10 ms·

Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

653 points by susam 8mo ago

ivanjermakov 8mo ago
I struggle to see anything "social" about social media. Looking at short videos of others and ads is anything but social activity.
- vaylian 8mo ago
  The problem is that people who don't know the history of the internet just call everything with user posts "social media". Web 2.0 has some overlap with social networks. But it is still a different concept. And social media is a meaningless term at this point.
- edwin2 8mo ago
  It’s handheld, portrait television
PaulKeeble 8mo ago
"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. " It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.
- keyraycheck 8mo ago
  While number of active users still grows, one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots. The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
  - loloquwowndueo 8mo ago
    Plot twist: all old folks were also on Facebook only to chat with other old folks. Once this fact was spotted, they all just moved to Discord.
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    > who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots. Political activists, like a former partner of mine. … who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post … … which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything … … which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
    - naravara 8mo ago
      I take poorly directed targeting advertisements as a performance indicator for how well my data privacy efforts are working. When the ad targeting has you dead to rights is when you need to worry.
      - ben_w 8mo ago
        To an extent, sure, but I think also a sign their analytics were never as good as they claimed. For example, so far as I know my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?
        thaumasiotes 8mo ago
        > my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads? Probably so you can suggest it to your partner.
- hippo22 8mo ago
  Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.
- BorisMelnik 8mo ago
  hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.
  - JKCalhoun 8mo ago
    Too late. (And I don't do mobile anyway.) I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.
    - Barbing 8mo ago
      and keep your kids away from it too before Mark’s robots get handsy https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chatbot-guidelines https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat... Warning: truly disgusting
      - erentz 8mo ago
        The adult engineers and adult managers responsible for such things should get the same treatment as any adult having such conversations directly. You can’t just say “wasn’t me, it’s the AI layer I built to do the abuse for me”. You’re actively choosing to abuse and groom children. Sick stuff.
  - magicmicah85 8mo ago
    The funny thing about the friends feed is that it highlights for me who is extremely active on the platform. People resharing stuff all the time. And, it's one of the few feeds you can't endlessly scroll through. It will tell you to "check back later" once you get to 3-4 days of updates. No money in showing people their friends feeds, so why let them endlessly scroll.
  - Xiol 8mo ago
    The amount of shady stuff Facebook has tried with their app over the years has resulted in it, and other Meta apps, being banned from my devices.
- cyanydeez 8mo ago
  People seek novelty. Real social networks do not change as fast as that.
- steveBK123 8mo ago
  Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me. For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years. Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form. It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
  - Brog_io 8mo ago
    You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/ https://fotoapp.co/
    - zukzuk 8mo ago
      Or Pixelfed, for a decentralized fediverse option.
    - uhoh-itsmaciek 8mo ago
      +1 for Foto. I was also using Instagram through a photography lens and fell off when it got totally unsuitable for that. Foto is pretty good so far.
    - squidsoup 8mo ago
      Foto is good, provided you want a community exclusively made up of other photographers. If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option. The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.
      - Seattle3503 8mo ago
        > If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option. Wasn't people wanting reach what supposedly ruined Instagram in the first place? Seems like wanting it both ways if you want reach for yourself, but not for "influencers"
- bad_username 8mo ago
  > These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone They clearly work for advertisers, and that's all that matters.
- dyauspitr 8mo ago
  For many people, the alternative would be that their feeds are completely empty since a lot of folks don’t post any updates on Facebook really.
- terminalshort 8mo ago
  It's literally what got me off Facebook for good. I used it less and less over the years, but would still log in once every couple weeks or so. At least it was always 100% content posted by friends or friends of friends, or at least something that was interacted with by someone I know. Then it seems like overnight they flipped a switch and it was 10% content from people I know and 90% completely irrelevant slop. I logged in one more time after that, and then never again.
- baby 8mo ago
  Twitter followed the same way ad well. All political rubbish now
  - atmosx 8mo ago
    It’s the worse. The algo will feed anything that makes you cheer or infuriates you. No middle ground. And God forbid if you dig to some disunion and you “like” something or stop scrolling in the “wrong” tweet… you’ll be getting similar content for months. It’s crazy how bad it has become.
    - baby 8mo ago
      I really think youtube did a good job there. No thirst trap, no outraging content. Praise to the youtube algorithm.
- a123b456c 8mo ago
  It's not complicated. That random garbage increases advertising revenues. Maybe not from every user, but certainly in the aggregate.
- renewiltord 8mo ago
  It’s funny how everyone experiences their own Eternal September. Remember that there are 1.5 billion Indians. They’re on FB too and influencing the algorithm with what they want to see.
- xnx 8mo ago
  Everyone wants to be TikTok. The generated feed is much better than following "creators"/influencers.
benjiweber 8mo ago
This reminded me of this video from a more optimistic time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
- supriyo-biswas 8mo ago
  Thank you for posting this. Despite being an old video, I had never come across it, and it almost made me tear up. It showed me the hope that I wished the web would be, despite it never realizing that ambition, with businesses that only pursued engagement metrics, and governments who saw value in vassalizing tech companies to pursue their political goals.
creamyhorror 8mo ago
I was always perturbed by the shift from calling them "social networks" to "social media". It signalled a friends-to-famous shift (plus ads) that I didn't particularly want. Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.) They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)
- dhruv3006 8mo ago
  I guess social networking service is actually a more appropiate name for the thing.
  - Nevermark 8mo ago
    That makes sense in the case where people are mindfully connecting with particular individuals or organizations, and paying for that. Not for where algorithms select media for you. That's not a "networking service", even if that is one of its hooks. Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service". "Attention media" is more accurate. But that also describes traditional advertisement based "media". Which earned its keep via attention access, by including unintegrated ads as a recognizable second component. A description specific to the new form is "surveillance/manipulation media" or "SM media". Attention-access funded media lacked pervasive unpermissioned surveillance and seamlessly integrated individualized manipulation. Where dossier-leveraged manipulation, not simply attention access, has become the defining product.
