5 ms·

Social media platforms: what's wrong, and what's next

45 points by eggbrain 1y ago

nick007 1y ago
Very thoughtful analysis. I particularly like the insight around the industry metrics and Goodhart's Law. “DAU” and the like align with social media companies’ interests of increasing attention and time on site, which lead to more ad revenue. But, they are at odds with their users’ interests, or at least don’t consider user costs (ie time). I wonder if a social product could thrive based on the principle of “efficient” usage, a la the platform works on my behalf to keep me efficiently informed on what’s going on in my network and considers the cost tradeoffs of my time and attention. I suspect I could feel very “up to date” on the things I care about most by checking into a social product ~weekly with a thoughtfully curated digest of content.
- eggbrain 1y ago
  I can see a platform that gives you just the data you need to stay informed working, although what data you wish to receive and how quickly seems like a potential stumbling point. Perhaps you don't want to receive news about celebrities, _unless_ it involves someone you care deeply about, for example Michael Jackson. It would require quite a bit of tailoring for a platform to be able to curate for that.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - lapcat 1y ago
    > Perhaps you don't want to receive news about celebrities, _unless_ it involves someone you care deeply about, for example Michael Jackson. I, uh... don't expect much news in the future about Michael Jackson.
- TheCondor 1y ago
  Aren't a lot of users on there simply to waste time? It costs next to nothing, provides some sort of sensation in your brain that you're doing things, you might see some neat pictures or videos. It's like a different kind of video game where you can't win and it's appealing to nearly every age group, gender, demographic.
- cvwright 1y ago
  Having tried (and failed) to build a more privacy friendly social network, I can confidently tell you that the big players in this space do the shady things they do solely because users reward them for doing so. Trying to grow a new product is super hard. Trying to move into an established market is even harder. Trying to do that while also foregoing all the dark patterns is … well I won’t say it’s impossible but ugh it would take a huge head start in terms of name recognition, funding, or something else truly extraordinary.
bananabreakfast 1y ago
Couldn't agree more. We need to put the "social" back into social media.
- eggbrain 1y ago
  An interesting thought (to your point) is what people hope social media can actually become -- in the ideal scenario, is it just us being able to engage with people online in better ways? Is it us being able to consume content from others in the ways we want?
incomingpain 1y ago
>I think we need a new social media platform to emerge from the web. There are a very large number of major platforms? None of them fit your needs? Many of the examples throughout are reddit. Though many of the memes are more facebook. The big question to me; can you be social and interact with people on many subjects. Say what I want, when I want. I want to see what I want. Just because a small group of people dont like what I said, they dont get to unilaterally hide what I said. When you go on reddit and you say something that many people agree with, but many dont. Suddenly my message is disappeared. Why bother being on reddit? You now have a small group of people curating content. If you go on X and say something many people agree with and many dont. I top comment. The people wont dont like what I said can leave a comment but they cant hide my message. This is the fundamental flaw in many social media.
lapcat 1y ago
> All existing large social media platforms of today use one or more (if not all) of the above methods to incentivize users to consume, engage, and create content on the app — and that’s been the state of the social web for the past ~30 years. I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition. All existing large social media platforms of today are for-profit. Moreover, being large, they require large amounts of capital. Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification, which is why all large social media platforms have followed this pattern for the past ~30 years, even if they started with good intentions and user friendliness. What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap? Unfortunately, it appears that social media platforms are not the type of product that many users are willing to spend money for, thereby maintaining some level of respect for the users. If the product is not free, it won't become "large". Several platforms, including Twitter/X (and remember ADN?), have tried and mostly failed to promote subscription funding. As the old saying goes, if you're not the customer, you're the product.
- eggbrain 1y ago
  > I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition. It's a fair point that Mastadon was left out, and yet it does tackle some of the problems I mention -- perhaps worth a followup post. That being said, I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others. > Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification [...] What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap? I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here -- it grew fairly slowly compared to other social media platforms, but now feels like it has quite a lot of staying power (although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify). That being said, I think a lot of problems I mention can be solved just by giving the customer (e.g. the user on the social media platform) more choice. Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.
amelius 1y ago
Just give me a way to see what events my friends are attending. That's all I need from a social media platform.
- jjulius 1y ago
  Group texts! "Hey y'all, what's everyone up to this week/end? Any good shows/happenings!?"
  - amelius 1y ago
    It works in smaller circles, yes.
    - jjulius 1y ago
