20 ms·

The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

• PaulHoule 3y ago
  Something on my mind is how to build a non-toxic engagement model and I am finally getting a clear picture of how to do it. You can make a pretty good engagement model for Hacker News based on headlines by filtering for posts with > 10 votes and predicting the ratio of comments to votes. The trouble is that "high engagement" posts are frequently clickbait. I suspect that the trending toots on mastodon.social right now are about a person who got elected to the Speaker of the House who I'd like to call a "clown" but that would be an insult to clowns so I won't. If a trained a model to maximize boosts and favorites I'd create a monster (e.g. if the US was truly a "democracy" today we'd write a constitution enshrining a one-party state, the only disagreement is which party it would be) I know though that I get really good engagements on (low-effort) pictures of flowers that I post as opposed to the sports photos I take which I work really hard at it. That is, there are paths to high engagement that aren't toxic, a model just has to be trained to reward them. In either case it would take developing a training set of a few thousand non-toxic but high engagement posts, it's probably easier to do that for HN than it is to do it for Mastodon.
  • AraceliHarker 3y ago
    It is no secret that Japan already has a website called GIGAZINE that brazenly translates and monetizes stories from Hacker News, often without regard for copyright law. The site is a veritable smorgasbord of clickbait and ads, and it is a prime example of how the internet can be used to exploit intellectual property for profit.
• sixhobbits 3y ago
  > The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following Every now and again Twitter switches me to the "For you" tab. I always immediately notice because there are like 5 BuzzFeed-esque tweets in a row from accounts I am not following. I switch back to the "Following" tab, which is still a simple chronological list of tweets from people I follow and Twitter is good again. I can see why Twitter is losing users if it keeps showing people the algorithmic feed though.
• bnralt 3y ago
  One thing I’ve noticed is that the culture on Twitter now is quite different than it was a decade ago, and the platform has calcified. A decade ago the common adivce for how to connect with people - Tweet often, comment often, follow accounts - connected you with a lot of people, and you would often end up following each other. I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got me just about zero attention. I got zero followers from comments, posts I made, following others, etc. It was like shouting in an empty room. Of course, there were ways to “increase engagement” that I tried and they did increase my follower account - but to what end? At that point it just feels like a weird game where everyone is trying to scam each other. I tried another social media app recently, and was surprised to find it was like how Twitter used to be. When I followed people, a bunch of people followed me back. A bunch of people reached out to me, so that even though I haven’t put _any_ effort into engagement so far, I’ve made a lot of connections. People there are one social media to be, well, social. On Twitter, it feels like a mercenary game of “What can this person do for me?”/“How can I trick this person into making them think I’ll make them rich/healthy/wealthy/successful.”
  • twicetwice 3y ago
    Which social media app was that?
    • CaptainFever 3y ago
      It sounds like Mastodon. Or at least, that was my experience with it. People do find you quite easily via the Local Timeline, and engagement tends to be much higher and more authentic even with lower numbers. Just be sure to stay away from the drama.
  • TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
    > I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got me just about zero attention. I got zero followers from comments, posts I made, following others, etc. It was like shouting in an empty room. Same. I've run my own experiment by paying for a couple months, then letting the subscription lapse, and repeating. I've been through 3 cycles. My conclusion is that if you don't pay, you don't exist. I'm currently not paying, and I don't see doing so any more. Even if I do pay, I have no desire -- and nothing particular to leverage -- to build a serious "presence," so I will always be just another nobody spitting in the wind.
• philip1209 3y ago
  I'm more annoyed by this in blogs. Substack started as an anti-Twitter, with long-form intentional communication and calm newsletters. Now, it's slowly shifted to a growth hacker cesspool of pop-ups, recommendations, and dark UI patterns. Beehiv is worse. We've ended up with an explosion of content blogs by people who don't value content.
• trash_cat 3y ago
  What is not really mentioend is that authenticity is not really guaranteed unless you know the people well, from irl meetings following them for a long time (i.e interviews). It´s very hard to find a single source of a platform for "authentic" content or connections. One day a person you know might post something insightful the other time it´s a marketing LinkedIn how to xxxx. Twitter is not as authentic as it used to be but I think this happens to any platform. Look at facebook.
• jpalawaga 3y ago
  PJ Vogt (formerly Reply All) recently did an interesting episode on his new podcast about this exact topic[0]. It's worth a listen. It really helped to clarify some meta-thoughts about how attention works, how media consumption influences us, and how I think about Twitter (and people's relation to it). Like, at one point, PJ talks about how he's witnessed people at the bar talking to a friend (purportedly), but in a format that seems to be talking to an imaginary twitter audience. The way people talk, communicate, quip, etc on twitter is bleeding into discourse OUTSIDE twitter. I tend to agree as I've seen this. Worse, when I use things like twitter, I find myself being unintentionally obtuse, contrarian, quippy, etc. You are a product of what you consume. How deep of thoughts can be conveyed in 140/280 characters? And perhaps more importantly: does such a shallow medium give you a proper opportunity to explore your thoughts on a topic before you begin to formulate an opinion/response? [0] https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-do-i-use-the-internet-now https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-do-i-use-the-internet-now
  • czue 3y ago
    I almost quoted this episode in the post! But I couldn't be bothered to go back and find the clip I wanted to use...
• keiferski 3y ago
  I think Twitter is actually useful because it reveals what people are authentically thinking. If you ever want to stop hero worshiping someone, follow them on Twitter. You'll quickly lose all illusions about their "genius" or supposed expertise on things beyond their narrow sub-specialty, and realize they're a flawed human being like everyone else.
• AraceliHarker 3y ago
  It is not only Elon Musk who is to blame for the decline of Twitter. After all, other social media platforms, such as YouTube, have long been using eye-catching content to generate revenue. Even before Musk's acquisition, Twitter was already engaging in monetization practices such as redirecting users to external sites, allowing influencers to post sponsored tweets, and inadequately moderating content.
• commieneko 3y ago
  "Authenticity in an Attention Economy" Is that anything like Authenticity in an Advertising Economy? I have to admit, I've never really understood (or used) Twitter/X. Short form posts lacking depth but very, very timely? The only time I used it very much was early on when I was living in Boston and it was useful to find out if there were subway outages. Lacking depth, timely, but pointedly useful. Somehow that function stopped working after a while. I've no idea why. I suspect I simply don't understand Twitting. I've never figured it out. Facebook and Youtube figured _me_ out, and they both provide stuff I'm actually interested in. (And yes, I find it mildly disturbing as I use something that I don't really control or understand. But FB and YT actually do work.) Twitter/X despite several attempts on my part to play its game, simply has never produced much attention or engagement for me. Hell, I've gotten more use from Instagram than Twitter. Though not much. For what it's worth, I'm older, in my mid 60s. I do note that FB tends to skew older. Or at least my FB experience does. Possibly an artifact of it's algorithm. But when I click on it's recommendations for "friends" I find the older users active and the younger users accounts a ghost town. My suspicion is that the changes we are seeing in how social media works with people, especially people of different ages, is a kind of societal immune response. To hark back to my initial reaction to this post, advertising has certainly evolved, and evolved its audience over the last century. It's still here, and still pretty deeply embedded. But what it does and how it does it has changed. Insert your own viral analogy here...
