8 ms·

First-gen social media users have nowhere to go

74 points by fariszr 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
est 3y ago
I feel abandoned after Google Reader shutdown. I never got engaged with daily long text reading again.
- rtpg 3y ago
  As always I will point out that The Old Reader is basically a carbon copy of Google Reader. It works, plenty of blogs have RSS feeds still (I just add more or less every interesting blog I see linked here in there), so you can get back if you want to. It's not exactly the same, but it sure feels close!
  - walteweiss 3y ago
    Thank you for the recommendation. As the opposite, more minimalistic approach, I started to create different thematic feeds in newsfeed (a terminal reader), and I quite like the result. I check different sources, but it demotivates me to spend too much time with it.
  - emayljames 3y ago
    Nothing matches the content that filled Google Reader though. It was buzzing, very much like HN.
  - maxglute 3y ago
    RSS readers dime a dozen, nothing feels close to Google Reader + Google+ (circles lol), having friends on your contact list who were RSS users automatically linked to your reading social circle.
    - nickthegreek 3y ago
      I use Inoreader for its social features. Closest I have experienced on RSS since the old days. Of course, my RSS social circle ended up fracturing and some went to feedly, etc.
- pupppet 3y ago
  I never fail to upvote anyone who mentions this. I will never let Google live this down, in whatever small, spiteful way I can.
- aquafox 3y ago
  Maybe not a perfect replacement, but have you tried Feedly? https://feedly.com/ https://feedly.com/
- dewey 3y ago
  I see this all the time and while at the time I thought the same there's so many good alternatives these days, even better than back then. All the interesting and small websites I want to follow still have RSS feeds so I feel like we can move on. The two I use for many years already are: - https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app (OS, Minimal, web interface and can be used with all clients that support Fever or Google Reader API) - https://reederapp.com https://reederapp.com (iOS, Mac)
latency-guy2 3y ago
In other news, social media apps continue to hit new highest MAU counts for all generations every year. Disaffected social media addicts are way too loud of a minority. The world goes on.
- LesZedCB 3y ago
  there are dozens of us!
NoPicklez 3y ago
I think being any age demographic that grew up before these apps came to rise you can remind yourself that you don't need to have them. I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family, not articles, not random videos from across the world, not influencers, but people that were actually close to you. I didn't need to send a text message any longer, I could send an instant message or a post to a group of friends and family. Social media really hasn't got much better for my quality of life than that. It's now filled with crap, random videos, random influencers, eat this, don't eat that, you're not motivated because of x, read this/read that. Having said that, for me it's more about attention span, these social media apps have grabbed way too much of my attention and continue to find ways to keep me opening my phone. I can clearly see that these apps are trying to keep me looking at content and that's it, they aren't really adding value to my life, they're trying to make it my life.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  I was using IRC and a few forums at that time. Those have been largely drained.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    Funnily enough, I closed all my social medias account except the activitypub one and I am still loging in almost every day to 2 old school web forums. Activity may be lower than during the heydays but in term of quality and positivity it is much better. The moderators are doing a good job to keep everything civil, which is only really possible at a small scale.
  - operatingthetan 3y ago
    I still follow some forums and the tone of the conversations there are generally much less combative and friendly than reddit, so if you can find some in your interests it can be great.
    - iforgotpassword 3y ago
      I still frequent one but it's basically the same people as 15 years ago and conversations are exclusively injokes and lore. No sane person stumbling across it in their right mind would ever sign up there. I think this is a common problem to smaller, older communities, but I feel it is more pronounced in German ones. We are the kings of snark and knowing-it-better. Just the other day I was googling about a TRV and ended up in a German home automation forum. A new user started a thread posting a very specific question that was about the mechanical connection of the TRV to the radiator, they explained the issue well and included a photo. In the photo you were able to see the exact brand/model of the TRV. The very first reply was literally just "why are you using X? Aren't you reading this forum?" Like, this shit would get downvoted into oblivion ob sites like reddit, but since this was an old, well established user with a four-digit postcount, another two or three users chimed in commenting about the TRV sucking. Not a single mention why it sucks, or a Link to an according thread. This was German forums in a nutshell to me.
rustcleaner 3y ago
