8 ms·

Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

346 points by pseudolus 1y ago

homeonthemtn 1y ago
A couple people have mentioned this but I think it's worth isolating (no pun intended) for emphasis We started social media with chats that connected people across the world. Then we handed over the majority of the Internet to Google who, in their pursuit to build out personally useful services, inadvertently jailed us into a hyper localized bubble That bubble then became the standard of the Internet, and all sorts of pipes of toxic gas hooked in to the bubble and started poisoning us en masse.
- gipp 1y ago
  Not to say they're fully innocent, but it seems really strange to point to Google specifically on this issue, rather than like... Meta.
  - homeonthemtn 1y ago
    I pick Google because they ended up centralizing services hyper locally. Facebook, to me, came after that
austin-cheney 1y ago
> Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. It never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.
- cindyllm 1y ago
  [dead]
- sedgjh23 1y ago
  I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.
  - gausswho 1y ago
    Facebook died with the like button. Twitter died with retweets.
  - pndy 1y ago
    The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming. We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies. People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it. Subscribe and hit that bell notification button for more content.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start. There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash. Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less... By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now). The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.
  - esafak 1y ago
    Facebook always had the ability to organize contacts, but few people use it. https://www.facebook.com/help/200538509990389/ https://www.facebook.com/help/200538509990389/
- riffraff 1y ago
  There was no algorithm in the original Facebook and Twitter. The echo chamber you got was the same you get in real life: your friends and family may share your pov and bias.
- tgv 1y ago
  My take on this kind of view: it wasn't built on authenticity or social connection. That was what the enthusiasts were claiming it would be. It was a reference to something known, very superficial in nature, only meant to to increase the appeal.
chmod775 1y ago
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's going away.
- erxam 1y ago
  So long as the same incentives stay in place, we're going to get the same results. Change the names yet it's all the same.
- pineaux 1y ago
  Just like drugs, but most people understand you should have respect for them.
atleastoptimal 1y ago
The same problems people cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.
- egeozcan 1y ago
  Nitpick: Around 60% of the world population live in urban areas, and if a lot of people decide to live in a particular rural area, then it quickly faces urbanization.
- CommenterPerson 1y ago
  I went to NYC the other day. There was lots of diverse interesting stuff. Not full of people who looked just like me.
  - deleted 1y ago
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- jajko 1y ago
  Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute. Triple that for families with small kids. Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).
- rufus_foreman 1y ago
  >> people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census. If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)
ookblah 1y ago
unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again. SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you. anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
- jbm 1y ago
  Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.) What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion. It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space. (I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)
  - ookblah 1y ago
    reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh). everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.
roomey 1y ago
Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this. The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status. It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise. I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
- close04 1y ago
  Doesn’t this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your “editor” only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see. And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
  - roomey 1y ago
    You have hit the nail on the head there! The point in the book was that depending on your editor, you were essentially living in different realities. There was the east and west coasts, and then there was Ameristan (or something I can't remember exactly) in between, which was fundamentalist
- fullshark 1y ago
  Algorithmic feeds, search result pages, and LLM responses with web citations are all different editors. It's just a computer doing the editing.
deleted 1y ago
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avereveard 1y ago
eh, I'd say monetization/gamification was the issue. bet a social media without likes, organized in circles, would be way less toxic.
- esafak 1y ago
  Without advertising you would have to pay for it. But that would not sufficiently deter bad actors. What you need is culture to repel and moderation to exclude them.
  - avereveard 1y ago
    circles cover moderation's need. of course sustainability of the whole thing is questionable
mattikl 1y ago
When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.
- mantas 1y ago
  And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends. There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
    - m_fayer 1y ago
      Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
      - closewith 1y ago
        HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
        m_fayer 1y ago
        HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
matesz 1y ago
I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response. I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind. I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc. The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively. What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it? Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves. Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads. I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media. PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
- devoutsalsa 1y ago
  I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.
  - matesz 1y ago
    Unfortunately it's an incredible tool, especially for industries which pray on people's insecurities like beauty - botox, fillers etc. This person I know puts instagram story and gets instantly booked for all free slots she has for the entire week. She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
oldpersonintx2 1y ago
[dead]
MrDresden 1y ago
I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm. Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus. The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
- pndy 1y ago
  Mastodon and fediverse despite not running on algorithms sadly aren't free of spam and bots - probably nothing nowadays is. Last year in February there was a flood of messages attacking less populated instances, with... Spam can image in message body. What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.
- tokioyoyo 1y ago
  Unfortunately, we discovered that people would rather be told what to watch, rather that self-discover their interests, because that’s a lot of “work”.
  - zoul 1y ago
    I hope it’s not that black-and-white, that it’s possible to have a sane social network with algorithmic feed, only we need to design the algorithms around users’ needs first.
