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Social Quitting
- galaxyLogic 4y agoI wasn't aware of how Facebook won over MySpace by using a bot to allow you to use MySpace THROUGH Facebook so you didn't really lose anything when you opened a Facebook account and started using it. Now why couldn't there be a service that was simply a super-bot, it would automatically open an account for me on all social media platforms. It would then post all my entries to all other platforms, relay the responses back to me. Why not?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Centigonal 4y agoThese exist for companies to unify their social media presence. See Sprinklr and Qualtrics Social Connect. I bet a personal service that does this will face efforts by platform operators to block them - but I'm sure that could also be circumvented.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoAnd before, many people were on ICQ, MSN, AOL, etc. Then before that you got BBSes, CompuServe, Minitel, etc. And before that you probably got Ham radio.
- wrycoder 4y agoDon’t forget IRC, USENET, and plain old email lists, like Mailman.
- travisgriggs 4y agocomp.lang.* I miss thee. Pre-the-spam that is.
- midoridensha 4y agoI never understood the attraction of Ham radio, outside the technical aspect (building fancy radio equipment) if you're into electronics, and I'm old enough that Ham was still a thing when I was growing up and I had one friend that was really into it. Unlike all the online services where there were separate channels for different interests, even back in the BBS/Compu$erve days, ham radio had no such thing, it was just random people. You might as well just go hang out at a bar and talk to random people there; the quality of conversation won't be any different.
- galaxyLogic 4y agoIt was a club. You had to pay for the radio to join, and you had to be skillful enough to operate it. In other words my kinda buddy. Now I wonder what if there was social media you had to pay to join?
- rendall 4y ago> Now why couldn't there be a service that was simply a super-bot, it would automatically open an account for me on all social media platforms. It would then post all my entries to all other platforms, relay the responses back to me. Why not? The part of the article's analysis about switching costs is spot on. Facebook is aggressive about keeping switching costs high. It is against the ToS of Facebook users to give their password to any service like that, and they will shut down any account they suspect does this.
- galaxyLogic 4y agoAh, but they did it themselves with MySpace! What's good for the geese.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago> against the ToS of Facebook users to give their password to any service like that What if it was not a service but an application I download and run on my PC? I'm not sure how ToS could forbid that, me running an application on my PC.
- TheHappyOddish 4y agoWhy wouldn't it? They can suspend your account for using a third party application to access their servers.
- slater- 4y ago"Ryan, you have a WUPHF on line 1"
- nostrapollo 4y agoHard to tell from my phone but are there any sources for the ‘exodus’ numbers? I don’t get the same impression that this post is laying out.
- PixyMisa 4y agoDoctorow is engaging in an awful lot of wishcasting here.
- ekianjo 4y agoIsn't he always?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Swizec 4y agoIt’s a vibe shift. The hard numbers may not be there (yet?), but the early signs are. Facebook has been dead for years, unless you count instagram. Twitter never actually caught on with the normies. Gen Z is on TikTok. In my friend groups everything that used to happen on Facebook now happens on private WhatsApp, iMessage, and Slack groups.
- ekianjo 4y ago> Twitter never actually caught on with the normies. Does not need to. That's where all journalists look for news. Normies then get their news from journalists. The circle is complete.
- nuc1e0n 4y agoDoctorow continues to be as wise as ever.
- idlewords 4y agoDevastatingly harsh but true
- esperent 4y agoUnfortunately I disagree. I always want to like Doctorow. In theory we have similar political views and I love that there's a famous writer who espouses them. But then I read his work and pretty much always find it lacking. For example, this post. It starts with a very clear point: huge numbers of users are leaving Facebook and Twitter, to the point where these companies are in serious trouble and will soon go the way of Myspace. But then... There's nothing to back it up. No data. You're just supposed to believe it's true because Doctorow said it and he's famous, I guess. Except that he always does this. Leaves out critical data, doesn't back up his points. So I don't trust him. Worse, I think he essentially writes wish fulfilment narratives aimed directly at people with my political leanings. These are close enough to the truth and even closer to what I want to be true, so they come dangerously close to short-circuiting the scepticism I work so hard to apply to everything I read.