      I recognize that this is certainly going to be a YMMV response, but I've got circles of friends and acquaintances in most of the areas I'm interested in. I can reach out to all of them if I'm feeling up for whatever, or I can reach out to specific ones depending on what I want to get into this weekend. I appreciate that sense of community more than a cold events calendar can get me. I don't need to know what all of my friends are up to all of the time, and if it's important to me, I can reach out directly. Heck, even RSVPs to calendar events can be misleading and don't actually tell me why my friend marked themselves as attending. Sometimes people use it as reminders, or maybe they were interested last month but aren't anymore and forgot to remove the event from their list. Maybe plans have changed and they're not going, or maybe their reason for going would be wildly different than mine. I'd rather find out from them what's happening and what they're excited about.
  - wffurr 1y ago
    That has a much higher activation energy than checking a feed, and only works in smaller groups. If you are checking across groups, you are managing N group chats and texting all of them.
    - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
zyx_db 1y ago
somewhat unrelated, but i really wish platforms like youtube and instagram had the ability to "opt-out" of certain features. i find that the short form content in youtube shorts / instagram reels can be really easy to waste a few minutes on. if anyone knows any solutions (ex. browser extensions) that solve this, id be really interested
- notben 1y ago
  For YouTube there is the Chrome/Firefox extension Unhook which allows you to hide certain parts of the UI
- id34 1y ago
  For Android/iOS I've used ScreenZen, which is wonderfully configurable.
- sckleinis_8 1y ago
  Extensions are necessary if you want to use any social media app these days, for YT there's UnTrap for YouTube. I don't use Xitter anymore, but when I did, Control Panel for Twitter was my go to. It's insane how better (and boring/less addictive) social media becomes by simple enhancements.
standardUser 1y ago
I think a lot of us want the same thing - a minimally commercialized social network with content exclusively from people we actually know or like. But much like with group chats (or real life) the people we know are not going to be consistently engaged, let alone entertaining, and we'll get bored fast.
- esafak 1y ago
  So you'll do something else instead. Sounds great.
  - standardUser 1y ago
    No, instead we doom-scroll content curated by an ever-evolving algorithm designed by some of the smartest people in our society to maximize corporate profits.
- glial 1y ago
  > I think a lot of us want the same thing Cognitively, yes. This is like saying "a lot of us want the same thing - healthy, fresh food that makes us stronger, sleep better, and live longer". Of course. But fast food is a $400B industry in the US. Social media is fast food. Nobody says they want it but their behavior indicates otherwise.
  - eggbrain 1y ago
    I agree both with you and the OP comment here. Ideally, I think if we could, we'd only get content from the creators or people we care about -- but that content runs out eventually, and yet our minds still want to be stimulated. To bring it back to your food analogy, if I had a personal chef that made delicious food whenever I wanted it, I'd probably not indulge in fast food very often -- but if I needed a quick bite to eat, I'd probably still jump into a McDonalds.
  - Draiken 1y ago
    Our brains are wired to answer to stimuli but that doesn't necessarily mean we consciously want it. These platforms prey on us with every possible tactic to keep us there since every second "engaged" means profits for them. If we take a generic view of "if they are in these platforms, then they want it" we might as well say that fish want to be caught because they bite the hook.
kdamica 1y ago
The biggest issue is that most people don't want social media. They want TV
- blueflow 1y ago
  Specifically, entertainment.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 1y ago
  I think people actually do find social networks, and apps that support them, to be deeply useful and in high demand. The problem is almost every social network app, or website, is really just a massive spynet trying to capture as much personal information and data as possible to sell. The social network part is really really simple. The early form of Facebook was remarkably effective, simple, and useful. The same goes for Instagram and MySpace. The business side, however, has poisoned that original creation into a profoundly corrosive "content delivery system" and a spy network that hides behind a fancy profile page and algorithmically (read: business interest determined) "feed".
sigmaisaletter 1y ago
After reading all the posts, I feel this is far too strongly centered on Reddit. What about the other services? They seem to be mentioned in an aside, if at all.
burningChrome 1y ago
I feel like social media has changed human behavior for the worse and we're too far gone in trying to get it back. I was just getting into development when social media was coming on the scene. It was so cool to be engaged in communities with people who I loved to see what they were doing, finding emerging technologies and development frameworks and techniques. People were willing to tell you about stuff they were working on. It really felt like a community. Every new platform someone at work would find it and send out invites or get us to sign up and run it through its paces. It was such a great time and I really felt like my growth as a developer was accelerated by being apart of these early communities. Now? Its not about bringing people together with common interests. Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes. It would seem the entire purpose of social media these days is just about getting people to react negatively to what you're posting in order to generate MORE negative content. It turns into a self fulfilling cycle that is now in a space where I have no idea how it will be broken. As a footnote to this, there are still very good people, still posting very good content that does not have that purpose. One account I found a few months ago was trailerparksports on instagram. Its a black guy who got interested in Hockey after the Four Nations Cup and how crazy that tournament started out with the Canada/USA game. His interest was 100% genuine. In the last four months, he's detailed how much he's learned and the outpouring from hockey fans AND the teams themselves has been unreal. The LA Kings flew him out for a few of their games, he's been going to games in other cities. He's 100% into the sport now and its been really cool to see him go through the process of picking a team to support, learning the rules and the strategies. So yes, there are still very honorable and decent content creators who are sharing ceratain aspects of their life with the internet and getting a lot of positivity in return. But man oh man, it takes a LOT of digging to find them these days.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  > So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Did you intentionally call “thirst traps” “rage bait” erroneously so that someone would correct you? Engagement bait works surprisingly well on HN, I just wasn’t sure if that was an ironic wink at the audience.
webdoodle 1y ago
Social media platforms cost money. Until we solve that, without monetizing it and giving rich parasites an advantage, we'll continue to be pitted against each other to there benefit. Fediverse, mastadon, other open source systems are likely the way, but until everyone abandons the fake monetized social media, they'll continue to reign.
- immibis 1y ago
  Mastodon is a piece of software. mastodon.social is a social media platform, which happens to interoperate with many others, and not with many more. That's important to remember. chaos.social is also a social media platform, which happens to interoperate with many others including mastodon.social. In the open source world there's this tendency to confuse software and services - people write software with which a service could be run, and then declare that the service exists. Highly P2P software (like Bitcoin) is an exception since the software and the service are basically the same thing. Services don't have to be expensive to run, but they do if they want to host image and video uploads. IRC is still available for free. The most expensive part of running a service in the current environment is most likely mitigating the legal risk when someone uploads something the government doesn't like. Note this expense doesn't exist if you run it on the dark web, but then you won't have any users either.
- sckleinis_8 1y ago
  I prefer to pay with my wallet than my data, mental health, and time, you can create a good social media site that is subscription based, you can fully monetize it that way, sure many users wouldn't even approach it once they see the word "paid" but you don't need to appeal to everyone, a service being paid makes people consider their choices more carefully.
_ink_ 1y ago
I think the EU is on the right track. The network effect prevents progress. If big corporations need to provide APIs that might change. We might even get an app, where you can chose to only see what you want to see (e.g. only content from your friends) and still be able to talk to people that use Fb, Insta, whatever exclusively.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Zak 1y ago
I read through the whole series, and there's definitely some thoughtful analysis in there. I'm pretty skeptical of the proposal at the end though. What's proposed is a centralized platform with some sort of identity verification and no community moderators. It presumably aims to avoid many of the issues the series describes as being wrong with other platforms but doesn't say how it's going to handle the enshittification problem. Many of the issues mentioned are related to the only business model we've seen work for large social platforms; good intentions at the start won't keep them from popping up later when the incentives are aligned in their favor. Decentralization is my favorite solution to that problem, but it's not compatible with the ideas of one account per person for life and no community moderators. I'm interested to see what comes next in this series.
- eggbrain 1y ago
  Thanks Zak, appreciate your thoughts. I hope to have some of the followup posts soon, although you are right that my idea is based around a centralized platform with ID Verification. RE: How to solve for enshittification, I'd mention two things: 1. I think a good product can _stay_ good over time with strong centralized leadership, aka a "benevolent dictator". Think Steve Jobs at Apple, DHH at 37 Signals, etc. - Once that power structure changes, however (new leader, etc), that can quickly fall apart, so it's definitely not a bulletproof solution. 2. If incentives from the start are built into your platform to make the "user" the biggest customer on your platform, incentives will make sure that you keep those users happy. - If you have to choose between customers who give you $0/month and advertisers who will give you $1000/month, you'll eventually choose the advertisers to the detriment of the users.
pizzadog 1y ago
This might sound like a strange position to take, but in my experience at least one social media platform has managed to retain its original direction (just being a place for people to come socialize) and that platform is 4chan. I've seen people there theorize that it hasn't gone belly-up because it literally cannot be sold to advertisers due to its reputation. This is not to say that 4chan doesn't have its own problems, but it did somehow manage to stay on mission for nearly 20 years now when we watch other social media platforms struggling; being allergic to advertisers may have been a blessing in disguise. It might not be the most enlightening conclusion to reach but, maybe the issue is (and always has been) trying to monetize a space that doesn't actually create a product?