There is still one good class of apps to socialize over: distributed/mesh peer-to-peer messaging to replace your surveiled lines of communication. Four excellent examples in order of favoritism for me: 1) Briar. What can I say? Briar is well built and hardly hiccups. It's annoying that the desktop client is in forced upgrade beta still, no single-profile on multi-device, and there will likely never be an iOS version (iOS' fault), but aside from that for Android users it is bar none number 1. Where it lacks voice/video, it has groups, forums, blogs, and is modular with its transports (Tor, LAN, Bluetooth, Sneaker Net). It will absolutely work in a zero internet situation; for emergencies at minimum android-owning families really ought to install it and add each other. It will work with no internet! 2) Session. Session started as a fork/clone of Signal which did not require an associated phone number to use. It has since evolved to use Oxen (Lokinet, an onion network like Tor/I2P) for messaging. Session has multi-device profiles. Unlike Briar, Session has voice and video (and it is stable most of the time, over mullvad vpn). Voice and video rely on a clearnet Oxen introduction server still (this will eventually change) and the two participants stream p2p; if anonymity is desired then a trustworthy obfuscator is a must for voice/video. Session can be used metadata free if voice/video are avoided for the time being and Slow Mode is selected (no push notification services used). Session is my second because it is more feature rich for normies, works on iphone (that abomination*), and is quite stable. 3) Tox. Tox makes the list as #3 for being around a while and having a lot of client choices. Tox seems a little less stable, but that's more the fault of the various clients being buggy sometimes. It has voice and group voice (I think). Tox is not anonymous, so an obfuscator will be needed if anonymity is desired. 4) Jami. Jami is a GNU project application (formerly Ring) which I think could substitute for Zoom potentially. It can be a bit buggy sometimes dropping calls or video not working right sometimes [though I haven't used it enough to say it's not PEBKAC here at this point]. I make mention of this because it underwent heavy improvement during COVID to try to offer some competition to the dismal (proprietary, China) video conference landscape. It too can do multi-device profiles. All of the above are short listed because they are easy to install, really quick to generate a locally stored and used set of identity tokens, and then trade strings with friends to link with them. Honorable mention because it's not a messenger but it is in the same vein as the rest spiritually: SyncThing. Ditch the cloud, sync headache-free! (MS should have used this to replicate their windows domain controller file stores IMO, no joke!) We are soon entering the age of The Basilisk... except The Basilisk will be leashed, tethered to men who dictate upon whom The Basilisk gazes. Stop being an NPC when it comes to your data and privacy habits, and start acting like a strategic player... always practice all of the Safe SECs! (* Disclosure: I daily drive Qubes OS and GrapheneOS.)
magic_hamster 3y ago
This was a disappointing read. There's no data in there. No research. Just a couple of opinions. I can relate, but what I'd really like to see is some usage data for social apps with more insight.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Also author do not really try to evaluate if the evolution comes from this generation suffering from enshitification of social medias they used to love or if it is just a natural part in one's life to reconsider some activities, especially when reaching the thirties and fourties. It could also be based on the social circles those person haves. I had never been big into social medias but when I moved in another country and divorced 5 years ago I found myself with a completely reduced social circle apart from my coworkers. Most locals are very welcoming but also very superficial/hypocritical: you will meet people in a bar and most they will act like a long time friend and give you their number but past that first encounter most are either not reliable or will decline all invitations because they already have a big enough social circles and stacked agenda and don't care inviting you. So you are mostly stuck with meeting other expatriates who are more keen to build relationships and for that it is easier to enter organized events (otherwise you just meet tourist that leave the week after). Most social events where I would have the possibility to encounter people are now only announced on social medias so I ended up using facebook for a 2-3 years at fourty-something despite not liking that platform.
otterley 3y ago
I think they meant third-gen, with Usenet/BBS, IRC, and LiveJournal communities all preceding them by years.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  The term social media didn't exist at that time.
  - otterley 3y ago
    Perhaps so, but just because we didn’t call something by a name at the time doesn’t mean that’s not what it was!
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      From what I've overheard of critical theory, this is the argument between historical contingency (historicism) and social construction (constructionism). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2019.1653351 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2019.1... : Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. People used to have letters to the editor and billboards. Even in computers there were login messages, user signatures, and presumably notes taped to shared terminals.
      - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        To add on to social media precursors, which can functionally be called social media 2.0 if one is following historicism, randomdata mentions newspaper society pages as similar to timeline feeds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39272068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39272068 And basically forever we've had dedicated gossips for social media 1.0. I'm kind of with prmoustache. It becomes a thing when people start treating it like a thing, and said treatment involves the labeling.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Social media is pretty cool. I met my wife, a ton of business contacts, and most of my best friends through social media, so I'm probably an outlier case in just how positive an impact it had on my life. But it was a very very strong positive indeed, and contributed greatly to my agreeing with patio11 about the internet being the caps-G caps-dub Great Work of humanity. I don't feel particularly bad that my children likely won't have the same social media experience that I have. They'll probably have a much better one, refined by a few extra decades of free market practices figuring out better ways of getting people what they really want it out of it. It's entirely possible that in a decade or so meeting people first online, then irl will be much more common than it is today. I don't think that's a bad thing in the slightest.
- javaunsafe2019 3y ago
  I don’t believe you.
hit8run 3y ago
I’m a little surprised the author didn’t mention Reddit.
- tayo42 3y ago
  I feel like reddit is the biggest site that no one talks about using.
  - over_bridge 3y ago
    A site with accounts that you never want linked to your real self, or your other accounts, under any circumstances. It bucks the trend of every profile linking to every other one somewhat
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Even if it has a social aspect to it I wouldn't strictly call it a social media. It looks more like a fucked up mix between a web forum and a tool like stack overflow.
  - vaylian 3y ago
    This. I draw a line between 1) sites where the author of some content is very visible and 2) sites where you need conscious effort to check out who wrote something (like reddit, HN, wikipedia). The former is social media. The latter is just web 2.0.
OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
I still long for the days of Zeroth-gen tech: Usenet, listservs, and bulletin boards. I miss the focused discussions, some of which turned into face-to-face contacts that have lasted for 25+ years. Reddit never scratched the itch. The Stack Overflow network did not either especially when my questions, carefully worded to comply with the guidelines, got the blockhammer anyway. My best alternative so far is searching the HN archives at least for certain kinds of technical questions. Lots of firepower here despite it not being a Q&A site. (Never used Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter)
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  > The Stack Overflow network did not either especially when my questions, carefully worded to comply with the guidelines, got the blockhammer anyway. Tangent, but: I've honestly never stumbled upon a question on SO that had been closed objectively unfairly. Not in 5 or so years, anyway. Can you maybe share a story?
  - OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
    ~8+ years ago: I wanted to know if/how I could accomplish X with tool Y in the relevant group. Showed examples of what I had tried with negative or inconclusive results, listed some SO and non-SO references I consulted, and specifically said I was _not_ looking for alternate tool recommendations since that was against the guidelines. Got closed because I was asking for recommendations (!) which was against the posting guidelines that I obviously had not read. There was another ~1-2 years before that which got a few helpful responses/discussion and one or two that were off base. It got closed for attracting low quality responses. Suffice it to say I wasn't lazily shotgunning SO but posted only when thorough research and experimentation hadn't gotten me over the hump.
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
  > I miss the focused discussions There are many such communities alive and well today, on for example Discord. Here's one I use often, for the Bevy game engine: https://discord.gg/bevy https://discord.gg/bevy with 3100 users online. The issue as I see it with reddit et al is they are too open and too large. When there are too many unknown people around, users tend to treat each other as strangers and that can turn ugly fast. I think this is related to tribalism [1], where you can have relations and "know" a couple of hundred people, but with too many people around you no longer feel the same connection with them, they are all strangers to you. That's just my take, but I think there's something to it. Most if not all enjoyable groups I found, even on reddit and facebook seemed to be working because there were just a few hundred to thousand people, rather than a 500k subreddit. The same held true on older forums, where usually you have a few hundred active users. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism
philip1209 3y ago
I think the next trend will be low-attention apps. People shouldn't be tied to their phones nonstop. Engagement, measured by active users, will increase if we make communications more async.
Animats 3y ago
Time to bring back USENET. Really. It was a successful federated system in its day.
mo_42 3y ago
New social networks are exciting until the business needs to make money. The first phase of a social network is funded by investors. So the developers make it super-interesting and easy to join. Then, it reaches a stage where the investors want to see a profit. So developers need to convert an interesting and exciting social network into a money-making machine. Feeds won't be ordered by time anymore, ads lurk around in every corner, and algorithms will be tuned to push profitable content over interesting content. Before that, social media was a bargain for the user. Now, it's a bargain for the investor.
- jader201 3y ago
  The definition of bait and switch.
andsoitis 3y ago
For someone who hates X, they sure like to post on it: https://twitter.com/nonlinearnotes https://twitter.com/nonlinearnotes