- andirk 4y agoI too align with his critique of capitalism, but why does every article start with a picture of his head?
- ako 4y agoTrends can be observed without the actual data. The fact that he doesn’t have the data to proof it, doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I’ve observed the same trend, hardly anybody I know still uses Facebook, same for Twitter. WhatsApp however is an essential communication tool: sportclubs, schools, all use WhatsApp for last minute info. Not sure if Facebook/meta is in trouble, as instagram and WhatsApp seem to pretty popular.
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- mkl95 4y ago> This didn’t happen to Facebook and Twitter. Both attained a scale and durability that exceeded the networks that preceded them. For many people, it seemed like the operators of these services had cracked the nut of making eternal social media. There is a qualitative aspect to it that is not reflected by numbers yet. In the late 2000s to early 2010s Twitter used to be this cool new thing everyone wanted to try out. Now a significant part of society sees it as a cesspool.
- photochemsyn 4y ago> "Twitter got bought out by a low-attention-span, overconfident billionaire who started pulling out Jenga blocks to see whether the system would fall over, and when it did, we all got crushed by the falling blocks." I've spent years mocking Twitter for it's short character limit (designed IMO for the low-attention-span trend) and the siloizing/bunkering effect of Facebook and groups (where never a contrary opinion is tolerated, much like with many of Reddit's subreddits). As an experiment I created a Twitter account for the first time when Musk took over the platform. It's not terrible but not great either - there are some decent sources of information and interesting accounts to follow, but the search function is still very poor, and there's what feels like a lot of algorithmic optimization of engagement going on. Finding interesting and informationally accurate accounts to follow is a bit of a struggle, but once you do it's not too bad. I doubt it was drastically different in the past.
- Isamu 4y ago>designed IMO for the low-attention-span trend Actually the original idea was about posting to the web from SMS, back in the days of limited message size
- chime 4y agoAnd a precursor to group texting before it existed and when texts were 10c each for most people not on an unlimited plan.
- gonehome 4y agoThe other wrong thing about that quote is that Twitter hasn’t fallen over - it’s operating the same as it ever was.
- ISL 4y agoYep. I've ported myself over to Mastodon in case it is needed. The primary community that I interact with on Twitter has done the same. With that backup in place, everyone is still interacting on Twitter. The network effects are still quite strong. Search and useful recommendations are still excellent on Twitter.
- andsoitis 4y ago> these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate. Really? At what rate? Also, “contracting” would mean net outflow of users; are Twitter and FB experiencing that?
- ekianjo 4y ago> As I type these words, a mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. No. Given that the number of Twitter users is increasing the premise of this article is false.
- lanstin 4y agoMastodon has seen pretty solid increases in usage rhe last month or so. Certainly a lot of journalists, cs folks, and science people. and i believe Facebook usage has declined to the point it is discussed on earnings calls. Even very large and successful networked media companies can wither away (source: I worked at AOL once) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago>Mastodon has seen pretty solid increases in usage the last month or so. Certainly a lot of journalists, cs folks, and science people. can it be people are keeping double presence, and would like to switch to Mastodon when it becomes convenient or necessary to do so, but right now are also on Twitter.
- ekianjo 4y ago> Mastodon has seen pretty solid increases in usage rhe last month or so. Certainly a lot of journalists, cs folks, and science people. Even if it gains 1 million users it will get to a few Million users, it's nothing vs the 250M active users on Twitter. I like Mastodon but let's not pretend it's going to be a major network anytime soon.
- phnofive 4y agoTwitter is basically the only source for this, but is it true?
- incompatible 4y agoHow many of them are bots?
- orsenthil 4y agoHow does this apply to Whatsapp? The way I see, users of whatsapp cannot quit whatsapp. It is like quitting their phone.
