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Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a p

Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more addicting. And there was a whole culture around what it meant if you saw somebody (a crush?) visiting your profile, sending a "poke", or commenting on a picture. I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant, and I believe it was also not inconvinient for FB as they moved from home pages and Farmville to newsfeeds and now videos (which probably earns them more). Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.

decafninja 4y ago
This. Is such a business model like Facebook circa late 2000s simply not viable? How did Facebook make money back then before they turned "evil"?
- Noe2097 4y ago
  They weren't making money, were they? I guess it depends what you mean by Evil. Force-pushing ads and sharing updates about people you don't know because it could keep you connected so that you could see more ads, made them profitable. A free service that doesn't push ads can't be.
- kritiko 4y ago
  To quote Abe Simpson, "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you..." Facebook late 2000s was a very utopian vision of the social graph with Obama staffers bragging about the same tactics that were demonized by Cambridge Analytica. If anything, Facebook was more evil because of the data leakage then. The way that they made money then was still ads.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    as a FB sceptic and part of a Berkeley data science community, I visited FB on a group tour, in the first weeks of opening the Menlo Park Campus. We were told explicitly, with a ten meter wide screen in the back, that any analytics could run on their Map-Reduce stack for pay. The example was "people who bowl in the Minneapolis area" or something. Some nod to political or sexual extensions to that was implied but not explained. "You can run your code jobs on this data. We have customers now" the spokesperson announced to the Berkeley data science crowd of about 45 people. I regret not recording it on video. Much later, after personally running away from anything FB, this Cambridge Analytica scandal happened, and a picture of Zuck and wife walking with the King of Spain was publicized, and a picture of FB COO Cheryl Sandberg on a tour of a US Aircraft carrier and the fleet admiral in dress uniform was publicized -- I do not know how these transitions were managed socially but ... ?? How could anyone not see this? ugly, creepy.. against the whole FB consolidation here, from Day Zero.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
“Once the FOAF standard gets adopted, blogs will take over Facebook!” 2006
- throwaway346434 4y ago
  Yeah. So. What exactly is your point here? - a distributed, technically suitable protocol existed for describing yourself and your network? - that you had control of it? And thats... bad? - that large social networks saw interoperability and decided No! - it would unprofitable if we didnt own the whole game? Foaf was - and is - a very good vocabulary for a social network. Having a corporate centralist version lead to what exactly? Qnanon? Antivax? Neonazis? Astroturf? While foaf would not have been immune to this, the seperation between protocol and filtering aggregator would have at least provided a choice.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    My point is that I miss the mid 2000s. Better vision for the internet. We can still build it, though!
madeofpalk 4y ago
I don't think that gap actually exists. That "directory of people" is now people's whatspp/discord/snapchat/instagram/messenger DMs. I think people are over the one giant hirehose of people you're loosely acquainted with, so social media has split into two extremes - a big feed of content from others, like reddit/tiktok/twitter. And a lot more closed/private groups, like DMs, group chats, and discords.
- enraged_camel 4y ago
  Yes, the gap does exist. Back in the day you would meet someone IRL, get home and then find a friend request from them on Facebook because they found your page. Sure a lot of those went nowhere, but I became closer friends with a lot of those people as they kept engaging with my posts and uploads. Adding someone to private groups has a ton more friction. They need to download the app, you need to send them an invite, etc. It’s nowhere near the same as before.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    People the age as you were then are not having that problem now. Nobody wants that stalker product, and I hate having to play with Gen Xers fawning for the vestiges of that product once per year with new Facebook account just to coordinate with a Burning Man camp.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      How is this definitively true? Not everyone is great at socializing or having lots of friends or acquaintances where they’ll have other people’s info on the networks mentioned above.
      - yieldcrv 4y ago
        Because the current/younger people all have the different apps that provide that already People understand that their social graph is optionally transportable They can recreate it on any app just by putting in their phone number or letting the app access their contacts
ngold 4y ago
For some reason before MySpace was high school friends websites, that bordered on stalking platforms. In 1999.
jsemrau 4y ago
We have moved from a people focus to a content focused UX design. TikTok is this in perfection as while "creators" get millions of views, remembering them on scale is hard and following usually doesn't alter the experience much. The reality is that a "people directory" doesn't have the same level of engagement.
- saurik 4y ago
  The assertion wasn't that that model was somehow better or "more engaging" (as if that even means something is better...): it was that it is essentially now missing as Facebook pivots from being a social network to trying to do this other thing that is competing with their strategy to force people to "engage" more with their friends (which I 100% agree doesn't scale as well as engaging with dedicated creators).
- api 4y ago
  TikTok is basically an algorithm to crowd source superficially engaging content in order to keep people staring at the app as long as possible to show ads (and propaganda) while the app hoovers up data.
  - jsemrau 4y ago
