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In my opinion, social media like Facebook and Twitter were (mostly) fine before commercial interests killed them. There are plenty of reasons to connect with a

by phicoh 4y ago

In my opinion, social media like Facebook and Twitter were (mostly) fine before commercial interests killed them. There are plenty of reasons to connect with a group of people and have asynchronous communication. In many ways, current messaging groups are a poor replacement of early facebook and twitter. Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates. Over time, the initial concept of people who have something to say, watered down to liking or forwarding other people's updates. Topic-oriented discussion is great. But there is also a need to connect to a small group of people that just want to talk about random subjects that come up in everyday life.

moron4hire 4y ago
> Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates. I think where it went wrong was moneyed advertising interests forcing controversial content on people because they had a one-stop-shop to do it instead of the unmanageably costly operation it would have been to carpet bomb the PHPBBs of yor. Advertising was still a thing back then, but advertisers were not in a position of power. Popular boards like Penny-Arcade could demand a premium and had full editorial control. Smaller boards had less of a bargaining position, but only insofar as they were willing to annoy users. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth the day Gamedev.net introduced a one-time, full-page ad, that could be dismissed immediately, that only showed up when you first visited the site for the day. It lasted less than a week. Now you can't go 10 minutes on YouTube without getting essentially the same thing with a strict timer making sure you have suffered to a satisfactory degree before being allowed to continue on. If advertisers could track your eyes and make sure you were actually looking at the screen before engaging the timer, they would. It has nothing to do with user facing features on these platforms. It's the centralization and control that centralization gives to the owners of the platform that is the problem. Recall the 90/9/1 rule of the Internet. It's always been the case that 90% of people are nothing more than lurkers and the content is only created by 1% of people, with the missing middle commenting on it. Like buttons shifted the scale on how many people "engaged" with content, drawing from that 90% of lurkers, but didn't change the 9/1 part. That alone doesn't stratify people. It takes maliciously weaponizing that content against people.

by phicoh 4y ago

moron4hire 4y ago

> Where it went wrong was, in the case of facebook, the lack of control over the visibility of updates, and for both facebook and twitter, the lack of control on how to filter and sort updates. I think where it went wrong was moneyed advertising interests forcing controversial content on people because they had a one-stop-shop to do it instead of the unmanageably costly operation it would have been to carpet bomb the PHPBBs of yor. Advertising was still a thing back then, but advertisers were not in a position of power. Popular boards like Penny-Arcade could demand a premium and had full editorial control. Smaller boards had less of a bargaining position, but only insofar as they were willing to annoy users. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth the day Gamedev.net introduced a one-time, full-page ad, that could be dismissed immediately, that only showed up when you first visited the site for the day. It lasted less than a week. Now you can't go 10 minutes on YouTube without getting essentially the same thing with a strict timer making sure you have suffered to a satisfactory degree before being allowed to continue on. If advertisers could track your eyes and make sure you were actually looking at the screen before engaging the timer, they would. It has nothing to do with user facing features on these platforms. It's the centralization and control that centralization gives to the owners of the platform that is the problem. Recall the 90/9/1 rule of the Internet. It's always been the case that 90% of people are nothing more than lurkers and the content is only created by 1% of people, with the missing middle commenting on it. Like buttons shifted the scale on how many people "engaged" with content, drawing from that 90% of lurkers, but didn't change the 9/1 part. That alone doesn't stratify people. It takes maliciously weaponizing that content against people.