    - j16sdiz 8mo ago
      > Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service". sb should tell those linkedin folks this.
    - butlike 8mo ago
      You got me thinking. "Social media" is like a catalog you used to receive via snail mail in the mailbox. You kind of thumb through for something interesting, but there's no real substance there.
dhruv3006 8mo ago
Any other platforms like Mastodon which are doing things well - are you guys on lemmy?
- PaulKeeble 8mo ago
  Lemmy is mostly a clone of reddit with a lot less people on it. That is to say it works fairly well and doesn't yet seem filled with bots, but its got the same issues as Reddit since its based on the same design.
  - dhruv3006 8mo ago
    What were the main issues of reddit according to you?
    - AdamN 8mo ago
      I'll answer - too many bots and most communities don't demand high quality comments. I still use it though - it's my only social network (although I don't think it's really a social network since I have no durable social connections with anybody there and I presume most other people don't either).
      - dhruv3006 8mo ago
        Reddit does give a lot of value - despite the shortcomings.
    - bloggie 8mo ago
      The idea that community votes will result in the best content floating to the top is flawed, because what happens is the most popular content gets upvoted and not necessarily the most insightful or pertinent. This effect is magnified as the network or communities grow and welcome more a more general audience. The most prominent commentary is often useless jokes, memes, reactions etc. Slashdot, HN, lobsters have similar flaws with different strategies to overcome them.
black_puppydog 8mo ago
I still think it's worth reflecting which of the toxic patterns we want to, or don't want to reproduce on non-commercial networks like mastodon. Infinite scroll, quote reply, the like button... all these aren't neutral, and discussions were rightly heated about introducing them.
- ceayo 8mo ago
  You're so right... Some of these patterns are, to their very core, parts of what make these social media bad.
- esafak 8mo ago
  https://www.deceptive.design/ https://www.deceptive.design/
adithyassekhar 8mo ago
This might be controversial. Please disagree with me. When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms. So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
- blurbleblurble 8mo ago
  "We deserve it" is the tldr I gather from you here, just like people addicted to opiates are ultimately responsible for the way those drug companies systematically set them up for that, right? I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.
  - morissette 8mo ago
    Capitalism at work…
  - NitpickLawyer 8mo ago
    I appreciate your comment, and how you argued your disagreement. Yet I think you missed something in GPs post. First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on. I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted. Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature. Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things. I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.
webscout 8mo ago
[dead]
Almondsetat 8mo ago
IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time. To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks
- Forgeties79 8mo ago
  I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me. Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
  - Gooblebrai 8mo ago
    > Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know. How do you discover new people? I'd say some people I followed I discovered them thanks for the feed
    - Almondsetat 8mo ago
      Suggestions from friends? The network of people even without a feed is extremely vast on its own. You'd be surprised how far "a friend of a friend" can go.
    - Forgeties79 8mo ago
      Why do I need to discover new people? If I like your podcast or your art or whatever, I will find you on the platform. Other than that, I only want to follow friends and family
- Jeff_Brown 8mo ago
  This feels like the most important comment here. Do other Mastodon users feel the same? The OP Madden me want to try Mastodon.
asim 8mo ago
Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails. What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.
- everdrive 8mo ago
  I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time makes your life actively worse even if in the moment you feel good. Social media should be thought of through that lens -- if you think you want to preserve "the good parts," you're like an alcoholic who keeps finding a reason to continue drinking. "No, the problem was just drinking alone. Now that I'm drinking at the bar, socially, it's OK!" To an extent, but mostly it's harming you.
  - tannhaeuser 8mo ago
    The difference is the "algorithmic" timeline (meaning ads) you get with Facebook, Insta, and co compared to the strictly chronological timeline you get on the Fediverse equivalents (Mastodon, Pixelfed). That it's less addictive, or at least not in the doom scrolling type of way, is more a consequence. Aka the enshitification argument. Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation. For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.
    - 8mo ago
dangus 8mo ago
The title of the article is arguing semantics. Like it or not, the term “social media” is what we use to describe scroll apps like TikTok. The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else. I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.
pvtmert 8mo ago
Unrelated to the topic described in the blog itself, I overall like the theme of `susam.net`. The name itself reminded me of a sesame seed in Turkish for a while. (I think author had recently mentioned one of the recent posts that they wanted to get susam.com but that was already taken by a Turkish company selling some spices...) The content (that shows up in HN) is also good. Since I am on mobile device, I cannot tell the exact font used, but seems like Georgia to me. While https://github.com/susam/susam.net https://github.com/susam/susam.net hosts the actual source code of the website. Another remark: Would be really nice to have a same theme adaptation for BearBlog and similar places.
- MinimalAction 8mo ago
  Agreed! I thought this site was generated in Hugo for some reason. Never knew Lisp was used until I saw that GitHub you linked.
Simboo 8mo ago
Why won’t their stock crash and burn already???
grishka 8mo ago
I myself started making the same distinction when I talk about these things in English, except it's "social media" vs "social networks". Though I have no idea how to make that distinction in Russian, social "media" never caught on as a term there. An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.
- wussboy 8mo ago
  Sure you can. You can not post political things on social networks. They're not doing any good anyway. They're not changing anyone's mind. They're not providing depth or width to the discussion. I don't say this to be insulting, but rather a realist.
  - lapcat 8mo ago
    Why do you assume that there needs to be a purpose other than discussing a topic that you're interested in?
    - wussboy 8mo ago
      Politics is a complex topic. If you want to learn more, social media is not the way to do it. Well reasoned books and essays are. If you want to convince others of your positions, social media is not the way to do it. Personal relationships in real life are. What's left?
      - lapcat 8mo ago