    True. Yet if you look at it from a UI perspective. The name of the "creator" is tugged away on the most left which in most cases you wont see as you swipe away. Yes, you might see the face of the person who made it, but there is a multitude of videos without personally identifying features. Contrast that with LinkedIn, you see a post and the immediately visible information is the person who wrote it, what's his/her role is, and only then the content.
slategruen 4y ago
> people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006 I disagree with this one. They might be afraid of sharing their data explicitly i.e. sharing everything happening to them for everyone to see (even strangers). The trend now is sharing content to people they only have very close relationships with. But them being afraid of big tech collecting and analyzing their data? I don't think so.
- desindol 4y ago
  I believe the world is way more anonymous now when I grew up you could basically take the phone book look a name up and just call them. That's now mostly impossible.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Well, that's one specific communications channel. You mostly don't socially call people out of the blue outside of a very tight circle of friends and family--and cell phone numbers can't be looked up in general. However, many people--especially professionals--have LinkedIn profiles. And many in general can be searched on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Given someone's name and maybe a little more information about them, you can often look up a lot more than a phone number and address.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it, and now there isn't, and probably never could be again with how we all now feel about and regulate data privacy.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
        There isn't? I still get phone books every year from my landline provider. I haven't opened one in over a decade, but I still get them.
      - ghaff 4y ago
Diris 4y ago
>Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing. Like this? https://jasonrobinson.me/ https://jasonrobinson.me/ (uses https://socialhome.network/ https://socialhome.network/)
skummetmaelk 4y ago
> And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant A quick dismissal of the fact that this data collection was and is happening and has already had massive effects on society. Just because it is in the interest of "old" media to point this out doesn't mean they're wrong.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  What's important isn't whether they're wrong or not; it's whether anyone cares.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  “Old media” suffered far more from the competition by Craigslist and eBay, which drove away almost all their income in classifieds, which made up around a third to half of all income at average newspapers. And yet… there just wasn’t any criticism of those companies at any scale comparable to what Facebook gets. That’s evidende against this theory that journalists are somehow working for the commercial interest of publishers. Which was always quite silly anyway: if there’s one thing a journalist will always brag about, it’s how they screwed over their publisher with some story.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    That’s an excellent point. For all of the scams and abuses that could emerge from Craigslist, there was never a concerted media effort to label the platform as dangerous or untrustworthy.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      That's the image the media gave but this happened 10-15 years ago before the press turned on companies. Craigslist was untrustworthy, ebay as well. The whole internet was untrustworthy. Things only became dangerous when non-computer users got a cell phone.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
As long as people are unwilling to pay for social media the Insta's and Tiktok's will have to make money with ads which leads to data collection. Make no mistake the very fact that these services are free lead to their popularity.
ImPleadThe5th 4y ago
I know it will never happen, but I would love a resurgence of micro-blogs. All this talk of decentralised social media and all these new solutions, just to full circle back to self-hosted personal blogs. I feel like in the tech circle they never left, but they aren't consumed by the general population.
- beardedetim 4y ago
  Microblogs are _the thing_ just have always been "too early". Not sure _how_ this will work but I strongly believe that microblogs are the _end goal_ here.
- 9dev 4y ago
  I don’t think self-hosted will ever happen. Centralisation wins for consumer services. This has been proven even with the crypto shitshow, which revolves by and large around a few centralised platforms. On the other hand, are micro-blogs so different from TikTok stories, other than the format of the content (text vs. video)?
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    I don’t think self hosting can win either. As you’re saying. I do like the idea of everything like micro blogs not having to be on a central site. Though even that seems unlikely. It would be nice to have the format of blogs again where there’s different subdomains or domains and you can’t directly click thru to get to the rest of the “social media” bigger org. I sort of described substack here but a bit more personalization and independence if possible.
    - chasd00 4y ago
      is geocities.com available? i like being old enough to witness how back and forth the pendulum swings...
      - discardedrefuse 4y ago
        There is NeoCities. https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse
mrkramer 4y ago
>Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. This was Social Networking 101 and Zuck got it right and he won big but there are so many different forms of social networking that are possible and are happening today like ephemeral content(Snapchat), short videos(TikTok) etc. Video was and still is huge opportunity and you could see that from the astronomical rise of YouTube since 2005/2006 till today. YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world and the second most visited website in the world. Speaking of TikTok; the rise of TikTok was inevitable since Vine was also huge video opportunity but Twitter simple blew it away. If Vine had good leadership TikTok probably wouldn't exist or it wouldn't be as popular as it is today. And also YouTube and TikTok are sort of hybrid social networks in a way that they are modern form of TV entertainment platforms because you can passively watch videos and get entertained nonstop without interacting with anybody. So they are not really at the same conceptual level as Facebook is. >I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers. That's an entirely different thing than individual sharing private details of their personal lives.
