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> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. I remember that feeling of being blown away

by jjav 1y ago

> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations! But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free. What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.

Braxton1980 1y ago
I loved using chat rooms on AOL in the late 90s, later I moved to IRC (dalnet, efnet) and made some close friends. The interactions saved me from horrible depression as in my suburban area I had trouble making friends. The reason I believe things are different is that the Internet was tech people. People more likely to be logical and rational. Once "regular" people came on they brought their stupidity with them.
skydhash 1y ago
Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group. Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback). The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?
  - AstralStorm 1y ago
    Neither does not have the same shared consistent group of participants. A forum ultimately ends up a group of more or less known individuals with a focus. Reddit and HN don't have that feel, chatrooms and such as Discord usually do, unless they get huge and overwhelm Dunbar's number. The friend feeds like Facebook's are less anonymous, but they do not form topical discussions nor feel like hangouts with the person.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN? Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page. Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted before you, and before messages posted after. Everyone's view and message was equal, so pile-ons or hive-mind "this is the right way of thinking" seemed less common.
    - scelerat 1y ago
      I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts. In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
      - swed420 1y ago
        > I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts. > In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience. The following was built and deployed in Taiwan and proved to be very capable at sidestepping policy gridlock. I've often wondered if some of the concepts that power it could be applied to help facilitate more generalized discussion and debate (which could also optionally tie into instances of the original political purpose it was built for). https://www.plurality.net https://www.plurality.net https://github.com/pluralitybook https://github.com/pluralitybook https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey-tang-toxic-social-media-fake-news-taiwan-trans-government-internet https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...
- II2II 1y ago
  The over generalization of the term social media drives me bonkers. In the olden days we had things like message boards, forums, and chat rooms. Then came social networks. All of those terms reflect some sort of connection between people. When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting self-promoters (for the lack of a better term) to an audience, not the other way around. As you said: the focus is on the individual, may that be a person or a business. Perhaps we should be making an effort to distinguish between the two environments, to avoid associating connecting businesses and self-promoters to customers with connecting people to each other.
  - Gormo 1y ago
    Agreed. I consider traditional "virtual communities" (lie Usenet, IRC, BBSes, web message boards, etc.) to be something quite different from modern "social media", and I find the former to be far preferable to the latter.
  - camgunz 1y ago
    There's two distinguishing characteristics: One: algorithmic feeds (etc) are engineered to addict you Two: virality stats (views and likes) allow senders to hone message effectiveness based on structure (funny GIF, misspelling, "this you", etc), completely separate from content (white supremacy, authoritarian communism, etc) This is why Reddit is maybe barely social media, and HN, other forums, IRC, etc, aren't.
  - safety1st 1y ago
    The self-promoters, 90% of the time, are either operating an entertainment business, advertising products, or both. So we can still just call it connecting businesses to customers, otherwise known as marketing. It should all be called social marketing, not social media, as it really just a thin veneer over the Google and Meta ad monopolies. Your attention was once in other places and it moved onto the Internet. The ad monopolists figured out a way to turn the Internet into a marketing platform, by purchasing their competitors and then gradually changing the features their services offered. They then converted you from a human being into a unit of advertising inventory. Doctorow's reverse centaur aptly describes the phenomenon; the simian body is slaved to the ad machine brain and now follows its command through the magic of cheap psychological tricks.
- garrickvanburen 1y ago
  "social media" is forums, IRC, blogs, etc, but through the lens of advertisers.
jfengel 1y ago
Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.) I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about. You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people.
- jjav 1y ago
  > Email is still completely open. Yes, fortunately. Email should always be used, at least as an available option, because it is the only truly open way to communicate electronically. Recently I bought something and had some hiccups getting it to work and found that the vendor only provides support in one single place: discord. A proprietary platform I can't get access to. > Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. I still read usenet most days ;-) But no, it is very small compared to the good times. It would take me hours to read through my list of newsgroups in 1990, now at most 10 minutes.