    - tokioyoyo 1y ago
      If you judge users’ needs by “things they’ll pay attention on and engage with”, well… it is exactly what all the current algorithms are good at right now. It’s just, in my opinion, bad for the society at large, as rage baiting, slop-posting and etc. is great in achieving that.
3form 1y ago
It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense. It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
- riffraff 1y ago
  Is Tumblr doing fine financially? I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable. I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
  - sprkwd 1y ago
    Now owned by Automattic.
    - riffraff 1y ago
      Yeah I recall when they started porting it to WordPress's infrastructure and then gave up. But I think that doesn't imply their profitable, so Matt could wake up one day and shut it down.
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    I don't know. I know their ad people have a hard time selling ads. They've been working to bring costs down. It might be profitable.
Juliate 1y ago
Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc. Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it. (notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  My fingers are not fully compatible with touch screens so I'm not a big phone guy, so I can't speak for them, but I've been trying to make my computer more task oriented, to make choices more explicit. I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities. It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront. My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).
- tumdum_ 1y ago
  > someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc. It’s is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I don’t think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.
  - Juliate 1y ago
    No, indeed, but^W and that would be an interesting use case. What would a dedicated social media device work, and look like? (actually, that may depend a lot on what privacy one can expect out of it)
ValveFan6969 1y ago
These "internet is dead" articles are coming across as more robotic than actual robot content these days.
Popeyes 1y ago
The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes. The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  > The problem is that people are addicted to tension And some. We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
- lukan 1y ago
  "The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.
  - glial 1y ago
    I'm increasingly of the opinion that ad-driven media is the root cause of many of our social problems.
- tokioyoyo 1y ago
  I would argue that financialization of the social media is what made it fail. Once there’s direct dollar cost to your posts, ideas and etc., the incentives change from “fun” to “commercial”. That started heavily around 2017ish, where every social media switched to algorithm-first, and heavily started tracking engagement/attention per post.
acd 1y ago
Social media is actually anti social. Meeting real people and making real connections is social.
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full. Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
  - dsign 1y ago
    > Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Not for everybody. Me and a work friend are considered "highly energetic" by our colleagues when we are at the office in person, to the point that people and things soon find themselves in orbit around us. But the truth is that when we come home, we both feel drained and exhausted for the next day or two. For me, it's as if my entire mind and soul got washed and diluted by those interactions. I'm not saying it's all bad, in the same way that running a marathon is probably not all bad. But "boost your energy" wouldn't be a term I would ever use for it.
    - marginalia_nu 1y ago
      You well as with anything you can definitely go overboard, and the type of social interaction matters fairly significantly. There's a difference between spending all day at work, and spending a few hours with a good friend.
benrutter 1y ago
Like most of the other commenters here, I agree that modern social media is often an echo chamber, and frequently surface level. I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?
- panstromek 1y ago
  I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested: https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/ https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/ I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.
  - benrutter 1y ago
    Thanks, I was interested and enjoyed you blog post! It's definitely complex- I really liked your observation that even on the same platform (say youtube comments) the quality of interactions can vary hugely based on the amount of traction something gains.
- yoz-y 1y ago
  IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the “true” subreddits)
- Timwi 1y ago
  I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience. I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.
deleted 1y ago
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3form 1y ago
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. ... I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited. Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible. What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
- lurk2 1y ago
  > These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. No one goes to the beach anymore—there are too many people there.
  - 3form 1y ago
    Yeah, I think that's also why it's an odd argument to me. If the users spend all the attention on your platform anyway, is it really dead?
kingkawn 1y ago
The problem is that ultimately it connects people around ideas because it isn’t taking place in the world, and everyone’s ideas are tired strange remixes of things we happened to grow up around
j_crick 1y ago
More regulation and mandatory cool-downs to whatever is called “social media” because AI slop and bot-girls? Sounds reasonable /s
panstromek 1y ago
I love the term "semantic sludge"
weinzierl 1y ago
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media. At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like "people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop". Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user? "Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
- gipp 1y ago
  Exhaustion is absolutely the first word that comes to mind for me. Even when I'm not using it myself, I'm exhausted of all the oxygen it takes up in the room
- softwaredoug 1y ago
  There is a neurotic personality type that doomscrolls out of a compulsion. A lot of it is hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Where will the next shoe drop? We feel threatened, then some feel like they need to take some kind of drastic action. Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.
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thrownawaysz 1y ago
HN is the same echo chamber though. This same topic posted here every single week from random blogs to The Guardian, everyone posts their anecdotes, group hug, taps on the back and back to nothing. Rinse and repeat next week. You could just copy paste the top comments from the previous posts if you want some free karma.
sidnutulapati 1y ago
Funnily enough, I just [wrote a blog post](https://sidnutul.substack.com/p/the-thought-industry https://sidnutul.substack.com/p/the-thought-industry) echoing this sentiment around how the algorithms have fractured our shared perceptual reality:
jibal 1y ago
Just because something is bad, that doesn't that these are its last days.
- deleted 1y ago
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- jibal 1y ago
  Oops ... "Just because something is bad, that doesn't mean that these are its last days.
Swenrekcah 1y ago