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  narcissism is a helluva drug
- pixxel 3y ago
  Heh yeah. People here also jump into X/Elon threads to whine and pontificate. Move on or STFU.
prmoustache 3y ago
Also social media are now invaded by beggars and prostitutes (so called influencers or content creators). While I don't mind the occasional homeless or juggler asking for money and would stop to listen and donate to a good musician in the sidewalk or in a park, I would totally avoid a street where I would have to navigate around thousands of people begging for my attention and money.
jakobnissen 3y ago
We can go outside. It's certainly nicer there than on Twitter. If people did that it would be the happy ending for social media, really.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
No mention of Threads or Mastodon until right at the end, with the throwaway line "none of them have seized mass culture". Well sorry, you can't just completely ignore the biggest up-and-coming social networks like that. I left Twitter for the obvious reasons, and the combination of Mastodon and Threads has been a pleasant replacement for me.
- krapp 3y ago
  The fewer people descend on Mastodon, the longer it can hold back its own ruin. Assuming it hasn't already been ruined by the people like you and I escaping Twitter. Eternal September is as absolute a law as thermodynamics. I don't even recommend Mastodon to people anymore. It's selfish, but in this day and age of algorithms, dark patterns, psyops, influencer culture and AI, all engagement must be considered toxic, although the dose makes the poison. The day Mastodon does "seize mass culture" is the day it becomes something unrecognizable and irrevocably cancerous.
- fariszr 3y ago
  Honestly mastodon was never a replacement for Twitter and it's not even close to the variety Twitter has.On Twitter you can delve into pretty much anything and get the real time events about it whether its, sports, politics, economics or even tech and it's own niche cultures Nothing come even close to that, mastodon is just a couple of small niches within tech and some news organizations, you won't find anything near to how Twitter works and you won't find anything even close to being relevant as it is. I personally think most of the complaints that hacker News writes about Twitter, stem from who you follow.It really depends on who you follow, if you find the right people it's going to be your source for what's going on in anything you're interested in. And unfortunately Elon doesn't seem to be interested in keeping that, he is just interested in milking every last dollar out of it and the result is the platform fighting against its own users. Unfortunately he also proved something very dystopian while he's doing this:The network effect is so strong that even if you fight against your users، nothing is going to change. This article explains it fully: https://stratechery.com/2023/threads-and-the-social-communications-map/ https://stratechery.com/2023/threads-and-the-social-communic... My comment on it is also relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684443
yungporko 3y ago
we don't need anywhere to go, i'm quite happy having a life outside of the internet.
ensocode 3y ago
I am not able to use Instagram or Twitter for my own use cases. Either I want to gather information about some topic or I want to gather the news. But the search function is completely useless. What I dislike about the "new" social media is that it is missing the focus more and more and I am not able to make any use of it. YouTube if awesome to learn some new skills. TikTok or YT Shorts are pretty much useless for this. Question: How do you feel about this, and how do you make use of the next-gen social media apps?
leeeeeepw 3y ago
I'm running an alternative social net : netwrck.com Interested what people think but early days, hopefully will be a place with more interesting and useful AIs that can help us instead of trying to scam us like Facebook lol
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
mitchbob 3y ago
https://archive.ph/2023.11.10-153614/https://www.wired.com/story/first-gen-social-media-users-have-nowhere-to-go/ https://archive.ph/2023.11.10-153614/https://www.wired.com/s...
vcg3rd 3y ago
I still have a deactivated FB, which I would long ago have closed except Messanger became the default family chat app, and I have over 15 years of family messages. FB failed for me in the early years. Even though I only ever added friends I knew in the flesh,I didn't really care which coffee they picked at Starbucks or what cute thing their pets did. When FB moved into the next phase as global forum I found that, just like with email, most of USENET, and pretty much any digital communication tool/platform, no one had the attention and/or capacity for reasoned, balanced, nuanced, irenic discussion of any length. It's one reason why Twitter was "successful" at political/cultural/philosophical "discussion. Despite the complaints about character limit it's what people actually wanted. It's also why I couldn't use it. For years I used to write family and friends email like I would a postal letter. I replied in-line instead of at the top (thanks MS for destroying that sane practice), but even if when printed the email would be a page, page and a half at 12 pt font, I got constant compliments about length. I never used Instagram, quit Mastadon after it had its "Eternal September" as people fled Twitter to talk about nothing but Twitter. I never was able to find active IRC channels even in the late 90s. It felt like rooms with statues even when I asked a specific on-topic question. Mid-90s USENET and Prodigy forums were the best social experience I ever had. Now I mostly use internal forums in the tilde/rawtext public *nix space, a little gopher and gemini.