45 points by eggbrain 1y ago

Very thoughtful analysis. I particularly like the insight around the industry metrics and Goodhart's Law. “DAU” and the like align with social media companies’ interests of increasing attention and time on site, which lead to more ad revenue. But, they are at odds with their users’ interests, or at least don’t consider user costs (ie time). I wonder if a social product could thrive based on the principle of “efficient” usage, a la the platform works on my behalf to keep me efficiently informed on what’s going on in my network and considers the cost tradeoffs of my time and attention. I suspect I could feel very “up to date” on the things I care about most by checking into a social product ~weekly with a thoughtfully curated digest of content.

eggbrain 1y ago
I can see a platform that gives you just the data you need to stay informed working, although what data you wish to receive and how quickly seems like a potential stumbling point. Perhaps you don't want to receive news about celebrities, _unless_ it involves someone you care deeply about, for example Michael Jackson. It would require quite a bit of tailoring for a platform to be able to curate for that.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- lapcat 1y ago
  > Perhaps you don't want to receive news about celebrities, _unless_ it involves someone you care deeply about, for example Michael Jackson. I, uh... don't expect much news in the future about Michael Jackson.
TheCondor 1y ago
Aren't a lot of users on there simply to waste time? It costs next to nothing, provides some sort of sensation in your brain that you're doing things, you might see some neat pictures or videos. It's like a different kind of video game where you can't win and it's appealing to nearly every age group, gender, demographic.
cvwright 1y ago
Having tried (and failed) to build a more privacy friendly social network, I can confidently tell you that the big players in this space do the shady things they do solely because users reward them for doing so. Trying to grow a new product is super hard. Trying to move into an established market is even harder. Trying to do that while also foregoing all the dark patterns is … well I won’t say it’s impossible but ugh it would take a huge head start in terms of name recognition, funding, or something else truly extraordinary.

bananabreakfast 1y ago

Couldn't agree more. We need to put the "social" back into social media.