        Again, you seem to insist on an ulterior motive, completely discounting the value or pleasure of conversation. In contrast, reading is a solitary activity. Have you heard of book clubs? People read books, and then they get together to discuss the books. Hacker News itself is all about reading articles, and then discussing the articles with others. "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
blfr 8mo ago
Sure, the modern Twitter/X feed is not like the original reverse chronological timeline but the latter is still available right next to it. Maybe it's the power of the default but I find the algorithmic feed much better. The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok. The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.
- hotOrNot 8mo ago
  I find the algorithmic feeds literally horrible on twitter. Algorithmic feeds only work with video content/short form I feel like
gradus_ad 8mo ago
I will admit, one thing the crowd attention model does exceptionally well is surface the best comments on content. Whether it's HN, Instagram, YouTube, etc... the top comments are usually the "best", depending on how best is defined in the given context. On the silly Instagram meme videos my algo serves up, the top comments are invariably hilarious, often funnier than the actual content, and as you scroll it's impressive how the ordering by like count matches hilarity quite well.
- bananaflag 8mo ago
  This works on platforms like HN, Less Wrong or niche subreddits, which i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them) ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations) Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree. In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.
  - fritzo 8mo ago
    Right, hn is 50% collaborative filtering and 50% dang
    - state_less 8mo ago
      HN and other social media sites are closer to 99% free labor, 1% paid labor, like dang. Free labor writing comments, blog posts, voting/moderating, posting videos and so on. Imagine if HN or Youtube had to pay people to generate all that content[1]. I think the only pay most get, is that you get to enjoy the site content. But in the case of Youtube, they slap so many ads in front of it that you often end up paying for this free labor content just to get rid of the ads. HN doesn't do Ad walls, but is more of a sales funnel for YCombinator and harvesting whatever value they can from the data, so not so intrusive. [1] Youtube does pay some of the more popular content creators
- dhruv3006 8mo ago
  Speaking of instagram - i have found the ads sometimes incredibly helpful - sometimes exactly the thing i am looking for. Facebook on the other hand has become too very bad.
julianeon 8mo ago
This post has convinced me to give Mastodon another try.
newzino 8mo ago
[flagged]
morissette 8mo ago
Eh, watch as HN comments slowly become exactly the thing you don’t want to participate in.
mmclar 8mo ago
I'm surprised there's not more discussion here and in general about symmetric- vs. asymmetric-relationship networks. Facebook worked in the beginning because relationships were symmetric and there was no concept of getting "follows" -- friendships are modeled after real life ones, where the friendship is between two people. I can see why the big networks moved away from that: pushing "content" has a lot more friction when relationships are symmetrical. What I don't understand is why there is no upstart trying to bring that back.
- sitkack 8mo ago
  What does that mean exactly, how do you see that manifesting itself? Would we even be aware of these networks, sounds like email
  - mmclar 8mo ago
    Not email; social networking. Symmetrical just means the relationship is the same from both sides. Imagine a two-way "friendship" relationship (old-school Facebook) vs. a one-way "following" relationship (more recent Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc.).
    - hotOrNot 8mo ago
      A followers graph is much more stable. You can have 1m followers but you can't have 1m friends
  - al_borland 8mo ago
    The friendship link on the site would need to go both ways. Request and accept. There is no concept of “Follow”. In addition, I’d say limit the number of “friends” a person can have. Maybe cap it at 200 (Dunbar's number plus a little extra). This eliminates celebrity, news, and meme accounts. It also eliminates people playing the silly game of seeing who can get the most followers or bragging about follower counts. These are your actual friends, who also consider you a friend. Even if a celebrity were to join, the site would be useful for sharing with actual friends, not their fans or casual acquaintances. Facebook started out similarly, but I don’t think it ever had a friend cap. I remember some sorority girls try to get me to make a Facebook account around 2004/5, because they had a contest to see who could get the most friends. I thought this was stupid and said no. Since this happened almost instantly after launch, I think those friend limits are important to make people use it for actual friends and not a popularity contest. Facebook went the opposite way, leaned into it, and created the Follow option. It was all downhill from there.
jrepinc 8mo ago
That's why I am so glad to only be on Mastodon these days, the true social network, without any rich sociopath billionare or some vulture crapitalist behind it. That keeps Mastodon form becoming the attention/propaganda platforms that all these for profit platforms really are.
artzev_ 8mo ago
friction is underrated as an attention design pattern. blocking feels punitive, friction just makes you notice the reach instead of being on autopilot. not saying it solves algorithmic feeds, but the pause before opening apps changes the math for most people
bravoetch 8mo ago
My family has moved to group chats. It's great.
- lizknope 8mo ago
  Same here. My father is 1 of 8 children and my mom is 1 of 12 children. I have tons of aunts, uncles, 30 first cousins, and they have lots of kids that I know as well. It's lots of birthday pics, graduations, weddings, vacations, and especially when some of us get together.
- esafak 8mo ago
  I assume you mean SMS?
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
jwr 8mo ago
Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see. As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me. Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.
- al_borland 8mo ago
  Facebook’s best feature, at its peak, was that everyone was there. My friends and family aren’t on Mastodon, and likely never will be. If the goal of a social network is to connect with people I know in real life, rather than follow various Internet personalities, it fails at this for me. This isn’t Mastodon’s fault, but it’s the reality of the situation. I’m not on Facebook anymore due to what the site has become, but I found the same emptiness on Mastodon, as my friends aren’t there. I’m not influential enough to get everyone to move to a new platform just for me. When I joined Mastodon, I ended up following a bunch of developers, but ultimately felt like a fly on the wall to a friend group I wasn’t part of, as a lot of these people had been real-life friends or co-workers. I guess if your friend group is all geeky enough to join Mastodon, it can work. I have very few real-life connections that fall into that bucket, which I think is the case for most people. The people I know who still use social media seem more than happy with Meta’s products. The others just stopped using these things all together and don’t seem to care about finding an alternative.
  - hotOrNot 8mo ago
    Yup, feeling the same way. Mastodon needs to leverage a friends graph somehow
  - Skidaddle 8mo ago
neogodless 8mo ago