  • I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    In my experiences with Twitter, if you can find a group of some sort that you interact with a lot, Twitter would try to keep that group of people interacting with each other in some way. So part of Twitter is just "being part of a group" and is usually used as entertainment or self-promotion. If you are just there for the drama, you'll love it. There's always drama. If you are just there to interact with other music producers, there are enough of them that there's usually something new worth listening to or discuss. If you just want dumb memes, there are also plenty of them. But very few people are going onto Twitter to "be themselves" in the first place, so looking for true human interaction is a lonely time on Twitter.
  • rchaud 3y ago
• curation 3y ago
  What does authenticity mean here? It is an ideological term - meaning, no one will assert they are trying to be inauthentic.
• didgetmaster 3y ago
  You don't have to wait long until the next story comes out about some famous person who commits suicide or hits rock bottom in some other way. The average person thinks 'why would they do that when they have so many friends?'. The reality is that even though they might have thousands (or millions) who know their name or will act really excited to see them at their next cocktail party; they have no one to turn to in their real moment of need. They simply don't have deep, long lasting relationships with people who genuinely care about them. They are surrounded by 'suck-ups' who will tell them what they want to hear instead of having a real conversation with meaningful content. When they are in real trouble, all those 'friends' will abandon them at the drop of a hat. The online world mimics that situation very well.
  • falsaberN1 3y ago
    I'd say it even magnifies it to borderline cartoonish extremes. Twitter in particular is the loneliest place on Earth.
    • jstarfish 3y ago
      That illustrates the social media paradigm: Platforms where everybody wants to be heard, but nobody wants to listen.
• Nickersf 3y ago
  The sooner social media becomes unpopular the better.
• arnaudsm 3y ago
  Same reason why Wikipedia contributors do not want to be paid, and why cryptocurrency-based wikis failed. Money is not always the best incentive. It is leaking in every part of our society, sometimes in a destructive way. It's great for innovation and infrastructure, but not for our social life and human rights.
  • oakhaven 3y ago
    What do you think is the best incentive?
    • arnaudsm 3y ago
      There is no silver bullet. Money works on most contexts, but sometimes reputation, social structure and idealism work too. The open-source culture and Wikipedia are great examples. Reminds me of Eric Steven Raymond's hacker howto from 2001 [1] "Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation" [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
• steveBK123 3y ago
  It was clear when IG made this cutover ~5 years back. It was a fun platform for photographers to share work and make connections with random people throughout the world I'd never know. I even met a few IG friends IRL while traveling oversees. Slowly with the algorithmic feed and influencers, it became fairly hard to "reach" the people who had organically followed me, or to see the photos of the people I organically followed. Became less of an outlet for my hobby and more of a chore. Was interesting seeing my "follower" numbers double or triple while my "engagement" numbers went down 90%. Eventually was just family/friends I knew pre-IG, plus random bots. Seems like the curve of all social media platforms as they monetize & popularize.
• nologic01 3y ago
  Authenticity and commerce are awkward bedfellows. Just take a look at corporate communications where complete vacuity and obfuscation is the status-quo, way before social media. The main new thing is virality and actors trying to ride platform algorithms. This has led to a complex three-body system (producers-platform-consumers) the full degenerating dynamics of which we are only gradually discovering. There must be better ways but they are still to materialize. The fediverse is super cool but that's mostly because it has not yet attracted the crushing attention of commerce.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  I just follow people I know or who I want to listen to. And it's been fine. If you use the For You tab, you have to be prepared to mute. I also mute war related stuff.
  • dpifke 3y ago
    Muted words is a godsend, but I really wish they would allow more than 200 of them, or at least implement word stemming. It's easy to hit the 200 word limit when you have to add singular/plural/possessive/etc. forms of each word separately.
• nofinator 3y ago
  "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
  • passion__desire 3y ago
    We wouldn't have to pretend if the Long Tail idea was working. It seems Long Tail doesn't work. If there are 10 books expressing 10 distinct valuable insignts, suddenly comes along a youtube video which combines all these 10 ideas into a nice story and it gets the views and money. Same behaviour as the Netflix Hackathon behaviour, where participating teams merged to combine their strong ideas to win the prize.
• nullindividual 3y ago
  > Some of them love it so much that they offer courses teaching other people how to do it—which amplifies this godforsaken death spiral even further. Sounds like normal capitalism. Perhaps if the race to the bottom of capitalisms backside wasn't the goal, we'd have higher quality services.
• DudeOpotomus 3y ago
  Everything boils down to incentives. The idea that people are paid to grab attention is flawed. It has created a cyclone of everyone chasing what's hot while true creators, not the namesake, but people who actually create new stuff, are spun out to the farthest reaches. Like most things in life. The very best ideas and things are hidden. In someways that's good, but not if those people suffer in silence. If a great work is never read nor seen, is it great? Advertising, specifically adtech has destroyed the world. It perverted every media and medium. I watch with great anticipation of its impending reversal. We will find ourselves back at a contextual and demographic association sooner than most know.
• jmyeet 3y ago
  A lot of time when I hear people complain about an "inauthentic experience" in social media, what they really mean is "no one really cares what I say". Personally, I've never seen the appeal of Twitter. It's always been incredibly niche, particularly if you exclude all the people who simply use it for notifications ("I'm now live!"). Here's what I think (normal) people are starting to figure out: a lot of tech companies like to hide behind the Algorithm Defense, which is "We don't curate, suppress or promote anything, it's all The Algorithm [tm]". Google has effectively used this defense for search ranking for decades now. Thing is, people still decide what goes into that algorithm. You see this in post-Elon Twitter with what I like to call the Blue Check Reply Guys, annoying people who couldn't build an organic audience so pay $8 to be at the top of every reply with their inane drivel. You see this on Tiktok where just mentioning "Palestine", let alone using a related tag, (allegedly) reduces your audience. People who think they're having an authentic experience on social media I think are fooling themselves and probably living in a bubble. Like probably everyone, they want validation. Twitter in particular is the platform for snark and spouting popular opinions.
• dm319 3y ago
  Social media is a lesson for all of us that sometimes the cost of something isn't readily apparent. It reminds me of Cowslip's Warren in Watership Down - apparently healthy and safe rabbits welcoming in others, with a mortal danger that isn't obvious and somewhat overlooked. Thankfully we are at that stage with social (and other) media where Bigwig gets caught in a snare and narrowly escapes, and I can look around me and see my fellow people getting caught in these traps. For some people it is too late, for anyone who knows people who have gone too far down the youtube algorithm (like my mother) will know they aren't easily rescued.
