3 ms·

Deleting my Twitter and Reddit accounts led to me being less of that kind of online, which is a good thing. I still lurk around a little but don't have any atta

by gdulli 3y ago

Deleting my Twitter and Reddit accounts led to me being less of that kind of online, which is a good thing. I still lurk around a little but don't have any attachment to it. It's such a lack of imagination that the conversation always comes back to asking what's going to be the replacement for these sites. Why not move on? Both had already become unenjoyable even before their respective pivots to overt hostility to users this year.

73844739 3y ago
I'm always surprised people still talk about social media in terms of replacement tbh. Usually I take it as a sign someone either wasn't very engaged with a specific platform or that they just aren't that in tune with the mainstream in general. People lurk because they realize that's the actual experience they cared about. I know lots of people on Twitter/X but most don't tweet or even share their account because it's mainly a curated feed for them. Reddit is similar, it's a web forum replacement and if you're someone who likes interacting on forums still then great but for the most part the appeal is parsing the dialogue not contributing to it (or else they'd be somewhere like Discord talking to people they share any amount of greater social proximity to). I can see the appeal of writing off the platforms as dying or suffering because they failed in some fashion but imo it's mostly that as more social media platforms emerge and go mainstream the things they did well to achieve that mainstream appeal become elements of old platforms that people stop using but they still turn to the older platforms for the parts of the experience that haven't been replaced. Twitter and Reddit still lack good replacements for their niches (in the real way, not the "good enough" or "if more people used this competitor" way).

3 ms·

Deleting my Twitter and Reddit accounts led to me being less of that kind of online, which is a good thing. I still lurk around a little but don't have any atta

by gdulli 3y ago

73844739 3y ago
I'm always surprised people still talk about social media in terms of replacement tbh. Usually I take it as a sign someone either wasn't very engaged with a specific platform or that they just aren't that in tune with the mainstream in general. People lurk because they realize that's the actual experience they cared about. I know lots of people on Twitter/X but most don't tweet or even share their account because it's mainly a curated feed for them. Reddit is similar, it's a web forum replacement and if you're someone who likes interacting on forums still then great but for the most part the appeal is parsing the dialogue not contributing to it (or else they'd be somewhere like Discord talking to people they share any amount of greater social proximity to). I can see the appeal of writing off the platforms as dying or suffering because they failed in some fashion but imo it's mostly that as more social media platforms emerge and go mainstream the things they did well to achieve that mainstream appeal become elements of old platforms that people stop using but they still turn to the older platforms for the parts of the experience that haven't been replaced. Twitter and Reddit still lack good replacements for their niches (in the real way, not the "good enough" or "if more people used this competitor" way).