  - mrkramer 4y ago
    Your business career is also your private life. Why would the whole world need to see it or anybody who uses the internet?
    - 4y ago
baby 4y ago
> The "people directory" I think this is Facebook's biggest issue: they moved from being a very useful tool to being the app that tries to drive traffic and engagement so much that it becomes less useful. I think they should refocus back on being a useful tool to keep track of friends, and keep in touch with people you meet, and then do the other stuff they want to do separately. Facebook IS still useful, but because of all the noise now people mostly use it to be able to contact old friends OR they don't use the close social network features that use to make facebook useful. > I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006 I think that's projecting. Many countries don't care, and many groups of people don't care.
- IgorPartola 4y ago
  But how would you make as much money as FB does off a very useful tool?
  - Noe2097 4y ago
    Probably the money that FB "generates" is literally insane, and doesn't make sense for a single company to generate. Possibly a mastodon based solution where users pay a small recurring fee for server management and some R&D and offering privacy, could generate enough benefits for a company (or companies) to strive. FB (among others) made us forget the sense of scale and the value of things, including the value of privacy and brain time. I would rather pay today from 1 to 5 USD a month for a service that works, where I can share my kid's pictures with my direct family and only them, with no ads.
    - baby 4y ago
      Most people would not be willing to pay for this, QED
      - arrosenberg 4y ago
        If people aren’t willing to pay for it, its either a social service or it shouldn’t exist. Facebook continued existence is subsidized by extremely lax regulation in the advertising industry.
vikramkr 4y ago
Of all the platforms today, linkedin might be the closest to that. Maybe that's part of why it's become so garbage - in filling a niche as a people directory its accidentally providing a half baked solution to the gap that used to be filled by old facebook.
CPLX 4y ago
> because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant What are you talking about? These assholes invented panopticon surveillance based advertising. Instead of making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars selling normal ads to normal people the way it had been done for decades (buy an ad on a page people who see the page see the ad) they pushed and pushed to climb into every corner of your digital life to know exactly who you are to squeeze out even more profits. Then they used monopoly power so gained to illegally crush all competitors while buying off the political leadership that should have stopped them. But this is somehow the fault of “old media”? Come on. The reason it would be hard to start something like that is because of overwhelming monopoly power these platforms hold and their commitment to using surveillance. In a sane freely competitive world these alternatives would already exist.
Delwtion 4y ago
I thought I would love Facebook but apparently people don't. My family do not share more than a few holiday pictures. No one really shared normal likeable lifevents. WhatsApp groups are totally fine and even showed me how little I care about constant updates from other life's. And no people also don't care what I do. People are busy. Family people think about school issues and handling their daily life and planing a family holiday.i care about science and politics. My mother cares about the next hiking tour. Google+ circle feature was already the technology highpoint of handling social media and no one really had the motivation to setup their circles or even use Google+. Even sharing specific things is hard. Over or under sharing: I would have loved to see much more of a friend's house building for example. While it feels like digital is the future, the people around you are. That's something Facebook and co teached me. It's a bad substitute.
- headsoup 4y ago
  Or, like forums with off-topic sections. Slow paced, the shared interests are obvious, you can private chat if you want and you can join multiple forums to meet your needs. This is only my opinion, but I think forums do everything necessary really, with the only difficult things to manage being: - good moderation - site maintenance Which Facebook et al really fail at with the former. I also personally dislike how Discourse attempts to make forums more like chat apps.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    How does Discourse do that? With their home page design?
  - chasd00 4y ago
    specific niche forums foster good communities IMO. I've been on a rocketry forum for about 4 years and it's a very close knit healthy community. There's a forum called "the watering hole" for general off-topic discussion, i'm not there often but it looks to be a good place. It also helps that the only ads/monetization going on are some banner ads from various rocketry store websites. The forum is run just as a service to the hobby and not to make money.
rvz 4y ago
> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing. It has been 6 years since Mastodon should have accelerated to be a viable alternative to Twitter and today the only successful Mastodon-derivative that is in operation is Truth Social; a centralized social network and even that has more users than Mastodon itself. I don't know but that already sounds like a failure, where it has helped the 'undesirables' get their own platform, unfortunately. But that's free software folks, where anyone can use it.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Does Truth Social have more people than the rest of Mastadon now? I thought it was mostly a dumpster fire. The SPAC stock isn’t doing well nor the insider behavior.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Personally I think Instagram (The core product, not stories or reels) is to today what Facebook and MySpace where back in the day. Obviously though that is being eroded away by Instagrams lack of confidence and insistence to fight TikTok, which I also find strange I mean yeah its a vertical feed of video but really why you go to it is really different for why you go to IG, TikTok has more in common with YouTube than IG.