• huevosabio 3y ago
  Some thoughts: > Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts... Honestly, the long form tweets became a signal to just ignore that tweet. I unfollow or block users that tweet long form often. > The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following, by the way— Yea, just use the chrono-tab ("following"). Only usable version of Twitter. > love posting for engagement. Some of them love it so much that they offer courses teaching other people how to do it—which amplifies this godforsaken death spiral even further. This is so bizarre to watch. --- I think Twitter is usable only if you stick to the chronological tab which has only your follows and putting non-trivial effort to clean your follows periodically. Unfollow and block people aggressively. Outrage-focused account? Blocked. Grift? Unfollow/block. Random-ass comment pushing some political angle? Block. I block even people that don't share follows if I got to see a tweet I just don't like. Social media generates a lot of waste, and good platforms provide a way for you to remove the waste from your experience. Otherwise, the end state of these types of networks is LinkedIn: a useful tool hidden beneath the massive pile of social media waste. Even ChatGPT can generate generic LinkedIn grift: https://chat.openai.com/share/3585085b-5407-4d48-b6e3-12d3cb807733 https://chat.openai.com/share/3585085b-5407-4d48-b6e3-12d3cb...
  • DerekBickerton 3y ago
    Their lists feature is a massively undervalued feature. Pretty certain if lists was deprecated I would disband Twitter.
    • huevosabio 3y ago
      I don't use it all, I should give it a try!
    • jerlam 3y ago
      Even Twitter doesn't know about Twitter lists. They don't show ads.
    • macintux 3y ago
      Lists kept me engaged with Twitter for a few years longer than I would have otherwise stuck around. Definitely a great feature.
• thedaly 3y ago
  It is interesting, I have almost the opposite experience as the author. I first signed up for twitter 8 years ago, but it never really interested me and I barely used it. I started using it again around the time that Elon bought it, and I have found it to be both useful and entertaining, depending on what I'm looking for. I'm very selective about who I follow, and I'm quick to unfollow, mute/block, etc any content that I don't want on my feed.
• deanCommie 3y ago
  I do not enjoy the default economic perspective that when it comes to artistic creation, capitalism will necessarily force all the worst possible negative incentives. Least of all, if using Twitter as the example, for reasons I will return to. The history of art and creation is filled to the brim with examples of creatives that refused to fold to the mold, to embrace the trends and incentives of the economy, and stuck to their convictions regardless of the monetary disincentives to do so. YouTube and TikTok each have stereotypical extremes that gravitate for attention but each have brilliant, unique, relatively long-form (Hours+ on Youtube, 5-10 minutes on TikTok) content that is are basically the singular vision of one human sharing their perspective in a way that does not exist anywhere else. (I like many of you prefer to consume written word, but there is of course a lot to be said that seeing a person speak, and all their emotional intonation contributes something too). It's hysterical to me that the stereotype for TikTok is still "teenagers dancing" or "gen z making funny faces", when for me it's Philosophers, Lawyers, Activists, Scientists, Technologists, Adventurers, all sharing their passions and perspectives in deep nuanced interesting looks into subjects I know nothing and everything about. Twitter itself is interesting because this all used to be true about it too, and to a much more constrained way can still be found there. But by and large it was deliberately destroyed by Elon Musk, and the only "creators" that are left are ones that are absolutely there because they are salespeople selling themselves, or basically get rich schemes masquerading as tech content (NFTs -> Generative AI, but in general also a lot of "here's how i made money by selling a course on how to make money")
• BryanLegend 3y ago
  If you really want to fix your Twitter/YouTube addiction the easiest way I've found to do it is unfollow/unsubscribe/unlike everything, turn off watch history, & install plugins like Control Panel for Twitter and Unhook for YouTube.
  • timeagain 3y ago
    A little friction is the best way, agreed. Another thing I do is read Reddit on old.Reddit.com on mobile. I destroyed my login by changing the password to a random string I don’t remember. It’s kind of hard to read and hard to collapse comments correctly. The default subreddits are atrocious. I find that it has cut my Reddit time to about 10m/day. As I read this it strikes me how powerful addiction and habit are that I still go at all
• sdwr 3y ago
  Saw this video yesterday about how the reality show Love Island got professionalized in the same way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8VqPxYM2tY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8VqPxYM2tY
  • 1-more 3y ago
    Early vs recent 90 Day Fiancé(e) seasons are night and day for this reason. The latest season of Love is Blind features a lot of contestants pointing the "you're here for clout" finger at one another, as though violating the academic integrity of their (self-styled) experiment was beyond the pale.
• Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Authenticity often doesn't scale because authenticity requires a history that is unvarnished and informed by actual events and cannot be coerced
• slowhadoken 3y ago
  I find 90% of social media interactions to be inauthentic. Communication in massive free-for-all groups is weird. It causes people to want to be right, win, or sell you on something. It’s funny that people would look got truth on divisive argument websites.
• honkycat 3y ago
  I started a twitter a few months ago, and then deleted it after I realized the current meta is to say something extremely vapid and wrong to phish for annoyed engagement. That is where we are at. Annoying people for follows. I deleted it the next day. Online culture is over. As people have improved at debating we have realized half the time you are shadow boxing with someone who doesn't even believe what they are saying. Or hell, anymore it could be a literal bot. It is bad faith everywhere. It is all a waste of fucking time. Not to mention the clear brigading and bot-nets on Reddit that makes arguing with the wrong person account suicide. Just use the internet for what it was meant for: photos of cute animals.
• swayvil 3y ago
  Fiction is cheaper than reality. A lump of slop entitled "delicious sandwich" is cheaper than an actual delicious sandwich. Take away the slop and it's even cheaper. It's a miracle of disruptive innovation.
• thedogeye 3y ago
  What if you chose to follow people who you enjoy following instead?
• manicennui 3y ago
  I never understood why these services were sold as "social networking". They are just a more sophisticated form of advertising for the most part.
• swayvil 3y ago
  Whenever I see "X" (twitter) I think of the x in the corner of a window, for closing the window. Sometimes I even click the logo. Surely this is unintentional.
• Jabbles 3y ago
  The same could be said of Airbnb or Etsy, where the original vision of individual, personal inventory was displaced by more profitable, professionally managed, mass produced entities.
  • hk__2 3y ago
    > The same could be said of Airbnb or Etsy, where the original vision of individual, personal inventory was displaced by more profitable, professionally managed, mass produced entities. This is called capitalism. The issue is a bit different here, because Twitter is a social media, not Airbnb nor Etsy.
• redleggedfrog 3y ago
  "authenticity", "attention economy", "engagement"... This is just stirring the turds around in the cesspool. Deadbird is a net negative in the world, run by sociopath, and has no redeeming value, is actively harmful, but is addictive, like meth. Why do any of you actually care? Do something useful with your time.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  > And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. Maybe, maybe not. Without specifying what trait you're talking about, "better" is largely a meaningless term.
• wuliwong 3y ago
  Someone else mentioned about the differences between different categories of content on Twitter and I agree. Mainly, I like Twitter for sports. I have not experienced another platform that gives me this type of interactions with writers, show hosts, players, and other fans. I find Twitter for political stuff to be pretty bad. It's kind of amusing but that no matter how irrational and unhinged sports fans are in the U.S., they aren't as bad as what I see on political Twitter posts. :) I barely follow any tech/startup stuff on Twitter anymore. I'm not sure why, I guess the content just wasn't engaging to me. A side note, I've also bailed on IndieHackers as it seems to have changed (in my opinion) with regards to the type of content that made it cool in the beginning to whatever is going on there now. I guess IH is starting to experience this evolution in content that the author is talking about. I still read HN though! HN has the most insightful and thoughtful comments/discussions and cause doom scrolling.
