisis and started making fentanyl to support the habits of its citizens.
Not every single trend humans take on should be encouraged. We can be dumb as individuals, as well as collectively. At least in bursts.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/200901/faceb...https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0806746106
Where FB and Instagram are to blame is not just being aware of the psychological impact but amplifying it make it worse, especially onto a teen audience that has no capability of distinguishing the real world from social media. To them, it's the exact same. Your online social circle may be all you have in real life, not to mention the cyber bullying, unrealistic body standards and all the other awful parts that come when you gamify and reward capturing people's attention.
I won't deny that individuals are also responsible to guard themselves and especially parents, but these platforms have been accused (and are currently in US court) over the fact that they knew about the addictive potential of their platforms and made no safeguards over improving that. As a platform owner, you are responsible for all aspects of its success and failures, its highs and lows.