74 points by fariszr 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

est 3y ago

I feel abandoned after Google Reader shutdown. I never got engaged with daily long text reading again.

rtpg 3y ago
As always I will point out that The Old Reader is basically a carbon copy of Google Reader. It works, plenty of blogs have RSS feeds still (I just add more or less every interesting blog I see linked here in there), so you can get back if you want to. It's not exactly the same, but it sure feels close!
- walteweiss 3y ago
  Thank you for the recommendation. As the opposite, more minimalistic approach, I started to create different thematic feeds in newsfeed (a terminal reader), and I quite like the result. I check different sources, but it demotivates me to spend too much time with it.
- emayljames 3y ago
  Nothing matches the content that filled Google Reader though. It was buzzing, very much like HN.
- maxglute 3y ago
  RSS readers dime a dozen, nothing feels close to Google Reader + Google+ (circles lol), having friends on your contact list who were RSS users automatically linked to your reading social circle.
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    I use Inoreader for its social features. Closest I have experienced on RSS since the old days. Of course, my RSS social circle ended up fracturing and some went to feedly, etc.
pupppet 3y ago
I never fail to upvote anyone who mentions this. I will never let Google live this down, in whatever small, spiteful way I can.
aquafox 3y ago
Maybe not a perfect replacement, but have you tried Feedly? https://feedly.com/ https://feedly.com/
dewey 3y ago
I see this all the time and while at the time I thought the same there's so many good alternatives these days, even better than back then. All the interesting and small websites I want to follow still have RSS feeds so I feel like we can move on. The two I use for many years already are: - https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app (OS, Minimal, web interface and can be used with all clients that support Fever or Google Reader API) - https://reederapp.com https://reederapp.com (iOS, Mac)

latency-guy2 3y ago

In other news, social media apps continue to hit new highest MAU counts for all generations every year. Disaffected social media addicts are way too loud of a minority. The world goes on.

LesZedCB 3y ago
there are dozens of us!

NoPicklez 3y ago

I think being any age demographic that grew up before these apps came to rise you can remind yourself that you don't need to have them. I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family, not articles, not random videos from across the world, not influencers, but people that were actually close to you. I didn't need to send a text message any longer, I could send an instant message or a post to a group of friends and family. Social media really hasn't got much better for my quality of life than that. It's now filled with crap, random videos, random influencers, eat this, don't eat that, you're not motivated because of x, read this/read that. Having said that, for me it's more about attention span, these social media apps have grabbed way too much of my attention and continue to find ways to keep me opening my phone. I can clearly see that these apps are trying to keep me looking at content and that's it, they aren't really adding value to my life, they're trying to make it my life.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
I was using IRC and a few forums at that time. Those have been largely drained.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Funnily enough, I closed all my social medias account except the activitypub one and I am still loging in almost every day to 2 old school web forums. Activity may be lower than during the heydays but in term of quality and positivity it is much better. The moderators are doing a good job to keep everything civil, which is only really possible at a small scale.
- operatingthetan 3y ago
  I still follow some forums and the tone of the conversations there are generally much less combative and friendly than reddit, so if you can find some in your interests it can be great.
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    I still frequent one but it's basically the same people as 15 years ago and conversations are exclusively injokes and lore. No sane person stumbling across it in their right mind would ever sign up there. I think this is a common problem to smaller, older communities, but I feel it is more pronounced in German ones. We are the kings of snark and knowing-it-better. Just the other day I was googling about a TRV and ended up in a German home automation forum. A new user started a thread posting a very specific question that was about the mechanical connection of the TRV to the radiator, they explained the issue well and included a photo. In the photo you were able to see the exact brand/model of the TRV. The very first reply was literally just "why are you using X? Aren't you reading this forum?" Like, this shit would get downvoted into oblivion ob sites like reddit, but since this was an old, well established user with a four-digit postcount, another two or three users chimed in commenting about the TRV sucking. Not a single mention why it sucks, or a Link to an according thread. This was German forums in a nutshell to me.