• danjc 3y ago
  Surprised the author limits this to Twitter and recent history. Social media has mostly been self promotion and virtue twerking for at least a decade.
• Gud 3y ago
  I think by now the most efficient social media would be an endless doom scroll with sub 5 second videos that the viewer gets to like or dislike to train the algorithm. No thinking, just flashing lights straight into the brain. I'm sure this is what the kids will be watching in 2-10 years. Total mindless entertainment. I'd develop it myself and get rich, if I didn't have a conscience.
  • koin12 3y ago
    that already exists...it's called tiktok
    • Gud 3y ago
      I'm talking about taking it even further.
  • sogen 3y ago
    For investors slap on some buzzwords such as YOLO, NFTs, ASMR, Cambridge Analytica, Elon, Bezos and boom! to the moon baby!
• w10-1 3y ago
  Twitter isn't about people connecting, or even about advertisers and making money. It's about controlling the national conversation. Anything noisy enough on twitter will be picked up by hungry media of all sorts, so a steady stream of disinformation can exhaust any real governance feedback cycle. Elon bought Twitter so he could be a player in national elections. (And the death of authenticity hasn't been particularly slow. It may be that people who sacrificed time and loyalty are blind to the possibility that it was a complete waste and a huge mistake to enable this.)
• tracerbulletx 3y ago
  I'm not convinced there is less high quality, highly authentic content, there's a ton, but there just are no longer gate keepers or limiters and everything is mixed together. Instead of skipping past the tabloids at the grocery aisle, that stuff is alongside a brilliant essay in a youtube stream or next to a picture from your mom.
• arnorhs 3y ago
  Yes, browsing twitter these days feels like walking into a toy store where you can buy anything in the store, but everything in it is sold in exchange for time/attention. The main problem is just the for you feed. Usually I'll mostly get posts from people I know IRL, but browsing a bit down you just get all these viral posts that are super interesting, but I don't have the time/attention to devote into bringing those toys home.
• ranprieur 3y ago
  This reminds me of how Hollywood can't make great films anymore because of test screenings. Authenticity is perceived as weirdness and gets filtered out.
• deweywsu 3y ago
  This article shoots itself in the foot right at the start. It reveals that the author is in fact just as wrapped up in Twitter as those he critiques. It shows a graph with a person on the left who has "nothing to say" being a mongrel, as if it's bad not to want to insert or even have a personal opinion about everything. There is completely nothing wrong with not getting wrapped up in the BS that is modern western society at large. In fact, it's quite healthy NOT to have an opinion about any of it because you're off doing much better, much healthier things.
  • mtlynch 3y ago
    >It shows a graph with a person on the left who has "nothing to say" being a mongrel I think you may have misread. Both the person on the left and right in the graph are labeled "have something to say."
• CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
  I tweaked all my social media down from following thousands of people to following ~100 that I really know and love. The result was amazing, a truly transformative social media experience. I don't care about likes or comments, they are irrelevant to me, I just love seeing what people are up to, I comment and like when I mean it, and I often get to the end of the feed with no more scrolling to do. I reduced my FB friends from around 3,700 a few years ago, followed by also removing liked pages and groups that no longer interested me or that I had liked out of politeness - and the lovely result of that led me to doing it elsewhere. Best decison, no question of it.
• happytiger 3y ago
  A system that rewards people with attention will always encourage attention seeking behavior, and when incentivized will also inevitably generate professional attention seeking behavior. It’s not a new concept. I really like the way Academia of Ideas presets the problem. Link at bottom. > But a strange thing has occurred with the rise of social media: many people are reverting back to a mechanism of identity formation that resembles sincerity, a mechanism of identity formation which Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio in You and Your Profile, have termed profilicity. Like sincerity, profilicity is other-directed and reliant on the reactions of an audience. With sincerity one’s family and community are the audience that casts judgement on how sincerely, or properly, one plays the pre-determined roles. With profilicity the audience is a generalized peer group consisting of hundreds, thousands or even millions of social media users and this audience plays a somewhat different role than under sincerity: not only does the audience judge the identity one forms, but it also helps shape the very roles one strives to play. For profilicty entails creating profiles on social media through the selective display of pictures and other bits of information, or in a more passive manner merely observing the profiles of admired personalities, and then using these idealized profiles as roles to play in real life. Or as Jeremy Weissman explains in The Crowdsourced Panopticon: “. . . a simultaneous exchange occurs between the two entities, our digital [profiles] and our in-real-life self. As we broadcast idealized portraits of our in-real-life self online, we then in turn adjust our in-real-life self so as to meet with popular approval when we are broadcast online again. At a certain point, our in-real-life self and digital [profiles] practically merge.” Jeremy Weissman, The Crowdsourced Panopticon Forming an identity through the mechanism of profilicity has serious drawbacks. Firstly, it promotes an unhealthy degree of conformity. For to succeed in the world of social media is to conform as a successful profile is measured by metrics such as likes, shares and follows. But profilicity necessitates not just conforming to the preferences of one’s peer group, but also conforming to the standards set by those who manipulate the algorithms of social media, or as Weissman writes: “Through the ever-increasing gaze of a pervasive audience online, we may become overly pressured, even coerced toward collective opinion, as social media’s mechanism of likes, dislikes, friends, and followers constantly subjects us to the crowd’s judgment along with that gaze.” Jeremy Weissman, The Crowdsourced Panopticon By promoting a hyper-conformity, profilicty limits our potential as the generalized peer group of social media users, and the manipulators of social media algorithms, have no interest in many elements that comprise a healthy sense of self. With profilicity if we step too far out of line, if we are too unique, or if our value system diverges too far from what is deemed acceptable, we will be shunned, shamed and ostracized. Appearances, superficialities, and adhering to the values of popular culture are what matter with profilicity, not cultivating a harmonized mind, a healthy body and a fulfilling life. What is more if we live in a sick society, this sickness will be embodied in the preferences of the generalized peer group and so in seeking validation of this crowd, and embodying their preferences, we lock ourselves into a sick sense of self. “Once we give up our true self to play a role, we are fated to be rejected because we have already rejected ourselves. Yet we will struggle to make the role more successful, hoping to overcome our fate but finding ourselves more enmeshed in it. We are caught in a vicious cycle that keeps closing in, diminishing our life and being.” Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life Continued: https://academyofideas.com/2021/10/social-media-why-it-sickens-the-self-and-divides-society/ https://academyofideas.com/2021/10/social-media-why-it-sicke...
