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This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back. Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never

• raffraffraff 2y ago
  Wife went cold turkey on social media and then had to join Instagram and LinkedIn for her business. Now she's addicted to Instagram. No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.
  • blitzar 2y ago
    People love LinkedIn cringe on instagram and twitter - but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious
    • lazide 2y ago
      Well, serious in the same way cult members have to be serious. If you crack and admit it’s fake, everything falls apart and it’s your fault. Expulsion out onto the street follows. Even worse, now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.
      • throwawee 2y ago
        >now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time. Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.
        • ethbr1 2y ago
          I do judge people who post thought leadership on LinkedIn about the same as people who are really into pro wrestling.
          • lazide 2y ago
            I bet you also tell the Mormons to take a hike when they come visit.
            • ethbr1 2y ago
              Honestly, I'm really nice to the LDS when they drop by. My experience has been that Mormons are generally self-aware, polite, and willing the engage in interesting conversation. In contrast, LinkedIn influencers' eyes glaze over whenever you try to dig into the details of what they're purporting to talk about. Because, ugh, nerd stuff that's beneath them.
              • mrguyorama 2y ago
                It's not because "nerd stuff that's beneath them" but because to a significant portion of the middle management class, the bullshit IS reality. The bullshit is how they get their job, how they function day to day, how they explain themselves to others, how they THINK about themselves etc. It's much the same as the people who get books ghostwritten and say "I wrote a book". It doesn't matter if you understand someone else wrote it, if you say that in your head or out loud enough, your brain will treat it as reality and you will think it to be reality, and that will effect future thinking and feeling. It doesn't matter if you are playing a character. Play it convincingly enough and it WILL bleed into your reality.
                • lazide 1y ago
                  yup, and some people are very insecure about this, and will try to destroy you if you ruin the illusion.
          • iugtmkbdfil834 2y ago
    • harvey9 2y ago
      A comedy act called 'Wankernomics' just showed up in my YouTube recommendations. I thought about booking a ticket to their show but its too close to reality.
    • cmsj 2y ago
      I have made one post ever to LinkedIn and it was something I said as a joke in a 1-1 that I realised was perfect LinkedIn fodder. It did some pretty good numbers, and made me respect that site even less than I already did.
    • alabastervlog 2y ago
      > but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious I doubt many are being serious. Business culture (at least in the US) is so steeped in lying and general fake-ness that in-group signaling as "real business person" involves public performances of bullshit. It's what you're supposed to do in interviews: bullshit just the right way, to show you understand the game and are willing to debase yourself to play it. Otherwise you're "risky", either due to excessive commitment to ethical principles or to being too clueless or inept to play the game right. That's what's going on, on LinkedIn. "Humility" and "realness" even have to be faked just the right way. It's incredibly gross.
      • seec 2y ago
        That's probably one reason that business degrades over time. With that type of "requirement" you can't get anyone worth a dam to work for you, past a certain point.
    • doright 2y ago
      "The baby's gotta eat" is a very strong motivator for people to do somewhat cringe things in the name of their livelihoods and future. Including $50/year subscriptions for PDF reader apps (dead serious).
• moritonal 2y ago
  Google+ by any other name and four years earlier would have been an incredible platform. Circles were so neat.
  • fsckboy 2y ago
    two years earlier it was Google Buzz. two years before that it was Google Wave.
    • radlad 2y ago
      I don't recall Buzz or Wave having the Circles feature that many (including myself) miss from Google+.
      • starkparker 2y ago
        The closest thing that I remember within a Google product was actually Google Reader's optional friend-of-a-friend visibility on shared items/comments. A lot of little circles-like communities that sprung up around individual people.
  • FeloniousHam 2y ago
    100%. I got pulled into Old School Revival TTRPGs there. It was smaller and quieter, and in the sections I read mostly free of politics and other noise. I miss the "anti-social network".
• chasd00 2y ago
  The best social networks i have are imessage group chats. One with my old college friends, one with my immediate family, and another with extended family. My kids have their own group chats with their classmates. They're much better than the social platforms.