> I stumbled upon Mastodon and it reminded me of the early days of Twitter. Back in 2006, I followed a small number of folks of the nerd variety on Twitter and received genuinely interesting updates from them. Personally, I never got into Twitter. I'm on the Fediverse now, and check in on it occasionally, but it never draws me in. I don't connect with people on that kind of platform. Some forums work for me, mostly because there's a small enough number of participants, or, importantly, there's a place I can go to read content from specific people. Even if we don't become friends (or IRL friends), I still feel like I know them to some degree. The people matter. Twitter / Fediverse / Bluesky seem to be about topics, and as such, I lose interest quickly. Because no matter how much I like photography, birding, cars, board games, computers, software, etc... I don't really care what the masses have to say on those topics. I want to know about Alice, Bob, and Carol have to say on things that interest me. Early Facebook was, as described in the article, people you knew, who held some sway in your life, sharing their life events (however inane), or their opinions. I care more about that than I care about a celebrity or complete stranger declaring some thing as good or bad or interesting. But the network effect was always going to matter. LiveJournal/Xanga/MySpace all had some network effect where some of your friends were there, and you wanted to be there, too. But Facebook figured out monetization, and they still seem to hold the greatest network effect despite how terrible the experience has become. I can post photos there, and dozens will respond, all people I know. If I post in literally any other place, I will get less than dozens of responses, and almost none of them will be from people I know. There is no new place like early Facebook, or even current Facebook. But of course what I want is a place where I can share with the people I know, and no one has to pay for it, but the monetization doesn't drive the service towards enshittification. This isn't a very realistic desire. Discord has been the closest for me, where I have dozens of contacts in a shared space, and very frequently get interaction with people I know about things I care about. But it also feels like enshittification of Discord is also inevitable even though there's a paid subscription option.
Trickery5837 8mo ago
The final transition happened with the death of online forums. I still miss those dearly. I've met extremely interesting and competent people with a true desire to interact with passionate peers. They thought me how to ask for and give advice, how to express opinions in public, the value of growing a community around common interest, and the joy of laughing and getting angry on the OT section.
anonu 8mo ago
My mental model for all of this is that my attention is valuable. I can choose where to spend my attention and it should cost something to these platforms and their advertisers to command that attention. Unfortunately, these platforms have figured how to lower their cost by triggering lizard brain reflexes. The best solution is to simply remove any pathways they have to command that attention: uninstall apps and turn off all notifications. My attention is more under my control in this way.
keepsmiling77 8mo ago
Modern large platforms are no longer social networks in the original sense, but media platforms optimized for attention. Real social networks are characterized by the fact that users themselves determine whose content they see.
dev1ycan 8mo ago
I would tend to agree with this, I vibidly remember when facebook had a feed on the top right that told you what your friends were doing, playing games, listening to music on soundcloud, etc. That was social media, not whatever the hell we have today... it's antisocial and attention grabbing.
ulrischa 8mo ago
I wonder why the author did not mention bluesky as his critisism is on the timeline algo and bluesky allows to create custom timelie algos
didgetmaster 8mo ago
>It feels closer to how social networks used to work originally. I hope it stays that way. Is there something about it (it's architecture or the company behind it) that is fundamentally different than other social networks? If not, it is doomed to follow them all eventually.
- isodev 8mo ago
  I think the fact that there is no one company behind it helps a great deal. Monetising user attention is simply incompatible with the architecture of the fediverse - even Meta couldn’t twist it into that and eventually decided to give up.
cmrdporcupine 8mo ago
The failure of Mastodon to thrive even when Twitter itself became very vulnerable unfortunately tells me that people actually want this pathologically bad behaviour. Lots of friends who slagged Twitter and Facebook etc for its anti-social aspects turned around and tried Mastodon for a few days and then came back to me with a "there's nothing happening there" and it's "boring" etc because they were fundamentally expecting to be force fed entertainment just like Twitter. Lots of comments on hackernews to that effect, too. That's fine. I never liked Twitter anyways, but I do think it's interesting how two faced we can be about this. The engagement hackers found a market and met it. Not good, but true.
pks016 8mo ago
I was active on FB, Insta, Goggle +, and Orkut during their early days. My brother and I were the first few people from our circle to have these social media account. Looking back, the incentives have changed. Back then, there was some openness, rawness, and genuine curiosity about people and things. And of course, the signal-noise ratio was much higher. Influencer culture ruined everything, consciously or subconsciously. I still use Insta for photography. But, it's a sinking ship. Insta could have made a different app for reels.
isodev 8mo ago
I’m quite literally experiencing a physical reaction whenever I need to browse some algorithmic timeline. Even YouTube, what used to be a couple of related videos is now a wall full of “recommendations” - the unskippable ads on every video are more relevant than the actual videos… Mastodon and related (for me Loops mainly) are a breath of fresh air and I wish more people can (re)learn to enjoy that.
- BloodyIron 8mo ago
  YouTube recommendations are very well tuned for me. You need to mark videos "not interested" and downvote stuff you don't actually like, as well as stopping videos when you've decided you're not interested. This and other aspects WILL improve your recommended feed. So if your recommended feed sucks, well that's on you there bud, you can influence it completely.
  - vmg12 8mo ago
    Do you use youtube intending to be drawn into watching things you never intended to watch? I don't want a feed but the people operating these sites do not care that they are destroying people's time. Go to twitter, click on "following". Next time you sign in, somehow it's on "For you" (the algorithmic feed). Thankfully on Youtube I can completely disable recommendations on the site and I use it purely as a source of information, not as a dopamine addiction funnel.
  - doomslayer999 8mo ago
    I just get the same videos recommended over and over. I liked it when the YT feed would recommend stuff new and different i might find interesting. Now its just hyperoptimized to get me to click on ads.
cwoolfe 8mo ago
Substack has been a welcome alternative in this space as well. It reminds me of my experience on web blogs back in the 2000s. A real sense of community and substance.
TrackerFF 8mo ago
FB is still a social network, but seemingly only when you use groups. And you actively need to moderate those. Public pages, and things like that? AI/bots and ads wasteland.
lukeschlather 8mo ago
The funny thing about Facebook is that it's got a perfectly good social network in there, I think the only one that exists. In the menu is "Feeds" which is what you want. It only shows friends and followed things. If they made that the default when you go to facebook.com I don't think I'd have any complaints feature-wise, though an ad-free option would be nice. It's a genuine social network. Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.