The algorithmic feed should be banned for all public discourse. That is what’s killing us (quite literally). Let topics be searchable and people should find what they need. Very simple algorithms such as “most recent conversation” may be allowed.
- diggan 1y ago
  I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff. I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
- throw101010 1y ago
  In a way I see these algorithms as segregstionist, their goal is ultimately to isolate certain groups and perniciously expose them only to the rage inducing bad aspects of the other group(s) to generate more posts/likes/comment. Segregation applied to public spaces should indeed be banned, when these platforms become so huge, they become a defacto public square that you can hardly avoid effectively without missing a good share of the conversations that need to happen in public for a healthy flow of information, so I would not see an issue with law makers to regulate this... obviously as long as it's applied fairly. The issue is that currently even platforms that are getting regulate, for even more concerning aspect (national security, undue foreign influence on fair elections) like Tiktok seem to be exempt of the law itself and the US Congress seem unable to get the laws they voted in a bipartisan manner enforced... the only reason I see is that a certain tangerine tinted individual sees it as a tool to control the American discourse in his favor, and thus refuses to enforce the law. So these concerns about healthy public spaces are taking the backseat for now.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  While I agree, forums are also easily derailed and destroyed by trolls. I'm in a few political threads and they're totally ruined by a few people that the mods do nothing about.
tannhaeuser 1y ago
Yeah, original title I upvoted was the actual title of TFA "The Last Days Of Social Media". Why is it different now? This is against HN rules.
thefz 1y ago
Because everything must be profited off, so the platform itself is a vehicle for products.
toasted-subs 1y ago
Social media brought nothing but a bunch of jerks who bully and enslave people. Gonna die alone because of what those people have done. I hope when the people look back at this they try every single one of those people as murderers.
full-stack-dev 1y ago
This piece makes a great point about needing "architectures of intention." The default social media experience is pure passive consumption, and I felt my own intentions for the day slipping away. As a personal project, I built an extension to create my own little architecture of intention. It introduces a 20-second pause before I enter distracting sites, and during the pause, it nudges me with a positive micro-habit, like fixing my posture or taking a deep breath. It's called The 20s Rule (Chrome/Firefox) if anyone else finds that idea useful.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
Social media was nice when it was mostly you connecting to people, going to their page to check on them and a shared calendar. The feed was honestly the beginning of the end. It turns people from actor of their experience to mindless consumer.
spamjavalin 1y ago
Social media and social networking are two very distinct things.
ogou 1y ago
Social media hasn't been social for a while. Personal posts from people I know are buried under the algorithms. It's a high friction action to actually find my friends. All the defaults are pointed at optimized content from generic sources. I have many friends that are artists and musicians. I follow them on these platforms and my engagement with them is captured and funneled into garbage content about art and music instead of letting my see my friends. I hate it.
nottorp 1y ago
First of all, social media has stopped being social long ago. Now it's just a platform for content mills. Producer to consumer. Social media was peer to peer and it's dead.
- sniffers 1y ago
  You are literally topping that comment on a peer to peer social media website right now. It's hardly dead, it just happens away from meta and X. Discord is absolutely popping off, for example. HN and other forums are still very lively.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    This is hobby project for a billionaire, not a social media website. It doesn't need to generate a dime. It runs very efficiently because it was coded well (and cared for), but there are salaries paid to people to watch it that are just a gift to the people who post here.
    - fasterik 1y ago
      Social media isn't defined by the business model. Straight from Wikipedia: "Social media are new media technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks." That perfectly describes HN.
    - sniffers 1y ago
      What makes it not a social media website? Social media is a function of what it does, and it's a place people comment, converse, share links, there's a user scoring system, there's a feed of recent events on the front page... how is it not social media?
ktosobcy 1y ago
The problem is - it's not "social" and it's pure "media" at this point. It's almost impossible to have social aspect on the platforms where you only have real people with sane number of connections that interact with eachother. Rather you have a bunch of huge "pages" that simply push their news publications... IMHO it would be awesome to have again sane, SOCIAL-media. Probably with the correct regulation it could be done… And the current SM platforms could use the regulation as well (force viewing only what one follows, make it transparent like other media - i.e. if someone has more than 10k "followers" it's just a media so put same requirements: full ID disclosure and having to respond to the takedowns immediatelly…)
cynicalsecurity 1y ago
It's still social and it still connects people. You are simply on the wrong platforms.
mallowdram 1y ago
The acceleration (into automation) of language and images - both arbitrary units - requiring cost-benefit for shareholders inevitably reduces the input to noise and then chaos. Because the dark matter of language is control, bias, manipulation for status, status becomes the central factor, not the sharing. That we bemoan sub-industries of media, rather than notice the system effects across it is suspicious. “… if we say that linguistic structure "reflects" social structure, we are really assigning to language a role that is too passive ... Rather we should say that linguistic structure is the realization of social structure, actively symbolizing it in a process of mutual creativity. Because it stands as a metaphor for society, language has the property of not only transmitting the social order but also maintaining and potentially modifying it. (This is undoubtedly the explanation of the violent attitudes that under certain social conditions come to be held by one group towards the speech of others.)” Excerpts from Halliday Language and Society Volume 10
gethly 1y ago
internet too was a great place before there were too many people online. social networks met the same fate. there is a critical mass for the amount of interacting people that when reached, the system becomes the opposite of what it was built for - connection. i guess it goes back to the Dunbar's Number, but on steroids. on the other hand, too much of anything turn from good to bad so it's not unexpected result either way.
- darkpicnic 1y ago
  I created an open source tool to help apps stay near the Dunbar Number: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed. I think the concept of social networks is interesting, but the ultimate unbounded result is a disaster. Edit (missing link to github repo): https://github.com/darkpicnic/ten_cubed https://github.com/darkpicnic/ten_cubed
coolThingsFirst 1y ago