eggbrain 1y ago
An interesting thought (to your point) is what people hope social media can actually become -- in the ideal scenario, is it just us being able to engage with people online in better ways? Is it us being able to consume content from others in the ways we want?

incomingpain 1y ago

>I think we need a new social media platform to emerge from the web. There are a very large number of major platforms? None of them fit your needs? Many of the examples throughout are reddit. Though many of the memes are more facebook. The big question to me; can you be social and interact with people on many subjects. Say what I want, when I want. I want to see what I want. Just because a small group of people dont like what I said, they dont get to unilaterally hide what I said. When you go on reddit and you say something that many people agree with, but many dont. Suddenly my message is disappeared. Why bother being on reddit? You now have a small group of people curating content. If you go on X and say something many people agree with and many dont. I top comment. The people wont dont like what I said can leave a comment but they cant hide my message. This is the fundamental flaw in many social media.

lapcat 1y ago

> All existing large social media platforms of today use one or more (if not all) of the above methods to incentivize users to consume, engage, and create content on the app — and that’s been the state of the social web for the past ~30 years. I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition. All existing large social media platforms of today are for-profit. Moreover, being large, they require large amounts of capital. Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification, which is why all large social media platforms have followed this pattern for the past ~30 years, even if they started with good intentions and user friendliness. What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap? Unfortunately, it appears that social media platforms are not the type of product that many users are willing to spend money for, thereby maintaining some level of respect for the users. If the product is not free, it won't become "large". Several platforms, including Twitter/X (and remember ADN?), have tried and mostly failed to promote subscription funding. As the old saying goes, if you're not the customer, you're the product.

eggbrain 1y ago
> I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition. It's a fair point that Mastadon was left out, and yet it does tackle some of the problems I mention -- perhaps worth a followup post. That being said, I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others. > Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification [...] What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap? I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here -- it grew fairly slowly compared to other social media platforms, but now feels like it has quite a lot of staying power (although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify). That being said, I think a lot of problems I mention can be solved just by giving the customer (e.g. the user on the social media platform) more choice. Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.

amelius 1y ago

Just give me a way to see what events my friends are attending. That's all I need from a social media platform.

jjulius 1y ago
Group texts! "Hey y'all, what's everyone up to this week/end? Any good shows/happenings!?"
- amelius 1y ago
  It works in smaller circles, yes.
  - jjulius 1y ago
    I recognize that this is certainly going to be a YMMV response, but I've got circles of friends and acquaintances in most of the areas I'm interested in. I can reach out to all of them if I'm feeling up for whatever, or I can reach out to specific ones depending on what I want to get into this weekend. I appreciate that sense of community more than a cold events calendar can get me. I don't need to know what all of my friends are up to all of the time, and if it's important to me, I can reach out directly. Heck, even RSVPs to calendar events can be misleading and don't actually tell me why my friend marked themselves as attending. Sometimes people use it as reminders, or maybe they were interested last month but aren't anymore and forgot to remove the event from their list. Maybe plans have changed and they're not going, or maybe their reason for going would be wildly different than mine. I'd rather find out from them what's happening and what they're excited about.
- wffurr 1y ago
  That has a much higher activation energy than checking a feed, and only works in smaller groups. If you are checking across groups, you are managing N group chats and texting all of them.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago

zyx_db 1y ago

somewhat unrelated, but i really wish platforms like youtube and instagram had the ability to "opt-out" of certain features. i find that the short form content in youtube shorts / instagram reels can be really easy to waste a few minutes on. if anyone knows any solutions (ex. browser extensions) that solve this, id be really interested

notben 1y ago
For YouTube there is the Chrome/Firefox extension Unhook which allows you to hide certain parts of the UI
id34 1y ago
For Android/iOS I've used ScreenZen, which is wonderfully configurable.
sckleinis_8 1y ago
Extensions are necessary if you want to use any social media app these days, for YT there's UnTrap for YouTube. I don't use Xitter anymore, but when I did, Control Panel for Twitter was my go to. It's insane how better (and boring/less addictive) social media becomes by simple enhancements.