- kelvinjps10 8mo ago
  The only thing I used Facebook, is for marketplace and groups you can buy cheap stuff on there.
- godot 8mo ago
  Wow, I did not know about this Feeds page despite being a daily FB user for 20 years (yes, to the ridicule of most people, I know). Thanks for pointing this out. I wish this was the default homepage or at least a way to set it as default.
  - Zak 8mo ago
    Each feed has a unique URL, so you can bookmark it in your browser. For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser.
    - hapticmonkey 8mo ago
      Annoyingly I can not get it to work on mobile (iOS Safari). Loading the url cause the page to refresh and take me to the main page.
    - anonymars 8mo ago
      > Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity > For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser Related (2025): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115
1berg 8mo ago
Though that's where a lot of people get their news, ironically.
baxuz 8mo ago
Luckily, the EU is tackling the most impactful feature — the infinite scroll "slot machine". https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagram-brussels-kill-infinite-scrolling/ https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagr...
florakel 8mo ago
I have never used mastodon, but why is it so much better than X (twitter)? I also follow a small group of people on X that I find interesting and I get a chronological feed of their posts in the “following” tab. I know that the “For You” tab abyss is right there. I opened it once, was shocked by all the crap the system assumed I would like, and never went back. The good thing is that nobody forces me to use it. I am perfectly fine in the “following” feed and not exposed at all to recommender systems trying to grab my attention. Only the ads in the feed annoy me - and they are so bad that I wonder how X makes any money.
- haunter 8mo ago
  > I get a chronological feed of their posts in the “following” tab Which is broken for 2 weeks now. The small drop down to change it to "most recent" have been disappeared for a lot of people both on web and iOS/Android so you see ALL tweets from accounts you follow, even replies you don't care about.
hinkley 8mo ago
But which social networks aren’t attention media these days, and will they remain thus after a few more investment rounds?
throawayonthe 8mo ago
i find this sorta thing very interesting because not only have i never experienced the 'early' social networks as described (too young), i've never even considered using one of these sites as described - why would i voluntarily forgo pseudonymity on the public internet? I don't think this was fully a generational thing, i remember being genuinely baffled when i discovered my peers/classmates were using their real names, posting pictures/videos of themselves, and interacting with each other on these public platforms; wasn't internet safety 101 "Don't Do That?"
TrailingArbutus 8mo ago
The problem is that a functional social network is a bad business model. A chronological feed has a "stop" point. You catch up, you feel satisfied, and you close the app. Meta’s revenue depends on you never feeling caught up. That’s why the "Feeds" tab is buried three menus deep—it’s there so they can say it exists, but hidden so you stay stuck in the algorithmic slop. Even if they made it the default, you’re still left with the trust issue. You aren’t the customer; you’re the data being mined. At this point, the brand is probably too far gone for a simple UI tweak to fix the underlying rot.
smohare 8mo ago
[dead]
umairnadeem123 8mo ago
[dead]
fHr 8mo ago
they try hard to obfuscate this
CalChris 8mo ago
Social Networks ⊆ Attention Media.
dizhn 8mo ago
Recently I realized something. Back in the day in the early 2000s people were talking about this thing called social media that didn't really exist but would be the future. (That and micro transactions) I never got what was so hot about it. Looking back I am realizing that the techno elite did not coopt something that used to be nice. This whole narrative control and private information funnel was designed from the beginning with what it became today already on their crosshairs. We just went through the phases and ate all of it up.
- thaumasiotes 8mo ago
  Good news! Microtransactions really were the future. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/05/30/noony-nokuni https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/05/30/noony-nokuni
  - dizhn 8mo ago
    They used to be hung up on the fact that the transaction cost of a microtransaction (5 cents to read the new york times for a day) was the show stopper. Boy did they solve that issue. :)
orsenthil 8mo ago
Everything evolved into a marketing platform right now. It is innately driven by the human desire for power, control and greed. There are very humans that recognize it and act in beneficial ways when power is given to them. With the rest, we get what we have right now. That’s normal thing with humans. We want to market to others, show our power, and we want to be marketed by powerful hoping we will become like them.
kelvinjps10 8mo ago
My only "social network" I'd say is WhatsApp, only people I have added I can see their posts(updates) and since you need their phone I only give it to people that are close to me.
kazinator 8mo ago
> Attention Media I like this and will use it from now on, reserving "social network" only for Usenet, Mastodon and IRC and such.
strix_varius 8mo ago
When our first child was born, we wanted to share photos with family. So I set up a Google photos album and shared it with parents, aunts, grandparents, etc. It supports general chat plus comments and reactions linked to posted media. It's exactly what I wish social networks became... Something like the "circles" idea that Google abandoned years ago. Now with several thousand images and videos and comments we're hitting the limits of what Google seems to have designed for with however shared albums sync. This community feature though is the only reason I haven't self hosted all this stuff...
MarcLore 8mo ago
[dead]
nanobuilds 8mo ago
Yea since the old FB the dial of human/friends posts vs human attention harvesting posts & ads has been slowly changing so that users wouldn't notice it immediately.
with 8mo ago
The real social network is the group chat / friend group you already have. Everything else is algorithmic brainrot with some kind of "friends list" for "legitimacy". The problem isn't the feed, it's that people actually use "social" networks instead of just talking to actual friends. Just close the apps, lol
pipeline_peak 8mo ago
Let’s not forgot the emerging deity-esque “content creator” and “influencer”. A far stretch from the humble “vlogger” or “YouTuber”. The latter two sound like a jolly guy with a camcorder and a backpack. I remember when social networks were at the very least portrayed in the interest of “connecting people from around the world”. I’ll often hear something along the lines of these services being engineered to pin us all against each other. Jaron Lanier’s “ Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” likes to claim this, but I never see any actual evidence. Either way, when I visit social media site these days, people are definitely nastier. There’s more snark, a need to ridicule others for not knowing niche little factoids. “You still use tea bags?” something something cast iron pans and dish soap. There’s a lot more capitalizing through hoarding trivial information. They know something you don’t, and they love it. It’s like joining an MMORPG and realizing you have to put more time in to reach the same level as everyone else.
alphadelphi 8mo ago
"Attention Media" is the perfect definition of what those platforms are, the term "social network" is deceiving