There's still a lot of room for progress in social networks. I'm planning an app where people are forced to talk to each other and learn more about each other, if they do not they are banned from the platform. Going on Tinder to gather likes and never talk to anyone should be forbidden.This is the issue with social sites, they make it as generic as possible.
citizenkeen 1y ago
I just want Discord but a forum. I would pay good money to that
- esafak 1y ago
  Discord has "forum channels". https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... What aspects of conventional forums are you looking for?
  - layer8 1y ago
    The absence of chat channels, I suppose.
    - esafak 1y ago
      Forums had chat channels too; e.g., https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ Sometimes it just did not have live updates: https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/general/chit-chat https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/general/chit-chat
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
cantor_S_drug 1y ago
> A few creators do append labels disclaiming that their videos depict “no real events,” but many creators don’t bother, and many consumers don’t seem to care. https://youtu.be/kLyuNo3vEuQ?t=346 https://youtu.be/kLyuNo3vEuQ?t=346 AI videos as propaganda. In this clip, the guy can be seen passing through a missile transport railing. 300K views.
- randycupertino 1y ago
  I enjoy watching movie trailers on youtube and I've noticed in the last month all these ai-created fake movie trailers for upcoming movies where the actual trailer isn't out yet. It's infuriating when I watch it, realize something is off and then at the end it's like "Fan-made!" If this ai-slop keeps up I'm going to just probably stop watching youtube altogether, it sucks getting tricked by fake content.
  - hollerith 1y ago
    I recently spent over an hour listening to a channel whose description starts with "This channel shares real stories of life, love, and heartbreak in Thailand. I focus on honest experiences from foreigners living here." Then I realized that these stories are entirely AI-generated! I know that because of the lack of personal idiosyncracies in narrative style, lifestyle and background (the stories purport to be autobiographical, where idiosyncracies show up more than in other kinds of writing) and the high rate at which the stories appear on the channel (namely, one 30-minute story every day for the last 70 days). Someone collecting actual true stories would not be able to collect stories at that rate -- at least not when just starting out (i.e., before becoming known and trusted by many expats) and the oldest video / story on the channel is only 2 months old. https://www.youtube.com/@InsideThailandStories https://www.youtube.com/@InsideThailandStories
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    YouTube started demonetizing these channels a few months back. Last year they had practically taken over the platform.
thomassmith65 1y ago
While this is an engaging essay, it's premature to claim that social media is dying. The state of social media has been awful for years, and yet billions stuck around. There probably is no depth low enough that the majority of users would abandon it. The essay also neglects what is possibly the largest part of a solution: systems to guarantee authenticity of users and user claims... A social media user shouldn't have to wonder if the brain surgeon giving them medical tips actually is a high school dropout, or the fellow Parisian sounding the alarm on French politics actually is a 12 year old Quebecer, or the new fan DM'ing them about their music actually is the same psychopath who online-stalked them two years ago, etc. Social media isn't going to die. It badly needs a mechanism for users to filter out bad information.
softwaredoug 1y ago
I think this is right but not quite. Politically, social media lately has fractured into ideological spaces. I go on bluesky or truth social or X or a certain subreddit to keep up with the politics as filtered through my tribe. A lot of people opt out of these spaces because of the huge amount of political content and the lack of nuance in discussion. But it also radicalizes the people who stay as they get their sides view of the political conflicts of the day. And they get addicted to winning arguments for their side. It used to be that Twitter revolved around whatever Trump did. Now people go online to find a little club they can kanoodle and bemoan how their side is the ultimate victim. And people will justify a lot of horrible things if they think they’re the victim.
southernplaces7 1y ago
I have an extended family and also an extended circle of friends that are spread all over the world. In both cases, numbering dozens of people, what would have previously been a slow erosion of contact and any real knowledge about most of them except those absolutely closest to me by necessity, has been converted into the ability to keep abreast of their daily lives, know when some direct communication might be helpful and generally take joy in being able to see how the good things in their lives move forward (or offer a hand when they don't). All of this almost entirely thanks to social media. This not to mention the interesting figures it lets me directly follow and the shared interest groups it lets me find. Is social media a complex and vast thing with its many pitfalls and flaws? Of course it is. The corporate giants that run much of it have some very disgusting habits of passive aggressive manipulation of their users, and grossly parasitic dark patterns of surveillance behavior. Nonetheless, under and around all of that, there's also a tremendous amount of practical human good being created by so much previously impossible connection between millions of family members, friends, loved ones and people who share things in common. I refuse to throw that baby out with the bath water as some seem to propose. Political manipulation, factionalism and ideological bickering have always been a part of human culture, for at least as long as we've had written words and means of spreading them. Could anyone have expected any differently to emerge from the massively democratizing landscape of social platforms, which let literally anyone communicate their own two cents of thought to places and context where anyone else at all might instantly see them and respond? Of course not, but to focus only on that is almost elitist in its implied notions of shutting up the masses because they don't communicate and debate "correctly" (even if many of them are indeed stupidly influenced by all kinds of interests, whithin and outside of social media).
alex1138 1y ago
Does social media mean Facebook? And how Zuckerberg may have just stolen it from other people and he thinks the idea of a good product is one where the feed is wildly non chronological and showing-actual-posts-from-friends-optional? Because that's not connection
bentt 1y ago
Mastodon shows that when a network is relieved of pressure to monetize it evolves to serve its users. Otherwise it evolves to serve the investors in the platform. It’s just that simple.
deleted 1y ago
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sabakarimmm 1y ago
This is why we started Favs - social network for close friends only. No ads, no brands, no influencers. Of course though we’ve had the cold start problem but fundamentally it’s what you’d want if your favorite people wanted to stay connected beyond a group chat. - one to many posts - maps of which city you’re in - upcoming plans - no new inbox either I hope it people give it a shot one day.
ArcHound 1y ago
I don't agree that Substack is a place for small niche communities. It seems to me that they are trying hard to turn into a social network - notes, DMs and other features are pushed while more writing related features like code syntax highlighting or tables are ignored.
radar1310 1y ago
It’s absolutely one of the worst things to happen to society.