standardUser 1y ago

I think a lot of us want the same thing - a minimally commercialized social network with content exclusively from people we actually know or like. But much like with group chats (or real life) the people we know are not going to be consistently engaged, let alone entertaining, and we'll get bored fast.

esafak 1y ago
So you'll do something else instead. Sounds great.
- standardUser 1y ago
  No, instead we doom-scroll content curated by an ever-evolving algorithm designed by some of the smartest people in our society to maximize corporate profits.
glial 1y ago
> I think a lot of us want the same thing Cognitively, yes. This is like saying "a lot of us want the same thing - healthy, fresh food that makes us stronger, sleep better, and live longer". Of course. But fast food is a $400B industry in the US. Social media is fast food. Nobody says they want it but their behavior indicates otherwise.
- eggbrain 1y ago
  I agree both with you and the OP comment here. Ideally, I think if we could, we'd only get content from the creators or people we care about -- but that content runs out eventually, and yet our minds still want to be stimulated. To bring it back to your food analogy, if I had a personal chef that made delicious food whenever I wanted it, I'd probably not indulge in fast food very often -- but if I needed a quick bite to eat, I'd probably still jump into a McDonalds.
- Draiken 1y ago
  Our brains are wired to answer to stimuli but that doesn't necessarily mean we consciously want it. These platforms prey on us with every possible tactic to keep us there since every second "engaged" means profits for them. If we take a generic view of "if they are in these platforms, then they want it" we might as well say that fish want to be caught because they bite the hook.

kdamica 1y ago

The biggest issue is that most people don't want social media. They want TV

blueflow 1y ago
Specifically, entertainment.
beezlebroxxxxxx 1y ago
I think people actually do find social networks, and apps that support them, to be deeply useful and in high demand. The problem is almost every social network app, or website, is really just a massive spynet trying to capture as much personal information and data as possible to sell. The social network part is really really simple. The early form of Facebook was remarkably effective, simple, and useful. The same goes for Instagram and MySpace. The business side, however, has poisoned that original creation into a profoundly corrosive "content delivery system" and a spy network that hides behind a fancy profile page and algorithmically (read: business interest determined) "feed".

sigmaisaletter 1y ago

After reading all the posts, I feel this is far too strongly centered on Reddit. What about the other services? They seem to be mentioned in an aside, if at all.

burningChrome 1y ago

I feel like social media has changed human behavior for the worse and we're too far gone in trying to get it back. I was just getting into development when social media was coming on the scene. It was so cool to be engaged in communities with people who I loved to see what they were doing, finding emerging technologies and development frameworks and techniques. People were willing to tell you about stuff they were working on. It really felt like a community. Every new platform someone at work would find it and send out invites or get us to sign up and run it through its paces. It was such a great time and I really felt like my growth as a developer was accelerated by being apart of these early communities. Now? Its not about bringing people together with common interests. Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes. It would seem the entire purpose of social media these days is just about getting people to react negatively to what you're posting in order to generate MORE negative content. It turns into a self fulfilling cycle that is now in a space where I have no idea how it will be broken. As a footnote to this, there are still very good people, still posting very good content that does not have that purpose. One account I found a few months ago was trailerparksports on instagram. Its a black guy who got interested in Hockey after the Four Nations Cup and how crazy that tournament started out with the Canada/USA game. His interest was 100% genuine. In the last four months, he's detailed how much he's learned and the outpouring from hockey fans AND the teams themselves has been unreal. The LA Kings flew him out for a few of their games, he's been going to games in other cities. He's 100% into the sport now and its been really cool to see him go through the process of picking a team to support, learning the rules and the strategies. So yes, there are still very honorable and decent content creators who are sharing ceratain aspects of their life with the internet and getting a lot of positivity in return. But man oh man, it takes a LOT of digging to find them these days.