- swozey 4y ago
  Instagram just did a huge update I think a week or two ago that makes it more like TikTok and people are revolting because it went from "see what friends are up to" to constant ad spam, worse than before. I always think FB/Meta is about to go the way of Myspace with a popularity drop off but I'm clearly biased as I deleted my account years ago and people still talk about using FB a lot.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    This specific decision might actually be that bad and may get rolled back, but people have gone up in arms about Meta’s decisions since the wall was introduced and the news feed was introduced. Plus other features like the FriendFeed acquisition cementing the like button. These are all things that people assume are obvious near requirements for social media and some other Web 2.0 sites.
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    I was an occasional IG user and that update was really jarring. I figured alright, I guess I’m not an IG user anymore, and I uninstalled the app without much hesitation. I think the ad spam was what did it. There was enough already, but it’s way over the top now. I had to constantly stop and check if I was seeing something relevant, as though there was never a long enough break from it to just enjoy my friend’s photos.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  IG doesn’t have any of the people directory. It’s heavily focused on bigger brands, profiles, influencers, and seeing random stuff from these entities I have no personal relation with. Facebook of old was like what the OP was saying. IG is only marginally like that with friends pic posts. This is regardless of whatever tiktok stuff since I don’t use IG much for the same reasons as OP.
earlyriser 4y ago
Shameless autoplug. What your friends are doing (and you are invited to join them) is the focus of my app Ferris.app Not a real directory as it's limited to the core circle of friends. Also no data-selling, ads.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
We probably need a social media craigslist that implements the basic features you are describing and then is ok with keeping things running without the need for growth.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
The problem with social media is that most people want to fill their free time consuming social media. But you have to have creators that want to create content for everyone else to consume. So you need to have some kind of addicting reward mechanism to get people to create content. (The simple upvote here and Reddit)
phreack 4y ago
Have you looked at Tumblr lately? It always sounds just like what people say they miss nowadays from social media. Its feed is chronological by default (for now), and it does allow you to customize your own page in a lot of ways. I feel it's inevitable that it'll become a soulless ad space like all others eventually, but it's not there yet. They're trying to monetize it with different approaches at the time like being able to boost a post's visibility without giving you any targeting tools, tipping, or giving another user a button to spawn crabs on the UI for a day. Will it last? Probably not! But it's not a terribly awful dystopic place yet.
- washyourdishes 4y ago
  Yeah I very much agree about tumblr. I’d plug mastodon as well. I think we basically do have social websites that work, are enjoyable and aren’t soulless. A big question is why are people complaining about one platform when they could be on another.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    Social graph lock-in. :( I use Mastodon and love it, but all of my IRL [weak ties] are on FB and IG. [weak ties]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties
- Kye 4y ago
  Tumblr puts an ad for the Tumblr app on your pages even if you put it under a domain. I don't mind plugging the platform I use, like the customized Posthaven plug on my blog, but I don't want an app install nag.
anonu 4y ago
I think there's a substantial part of society who don't want to be part of the people directory.
vineyardmike 4y ago
I completely agree that the “people directory” isn’t coming back due to to social hesitation. And I think I stand counter and say it was an anomaly that it existed. It existed solely because it was new. People have different identities across the internet and it’s best to keep them separate. You don’t use your work email for personal stuff. You don’t use your LinkedIn account when you want to create a Tinder account for a reason. I also agree that the “old media” trashed tech until people finally agreed it was bad. I think some of it’s justified but not all. I’ve long complained about the bias here. I think the shift of democratizing the voice of the people is only going to change society more (in the short term we may call this bad for democracy but I think it’ll be good in the long term). For example, no news site would have run a story about George Floyd, but thanks to social media we don’t need them to. The flip side is misinformation, of course. I think facebooks drive to video is probably benign trend chasing. I don’t know if it earns them more but I’m sure they’re lowering ad value in the short term until advertisers figure out how to make good ads on it. I don’t have data but I suspect the “home page and FarmVille” era died on its own and the newsfeed was facebooks way of injecting new life (as opposed to the NF killing individual postings)
dopa42365 4y ago
>because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006 People may say they're afraid of big data, but it's just mindless repetition of something they heard and doesn't affect their behaviour at all. 70%+ of them are mobile users on a first party app and happily receive targeted ads. Realistically, how many people use instagram etc. on a browser with an adblocker (especially on mobile), less than 1%?
jacooper 4y ago
> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing. And no body will use it, like how no one uses Mastodon. Because discovery on Activitypub is one of the worst especially on an independent server, where you are basically "tooting" to your self. Normal users don't understand what is an instance or what is a server. Which is fine, if advanced users adopted Mastodon it would be enough for the HN crowd, but they didn't because of the network effect.