653 points by susam 8mo ago

I struggle to see anything "social" about social media. Looking at short videos of others and ads is anything but social activity.

vaylian 8mo ago
The problem is that people who don't know the history of the internet just call everything with user posts "social media". Web 2.0 has some overlap with social networks. But it is still a different concept. And social media is a meaningless term at this point.
edwin2 8mo ago
It’s handheld, portrait television

PaulKeeble 8mo ago

"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. " It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.

keyraycheck 8mo ago
While number of active users still grows, one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots. The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
- loloquwowndueo 8mo ago
  Plot twist: all old folks were also on Facebook only to chat with other old folks. Once this fact was spotted, they all just moved to Discord.
- ben_w 8mo ago
  > who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots. Political activists, like a former partner of mine. … who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post … … which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything … … which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
  - naravara 8mo ago
    I take poorly directed targeting advertisements as a performance indicator for how well my data privacy efforts are working. When the ad targeting has you dead to rights is when you need to worry.
    - ben_w 8mo ago
      To an extent, sure, but I think also a sign their analytics were never as good as they claimed. For example, so far as I know my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?
      - thaumasiotes 8mo ago
        > my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads? Probably so you can suggest it to your partner.
hippo22 8mo ago
Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.
BorisMelnik 8mo ago
hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.
- JKCalhoun 8mo ago
  Too late. (And I don't do mobile anyway.) I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.
  - Barbing 8mo ago
    and keep your kids away from it too before Mark’s robots get handsy https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chatbot-guidelines https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat... Warning: truly disgusting
    - erentz 8mo ago
      The adult engineers and adult managers responsible for such things should get the same treatment as any adult having such conversations directly. You can’t just say “wasn’t me, it’s the AI layer I built to do the abuse for me”. You’re actively choosing to abuse and groom children. Sick stuff.
- magicmicah85 8mo ago
  The funny thing about the friends feed is that it highlights for me who is extremely active on the platform. People resharing stuff all the time. And, it's one of the few feeds you can't endlessly scroll through. It will tell you to "check back later" once you get to 3-4 days of updates. No money in showing people their friends feeds, so why let them endlessly scroll.
- Xiol 8mo ago
  The amount of shady stuff Facebook has tried with their app over the years has resulted in it, and other Meta apps, being banned from my devices.
cyanydeez 8mo ago
People seek novelty. Real social networks do not change as fast as that.
steveBK123 8mo ago
Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me. For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years. Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form. It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
- Brog_io 8mo ago
  You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/ https://fotoapp.co/
  - zukzuk 8mo ago
    Or Pixelfed, for a decentralized fediverse option.
  - uhoh-itsmaciek 8mo ago
    +1 for Foto. I was also using Instagram through a photography lens and fell off when it got totally unsuitable for that. Foto is pretty good so far.
  - squidsoup 8mo ago
    Foto is good, provided you want a community exclusively made up of other photographers. If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option. The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.
    - Seattle3503 8mo ago
      > If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option. Wasn't people wanting reach what supposedly ruined Instagram in the first place? Seems like wanting it both ways if you want reach for yourself, but not for "influencers"
bad_username 8mo ago
> These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone They clearly work for advertisers, and that's all that matters.
dyauspitr 8mo ago
For many people, the alternative would be that their feeds are completely empty since a lot of folks don’t post any updates on Facebook really.
terminalshort 8mo ago
It's literally what got me off Facebook for good. I used it less and less over the years, but would still log in once every couple weeks or so. At least it was always 100% content posted by friends or friends of friends, or at least something that was interacted with by someone I know. Then it seems like overnight they flipped a switch and it was 10% content from people I know and 90% completely irrelevant slop. I logged in one more time after that, and then never again.
baby 8mo ago
Twitter followed the same way ad well. All political rubbish now
- atmosx 8mo ago
  It’s the worse. The algo will feed anything that makes you cheer or infuriates you. No middle ground. And God forbid if you dig to some disunion and you “like” something or stop scrolling in the “wrong” tweet… you’ll be getting similar content for months. It’s crazy how bad it has become.
  - baby 8mo ago
    I really think youtube did a good job there. No thirst trap, no outraging content. Praise to the youtube algorithm.
a123b456c 8mo ago
It's not complicated. That random garbage increases advertising revenues. Maybe not from every user, but certainly in the aggregate.
renewiltord 8mo ago
It’s funny how everyone experiences their own Eternal September. Remember that there are 1.5 billion Indians. They’re on FB too and influencing the algorithm with what they want to see.
xnx 8mo ago
Everyone wants to be TikTok. The generated feed is much better than following "creators"/influencers.