346 points by pseudolus 1y ago

A couple people have mentioned this but I think it's worth isolating (no pun intended) for emphasis We started social media with chats that connected people across the world. Then we handed over the majority of the Internet to Google who, in their pursuit to build out personally useful services, inadvertently jailed us into a hyper localized bubble That bubble then became the standard of the Internet, and all sorts of pipes of toxic gas hooked in to the bubble and started poisoning us en masse.

gipp 1y ago
Not to say they're fully innocent, but it seems really strange to point to Google specifically on this issue, rather than like... Meta.
- homeonthemtn 1y ago
  I pick Google because they ended up centralizing services hyper locally. Facebook, to me, came after that

austin-cheney 1y ago

> Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. It never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.

cindyllm 1y ago
[dead]
sedgjh23 1y ago
I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.
- gausswho 1y ago
  Facebook died with the like button. Twitter died with retweets.
- pndy 1y ago
  The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming. We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies. People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it. Subscribe and hit that bell notification button for more content.
ahartmetz 1y ago
You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start. There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.
IshKebab 1y ago
It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash. Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less... By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now). The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.
- esafak 1y ago
  Facebook always had the ability to organize contacts, but few people use it. https://www.facebook.com/help/200538509990389/ https://www.facebook.com/help/200538509990389/
riffraff 1y ago
There was no algorithm in the original Facebook and Twitter. The echo chamber you got was the same you get in real life: your friends and family may share your pov and bias.
tgv 1y ago
My take on this kind of view: it wasn't built on authenticity or social connection. That was what the enthusiasts were claiming it would be. It was a reference to something known, very superficial in nature, only meant to to increase the appeal.

chmod775 1y ago

Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's going away.

erxam 1y ago
So long as the same incentives stay in place, we're going to get the same results. Change the names yet it's all the same.
pineaux 1y ago
Just like drugs, but most people understand you should have respect for them.

atleastoptimal 1y ago

The same problems people cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.

egeozcan 1y ago
Nitpick: Around 60% of the world population live in urban areas, and if a lot of people decide to live in a particular rural area, then it quickly faces urbanization.
CommenterPerson 1y ago
I went to NYC the other day. There was lots of diverse interesting stuff. Not full of people who looked just like me.
- deleted 1y ago
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jajko 1y ago
Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute. Triple that for families with small kids. Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).
rufus_foreman 1y ago
>> people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census. If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)

ookblah 1y ago

unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again. SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you. anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.

jbm 1y ago
Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.) What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion. It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space. (I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)
- ookblah 1y ago
  reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh). everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.

roomey 1y ago

Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this. The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status. It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise. I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back

close04 1y ago
Doesn’t this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your “editor” only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see. And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
- roomey 1y ago
  You have hit the nail on the head there! The point in the book was that depending on your editor, you were essentially living in different realities. There was the east and west coasts, and then there was Ameristan (or something I can't remember exactly) in between, which was fundamentalist
fullshark 1y ago
Algorithmic feeds, search result pages, and LLM responses with web citations are all different editors. It's just a computer doing the editing.

deleted 1y ago

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avereveard 1y ago

eh, I'd say monetization/gamification was the issue. bet a social media without likes, organized in circles, would be way less toxic.

esafak 1y ago
Without advertising you would have to pay for it. But that would not sufficiently deter bad actors. What you need is culture to repel and moderation to exclude them.
- avereveard 1y ago
  circles cover moderation's need. of course sustainability of the whole thing is questionable

mattikl 1y ago

When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.

mantas 1y ago
And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends. There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
  - m_fayer 1y ago
    Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
    - closewith 1y ago
      HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
      - m_fayer 1y ago
        HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.

matesz 1y ago

I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response. I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind. I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc. The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively. What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it? Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves. Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads. I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media. PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!

devoutsalsa 1y ago
I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.
- matesz 1y ago
  Unfortunately it's an incredible tool, especially for industries which pray on people's insecurities like beauty - botox, fillers etc. This person I know puts instagram story and gets instantly booked for all free slots she has for the entire week. She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago

oldpersonintx2 1y ago

[dead]

MrDresden 1y ago

I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm. Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus. The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.

pndy 1y ago
Mastodon and fediverse despite not running on algorithms sadly aren't free of spam and bots - probably nothing nowadays is. Last year in February there was a flood of messages attacking less populated instances, with... Spam can image in message body. What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.
tokioyoyo 1y ago
Unfortunately, we discovered that people would rather be told what to watch, rather that self-discover their interests, because that’s a lot of “work”.
- zoul 1y ago
  I hope it’s not that black-and-white, that it’s possible to have a sane social network with algorithmic feed, only we need to design the algorithms around users’ needs first.
  - tokioyoyo 1y ago
    If you judge users’ needs by “things they’ll pay attention on and engage with”, well… it is exactly what all the current algorithms are good at right now. It’s just, in my opinion, bad for the society at large, as rage baiting, slop-posting and etc. is great in achieving that.

3form 1y ago

It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense. It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.

riffraff 1y ago
Is Tumblr doing fine financially? I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable. I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
- sprkwd 1y ago
  Now owned by Automattic.
  - riffraff 1y ago
    Yeah I recall when they started porting it to WordPress's infrastructure and then gave up. But I think that doesn't imply their profitable, so Matt could wake up one day and shut it down.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  I don't know. I know their ad people have a hard time selling ads. They've been working to bring costs down. It might be profitable.