• captainmuon 2y ago
  That's great if you are the kind of person wo is added into fun social group chats. But my group chats are mostly functional, like for hobbies, or parents groups for the kids' classes, and so on. There is one family group which sees annoying memes every now and then, and one group with friends from university which is also rarely used. Old school social networks used to be this noncommital, low-threshold way to connect with others around you. It was really great if you were a socially awkward teen or twenty-something. It's no big deal to friend somebody on facebook (or MySpace, or your universities gamified campus management system or whatever) and see what they are doing, or strike up a conversation. I really miss that kind of network.
• Aromasin 2y ago
  Eh, I'd disagree on the Instagram front. If you look at the reels section, where most spend their time, it's just a more deplorable Tiktok. 80% of the content on there is soft core porn advertising one OnlyFans girl or another. The other 20% seems to be brain rot memes. I reinstalled it recently after 8 years of not having it, and immediately deleted it.
  • prmoustache 2y ago
    I guess it really depends if you have fed the algorithm with your preferences already.
    • sojournerc 2y ago
      Here's the thing, Instagram figured it quickly that I might spend another second or two looking at an attractive lady, but that isn't my preference for what I would see in the feed. Merely because I have libido Instagram became absolutely unusable no matter how many times I tell it I'm not interested in insta-bitches showing skin, it knows I'll look, so Instagram is gone out of my life. Too bad because other topics like woodworking and mountain biking we're interesting and less... provocative, but that's not good for Instagram.
      • seec 2y ago
        That's hilarious, I got a bit of the same "problem" but with Facebook (I don't use Instagram), but it's generally pretty actress or (for some reason) ballerinas. I'm not gonna lie, I kinda like it. I have found out that the algorithm will adjust itself relatively quickly if you don't click on stuff (at some point it decided I was into foot fetish and it disappeared quickly). With that I get stuff about philosophy, math (memes), science and technology stuff with a lot of animals videos.
    • navbaker 2y ago
      This definitely works. I have two profiles on IG: one for musical instrument related things and one for painting miniatures. I’ve been able to keep both profiles strictly on topic by aggressively using the “not interested” button whenever something not related pops up.
• noduerme 2y ago
  Any way you cut it, "feeds" are more addictive. Your family and friends only post a couple times a day, but you have all day at work to look for some quick stimulation. I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed about it. But it's fake. It's all fake. In real life, it took me a whole year to figure out that the people at one particular local pub actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. I only figured out why they were so hostile because the people at my other pub told me. (It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family. Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese. We get along a lot better than I do with my old antifa "friends") This was a hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people can be for no reason. It's not something you can understand properly, ever, on any kind of social media. The media format just gets in the way of understanding other people as people; of understanding truth and factual reality; of differentiating between opinion and fact. Feeds are garbage, optimized for chaos.
  • rightbyte 2y ago
    If the people in the pub don't show they hate you, they don't hate you. It might as well be the people in the other pub that are making stuff up about the others.
  • johnisgood 2y ago
    > actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. This happens virtually everywhere. It is extremely rampant. I have yet to find a place where there are humans and it does not happen, excl. friend circles.
    • noduerme 2y ago
      Yeh, I know. It's a kinda sad fact about humans. You can handle it a few ways. The most tempting and easiest is to compete on the same level, sniping at other people. More difficult but similar is to take it a step further and be the biggest guy at the pub, deal some drugs, fuck more girls, act like a friend and then talk shit. Every bar has one... it's just a method. They learned it from the internet, or possibly from being abused as a child. My method in all cases, everywhere, is to be extremely honest and see what comes out of people. What I find respectable is someone who tells you honestly what they think, even if they're not your friend. The people who tell you the unfiltered truth as they see it. Those are the good humans. Making other people reveal themselves, so you know what you're dealing with. That's actually understanding the world.
• alistairSH 2y ago
  The problem with Insta as a “hip LinkedIn” is I can’t even browse it properly without an account. Say I find an interesting business elsewhere and Ggogle them; their primary web presence is Insta; I find their page, but cannot browse their photos/posts. So, it’s a pretty shit tool for a business to share what it’s about.