- p1esk 4y agoWhat do you mean? What’s so unique about Whatsapp?
- simula67 4y agoNot much, but it has become the default way to share information for many groups: churches, friend/family groups, study groups, and even some government associations. If you do not have WhatsApp it has become very difficult to navigate life. For example, I had uninstalled it before going to college but had to reinstall it when I realized it might stop me from graduating.
- p1esk 4y agoStrange. I’ve never used it, and never needed to use it. Though I regularly use Telegram, Discord, Skype, Slack, and Viber. All conversations with relatives happen on imessage/facetime.
- npteljes 4y agoNetwork effect is what makes these platforms what they are - and what some, like Google Plus, couldn't achieve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
- phillc73 4y agoI managed to quit WhatsApp for about a year and have recently been sucked right back in. I nearly lost a significant sale because a client claimed they sent me a message on WhatsApp about a new purchase, which I obviously never received. It was only that about a week later I made a client contact call that I found out and the sale was made. More recently, my young son’s sporting clubs only seem to communicate crucial information via WhatsApp - is training going ahead, what time, which equipment to bring and changes in location etc. The above really made me realise that the vast majority of people care not a jot about the same things I do in terms of privacy and autonomy.
- travisgriggs 4y agoThere’s that old saying “God gave you two ears and one mouth, please use in that proportion.” So much of the social aspect of the internet has been about “giving more people a voice”, and we’ve chased that desire at the blogging, milli-blogging, micro-blogging level. I’m undecided, but I have a hunch that the increase in “speaking” via the internet has not increased at the same level as encouraging people to “listen.” I think there have been increases. Wikipedia is an asset I didn’t have as a kid. I can search for more stuff and read more stuff. But it doesn’t feel like they’ve increased at the same rate. Or put as quasi math, if M = desire/effort to use mouth and be heard online L = desire/effort to listen/ingest ideas of others online Then it feels like M/L is rising as a number over the last 2 socially netified decades.
- LarryMullins 4y agoSeems pretty simple. Like a noisy restaurant; if everybody is talking at once then nobody can hear anything.
- Gigachad 4y agoThat would be more like group chats. You hear the people close to you. Social media is different where a small group are screaming very loud and drown out the majority.
- ipaddr 4y agoI want to agree with your ideals but there are 1,000x more people who read and rarely share. The viewed stat on a top rate hn submission is probably 50,000 views on average where comments are measured in the hundreds.
- dibt 4y agoI wouldn't trust Cory Doctorow's anecdotal evidence on Twitter usage. His Like/View ratio is very low, and overall engagement for someone with 486k followers is some of the worst I've seen. Part of the issue is he spams his followers with retweets constantly, all day. People may not know they can turn off retweets for someone. They may just mute them, and continue to follow. It's very much like Cory to write a long article about this when really what's happening is him and the people he follows are becoming more irrelevant. 23 likes / 8,722 views = 0.26 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1612122825288208387 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1612122825288208387 44 likes / 9,384 views = 0.46 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611993024879554560 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611993024879554560 193 likes / 15,400 views = 1.25 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611976607845224451 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611976607845224451 44 likes / 29,300 views = 0.15 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611858168774098945 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611858168774098945 162 likes / 48,500 views = 0.33 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1610282255057813504 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1610282255057813504 I had to scroll a long time just to get those 5 because he's constantly retweeting. 1.0 is what you would want. Anything around 0.5 or less is really bad. He hardly has any replies to his tweets. IMO, replies and quote tweets are what people are using twitter for. He also links off twitter too much. SocialBlade stats: https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/doctorow/monthly https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/doctorow/monthly
- onion2k 4y agoElon's latest tweet has a like to view ratio of 180k to 20.2m, or 0.9.
- dibt 4y agoYou picked the most extreme example of any account. I'd bet Elon gets a lot of hate-follows. They won't like his tweets. You can see many real people replying to his tweets, so you can tell he gets plenty of engagement. For others without much engagement (retweets/replies), like Cory, all we have to go off of is likes, views, followers. I don't disagree that we can come up with a more accurate formula. Also, I gave percentages, so it's more like 0.9.