Juliate 1y ago

Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc. Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it. (notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).

marginalia_nu 1y ago
My fingers are not fully compatible with touch screens so I'm not a big phone guy, so I can't speak for them, but I've been trying to make my computer more task oriented, to make choices more explicit. I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities. It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront. My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).
tumdum_ 1y ago
> someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc. It’s is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I don’t think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.
- Juliate 1y ago
  No, indeed, but^W and that would be an interesting use case. What would a dedicated social media device work, and look like? (actually, that may depend a lot on what privacy one can expect out of it)

ValveFan6969 1y ago

These "internet is dead" articles are coming across as more robotic than actual robot content these days.

Popeyes 1y ago

The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes. The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.

awesome_dude 1y ago
> The problem is that people are addicted to tension And some. We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
lukan 1y ago
"The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.
- glial 1y ago
  I'm increasingly of the opinion that ad-driven media is the root cause of many of our social problems.
tokioyoyo 1y ago
I would argue that financialization of the social media is what made it fail. Once there’s direct dollar cost to your posts, ideas and etc., the incentives change from “fun” to “commercial”. That started heavily around 2017ish, where every social media switched to algorithm-first, and heavily started tracking engagement/attention per post.

acd 1y ago

Social media is actually anti social. Meeting real people and making real connections is social.

marginalia_nu 1y ago
I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full. Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
- dsign 1y ago
  > Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Not for everybody. Me and a work friend are considered "highly energetic" by our colleagues when we are at the office in person, to the point that people and things soon find themselves in orbit around us. But the truth is that when we come home, we both feel drained and exhausted for the next day or two. For me, it's as if my entire mind and soul got washed and diluted by those interactions. I'm not saying it's all bad, in the same way that running a marathon is probably not all bad. But "boost your energy" wouldn't be a term I would ever use for it.
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    You well as with anything you can definitely go overboard, and the type of social interaction matters fairly significantly. There's a difference between spending all day at work, and spending a few hours with a good friend.

benrutter 1y ago

Like most of the other commenters here, I agree that modern social media is often an echo chamber, and frequently surface level. I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?

panstromek 1y ago
I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested: https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/ https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/ I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.
- benrutter 1y ago
  Thanks, I was interested and enjoyed you blog post! It's definitely complex- I really liked your observation that even on the same platform (say youtube comments) the quality of interactions can vary hugely based on the amount of traction something gains.
yoz-y 1y ago
IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the “true” subreddits)
Timwi 1y ago
I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience. I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.

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3form 1y ago

> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. ... I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited. Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible. What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.

lurk2 1y ago
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. No one goes to the beach anymore—there are too many people there.
- 3form 1y ago
  Yeah, I think that's also why it's an odd argument to me. If the users spend all the attention on your platform anyway, is it really dead?

kingkawn 1y ago

The problem is that ultimately it connects people around ideas because it isn’t taking place in the world, and everyone’s ideas are tired strange remixes of things we happened to grow up around

j_crick 1y ago

More regulation and mandatory cool-downs to whatever is called “social media” because AI slop and bot-girls? Sounds reasonable /s

panstromek 1y ago

I love the term "semantic sludge"

weinzierl 1y ago

"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media. At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like "people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop". Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user? "Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.

gipp 1y ago
Exhaustion is absolutely the first word that comes to mind for me. Even when I'm not using it myself, I'm exhausted of all the oxygen it takes up in the room
softwaredoug 1y ago
There is a neurotic personality type that doomscrolls out of a compulsion. A lot of it is hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Where will the next shoe drop? We feel threatened, then some feel like they need to take some kind of drastic action. Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.

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thrownawaysz 1y ago

HN is the same echo chamber though. This same topic posted here every single week from random blogs to The Guardian, everyone posts their anecdotes, group hug, taps on the back and back to nothing. Rinse and repeat next week. You could just copy paste the top comments from the previous posts if you want some free karma.

sidnutulapati 1y ago

Funnily enough, I just [wrote a blog post](https://sidnutul.substack.com/p/the-thought-industry https://sidnutul.substack.com/p/the-thought-industry) echoing this sentiment around how the algorithms have fractured our shared perceptual reality:

jibal 1y ago

Just because something is bad, that doesn't that these are its last days.

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jibal 1y ago
Oops ... "Just because something is bad, that doesn't mean that these are its last days.

Swenrekcah 1y ago

The algorithmic feed should be banned for all public discourse. That is what’s killing us (quite literally). Let topics be searchable and people should find what they need. Very simple algorithms such as “most recent conversation” may be allowed.

diggan 1y ago
I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff. I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
throw101010 1y ago
In a way I see these algorithms as segregstionist, their goal is ultimately to isolate certain groups and perniciously expose them only to the rage inducing bad aspects of the other group(s) to generate more posts/likes/comment. Segregation applied to public spaces should indeed be banned, when these platforms become so huge, they become a defacto public square that you can hardly avoid effectively without missing a good share of the conversations that need to happen in public for a healthy flow of information, so I would not see an issue with law makers to regulate this... obviously as long as it's applied fairly. The issue is that currently even platforms that are getting regulate, for even more concerning aspect (national security, undue foreign influence on fair elections) like Tiktok seem to be exempt of the law itself and the US Congress seem unable to get the laws they voted in a bipartisan manner enforced... the only reason I see is that a certain tangerine tinted individual sees it as a tool to control the American discourse in his favor, and thus refuses to enforce the law. So these concerns about healthy public spaces are taking the backseat for now.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
While I agree, forums are also easily derailed and destroyed by trolls. I'm in a few political threads and they're totally ruined by a few people that the mods do nothing about.