by jjav 1y ago

Braxton1980 1y ago

I loved using chat rooms on AOL in the late 90s, later I moved to IRC (dalnet, efnet) and made some close friends. The interactions saved me from horrible depression as in my suburban area I had trouble making friends. The reason I believe things are different is that the Internet was tech people. People more likely to be logical and rational. Once "regular" people came on they brought their stupidity with them.

skydhash 1y ago

Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group. Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback). The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.

deadbabe 1y ago
Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?
- AstralStorm 1y ago
  Neither does not have the same shared consistent group of participants. A forum ultimately ends up a group of more or less known individuals with a focus. Reddit and HN don't have that feel, chatrooms and such as Discord usually do, unless they get huge and overwhelm Dunbar's number. The friend feeds like Facebook's are less anonymous, but they do not form topical discussions nor feel like hangouts with the person.
- diggan 1y ago
  > Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN? Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page. Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted before you, and before messages posted after. Everyone's view and message was equal, so pile-ons or hive-mind "this is the right way of thinking" seemed less common.
  - scelerat 1y ago
    I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts. In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
    - swed420 1y ago
      > I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts. > In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience. The following was built and deployed in Taiwan and proved to be very capable at sidestepping policy gridlock. I've often wondered if some of the concepts that power it could be applied to help facilitate more generalized discussion and debate (which could also optionally tie into instances of the original political purpose it was built for). https://www.plurality.net https://www.plurality.net https://github.com/pluralitybook https://github.com/pluralitybook https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey-tang-toxic-social-media-fake-news-taiwan-trans-government-internet https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...
II2II 1y ago
The over generalization of the term social media drives me bonkers. In the olden days we had things like message boards, forums, and chat rooms. Then came social networks. All of those terms reflect some sort of connection between people. When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting self-promoters (for the lack of a better term) to an audience, not the other way around. As you said: the focus is on the individual, may that be a person or a business. Perhaps we should be making an effort to distinguish between the two environments, to avoid associating connecting businesses and self-promoters to customers with connecting people to each other.
- Gormo 1y ago
  Agreed. I consider traditional "virtual communities" (lie Usenet, IRC, BBSes, web message boards, etc.) to be something quite different from modern "social media", and I find the former to be far preferable to the latter.
- camgunz 1y ago
  There's two distinguishing characteristics: One: algorithmic feeds (etc) are engineered to addict you Two: virality stats (views and likes) allow senders to hone message effectiveness based on structure (funny GIF, misspelling, "this you", etc), completely separate from content (white supremacy, authoritarian communism, etc) This is why Reddit is maybe barely social media, and HN, other forums, IRC, etc, aren't.
- safety1st 1y ago
  The self-promoters, 90% of the time, are either operating an entertainment business, advertising products, or both. So we can still just call it connecting businesses to customers, otherwise known as marketing. It should all be called social marketing, not social media, as it really just a thin veneer over the Google and Meta ad monopolies. Your attention was once in other places and it moved onto the Internet. The ad monopolists figured out a way to turn the Internet into a marketing platform, by purchasing their competitors and then gradually changing the features their services offered. They then converted you from a human being into a unit of advertising inventory. Doctorow's reverse centaur aptly describes the phenomenon; the simian body is slaved to the ad machine brain and now follows its command through the magic of cheap psychological tricks.
garrickvanburen 1y ago
"social media" is forums, IRC, blogs, etc, but through the lens of advertisers.

jfengel 1y ago

Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.) I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about. You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people.

jjav 1y ago
> Email is still completely open. Yes, fortunately. Email should always be used, at least as an available option, because it is the only truly open way to communicate electronically. Recently I bought something and had some hiccups getting it to work and found that the vendor only provides support in one single place: discord. A proprietary platform I can't get access to. > Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. I still read usenet most days ;-) But no, it is very small compared to the good times. It would take me hours to read through my list of newsgroups in 1990, now at most 10 minutes.