• kortex 3y ago
  Maybe this is my own neurospice speaking but...What even is authenticity? Do we even see authenticity in public? Any awareness that we are being observed introduces some amount of Hawthorne effect. Probably the most genuine folks are the introverts and socially averse. Regional burns are espoused to celebrate "radical self-expression" , and unlike the Big Burn, their smaller size seems to promote authenticity to a greater degree. But even there, people are doing bits or acting out a persona or even just socially experimenting. Authenticity itself is nebulous. But even taking that into account, there are definitely more harmful and less harmful facades. We pay actors and performers to be inauthentic. But we consider influencer "fake". Point is, I don't think "authenticity" is the main metric we actually care about. Inauthenticity can be lots of fun for all parties. It's the motivations of the act. It's the second-order authenticity. An actor is authentic in their inauthenticity: there's no hiding that they are putting on an act. But we dislike influencers and the like because while they are (often obviously) inauthentic, they try to hide that fact under a facade trying to make it seem like it's their "real expression". As a counterpoint, take a youtuber I really enjoy, Ryan McBeth. He does OSINT mostly military-themed current events vids and blogs. I'm sure the Ryan in front of the camera is different than the Ryan I'd meet at the bar: more polished, calculated in choice of words, presenting self in the best light, because that's what we all do in the limelight. But he totally lampshades his sponsored bits: "let me take a few moments to pay the bills". That's the second-order authenticity. Doing a paid sponsor bit is ipso facto inauthentic - it's not something you'd do without the influence of money. But lampshading it tips his hand and humanizes him. Or does it? <vsauce theme> Maybe he's saying that because his shtick is "down to earth authentic guy" and that's what that character would say? (I doubt it, but it's a fun hypothetical). Famously, "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players" - Shakespeare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://ryanmcbeth.substack.com/ https://ryanmcbeth.substack.com/
  • zer8k 3y ago
    > Do we even see authenticity in public? If you have the ability to sense another human's emotions you can often tell when someone is being authentic or not. Set and setting are also important. Authenticity is closer to honesty about yourself rather than some kind of self-expression. I am still authentic if I don't mention my hobby of collecting records while I am at the gym. I am not authentic if I start making up whatever will impress you. > But we dislike influencers and the like because while they are (often obviously) inauthentic, they try to hide that fact under a facade trying to make it seem like it's their "real expression". IMO, most people dislike influencers because they fall into the category of people who are outwardly pathetic. In any sort of human interaction desperation is seen as unattractive and wrong. Influencers are desperation boiled down into the highest concentration. They are fake, inauthentic, not because they aren't who they are but they try so hard to dial up everything about them to it's maximum. > Doing a paid sponsor bit is ipso facto inauthentic If I am doing a paid sponsorship for beard care equipment I am authentic. This generalization doesn't fit. > I'm sure the Ryan in front of the camera is different than the Ryan I'd meet at the bar: more polished, calculated in choice of words, presenting self in the best light, because that's what we all do in the limelight. Someone who takes the time to create an entire blog dedicated to a topic will likely be 90% similar to what you're reading. Of course there is nuance in human interaction but someone that dedicated to a particular craft will most likely obsess over it even in person. I understand your post is some sort of philosophical discussion on authenticity. Maybe in some textbook sense you are right. However, I have had more authentic interactions with people than inauthentic interactions. If you're close with anyone at all in your life you have also experienced that. The systemization of everything (through what you call "radical self-expression") is creating a bunch of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing on what is fundamentally a simple topic. Authentic people are honest people. You can often tell right away who is lying and who is not. The computer in your head has hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to help you with that.
• jendefig 3y ago
  I prefer the blue pill, but know I "should" be taking the red pill for my career. Regarding authenticity: it has been a social media goal and so on display everywhere for so much time now, that even if there is true authenticity, it has started to feel like marketing which is really sad.
• shadowgovt 3y ago
  There's two ways to look at this problem. One is that you're sacrificing something when you're not your authentic self. The other is that communication is a two-way street, and people who invest the resources in finding their audience closer to where they are are making their audiences' lives easier, and the attention economy rewards them for that. I note that most of the YouTube science educators I watch wear makeup, for example (unless they don't show their face at all). And they space their updates to make for a regular-ish pulse of content.
• shadowgovt 3y ago
  I'm waiting for the day that people's thoughts on how things work on Twitter are about as relevant to their thoughts on how things work on Digg. At current trajectory, that won't take long.
• rglover 3y ago
  Read Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars [1] and the "how did we get here" will become immediately clear. [1] https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/SilentWeaponsForQuietWarsOriginalDocumentCopy/Silent%20Weapons%20for%20Quiet%20Wars%20Original%20Document%20Copy.pdf https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/SilentWeaponsForQuie...
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• karaterobot 3y ago
  To me, the problems with Twitter were never complicated. The thing Twitter wants you to do with it is not good: it wants you to pay constant attention to a stream of short messages. Occasionally the messages are funny, sometimes they are even insightful, but they are always short and there is never and end to them. I could never imagine how that would make me smarter, wiser, or better informed. I could see how it would help me waste a lot of time, sure. But even if Twitter succeeds beyond their wildest expectations and nothing ever happens that was not exactly according to plan, it still leaves the world a worse place. If you think something makes the world a worse place, my advice is don't do it.
• jrmg 3y ago
  My opinion, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, is that Twitter changing its prompt, in 2009, from the ‘small’ “What are you doing?” to the ‘big’ “What’s happening?” sowed the seeds of its change from the authentic and personal thing it was, to the katamari of sound and fury it is now.
  • swagempire 3y ago
    Actually this comment is totally underrated :)
  • rchaud 3y ago
    I think the Iranian protests in 2009 against election results kicked that off. Twitter at the time was the only way to relay information to the wider world as the government had disabled phone service. Before that Twitter was relatively obscure. Global media coverage happened almost exclusively through people's tweets and photos. https://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/14/iran.protests.twitter/ https://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/14/iran.protests.twi...
• demondemidi 3y ago
  “ And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. ” What now? This is where the terms clickbait come from. Content gets more rage inducing to get more clicks thus more money while real journalism disappears behind paywalls.
• bilater 3y ago
  Can empathize. I use the F word a lot in my Tweets because its my natural unfiltered voice but it got me shadow banned. Now that my Twitter growth is just atrophied I'll often find myself thinking about engagement and I hate it. Anyway if anyone cares for raw unfiltered takes about AI and also hacky projects check out my profile :) https://twitter.com/deepwhitman https://twitter.com/deepwhitman
• jodrellblank 3y ago
  One of The Last Psychiatrist's points is that there's no such thing as 'authentic'. From his blog post "How to destroy a marriage (2009)"[1]: "I know, it's hard to keep those emotions in check after your boss has been riding you all day. Yet then the UPS guy comes to the door and you are instantly nice, bright, warm. "Hey, thanks, have a good one buddy! Go Raiders!" You'll say it's an act, but the other way of looking at it is that you think it's worth faking politeness to the UPS guy, but not to your family. See? Does your family need to see the real, irritable you?" "Oh, I hear you, my special, special, generation, the one that counts hypocrisy the greatest of all possible sins: "if I can't be myself at home, what's the point?" Because that isn't the real you, there isn't a you. Who you are is what you do. If you come home and are cranky and curt and bossy at home, then you are a jerk. You don't get to say, "I'm a nice person, but I just happen to be irritable every day." Even if you aren't a jerk, what your family sees is a jerk." [1] https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/04/how_to_destroy_a_marriage.html https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/04/how_to_destroy_a_mar...