tannhaeuser 1y ago

Yeah, original title I upvoted was the actual title of TFA "The Last Days Of Social Media". Why is it different now? This is against HN rules.

thefz 1y ago

Because everything must be profited off, so the platform itself is a vehicle for products.

toasted-subs 1y ago

Social media brought nothing but a bunch of jerks who bully and enslave people. Gonna die alone because of what those people have done. I hope when the people look back at this they try every single one of those people as murderers.

full-stack-dev 1y ago

This piece makes a great point about needing "architectures of intention." The default social media experience is pure passive consumption, and I felt my own intentions for the day slipping away. As a personal project, I built an extension to create my own little architecture of intention. It introduces a 20-second pause before I enter distracting sites, and during the pause, it nudges me with a positive micro-habit, like fixing my posture or taking a deep breath. It's called The 20s Rule (Chrome/Firefox) if anyone else finds that idea useful.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

Social media was nice when it was mostly you connecting to people, going to their page to check on them and a shared calendar. The feed was honestly the beginning of the end. It turns people from actor of their experience to mindless consumer.

spamjavalin 1y ago

Social media and social networking are two very distinct things.

ogou 1y ago

Social media hasn't been social for a while. Personal posts from people I know are buried under the algorithms. It's a high friction action to actually find my friends. All the defaults are pointed at optimized content from generic sources. I have many friends that are artists and musicians. I follow them on these platforms and my engagement with them is captured and funneled into garbage content about art and music instead of letting my see my friends. I hate it.

nottorp 1y ago

First of all, social media has stopped being social long ago. Now it's just a platform for content mills. Producer to consumer. Social media was peer to peer and it's dead.

sniffers 1y ago
You are literally topping that comment on a peer to peer social media website right now. It's hardly dead, it just happens away from meta and X. Discord is absolutely popping off, for example. HN and other forums are still very lively.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  This is hobby project for a billionaire, not a social media website. It doesn't need to generate a dime. It runs very efficiently because it was coded well (and cared for), but there are salaries paid to people to watch it that are just a gift to the people who post here.
  - fasterik 1y ago
    Social media isn't defined by the business model. Straight from Wikipedia: "Social media are new media technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks." That perfectly describes HN.
  - sniffers 1y ago
    What makes it not a social media website? Social media is a function of what it does, and it's a place people comment, converse, share links, there's a user scoring system, there's a feed of recent events on the front page... how is it not social media?

ktosobcy 1y ago

The problem is - it's not "social" and it's pure "media" at this point. It's almost impossible to have social aspect on the platforms where you only have real people with sane number of connections that interact with eachother. Rather you have a bunch of huge "pages" that simply push their news publications... IMHO it would be awesome to have again sane, SOCIAL-media. Probably with the correct regulation it could be done… And the current SM platforms could use the regulation as well (force viewing only what one follows, make it transparent like other media - i.e. if someone has more than 10k "followers" it's just a media so put same requirements: full ID disclosure and having to respond to the takedowns immediatelly…)

cynicalsecurity 1y ago

It's still social and it still connects people. You are simply on the wrong platforms.

mallowdram 1y ago

The acceleration (into automation) of language and images - both arbitrary units - requiring cost-benefit for shareholders inevitably reduces the input to noise and then chaos. Because the dark matter of language is control, bias, manipulation for status, status becomes the central factor, not the sharing. That we bemoan sub-industries of media, rather than notice the system effects across it is suspicious. “… if we say that linguistic structure "reflects" social structure, we are really assigning to language a role that is too passive ... Rather we should say that linguistic structure is the realization of social structure, actively symbolizing it in a process of mutual creativity. Because it stands as a metaphor for society, language has the property of not only transmitting the social order but also maintaining and potentially modifying it. (This is undoubtedly the explanation of the violent attitudes that under certain social conditions come to be held by one group towards the speech of others.)” Excerpts from Halliday Language and Society Volume 10

gethly 1y ago

internet too was a great place before there were too many people online. social networks met the same fate. there is a critical mass for the amount of interacting people that when reached, the system becomes the opposite of what it was built for - connection. i guess it goes back to the Dunbar's Number, but on steroids. on the other hand, too much of anything turn from good to bad so it's not unexpected result either way.

darkpicnic 1y ago
I created an open source tool to help apps stay near the Dunbar Number: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed. I think the concept of social networks is interesting, but the ultimate unbounded result is a disaster. Edit (missing link to github repo): https://github.com/darkpicnic/ten_cubed https://github.com/darkpicnic/ten_cubed

coolThingsFirst 1y ago

There's still a lot of room for progress in social networks. I'm planning an app where people are forced to talk to each other and learn more about each other, if they do not they are banned from the platform. Going on Tinder to gather likes and never talk to anyone should be forbidden.This is the issue with social sites, they make it as generic as possible.

citizenkeen 1y ago

I just want Discord but a forum. I would pay good money to that

esafak 1y ago
Discord has "forum channels". https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... What aspects of conventional forums are you looking for?
- layer8 1y ago
  The absence of chat channels, I suppose.
  - esafak 1y ago
    Forums had chat channels too; e.g., https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ Sometimes it just did not have live updates: https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/general/chit-chat https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/general/chit-chat
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cantor_S_drug 1y ago