decafninja 4y ago

This. Is such a business model like Facebook circa late 2000s simply not viable? How did Facebook make money back then before they turned "evil"?

Noe2097 4y ago
They weren't making money, were they? I guess it depends what you mean by Evil. Force-pushing ads and sharing updates about people you don't know because it could keep you connected so that you could see more ads, made them profitable. A free service that doesn't push ads can't be.
kritiko 4y ago
To quote Abe Simpson, "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you..." Facebook late 2000s was a very utopian vision of the social graph with Obama staffers bragging about the same tactics that were demonized by Cambridge Analytica. If anything, Facebook was more evil because of the data leakage then. The way that they made money then was still ads.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  as a FB sceptic and part of a Berkeley data science community, I visited FB on a group tour, in the first weeks of opening the Menlo Park Campus. We were told explicitly, with a ten meter wide screen in the back, that any analytics could run on their Map-Reduce stack for pay. The example was "people who bowl in the Minneapolis area" or something. Some nod to political or sexual extensions to that was implied but not explained. "You can run your code jobs on this data. We have customers now" the spokesperson announced to the Berkeley data science crowd of about 45 people. I regret not recording it on video. Much later, after personally running away from anything FB, this Cambridge Analytica scandal happened, and a picture of Zuck and wife walking with the King of Spain was publicized, and a picture of FB COO Cheryl Sandberg on a tour of a US Aircraft carrier and the fleet admiral in dress uniform was publicized -- I do not know how these transitions were managed socially but ... ?? How could anyone not see this? ugly, creepy.. against the whole FB consolidation here, from Day Zero.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

“Once the FOAF standard gets adopted, blogs will take over Facebook!” 2006

throwaway346434 4y ago
Yeah. So. What exactly is your point here? - a distributed, technically suitable protocol existed for describing yourself and your network? - that you had control of it? And thats... bad? - that large social networks saw interoperability and decided No! - it would unprofitable if we didnt own the whole game? Foaf was - and is - a very good vocabulary for a social network. Having a corporate centralist version lead to what exactly? Qnanon? Antivax? Neonazis? Astroturf? While foaf would not have been immune to this, the seperation between protocol and filtering aggregator would have at least provided a choice.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  My point is that I miss the mid 2000s. Better vision for the internet. We can still build it, though!

madeofpalk 4y ago

I don't think that gap actually exists. That "directory of people" is now people's whatspp/discord/snapchat/instagram/messenger DMs. I think people are over the one giant hirehose of people you're loosely acquainted with, so social media has split into two extremes - a big feed of content from others, like reddit/tiktok/twitter. And a lot more closed/private groups, like DMs, group chats, and discords.

enraged_camel 4y ago
Yes, the gap does exist. Back in the day you would meet someone IRL, get home and then find a friend request from them on Facebook because they found your page. Sure a lot of those went nowhere, but I became closer friends with a lot of those people as they kept engaging with my posts and uploads. Adding someone to private groups has a ton more friction. They need to download the app, you need to send them an invite, etc. It’s nowhere near the same as before.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  People the age as you were then are not having that problem now. Nobody wants that stalker product, and I hate having to play with Gen Xers fawning for the vestiges of that product once per year with new Facebook account just to coordinate with a Burning Man camp.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    How is this definitively true? Not everyone is great at socializing or having lots of friends or acquaintances where they’ll have other people’s info on the networks mentioned above.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      Because the current/younger people all have the different apps that provide that already People understand that their social graph is optionally transportable They can recreate it on any app just by putting in their phone number or letting the app access their contacts

ngold 4y ago

For some reason before MySpace was high school friends websites, that bordered on stalking platforms. In 1999.

jsemrau 4y ago

We have moved from a people focus to a content focused UX design. TikTok is this in perfection as while "creators" get millions of views, remembering them on scale is hard and following usually doesn't alter the experience much. The reality is that a "people directory" doesn't have the same level of engagement.

saurik 4y ago
The assertion wasn't that that model was somehow better or "more engaging" (as if that even means something is better...): it was that it is essentially now missing as Facebook pivots from being a social network to trying to do this other thing that is competing with their strategy to force people to "engage" more with their friends (which I 100% agree doesn't scale as well as engaging with dedicated creators).
api 4y ago
TikTok is basically an algorithm to crowd source superficially engaging content in order to keep people staring at the app as long as possible to show ads (and propaganda) while the app hoovers up data.
- jsemrau 4y ago
  True. Yet if you look at it from a UI perspective. The name of the "creator" is tugged away on the most left which in most cases you wont see as you swipe away. Yes, you might see the face of the person who made it, but there is a multitude of videos without personally identifying features. Contrast that with LinkedIn, you see a post and the immediately visible information is the person who wrote it, what's his/her role is, and only then the content.