• gigama 3y ago
  Here's a related Intercept article re: TwitX from today: https://theintercept.com/2023/10/27/elon-musk-twitter-purchase/ This recent PBS Frontline episode was also quite good: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/elon-musks-twitter-takeover/
• anotheryou 3y ago
  Easy band-aid: hide all blue check-mark people. It filters out exactly those running twitter as a business. It will also revive the comments (because checkmarks float to the top and now you quickly scroll past them) I wrote a userscript that does this https://pastebin.com/hfw8eQcf https://pastebin.com/hfw8eQcf It highlights and optionally collapses "seen" (scrolled past) and "blue checkmark" tweets. If you don't want the seen thing I could patch that out for you. looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/o68inWp.png https://i.imgur.com/o68inWp.png
• smsm42 3y ago
  I call bullshit on "if you're authentic nobody will care". I've been blogging for over 20 years (not on Twitter, Heavens forbid) and never did any promotional stuff and I am fine with amount of engagement I get. If literally nobody would ever engage again, I'd probably still do it. I also read dozens of other blogs, which don't do promotions - somehow I found them. There are probably hundreds of more interesting ones I haven't found and never will - but such is life, you can't earn all the money, eat all the food or read all thd content. I suspect those who complain about it either are in a wrong business or let their ego get ahead of them. Also, can we get people to stop to confuse whatever weird things happen on Twitter with all the internet and all the economy?
• passion__desire 3y ago
  Community Notes is the best feature. I wonder why wouldn't original Twitter implement it. Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.
  • orbz 3y ago
    Just a quick point: community notes existed before the takeover. It was called birdwatch but got rebranded.
  • kshmir 3y ago
    Exactly
  • ceejayoz 3y ago
    Original Twitter did implement it. Musk renamed it a month after finishing his purchase. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-birdwatch-a-community-based-approach-to-misinformation https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2022/helpful-birdwatch-notes-now-visible-everyone-twitter-us https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2022/helpful-b... And rolled it out broadly a few weeks before Musk took over. (Yeah yeah, that’s a long time for a feature to be in beta or development or whatever)
      • ceejayoz 3y ago
        A year or two really isn't a long time for a beta of this nature.
        • ethanbond 3y ago
          Personally I agree. It’s a social engineering feature and, accordingly, you need a lot of time to see how the system ends up abusing/adapting/repurposing it. It’s just an easy critique: “they don’t ship fast enough according to my totally uninformed and arbitrary assessment!”
• anonzzzies 3y ago
  Is it slow though? It seems to be going at neck-breaking speed.
  • Toine 3y ago
    It was completely dead and buried at least 5 years ago.
    • dpifke 3y ago
      Definitely longer than that. My favorite "Twitter is dying" is from 2012: https://i.insider.com/4f4f8f0d6bb3f71e5700002b https://i.insider.com/4f4f8f0d6bb3f71e5700002b
      • hk__2 3y ago
        Well to be honest it hasn’t been particularly alive since then.
• kiwikan 3y ago
  this phenomenon exists outside Twitter/X as well you know, Youtube is an example
  • dageshi 3y ago
    It's true but I'm not sure youtube creators ever really claimed to be "authentic", a lot of them are acting as presenters and always have been. Twitter was always more towards "this is the real me"?
    • rpigab 3y ago
      I miss the old Youtube when it was so hard to get money from ads that inauthentic channels were actually rare. Most people just wanted to share stuff likes video games or memes, some dreamed of fame and money of course, but they had no idea how to get there, they filmed with whatever camera they already had without Youtube, they didn't take a loan to invest in a perfect sound studio setup. Of course, I'm not taking unpaid labor for granted, I really wish they'd get the money they want and deserve from ads, but stayed simple. But because of competition, that's impossible. Now they all look the same, because they got advice directly from the Youtube company on putting red arrows and stupid faces on thumbnails. And jumpcuts. Good thing there's still 10 year old minecrafters who don't give a damn about all this or can't buy decent equipment, if I can still find their channels through the impenetrable algorithms.
  • jjoonathan 3y ago
    Here's a complaint about the printing press enabling the same dynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#/media/File:Puck112188c.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#/media/File:...
    • rchaud 3y ago
      Printing press spam was local, cost money to distribute, and not that many people were literate enough to bother. None of those are true of social media. $8/mo is nothing for a spammer charging $50 a pop for his AI mastery e-course.
• blueflow 3y ago
  I'm happy the author is finally realizing that twitter is not the world, and endless self-promotion isn't the only way to live.
• dudul 3y ago
  Always amazes me when someone realizes that Twitter is not the real world. As for the "engaging content" the author describes, I dont find these engaging at all. Nothing is less engaging than a 34 tweet long thread, each tweet being a wall of 800 characters and the actual content reading like some regurgitate, quasi-AI generated platitude. When you've reached a point where even big company millennial MBAs realize that Twitter is not real and that "likes" don't translate into sales, you can tell that we're at the end of the rope.
• _fat_santa 3y ago
  One thing I've realized about social media, especially X/Twitter, is that it's not a singular place, that is you can have 4 feeds on twitter from different users that might as well be different social media platforms. I've noticed if you follow the "Indie Hackers" on X then you will get lots of self promotion (ie. "My startup just hit $X/MRR!!, here's how I did it: substack.com...."). On the other hand there are other places like "Finance X" or "Sports X" where you get deep dives about the state of that space from various people. Moving away from X/Twitter, there's tons of "authentic" content you can find on Youtube, a recent favorite of mine has been watching Peter Santenello[1]. He could be considered a journalist and his whole thing is just going into random communities and talking to people. I especially enjoyed his series about Appalachia and the Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello
  • nullindividual 3y ago
    Interesting YouTube channel, looks like it is worth a watch. You'll note even he conforms to the algorithm, though. Just look at all of those video thumbnails with his face.
    • passion__desire 3y ago
      If content is this good, I will allow it. Manipulation is good if the end result is in my favour.
  • Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    I'm not sure the "global square" model of Twitter scales well for so many people. Just reading the comments here it seems like a lot of people use Twitter/X defensively. They're constantly scanning for what they think is grift, politics, etc. They have an attitude of "do not disturb me" on X by default. This sort of gruff fatigue is what seems to set in on very large, cacophonous social networks. I also find Youtube to be a lot healthier, probably because not everyone is incentivized to have an opinion, and it's quite easy to ignore the Comments section. I find the Youtube -> Discord pipeline to be great. I'd love to have an open version of this, something like Peertube/Bitchute -> Matrix, but due to the usual reasons FOSS continues to only appeal to small niches.
• keyle 3y ago
  I used to follow quality people posting meaningful stuff. They disappeared. Why? No blue check. Meanwhile I had to ban the Primerian or whatever the fuck that is because I got his every tweets, responses and memes shoved in my face and I never followed him. Every tweet is another "10 fact you didn't care about that will shock you" with a thread emoji like I should care. The whole thing is just disgusting now.
• bachmeier 3y ago
  > Elon’s political antics chased away a lot of good people. Many of my favorite follows have moved to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Also, more and more people are waking up and realizing that social media is actually quite bad for you, and leaving it behind. Good for them. Bad for me. It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics. And that's perfectly valid. I moved away for a much simpler reason. He killed Tweetdeck for anyone not willing to pay $8/month. Regular Twitter hits you with ads (very disruptively), related tweets they know you want to see, and an algorithm that tries to get you hooked on hits of toxicity. Mastodon is pretty close to what I had with Tweetdeck, but less toxic due to lack of quote tweets. Edit: Rereading this comment, I want to add that the things the author is saying make Twitter bad were to a large extent things we didn't have to deal with when we had Tweetdeck. That's not clear in the original version of my comment.