> A few creators do append labels disclaiming that their videos depict “no real events,” but many creators don’t bother, and many consumers don’t seem to care. https://youtu.be/kLyuNo3vEuQ?t=346 https://youtu.be/kLyuNo3vEuQ?t=346 AI videos as propaganda. In this clip, the guy can be seen passing through a missile transport railing. 300K views.

randycupertino 1y ago
I enjoy watching movie trailers on youtube and I've noticed in the last month all these ai-created fake movie trailers for upcoming movies where the actual trailer isn't out yet. It's infuriating when I watch it, realize something is off and then at the end it's like "Fan-made!" If this ai-slop keeps up I'm going to just probably stop watching youtube altogether, it sucks getting tricked by fake content.
- hollerith 1y ago
  I recently spent over an hour listening to a channel whose description starts with "This channel shares real stories of life, love, and heartbreak in Thailand. I focus on honest experiences from foreigners living here." Then I realized that these stories are entirely AI-generated! I know that because of the lack of personal idiosyncracies in narrative style, lifestyle and background (the stories purport to be autobiographical, where idiosyncracies show up more than in other kinds of writing) and the high rate at which the stories appear on the channel (namely, one 30-minute story every day for the last 70 days). Someone collecting actual true stories would not be able to collect stories at that rate -- at least not when just starting out (i.e., before becoming known and trusted by many expats) and the oldest video / story on the channel is only 2 months old. https://www.youtube.com/@InsideThailandStories https://www.youtube.com/@InsideThailandStories
- qingcharles 1y ago
  YouTube started demonetizing these channels a few months back. Last year they had practically taken over the platform.

thomassmith65 1y ago

While this is an engaging essay, it's premature to claim that social media is dying. The state of social media has been awful for years, and yet billions stuck around. There probably is no depth low enough that the majority of users would abandon it. The essay also neglects what is possibly the largest part of a solution: systems to guarantee authenticity of users and user claims... A social media user shouldn't have to wonder if the brain surgeon giving them medical tips actually is a high school dropout, or the fellow Parisian sounding the alarm on French politics actually is a 12 year old Quebecer, or the new fan DM'ing them about their music actually is the same psychopath who online-stalked them two years ago, etc. Social media isn't going to die. It badly needs a mechanism for users to filter out bad information.

softwaredoug 1y ago

I think this is right but not quite. Politically, social media lately has fractured into ideological spaces. I go on bluesky or truth social or X or a certain subreddit to keep up with the politics as filtered through my tribe. A lot of people opt out of these spaces because of the huge amount of political content and the lack of nuance in discussion. But it also radicalizes the people who stay as they get their sides view of the political conflicts of the day. And they get addicted to winning arguments for their side. It used to be that Twitter revolved around whatever Trump did. Now people go online to find a little club they can kanoodle and bemoan how their side is the ultimate victim. And people will justify a lot of horrible things if they think they’re the victim.

southernplaces7 1y ago

I have an extended family and also an extended circle of friends that are spread all over the world. In both cases, numbering dozens of people, what would have previously been a slow erosion of contact and any real knowledge about most of them except those absolutely closest to me by necessity, has been converted into the ability to keep abreast of their daily lives, know when some direct communication might be helpful and generally take joy in being able to see how the good things in their lives move forward (or offer a hand when they don't). All of this almost entirely thanks to social media. This not to mention the interesting figures it lets me directly follow and the shared interest groups it lets me find. Is social media a complex and vast thing with its many pitfalls and flaws? Of course it is. The corporate giants that run much of it have some very disgusting habits of passive aggressive manipulation of their users, and grossly parasitic dark patterns of surveillance behavior. Nonetheless, under and around all of that, there's also a tremendous amount of practical human good being created by so much previously impossible connection between millions of family members, friends, loved ones and people who share things in common. I refuse to throw that baby out with the bath water as some seem to propose. Political manipulation, factionalism and ideological bickering have always been a part of human culture, for at least as long as we've had written words and means of spreading them. Could anyone have expected any differently to emerge from the massively democratizing landscape of social platforms, which let literally anyone communicate their own two cents of thought to places and context where anyone else at all might instantly see them and respond? Of course not, but to focus only on that is almost elitist in its implied notions of shutting up the masses because they don't communicate and debate "correctly" (even if many of them are indeed stupidly influenced by all kinds of interests, whithin and outside of social media).

alex1138 1y ago

Does social media mean Facebook? And how Zuckerberg may have just stolen it from other people and he thinks the idea of a good product is one where the feed is wildly non chronological and showing-actual-posts-from-friends-optional? Because that's not connection

bentt 1y ago

Mastodon shows that when a network is relieved of pressure to monetize it evolves to serve its users. Otherwise it evolves to serve the investors in the platform. It’s just that simple.

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sabakarimmm 1y ago

This is why we started Favs - social network for close friends only. No ads, no brands, no influencers. Of course though we’ve had the cold start problem but fundamentally it’s what you’d want if your favorite people wanted to stay connected beyond a group chat. - one to many posts - maps of which city you’re in - upcoming plans - no new inbox either I hope it people give it a shot one day.

ArcHound 1y ago

I don't agree that Substack is a place for small niche communities. It seems to me that they are trying hard to turn into a social network - notes, DMs and other features are pushed while more writing related features like code syntax highlighting or tables are ignored.

radar1310 1y ago

It’s absolutely one of the worst things to happen to society.