- btheshoe 4y agoIt seems to me that the deaths of Twitter and Facebook are being greatly exaggerated (by this article, and by the vibes generally). A decrease in users is not the same thing as a mass exodus. And I'm frankly skeptical of any claims that Twitter is facing an existential decrease in users.
- Gigachad 4y ago“The great resignation”, “quiet quitting” and now “social quitting” are all instances of the media turning tiny observed trends or even normal operations in to some great names social shift when the reality is not much has changed.
- andirk 4y agoSimilar to when a couple people move out of San Francisco and they call it an "exodus" and there are handfuls of articles making up these stupid claims based on a couple interviews of people moving to Austin or Portland or, in more fringe cases, Colorado.
- antipotoad 4y agoYet. The builders of the next generation of social tools are doubtless already busy. I’d venture to say we’re looking for the wrong thing, if we’re expecting the Facebook-killer to be another giant platform.
- Gigachad 4y agoIt won’t be HN user freedom social. It’ll be super tiktok. The platform of the year changes but they only get more invasive and more addictive.
- antipotoad 4y agoMy wish is that this big tech cycle has been long enough for us to have collectively learned at least some lessons about what’s desirable and what’s not in such vital communication infrastructure. Is it really good for human psychology to have these hyper-connected, star-maker platforms so prominent in our lives? Online fame does very strange things to people, warping the way they interact with their actual physical surroundings, and the real people who inhabit them. Brings to mind the girl doing her TikTok dance in the middle of a lecture. It’s quite bizarre, but worth trying to understand. Anyhow, none of this is to disagree with you, sadly. Except to say, I think there is also appetite for more humane technology, which doesn’t try to sink such deep hooks into us.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago> the operators of these services had cracked the nut of making eternal social media Now I wonder how many % of drug addicts successfully quit if it were free and legal. It sounds like a scary psycho jail in sci-fi movie.
- nokya 4y agoJust finished reading the article. I already started disagreeing with the author while reading the first line. Mass exodus? What is he referring to? How does he differentiate mass exodus from being simply out of touch with users' needs? Mass exodus from social networks looks to me like a typical low-signal-high-noise opinionated clickbait, not fact-based journalism. If there was a mass exodus, I think we should observe it from our own eyes. In my case, nobody around me is (finally) leaving WhatsApp and nobody is quitting Twitter. I don't have thousands of "friends" but I think I can assume that I would actually see these platforms bleed out if there was a mass exodus in progress, and more particularly, I'd see where they are going to. I think the author's vision appears to be constructed on the premise that he perceives social networks as all-powerful businesses ("Today, it’s getting harder to believe that these networks will last forever."). I think he is sharing his own delusion about social networks with the public and trying to find an escape to the dissonance that ensued from the decline of their stock price. For more than 5 years now, Facebook has been offering nothing more than a worldwide directory and a stalking service to its users in exchange for their data, in my opinion. If we do the analogy with a milk company, he is basically surprised that cows are leaving the farm because they don't get anything valuable in return (the actual customers are the buyers of milk). What surprises me though, is the fact that he seems to miss an elephant in the room. It seems to me that these companies are failing simply because they are engaged in a very expensive operation that doesn't generate a lot of revenue anymore. And the reason for this decrease in revenue cannot be simply explained with users exodus or attrition: Meta still owns Instagram, TikTok is doing very well and many social networks are reporting massive users intake. What is happening in my opinion is just pure simple and raw competition. Finally, he also seems to neglect the potential behind Meta's investment in metaverse tech. I wouldn't dare betting on this: there are thousands of signals worldwide that show that metaverse technologies could disrupt society the same way Internet and touch screen smartphones disrupted our daily lives. Nobody knows whether Zuckerberg is at the "right place, right time" for the moment, he may as much as he may not be. But if he is...