  • Ensorceled 3y ago
    > It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics. And that's perfectly valid. I moved away for a much simpler reason. The bulk of the people I follow (mostly authors, journalists, and geeks) have moved off or drastically reduced their activity on Twitter and it's almost entirely due to Elon's politics and the changes he's making in support of that world view.
    • superfrank 3y ago
      It's funny to see the network effect work in reverse. As users start to leave the platform it becomes easier and easier for others to leave as well.
    • gorwell 3y ago
      To be fair, that's because he leveled the playing field that was tilted in favor of the elite establishment consensus. They aren't supportive of a platform with free speech. ie, speech one disagrees with. Team Establishment was happy when it censored opposing viewpoints and it's no surprise, although unfortunate, they migrated to regressive platforms where that still occurs.
• talkingtab 3y ago
  The use of the words "Attention Economy" is what I personally call the pablumization of a problem. If we want to address the problem we need to use the correct term: clickbait economy. The internet as we know it, is bought and paid for by clicks. And the way to get more clicks has nothing to do with authenticity. Just the opposite. Which article would you click on to read - "More and more Americans sink into poverty"? - "Trump and Biden have food fight at restaurant?". And Twitter takes this even further. `if isdemocrat title = "trump throws food at biden?" if isrepublican title = "biden throws food at trump?" if istrump title = "lock em up" It is actually worse than that, because the clicks are then used to sell you a bill of goods. How you should hate 'xyz'. How you should spend $10,000 for a new desk chair. Or how you need a $1000 a month obesity drug to fix the fact that you have been eating clickbait food? Tracking ads are toxic. They threaten our personal well being and the well being of our society. They are right up there with air pollution. Oh wait, no one will want to think about those issues, so why post this comment?
  • trey-jones 3y ago
    Unfortunately, the loss of authenticity has also overflowed into life outside of the internet. Marketing today is just another word for "telling our customers that our new product or service is exactly what they want, agnostic of reality". Hype through loud talking is big too, but my mother-in-law has been doing that since before the internet age began.
  • efitz 3y ago
    There are two fundamental problems with social media. The first is the ad-driven revenue model as you pointed out. The other is the dopamine economy that is driven by getting your stuff to have “engagement”, which is financially reinforced by the ad revenue model. If any one platform by themselves tries to fix these problems then it will be suicide. The industry as a whole has to do it, and they won’t without regulation.
    • billyjmc 3y ago
      It’s going to have to be a non-industry move or a radically different model sustained by an interested minority. Federated systems are the other way this can work.
• watwut 3y ago
  > My feed is full of posts that have obviously had more effort put into it than most of what I used to see. Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts, carefully curated images, and super-positive business updates. It’s mostly engaging stuff. I think that simply, it is NOT an engaging stuff. That is why author is bored by it. It is content author think "should" be engaging. Seriously, following two are pretty much opposite of engaging: carefully curated images, and super-positive business updates. These two are definition of the boring. And while the long form narratives have potential to be engaging, just being long form does not make the thing engaging. The content actually have to be engaging.
  • test1235 3y ago
    There's some quote somewhere along the lines of "classical books being the ones you want to have already read" which is basically saying you want the kudos of having reading war and peace, pride and prejudice, les miserables, great expectations, etc, even though you may hate the experience, or have no interest. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1035168-a-classic-is-something-that-everybody-wants-to-have-read https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1035168-a-classic-is-someth...
• daoboy 3y ago
  This very issue is why I haven't had a social media account in years. Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes. While we all make necessary and unavoidable judgements, the explicit nature of being judged and acting as a judge on social media lends itself to being inauthentic and narcissistic. Hans-Georg Moeller has an excellent YouTube channel called Carefree Wandering. There several very good episodes on authenticity and social media.
  • notac23 3y ago
    I hit this just recently here. Discussing a simple math problem that happened to be attached to a political point ended up w/ me getting downvoted by a person who I actually agreed with, but they couldn't see past their own nose to understand what I was saying.
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    Or just accept some downvotes now and again? They'll stop at -4 anyway. I've hit it (and once in awhile I've probably deserved it), and known some nice thoughtful people IRL who also post here and had it happen on comments I thought were perfectly fine. Sometimes you just hit a weird mood in a thread or whatever; it's not worth worrying about unless the moderators tell you to cool it.
    • daoboy 3y ago
      The system of likes/dislikes, upvotes/downvotes, etc are a feedback mechanism specifically designed to leverage the fact that we are predisposed by evolution to worry about that exact thing. So while I accept it to the extent that I still post here, I feel like 'don't worry about it' completely misses the point of 'it'. It exists specifically for you to worry about.
  • Clubber 3y ago
    >Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes. Just edit to make sure you are clear in your thoughts put into text. Don't censor yourself, karma points are largely meaningless anyway. You don't get to trade them in for an eraser or anything. Speak your mind, that's the main benefit of the platform.
• the_snooze 3y ago
  >And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale. It's valuable precisely because it takes a lot of time, energy, and luck to establish. You want authenticity? Go find community in meatspace. You want authenticity online? Talk to those meatspace friends in private group chats.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    There may be exceptions ( MMO guilds may be an examle ), where it is not meatspace, but authenticity may be higher.
    • Fnoord 3y ago
      Some of those do have RL meetings, such as BlizzCon. Or they're comprised of RL friends.
    • izzydata 3y ago
      I wonder if the newer generation of gamers can form connections from MMO style guilds like the past generation of gamers did. Everything that I've seen from young gamers today suggests that their motivations for playing games is quite different. Playing just for the sake of playing and socializing on a personal level is not part of it. I get the impression it is about being seen doing things. If nobody sees you do something it basically never happened. The more people that see you do something the more important it is to them.
  • Enginerrrd 3y ago
    I think the ugly truth of it is, just like there's a noticeable difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart (because of the annual fee at costco), there's just some people that are going to have an undesirable influence on your community. The temptation to try and rope in those extra users is often irresistible but to get them you have to tank your content to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Very few growth minded companies or content creators have escaped that trap. It requires prioritizing your principles and long-term outlook over short-term growth which is so antithetical to the typical silicon valley situation trying to tap into and keep the spigot of VC money flowing.
• spacecadet 3y ago
  Just abandon these products, they are useless and I think we have all seen enough evidence to suggest they do more harm than good. Dont start splitting hairs here either, I understand and was there when Twitter was the only way to communicate when governments were putting down protests... There are other tools. Go out there and build them... I wont ever touch a spycloud again while protesting...
  • spacecadet 3y ago
    This actually infuriates me. All those people who spent the last 20 years building adtech and social media. Thanks! You created a world that is now skeptical of tech and makes the rest of our jobs harder. Frankly, Id be worried with social and ad tech companies on my resume. I basically throw these away now.
    • IggleSniggle 3y ago
      > Frankly, Id be worried with social and ad tech companies on my resume. I basically throw these away now. I sort of unintentionally ended up in ad tech recently, and deeply regret it. I enjoy the technical issues, but...ironically, anybody who would throw out my resume because it has ad tech on it is exactly the kind of person I would want to work for. C'est le vie, I guess I'll stay in ad tech.