aspenmayer 1y ago
> So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Did you intentionally call “thirst traps” “rage bait” erroneously so that someone would correct you? Engagement bait works surprisingly well on HN, I just wasn’t sure if that was an ironic wink at the audience.

webdoodle 1y ago

Social media platforms cost money. Until we solve that, without monetizing it and giving rich parasites an advantage, we'll continue to be pitted against each other to there benefit. Fediverse, mastadon, other open source systems are likely the way, but until everyone abandons the fake monetized social media, they'll continue to reign.

immibis 1y ago
Mastodon is a piece of software. mastodon.social is a social media platform, which happens to interoperate with many others, and not with many more. That's important to remember. chaos.social is also a social media platform, which happens to interoperate with many others including mastodon.social. In the open source world there's this tendency to confuse software and services - people write software with which a service could be run, and then declare that the service exists. Highly P2P software (like Bitcoin) is an exception since the software and the service are basically the same thing. Services don't have to be expensive to run, but they do if they want to host image and video uploads. IRC is still available for free. The most expensive part of running a service in the current environment is most likely mitigating the legal risk when someone uploads something the government doesn't like. Note this expense doesn't exist if you run it on the dark web, but then you won't have any users either.
sckleinis_8 1y ago
I prefer to pay with my wallet than my data, mental health, and time, you can create a good social media site that is subscription based, you can fully monetize it that way, sure many users wouldn't even approach it once they see the word "paid" but you don't need to appeal to everyone, a service being paid makes people consider their choices more carefully.

_ink_ 1y ago

I think the EU is on the right track. The network effect prevents progress. If big corporations need to provide APIs that might change. We might even get an app, where you can chose to only see what you want to see (e.g. only content from your friends) and still be able to talk to people that use Fb, Insta, whatever exclusively.

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Zak 1y ago

I read through the whole series, and there's definitely some thoughtful analysis in there. I'm pretty skeptical of the proposal at the end though. What's proposed is a centralized platform with some sort of identity verification and no community moderators. It presumably aims to avoid many of the issues the series describes as being wrong with other platforms but doesn't say how it's going to handle the enshittification problem. Many of the issues mentioned are related to the only business model we've seen work for large social platforms; good intentions at the start won't keep them from popping up later when the incentives are aligned in their favor. Decentralization is my favorite solution to that problem, but it's not compatible with the ideas of one account per person for life and no community moderators. I'm interested to see what comes next in this series.

eggbrain 1y ago
Thanks Zak, appreciate your thoughts. I hope to have some of the followup posts soon, although you are right that my idea is based around a centralized platform with ID Verification. RE: How to solve for enshittification, I'd mention two things: 1. I think a good product can _stay_ good over time with strong centralized leadership, aka a "benevolent dictator". Think Steve Jobs at Apple, DHH at 37 Signals, etc. - Once that power structure changes, however (new leader, etc), that can quickly fall apart, so it's definitely not a bulletproof solution. 2. If incentives from the start are built into your platform to make the "user" the biggest customer on your platform, incentives will make sure that you keep those users happy. - If you have to choose between customers who give you $0/month and advertisers who will give you $1000/month, you'll eventually choose the advertisers to the detriment of the users.

pizzadog 1y ago

This might sound like a strange position to take, but in my experience at least one social media platform has managed to retain its original direction (just being a place for people to come socialize) and that platform is 4chan. I've seen people there theorize that it hasn't gone belly-up because it literally cannot be sold to advertisers due to its reputation. This is not to say that 4chan doesn't have its own problems, but it did somehow manage to stay on mission for nearly 20 years now when we watch other social media platforms struggling; being allergic to advertisers may have been a blessing in disguise. It might not be the most enlightening conclusion to reach but, maybe the issue is (and always has been) trying to monetize a space that doesn't actually create a product?