slategruen 4y ago

> people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006 I disagree with this one. They might be afraid of sharing their data explicitly i.e. sharing everything happening to them for everyone to see (even strangers). The trend now is sharing content to people they only have very close relationships with. But them being afraid of big tech collecting and analyzing their data? I don't think so.

desindol 4y ago
I believe the world is way more anonymous now when I grew up you could basically take the phone book look a name up and just call them. That's now mostly impossible.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Well, that's one specific communications channel. You mostly don't socially call people out of the blue outside of a very tight circle of friends and family--and cell phone numbers can't be looked up in general. However, many people--especially professionals--have LinkedIn profiles. And many in general can be searched on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Given someone's name and maybe a little more information about them, you can often look up a lot more than a phone number and address.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it, and now there isn't, and probably never could be again with how we all now feel about and regulate data privacy.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      There isn't? I still get phone books every year from my landline provider. I haven't opened one in over a decade, but I still get them.
    - ghaff 4y ago

Diris 4y ago

>Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing. Like this? https://jasonrobinson.me/ https://jasonrobinson.me/ (uses https://socialhome.network/ https://socialhome.network/)

skummetmaelk 4y ago

> And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant A quick dismissal of the fact that this data collection was and is happening and has already had massive effects on society. Just because it is in the interest of "old" media to point this out doesn't mean they're wrong.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
What's important isn't whether they're wrong or not; it's whether anyone cares.
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
“Old media” suffered far more from the competition by Craigslist and eBay, which drove away almost all their income in classifieds, which made up around a third to half of all income at average newspapers. And yet… there just wasn’t any criticism of those companies at any scale comparable to what Facebook gets. That’s evidende against this theory that journalists are somehow working for the commercial interest of publishers. Which was always quite silly anyway: if there’s one thing a journalist will always brag about, it’s how they screwed over their publisher with some story.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  That’s an excellent point. For all of the scams and abuses that could emerge from Craigslist, there was never a concerted media effort to label the platform as dangerous or untrustworthy.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    That's the image the media gave but this happened 10-15 years ago before the press turned on companies. Craigslist was untrustworthy, ebay as well. The whole internet was untrustworthy. Things only became dangerous when non-computer users got a cell phone.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

As long as people are unwilling to pay for social media the Insta's and Tiktok's will have to make money with ads which leads to data collection. Make no mistake the very fact that these services are free lead to their popularity.

ImPleadThe5th 4y ago

I know it will never happen, but I would love a resurgence of micro-blogs. All this talk of decentralised social media and all these new solutions, just to full circle back to self-hosted personal blogs. I feel like in the tech circle they never left, but they aren't consumed by the general population.

beardedetim 4y ago
Microblogs are _the thing_ just have always been "too early". Not sure _how_ this will work but I strongly believe that microblogs are the _end goal_ here.
9dev 4y ago
I don’t think self-hosted will ever happen. Centralisation wins for consumer services. This has been proven even with the crypto shitshow, which revolves by and large around a few centralised platforms. On the other hand, are micro-blogs so different from TikTok stories, other than the format of the content (text vs. video)?
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  I don’t think self hosting can win either. As you’re saying. I do like the idea of everything like micro blogs not having to be on a central site. Though even that seems unlikely. It would be nice to have the format of blogs again where there’s different subdomains or domains and you can’t directly click thru to get to the rest of the “social media” bigger org. I sort of described substack here but a bit more personalization and independence if possible.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    is geocities.com available? i like being old enough to witness how back and forth the pendulum swings...
    - discardedrefuse 4y ago
      There is NeoCities. https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse

mrkramer 4y ago

>Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. This was Social Networking 101 and Zuck got it right and he won big but there are so many different forms of social networking that are possible and are happening today like ephemeral content(Snapchat), short videos(TikTok) etc. Video was and still is huge opportunity and you could see that from the astronomical rise of YouTube since 2005/2006 till today. YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world and the second most visited website in the world. Speaking of TikTok; the rise of TikTok was inevitable since Vine was also huge video opportunity but Twitter simple blew it away. If Vine had good leadership TikTok probably wouldn't exist or it wouldn't be as popular as it is today. And also YouTube and TikTok are sort of hybrid social networks in a way that they are modern form of TV entertainment platforms because you can passively watch videos and get entertained nonstop without interacting with anybody. So they are not really at the same conceptual level as Facebook is. >I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers. That's an entirely different thing than individual sharing private details of their personal lives.
- mrkramer 4y ago
  Your business career is also your private life. Why would the whole world need to see it or anybody who uses the internet?
  - 4y ago

baby 4y ago

> The "people directory" I think this is Facebook's biggest issue: they moved from being a very useful tool to being the app that tries to drive traffic and engagement so much that it becomes less useful. I think they should refocus back on being a useful tool to keep track of friends, and keep in touch with people you meet, and then do the other stuff they want to do separately. Facebook IS still useful, but because of all the noise now people mostly use it to be able to contact old friends OR they don't use the close social network features that use to make facebook useful. > I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006 I think that's projecting. Many countries don't care, and many groups of people don't care.