rustcleaner 3y ago

There is still one good class of apps to socialize over: distributed/mesh peer-to-peer messaging to replace your surveiled lines of communication. Four excellent examples in order of favoritism for me: 1) Briar. What can I say? Briar is well built and hardly hiccups. It's annoying that the desktop client is in forced upgrade beta still, no single-profile on multi-device, and there will likely never be an iOS version (iOS' fault), but aside from that for Android users it is bar none number 1. Where it lacks voice/video, it has groups, forums, blogs, and is modular with its transports (Tor, LAN, Bluetooth, Sneaker Net). It will absolutely work in a zero internet situation; for emergencies at minimum android-owning families really ought to install it and add each other. It will work with no internet! 2) Session. Session started as a fork/clone of Signal which did not require an associated phone number to use. It has since evolved to use Oxen (Lokinet, an onion network like Tor/I2P) for messaging. Session has multi-device profiles. Unlike Briar, Session has voice and video (and it is stable most of the time, over mullvad vpn). Voice and video rely on a clearnet Oxen introduction server still (this will eventually change) and the two participants stream p2p; if anonymity is desired then a trustworthy obfuscator is a must for voice/video. Session can be used metadata free if voice/video are avoided for the time being and Slow Mode is selected (no push notification services used). Session is my second because it is more feature rich for normies, works on iphone (that abomination*), and is quite stable. 3) Tox. Tox makes the list as #3 for being around a while and having a lot of client choices. Tox seems a little less stable, but that's more the fault of the various clients being buggy sometimes. It has voice and group voice (I think). Tox is not anonymous, so an obfuscator will be needed if anonymity is desired. 4) Jami. Jami is a GNU project application (formerly Ring) which I think could substitute for Zoom potentially. It can be a bit buggy sometimes dropping calls or video not working right sometimes [though I haven't used it enough to say it's not PEBKAC here at this point]. I make mention of this because it underwent heavy improvement during COVID to try to offer some competition to the dismal (proprietary, China) video conference landscape. It too can do multi-device profiles. All of the above are short listed because they are easy to install, really quick to generate a locally stored and used set of identity tokens, and then trade strings with friends to link with them. Honorable mention because it's not a messenger but it is in the same vein as the rest spiritually: SyncThing. Ditch the cloud, sync headache-free! (MS should have used this to replicate their windows domain controller file stores IMO, no joke!) We are soon entering the age of The Basilisk... except The Basilisk will be leashed, tethered to men who dictate upon whom The Basilisk gazes. Stop being an NPC when it comes to your data and privacy habits, and start acting like a strategic player... always practice all of the Safe SECs! (* Disclosure: I daily drive Qubes OS and GrapheneOS.)

magic_hamster 3y ago

This was a disappointing read. There's no data in there. No research. Just a couple of opinions. I can relate, but what I'd really like to see is some usage data for social apps with more insight.

prmoustache 3y ago
Also author do not really try to evaluate if the evolution comes from this generation suffering from enshitification of social medias they used to love or if it is just a natural part in one's life to reconsider some activities, especially when reaching the thirties and fourties. It could also be based on the social circles those person haves. I had never been big into social medias but when I moved in another country and divorced 5 years ago I found myself with a completely reduced social circle apart from my coworkers. Most locals are very welcoming but also very superficial/hypocritical: you will meet people in a bar and most they will act like a long time friend and give you their number but past that first encounter most are either not reliable or will decline all invitations because they already have a big enough social circles and stacked agenda and don't care inviting you. So you are mostly stuck with meeting other expatriates who are more keen to build relationships and for that it is easier to enter organized events (otherwise you just meet tourist that leave the week after). Most social events where I would have the possibility to encounter people are now only announced on social medias so I ended up using facebook for a 2-3 years at fourty-something despite not liking that platform.

otterley 3y ago

I think they meant third-gen, with Usenet/BBS, IRC, and LiveJournal communities all preceding them by years.

prmoustache 3y ago
The term social media didn't exist at that time.
- otterley 3y ago
  Perhaps so, but just because we didn’t call something by a name at the time doesn’t mean that’s not what it was!
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    From what I've overheard of critical theory, this is the argument between historical contingency (historicism) and social construction (constructionism). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2019.1653351 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2019.1... : Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. People used to have letters to the editor and billboards. Even in computers there were login messages, user signatures, and presumably notes taped to shared terminals.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      To add on to social media precursors, which can functionally be called social media 2.0 if one is following historicism, randomdata mentions newspaper society pages as similar to timeline feeds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39272068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39272068 And basically forever we've had dedicated gossips for social media 1.0. I'm kind of with prmoustache. It becomes a thing when people start treating it like a thing, and said treatment involves the labeling.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Social media is pretty cool. I met my wife, a ton of business contacts, and most of my best friends through social media, so I'm probably an outlier case in just how positive an impact it had on my life. But it was a very very strong positive indeed, and contributed greatly to my agreeing with patio11 about the internet being the caps-G caps-dub Great Work of humanity. I don't feel particularly bad that my children likely won't have the same social media experience that I have. They'll probably have a much better one, refined by a few extra decades of free market practices figuring out better ways of getting people what they really want it out of it. It's entirely possible that in a decade or so meeting people first online, then irl will be much more common than it is today. I don't think that's a bad thing in the slightest.