      • medstrom 3y ago
        Can you not remove it from your own resume?
        • bee_rider 3y ago
          I assume there exist people out there for whom that would leave a couple years gap, unfortunately.
          • spacecadet 3y ago
            I have tons of gap years, Id rather struggle and fail at my own idea the given in. These experiences ultimately impress employers and clients more than any employer name I list.
• freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  The only social media I spend time on is Instagram and really IG is on the same level as 4chan in terms of how red pilled the comments section is.
• hliyan 3y ago
  Would any of the old classics (take your pick from Aristotle to Tolstoy) have been created in a data-driven world? What those authors put out into the world (I think), was what they thought was missing in the world, not what they thought the world wanted to hear. This is getting very hard to do today, even when you're honestly trying to do so, because the data is constantly telling you not to. And the data is necessarily short term an one dimensional, never fully capturing value in the way that our brains organically do.
  • DharmaPolice 3y ago
    I don't disagree, but something like Shakespeare's plays or the Odyssey/Iliad probably were refined/changed based on audience responses before they became the fixed works we have now. Dickens (after publication) softened the language towards Jews in the latter parts of Oliver Twist based on reactions he got from acquaintances. It's hard to evaluate cultural production without the benefit of hindsight. In two hundred years someone will take the best YouTube video produced today (best by their future standards) and be amazed at how great people were in 2023.
  • jyunwai 3y ago
    It remains possible to produce great original works of art, independent of popular trends. For example, Thomas Pynchon is a modern-day example of an author still creating significant works of literature, who is notably reclusive from the public view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon
• joduplessis 3y ago
  Twitter? Try going out to dinner without your phone. It goes way deeper than any single social platform. The way we relate to technology has become so weird.
  • wussboy 3y ago
    And every time you think of reaching for it, think “what evolutionary desire was I about to short circuit, and what important aspect of being a human does that circumvent?”
  • falsaberN1 3y ago
    I don't know about you, but if I go out with someone for dinner and that someone is constantly on Twitter with their phone, I consider that terribly rude.
• fullshark 3y ago
  People aren't authentic when they are talking to everyone on the planet at once, unless they are incredibly naive. They are authentic talking to their friends, or family, in private conversations. A lot of people were naive in the early days and it made for amusing conversation, not any longer and these platforms are just about brand management / advertising now.
  • cbozeman 3y ago
    You've identified what needs to change.
  • falsaberN1 3y ago
    You call them naive like if it was a bad thing. I for one welcome the naive ones, they don't feel like they are transparently trying to take advantage.
    • zirgs 3y ago
      It is a bad thing if you can be fired if someone digs up your 10 year old tweets.
      • nocontextpls 3y ago
        [dead]
      • falsaberN1 3y ago
        Hm well you may be right there, I admit I was mostly thinking about person-to-person engagement than twitter timelines.
      • pauldenton 3y ago
        The Naive don't have to worry about that. They just have to deal with it if it happens.
  • tensor 3y ago
    People are not authentic talking to friends or family in private either. The entire authenticity cult is a creation of modern media and is as much manufactured as "fitting in" is. In fact, I'd say that it's GOOD that people craft their image, no one genuinely wants to hear your unfiltered thoughts. Usually people who do that are considered socially maladjusted.
• mrtksn 3y ago
  Previously I objected to Musk's "Town Square" idea: >The whole feed based "internet town square" concept is flawed, if anyone have seen an actual European town square you would have noticed that it's nothing like Twitter or similar. In a good town square, you have people minding their own business and the public activities are actually curated(a few agendas that fit in the physical location) and people visit those if they they are interested in. However, maybe it is a town square but a bad one. Bad town squares are places where everyone tries to sell you something or make you do something and there are plenty of crazy people trying to grab attention and do things you would rather not see. My "for you" tab is filled with "ChatGPT is great but you are not using it right" posts that look like copycats, the only organic looking content is from anti-vaxxers and all kind of conspiracy theorists and fascist(maybe because ChatGPT refuses to generate such content, therefore the only organic content is that one). Oh an that is organic but not really authentic, that is it is not independent thinkers but solders of a cult or a movement that keep repeating same talking points. On the other hand, Twitter has become a better product overall thanks to making some stuff like lists more prominent so you have some tools to avoid the crazy town. However, the problem is that even the curated lists are not immune because now the people in those lists are incentivised to grab as much as attention as possible so they can monetise it. Thece are courses and tools made to optimize for that so the content becomes "made for Twitter to boost engagement". Youtube also has it but maybe of the higher production costs and longer to consume content format, a race to the bottom hasn't happen as dramatically. They still can get good engagement by creating higher quality videos. So what about actual people who don't produce content professionally? The actual authentic content? The authentic discussions are happening in groups of people who know each other(online or offline), that is WhatsApp/Telegram or other channels that allow small groups interact privately.
  • Cloudef 3y ago
    The actual authentic content is going outside and use internet only for work / entertainment.
    • mrtksn 3y ago
      Is that true?
• bertil 3y ago
  The most insightful piece of analysis I’ve ever seen was at Facebook, from the rockstars who were looking at Instagram for the first time — a couple of years after the acquisition, when it was time to apply some informed strategic thinking. The graph was super simple but very powerful: * On the x-axis, you had how many followers (or views) a poster had: me and my 5 followers would be on the left-most bucket, someone popular was in 50-100, 100-200, etc., until the fashion brands, footballers in the 1M+ bucket at the far right of the graph. - The y-axis was the total number of views over a period. So, if you tend to see friends posting, there would be a big lump at the left of the graph. If the platform were like traditional media, there would be a lump at the right. As things were, the lump was moving slowly towards the right. The problem was not that footballers and models don’t make good content — they do. The problem is that if you see that, you don’t post. So, the overall amount of content posted was dropping. Why put your wonky cake next to Amaury Guichon sculpting a peacock with nothing but chocolate and edible paint? I think there’s a big cultural difference there, one that Americans won’t instinctively appreciate. Of course, you want your cooking show to feature the best of the best, but to keep people engaged? Ask funny people to mess up and tease each other instead. “The Great British Bake-off” isn’t successful because the cakes are world-class. But have people who can riff for five minutes on penis-related puns because a cake looks like it should be blurred to appear on the BBC, and people behind their screen will spout their own joke like it’s a Reddit thread.
• xwdv 3y ago
  I don’t understand how there is such an assumed 1 to 1 relationship with getting lots of followers and making lots of money. Where the fuck is the money coming from??
  • master-lincoln 3y ago
    adverts
  • czue 3y ago
    advertising revenue share, paid newsletters, ebooks, courses, side-hustles, indie hacker apps... basically any way you can make money online.
  • michaelt 3y ago
    Twitter has started giving some users a portion of ad revenue, for ads beside their tweets [1]. Which would presumably mean that more tweets, and more followers, mean more money. Of course, on most platforms only a tiny fraction of influencers make a decent living. So it's certainly not the case that everyone is making money. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/13/twitter-starts-sharing-ad-revenue-with-verified-creators/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/13/twitter-starts-sharing-ad-...
  • flatline 3y ago
    From the platforms, generated by ad views by followers. Or more accurately, ad clicks downstream from that.