IgorPartola 4y ago
But how would you make as much money as FB does off a very useful tool?
- Noe2097 4y ago
  Probably the money that FB "generates" is literally insane, and doesn't make sense for a single company to generate. Possibly a mastodon based solution where users pay a small recurring fee for server management and some R&D and offering privacy, could generate enough benefits for a company (or companies) to strive. FB (among others) made us forget the sense of scale and the value of things, including the value of privacy and brain time. I would rather pay today from 1 to 5 USD a month for a service that works, where I can share my kid's pictures with my direct family and only them, with no ads.
  - baby 4y ago
    Most people would not be willing to pay for this, QED
    - arrosenberg 4y ago
      If people aren’t willing to pay for it, its either a social service or it shouldn’t exist. Facebook continued existence is subsidized by extremely lax regulation in the advertising industry.

vikramkr 4y ago

Of all the platforms today, linkedin might be the closest to that. Maybe that's part of why it's become so garbage - in filling a niche as a people directory its accidentally providing a half baked solution to the gap that used to be filled by old facebook.

CPLX 4y ago

> because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant What are you talking about? These assholes invented panopticon surveillance based advertising. Instead of making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars selling normal ads to normal people the way it had been done for decades (buy an ad on a page people who see the page see the ad) they pushed and pushed to climb into every corner of your digital life to know exactly who you are to squeeze out even more profits. Then they used monopoly power so gained to illegally crush all competitors while buying off the political leadership that should have stopped them. But this is somehow the fault of “old media”? Come on. The reason it would be hard to start something like that is because of overwhelming monopoly power these platforms hold and their commitment to using surveillance. In a sane freely competitive world these alternatives would already exist.

Delwtion 4y ago

I thought I would love Facebook but apparently people don't. My family do not share more than a few holiday pictures. No one really shared normal likeable lifevents. WhatsApp groups are totally fine and even showed me how little I care about constant updates from other life's. And no people also don't care what I do. People are busy. Family people think about school issues and handling their daily life and planing a family holiday.i care about science and politics. My mother cares about the next hiking tour. Google+ circle feature was already the technology highpoint of handling social media and no one really had the motivation to setup their circles or even use Google+. Even sharing specific things is hard. Over or under sharing: I would have loved to see much more of a friend's house building for example. While it feels like digital is the future, the people around you are. That's something Facebook and co teached me. It's a bad substitute.

headsoup 4y ago
Or, like forums with off-topic sections. Slow paced, the shared interests are obvious, you can private chat if you want and you can join multiple forums to meet your needs. This is only my opinion, but I think forums do everything necessary really, with the only difficult things to manage being: - good moderation - site maintenance Which Facebook et al really fail at with the former. I also personally dislike how Discourse attempts to make forums more like chat apps.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  How does Discourse do that? With their home page design?
- chasd00 4y ago
  specific niche forums foster good communities IMO. I've been on a rocketry forum for about 4 years and it's a very close knit healthy community. There's a forum called "the watering hole" for general off-topic discussion, i'm not there often but it looks to be a good place. It also helps that the only ads/monetization going on are some banner ads from various rocketry store websites. The forum is run just as a service to the hobby and not to make money.

rvz 4y ago

> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing. It has been 6 years since Mastodon should have accelerated to be a viable alternative to Twitter and today the only successful Mastodon-derivative that is in operation is Truth Social; a centralized social network and even that has more users than Mastodon itself. I don't know but that already sounds like a failure, where it has helped the 'undesirables' get their own platform, unfortunately. But that's free software folks, where anyone can use it.

skinnymuch 4y ago
Does Truth Social have more people than the rest of Mastadon now? I thought it was mostly a dumpster fire. The SPAC stock isn’t doing well nor the insider behavior.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

Personally I think Instagram (The core product, not stories or reels) is to today what Facebook and MySpace where back in the day. Obviously though that is being eroded away by Instagrams lack of confidence and insistence to fight TikTok, which I also find strange I mean yeah its a vertical feed of video but really why you go to it is really different for why you go to IG, TikTok has more in common with YouTube than IG.