javaunsafe2019 3y ago
I don’t believe you.

hit8run 3y ago

I’m a little surprised the author didn’t mention Reddit.

tayo42 3y ago
I feel like reddit is the biggest site that no one talks about using.
- over_bridge 3y ago
  A site with accounts that you never want linked to your real self, or your other accounts, under any circumstances. It bucks the trend of every profile linking to every other one somewhat
prmoustache 3y ago
Even if it has a social aspect to it I wouldn't strictly call it a social media. It looks more like a fucked up mix between a web forum and a tool like stack overflow.
- vaylian 3y ago
  This. I draw a line between 1) sites where the author of some content is very visible and 2) sites where you need conscious effort to check out who wrote something (like reddit, HN, wikipedia). The former is social media. The latter is just web 2.0.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago

I still long for the days of Zeroth-gen tech: Usenet, listservs, and bulletin boards. I miss the focused discussions, some of which turned into face-to-face contacts that have lasted for 25+ years. Reddit never scratched the itch. The Stack Overflow network did not either especially when my questions, carefully worded to comply with the guidelines, got the blockhammer anyway. My best alternative so far is searching the HN archives at least for certain kinds of technical questions. Lots of firepower here despite it not being a Q&A site. (Never used Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter)

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
> The Stack Overflow network did not either especially when my questions, carefully worded to comply with the guidelines, got the blockhammer anyway. Tangent, but: I've honestly never stumbled upon a question on SO that had been closed objectively unfairly. Not in 5 or so years, anyway. Can you maybe share a story?
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  ~8+ years ago: I wanted to know if/how I could accomplish X with tool Y in the relevant group. Showed examples of what I had tried with negative or inconclusive results, listed some SO and non-SO references I consulted, and specifically said I was _not_ looking for alternate tool recommendations since that was against the guidelines. Got closed because I was asking for recommendations (!) which was against the posting guidelines that I obviously had not read. There was another ~1-2 years before that which got a few helpful responses/discussion and one or two that were off base. It got closed for attracting low quality responses. Suffice it to say I wasn't lazily shotgunning SO but posted only when thorough research and experimentation hadn't gotten me over the hump.
shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
> I miss the focused discussions There are many such communities alive and well today, on for example Discord. Here's one I use often, for the Bevy game engine: https://discord.gg/bevy https://discord.gg/bevy with 3100 users online. The issue as I see it with reddit et al is they are too open and too large. When there are too many unknown people around, users tend to treat each other as strangers and that can turn ugly fast. I think this is related to tribalism [1], where you can have relations and "know" a couple of hundred people, but with too many people around you no longer feel the same connection with them, they are all strangers to you. That's just my take, but I think there's something to it. Most if not all enjoyable groups I found, even on reddit and facebook seemed to be working because there were just a few hundred to thousand people, rather than a 500k subreddit. The same held true on older forums, where usually you have a few hundred active users. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism

philip1209 3y ago

I think the next trend will be low-attention apps. People shouldn't be tied to their phones nonstop. Engagement, measured by active users, will increase if we make communications more async.

Animats 3y ago

Time to bring back USENET. Really. It was a successful federated system in its day.

mo_42 3y ago

New social networks are exciting until the business needs to make money. The first phase of a social network is funded by investors. So the developers make it super-interesting and easy to join. Then, it reaches a stage where the investors want to see a profit. So developers need to convert an interesting and exciting social network into a money-making machine. Feeds won't be ordered by time anymore, ads lurk around in every corner, and algorithms will be tuned to push profitable content over interesting content. Before that, social media was a bargain for the user. Now, it's a bargain for the investor.

jader201 3y ago
The definition of bait and switch.

andsoitis 3y ago

For someone who hates X, they sure like to post on it: https://twitter.com/nonlinearnotes https://twitter.com/nonlinearnotes

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
narcissism is a helluva drug
pixxel 3y ago
Heh yeah. People here also jump into X/Elon threads to whine and pontificate. Move on or STFU.

prmoustache 3y ago

Also social media are now invaded by beggars and prostitutes (so called influencers or content creators). While I don't mind the occasional homeless or juggler asking for money and would stop to listen and donate to a good musician in the sidewalk or in a park, I would totally avoid a street where I would have to navigate around thousands of people begging for my attention and money.

jakobnissen 3y ago

We can go outside. It's certainly nicer there than on Twitter. If people did that it would be the happy ending for social media, really.