  • ethbr1 2y ago
    I'd say that's a feature from Insta's perspective: leveraging user-created content into new user acquisition. And all they have to do is be shitty about monetizing their existing userbase via social pressure.
    • alistairSH 2y ago
      Oh yeah, Insta wants me to join. But I quit Meta last year because the algorithms suck donkey bollocks and drive me crazy. I'm much happier for it, but it is annoying to find a restaurant or craftsman who only uses Insta (or FB or whatever else).
    • TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
      For some reason Meta destroyed Insta as a monetisation tool. The algo used to be good for self-promo for artists and writers, and they tweaked it to kill that. Now it's useless. There was a mass exodus to Threads, which is now a weird toxic liminal space apparently tuned for woke-adjacent rage bait blended with LinkedIn-for-creatives. "I have an opinion, now buy my fan art." My take on all of these is that huge corporations are all polluters. We think of pollution as chemical and environmental, but Meta and X are the world's biggest sources of mental and emotional pollution - outside of the MSM.
  • dylan604 2y ago
    If there's a link to an Insta page that I'm actually interested in, I turn on the devtools and hide their modal pop up about logging in. That allows me to continue to scroll the page. Then instead of clicking on the item of interest directly, I use the browser's copy link which I then paste into a new tab. This avoids their attempt at getting you to login again. They'll let you land on any post without throttling the number of direct loads. It's a total pain in the ass, so I only do it for the rare account that actually looks interesting. After a couple of posts, I quickly realize that the account isn't actually worth all of that, and just close and move on.
• grumple 2y ago
  Group chats existed before any of this social media did. Pretty funny that we’ve come full circle on that.
  • lobsterthief 2y ago
    iOS added more social network-like functionality to the group chats—like being able to name them, set a photo, etc. To me, this helped cement their popularity since you can create a bespoke “named thing” that makes it easier to return to. You don’t accidentally leave someone off when returning to the convo.
    • grumple 2y ago
      I have never used any of these features, I just see the names on the group chat - same as groups texts 15 years ago. I don’t want to hide that with a group name that might make me forget who I’m messaging.
• MisterTea 2y ago
  > Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Don't forget FB marketplace. I know a few younger coworkers who have FB just for market place.
  • FeloniousHam 2y ago
    I'm Old, but this is me. Marketplace is big improvement over Craigslist, it's the only reason I have a FB account.
    • olyjohn 2y ago
      I hesitate to call it an improvement. The search is garbage, and you get tons of shit you didn't even search for, and the filters don't work. Yeah CL is dead by comparison, and everything is listed on Marketplace, but better? I dunno.
• bentt 2y ago
  "Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares." This is spot on. Facebook proper has supplanted private email chains for a lot of older people. This is ironic because they are moving in the opposite direction as everyone else. Everyone else is moving into private communities, older people are leaving the safety of email chains and, often unknowingly, posting publicly. Facebook (probably intentionally) upholds the illusion that they are posting for their friends. I've seen Facebook actually provide a compelling service to my older dad who keeps in touch with a lot of his old friends on there. It's a much more active community of seniors than you'd guess. Of course, they are subject to all the ills of Facebook at the same time. Overall I'd rate it as a net loss for society because of that.
• JauntTrooper 2y ago
  WhatsApp has really taken on this role for me, now that mention it. I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
• ashoeafoot 2y ago
  There are also the loners whos complete social and emotional life is the feed who send that feed onwards into group chats as input, isolating them further.
• TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
  > A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances. But sometimes I do, because saying something to one person feels like I'm demanding a response from them, but saying it to a broad circle of friends allows those interested to reply, and others to leave it. Back when I used Facebook, I was more likely to gripe (or brag) on the Facebook wall than in a personal text conversation with a friend. (Friends in person are the best option, of course.)
• metalman 1y ago
  While I never have used "social media" I recently changed my online viewing(news/reading) habit, to after work only, limiting myself to one or two forum comments before first coffee. And as a self employed person this has changed my whole day and work flow..,,.snappier.