swozey 4y ago
Instagram just did a huge update I think a week or two ago that makes it more like TikTok and people are revolting because it went from "see what friends are up to" to constant ad spam, worse than before. I always think FB/Meta is about to go the way of Myspace with a popularity drop off but I'm clearly biased as I deleted my account years ago and people still talk about using FB a lot.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  This specific decision might actually be that bad and may get rolled back, but people have gone up in arms about Meta’s decisions since the wall was introduced and the news feed was introduced. Plus other features like the FriendFeed acquisition cementing the like button. These are all things that people assume are obvious near requirements for social media and some other Web 2.0 sites.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  I was an occasional IG user and that update was really jarring. I figured alright, I guess I’m not an IG user anymore, and I uninstalled the app without much hesitation. I think the ad spam was what did it. There was enough already, but it’s way over the top now. I had to constantly stop and check if I was seeing something relevant, as though there was never a long enough break from it to just enjoy my friend’s photos.
skinnymuch 4y ago
IG doesn’t have any of the people directory. It’s heavily focused on bigger brands, profiles, influencers, and seeing random stuff from these entities I have no personal relation with. Facebook of old was like what the OP was saying. IG is only marginally like that with friends pic posts. This is regardless of whatever tiktok stuff since I don’t use IG much for the same reasons as OP.

earlyriser 4y ago

Shameless autoplug. What your friends are doing (and you are invited to join them) is the focus of my app Ferris.app Not a real directory as it's limited to the core circle of friends. Also no data-selling, ads.

spaetzleesser 4y ago

We probably need a social media craigslist that implements the basic features you are describing and then is ok with keeping things running without the need for growth.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

The problem with social media is that most people want to fill their free time consuming social media. But you have to have creators that want to create content for everyone else to consume. So you need to have some kind of addicting reward mechanism to get people to create content. (The simple upvote here and Reddit)

phreack 4y ago

Have you looked at Tumblr lately? It always sounds just like what people say they miss nowadays from social media. Its feed is chronological by default (for now), and it does allow you to customize your own page in a lot of ways. I feel it's inevitable that it'll become a soulless ad space like all others eventually, but it's not there yet. They're trying to monetize it with different approaches at the time like being able to boost a post's visibility without giving you any targeting tools, tipping, or giving another user a button to spawn crabs on the UI for a day. Will it last? Probably not! But it's not a terribly awful dystopic place yet.

washyourdishes 4y ago
Yeah I very much agree about tumblr. I’d plug mastodon as well. I think we basically do have social websites that work, are enjoyable and aren’t soulless. A big question is why are people complaining about one platform when they could be on another.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  Social graph lock-in. :( I use Mastodon and love it, but all of my IRL [weak ties] are on FB and IG. [weak ties]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties
Kye 4y ago
Tumblr puts an ad for the Tumblr app on your pages even if you put it under a domain. I don't mind plugging the platform I use, like the customized Posthaven plug on my blog, but I don't want an app install nag.

anonu 4y ago

I think there's a substantial part of society who don't want to be part of the people directory.

vineyardmike 4y ago

I completely agree that the “people directory” isn’t coming back due to to social hesitation. And I think I stand counter and say it was an anomaly that it existed. It existed solely because it was new. People have different identities across the internet and it’s best to keep them separate. You don’t use your work email for personal stuff. You don’t use your LinkedIn account when you want to create a Tinder account for a reason. I also agree that the “old media” trashed tech until people finally agreed it was bad. I think some of it’s justified but not all. I’ve long complained about the bias here. I think the shift of democratizing the voice of the people is only going to change society more (in the short term we may call this bad for democracy but I think it’ll be good in the long term). For example, no news site would have run a story about George Floyd, but thanks to social media we don’t need them to. The flip side is misinformation, of course. I think facebooks drive to video is probably benign trend chasing. I don’t know if it earns them more but I’m sure they’re lowering ad value in the short term until advertisers figure out how to make good ads on it. I don’t have data but I suspect the “home page and FarmVille” era died on its own and the newsfeed was facebooks way of injecting new life (as opposed to the NF killing individual postings)

dopa42365 4y ago

>because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006 People may say they're afraid of big data, but it's just mindless repetition of something they heard and doesn't affect their behaviour at all. 70%+ of them are mobile users on a first party app and happily receive targeted ads. Realistically, how many people use instagram etc. on a browser with an adblocker (especially on mobile), less than 1%?

jacooper 4y ago

> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing. And no body will use it, like how no one uses Mastodon. Because discovery on Activitypub is one of the worst especially on an independent server, where you are basically "tooting" to your self. Normal users don't understand what is an instance or what is a server. Which is fine, if advanced users adopted Mastodon it would be enough for the HN crowd, but they didn't because of the network effect.