LeoPanthera 3y ago

No mention of Threads or Mastodon until right at the end, with the throwaway line "none of them have seized mass culture". Well sorry, you can't just completely ignore the biggest up-and-coming social networks like that. I left Twitter for the obvious reasons, and the combination of Mastodon and Threads has been a pleasant replacement for me.

krapp 3y ago
The fewer people descend on Mastodon, the longer it can hold back its own ruin. Assuming it hasn't already been ruined by the people like you and I escaping Twitter. Eternal September is as absolute a law as thermodynamics. I don't even recommend Mastodon to people anymore. It's selfish, but in this day and age of algorithms, dark patterns, psyops, influencer culture and AI, all engagement must be considered toxic, although the dose makes the poison. The day Mastodon does "seize mass culture" is the day it becomes something unrecognizable and irrevocably cancerous.
fariszr 3y ago
Honestly mastodon was never a replacement for Twitter and it's not even close to the variety Twitter has.On Twitter you can delve into pretty much anything and get the real time events about it whether its, sports, politics, economics or even tech and it's own niche cultures Nothing come even close to that, mastodon is just a couple of small niches within tech and some news organizations, you won't find anything near to how Twitter works and you won't find anything even close to being relevant as it is. I personally think most of the complaints that hacker News writes about Twitter, stem from who you follow.It really depends on who you follow, if you find the right people it's going to be your source for what's going on in anything you're interested in. And unfortunately Elon doesn't seem to be interested in keeping that, he is just interested in milking every last dollar out of it and the result is the platform fighting against its own users. Unfortunately he also proved something very dystopian while he's doing this:The network effect is so strong that even if you fight against your users، nothing is going to change. This article explains it fully: https://stratechery.com/2023/threads-and-the-social-communications-map/ https://stratechery.com/2023/threads-and-the-social-communic... My comment on it is also relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684443

yungporko 3y ago

we don't need anywhere to go, i'm quite happy having a life outside of the internet.

ensocode 3y ago

I am not able to use Instagram or Twitter for my own use cases. Either I want to gather information about some topic or I want to gather the news. But the search function is completely useless. What I dislike about the "new" social media is that it is missing the focus more and more and I am not able to make any use of it. YouTube if awesome to learn some new skills. TikTok or YT Shorts are pretty much useless for this. Question: How do you feel about this, and how do you make use of the next-gen social media apps?

leeeeeepw 3y ago

I'm running an alternative social net : netwrck.com Interested what people think but early days, hopefully will be a place with more interesting and useful AIs that can help us instead of trying to scam us like Facebook lol

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

mitchbob 3y ago

https://archive.ph/2023.11.10-153614/https://www.wired.com/story/first-gen-social-media-users-have-nowhere-to-go/ https://archive.ph/2023.11.10-153614/https://www.wired.com/s...

vcg3rd 3y ago

I still have a deactivated FB, which I would long ago have closed except Messanger became the default family chat app, and I have over 15 years of family messages. FB failed for me in the early years. Even though I only ever added friends I knew in the flesh,I didn't really care which coffee they picked at Starbucks or what cute thing their pets did. When FB moved into the next phase as global forum I found that, just like with email, most of USENET, and pretty much any digital communication tool/platform, no one had the attention and/or capacity for reasoned, balanced, nuanced, irenic discussion of any length. It's one reason why Twitter was "successful" at political/cultural/philosophical "discussion. Despite the complaints about character limit it's what people actually wanted. It's also why I couldn't use it. For years I used to write family and friends email like I would a postal letter. I replied in-line instead of at the top (thanks MS for destroying that sane practice), but even if when printed the email would be a page, page and a half at 12 pt font, I got constant compliments about length. I never used Instagram, quit Mastadon after it had its "Eternal September" as people fled Twitter to talk about nothing but Twitter. I never was able to find active IRC channels even in the late 90s. It felt like rooms with statues even when I asked a specific on-topic question. Mid-90s USENET and Prodigy forums were the best social experience I ever had. Now I mostly use internal forums in the tilde/rawtext public *nix space, a little gopher and gemini.