benjiweber 8mo ago

This reminded me of this video from a more optimistic time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

supriyo-biswas 8mo ago
Thank you for posting this. Despite being an old video, I had never come across it, and it almost made me tear up. It showed me the hope that I wished the web would be, despite it never realizing that ambition, with businesses that only pursued engagement metrics, and governments who saw value in vassalizing tech companies to pursue their political goals.

creamyhorror 8mo ago

I was always perturbed by the shift from calling them "social networks" to "social media". It signalled a friends-to-famous shift (plus ads) that I didn't particularly want. Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.) They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)

dhruv3006 8mo ago
I guess social networking service is actually a more appropiate name for the thing.
- Nevermark 8mo ago
  That makes sense in the case where people are mindfully connecting with particular individuals or organizations, and paying for that. Not for where algorithms select media for you. That's not a "networking service", even if that is one of its hooks. Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service". "Attention media" is more accurate. But that also describes traditional advertisement based "media". Which earned its keep via attention access, by including unintegrated ads as a recognizable second component. A description specific to the new form is "surveillance/manipulation media" or "SM media". Attention-access funded media lacked pervasive unpermissioned surveillance and seamlessly integrated individualized manipulation. Where dossier-leveraged manipulation, not simply attention access, has become the defining product.
  - j16sdiz 8mo ago
    > Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service". sb should tell those linkedin folks this.
  - butlike 8mo ago
    You got me thinking. "Social media" is like a catalog you used to receive via snail mail in the mailbox. You kind of thumb through for something interesting, but there's no real substance there.

dhruv3006 8mo ago

Any other platforms like Mastodon which are doing things well - are you guys on lemmy?

PaulKeeble 8mo ago
Lemmy is mostly a clone of reddit with a lot less people on it. That is to say it works fairly well and doesn't yet seem filled with bots, but its got the same issues as Reddit since its based on the same design.
- dhruv3006 8mo ago
  What were the main issues of reddit according to you?
  - AdamN 8mo ago
    I'll answer - too many bots and most communities don't demand high quality comments. I still use it though - it's my only social network (although I don't think it's really a social network since I have no durable social connections with anybody there and I presume most other people don't either).
    - dhruv3006 8mo ago
      Reddit does give a lot of value - despite the shortcomings.
  - bloggie 8mo ago
    The idea that community votes will result in the best content floating to the top is flawed, because what happens is the most popular content gets upvoted and not necessarily the most insightful or pertinent. This effect is magnified as the network or communities grow and welcome more a more general audience. The most prominent commentary is often useless jokes, memes, reactions etc. Slashdot, HN, lobsters have similar flaws with different strategies to overcome them.

black_puppydog 8mo ago

I still think it's worth reflecting which of the toxic patterns we want to, or don't want to reproduce on non-commercial networks like mastodon. Infinite scroll, quote reply, the like button... all these aren't neutral, and discussions were rightly heated about introducing them.

ceayo 8mo ago
You're so right... Some of these patterns are, to their very core, parts of what make these social media bad.
esafak 8mo ago
https://www.deceptive.design/ https://www.deceptive.design/

adithyassekhar 8mo ago

This might be controversial. Please disagree with me. When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms. So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.

blurbleblurble 8mo ago
"We deserve it" is the tldr I gather from you here, just like people addicted to opiates are ultimately responsible for the way those drug companies systematically set them up for that, right? I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.
- morissette 8mo ago
  Capitalism at work…
- NitpickLawyer 8mo ago
  I appreciate your comment, and how you argued your disagreement. Yet I think you missed something in GPs post. First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on. I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted. Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature. Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things. I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.

webscout 8mo ago

[dead]

Almondsetat 8mo ago

IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time. To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks

Forgeties79 8mo ago
I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me. Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
- Gooblebrai 8mo ago
  > Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know. How do you discover new people? I'd say some people I followed I discovered them thanks for the feed
  - Almondsetat 8mo ago
    Suggestions from friends? The network of people even without a feed is extremely vast on its own. You'd be surprised how far "a friend of a friend" can go.
  - Forgeties79 8mo ago
    Why do I need to discover new people? If I like your podcast or your art or whatever, I will find you on the platform. Other than that, I only want to follow friends and family
Jeff_Brown 8mo ago
This feels like the most important comment here. Do other Mastodon users feel the same? The OP Madden me want to try Mastodon.

asim 8mo ago

Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails. What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.

everdrive 8mo ago
I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time makes your life actively worse even if in the moment you feel good. Social media should be thought of through that lens -- if you think you want to preserve "the good parts," you're like an alcoholic who keeps finding a reason to continue drinking. "No, the problem was just drinking alone. Now that I'm drinking at the bar, socially, it's OK!" To an extent, but mostly it's harming you.
- tannhaeuser 8mo ago
  The difference is the "algorithmic" timeline (meaning ads) you get with Facebook, Insta, and co compared to the strictly chronological timeline you get on the Fediverse equivalents (Mastodon, Pixelfed). That it's less addictive, or at least not in the doom scrolling type of way, is more a consequence. Aka the enshitification argument. Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation. For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.
  - 8mo ago

dangus 8mo ago

The title of the article is arguing semantics. Like it or not, the term “social media” is what we use to describe scroll apps like TikTok. The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else. I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.

pvtmert 8mo ago

Unrelated to the topic described in the blog itself, I overall like the theme of `susam.net`. The name itself reminded me of a sesame seed in Turkish for a while. (I think author had recently mentioned one of the recent posts that they wanted to get susam.com but that was already taken by a Turkish company selling some spices...) The content (that shows up in HN) is also good. Since I am on mobile device, I cannot tell the exact font used, but seems like Georgia to me. While https://github.com/susam/susam.net https://github.com/susam/susam.net hosts the actual source code of the website. Another remark: Would be really nice to have a same theme adaptation for BearBlog and similar places.

MinimalAction 8mo ago
Agreed! I thought this site was generated in Hugo for some reason. Never knew Lisp was used until I saw that GitHub you linked.

Simboo 8mo ago

Why won’t their stock crash and burn already???

grishka 8mo ago

I myself started making the same distinction when I talk about these things in English, except it's "social media" vs "social networks". Though I have no idea how to make that distinction in Russian, social "media" never caught on as a term there. An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.

wussboy 8mo ago
Sure you can. You can not post political things on social networks. They're not doing any good anyway. They're not changing anyone's mind. They're not providing depth or width to the discussion. I don't say this to be insulting, but rather a realist.
- lapcat 8mo ago
  Why do you assume that there needs to be a purpose other than discussing a topic that you're interested in?
  - wussboy 8mo ago
    Politics is a complex topic. If you want to learn more, social media is not the way to do it. Well reasoned books and essays are. If you want to convince others of your positions, social media is not the way to do it. Personal relationships in real life are. What's left?
    - lapcat 8mo ago
      Again, you seem to insist on an ulterior motive, completely discounting the value or pleasure of conversation. In contrast, reading is a solitary activity. Have you heard of book clubs? People read books, and then they get together to discuss the books. Hacker News itself is all about reading articles, and then discussing the articles with others. "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

blfr 8mo ago

Sure, the modern Twitter/X feed is not like the original reverse chronological timeline but the latter is still available right next to it. Maybe it's the power of the default but I find the algorithmic feed much better. The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok. The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.

hotOrNot 8mo ago
I find the algorithmic feeds literally horrible on twitter. Algorithmic feeds only work with video content/short form I feel like

gradus_ad 8mo ago

I will admit, one thing the crowd attention model does exceptionally well is surface the best comments on content. Whether it's HN, Instagram, YouTube, etc... the top comments are usually the "best", depending on how best is defined in the given context. On the silly Instagram meme videos my algo serves up, the top comments are invariably hilarious, often funnier than the actual content, and as you scroll it's impressive how the ordering by like count matches hilarity quite well.

bananaflag 8mo ago
This works on platforms like HN, Less Wrong or niche subreddits, which i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them) ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations) Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree. In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.
- fritzo 8mo ago
  Right, hn is 50% collaborative filtering and 50% dang
  - state_less 8mo ago
    HN and other social media sites are closer to 99% free labor, 1% paid labor, like dang. Free labor writing comments, blog posts, voting/moderating, posting videos and so on. Imagine if HN or Youtube had to pay people to generate all that content[1]. I think the only pay most get, is that you get to enjoy the site content. But in the case of Youtube, they slap so many ads in front of it that you often end up paying for this free labor content just to get rid of the ads. HN doesn't do Ad walls, but is more of a sales funnel for YCombinator and harvesting whatever value they can from the data, so not so intrusive. [1] Youtube does pay some of the more popular content creators
dhruv3006 8mo ago
Speaking of instagram - i have found the ads sometimes incredibly helpful - sometimes exactly the thing i am looking for. Facebook on the other hand has become too very bad.

julianeon 8mo ago

This post has convinced me to give Mastodon another try.

newzino 8mo ago

[flagged]

morissette 8mo ago

Eh, watch as HN comments slowly become exactly the thing you don’t want to participate in.

mmclar 8mo ago

I'm surprised there's not more discussion here and in general about symmetric- vs. asymmetric-relationship networks. Facebook worked in the beginning because relationships were symmetric and there was no concept of getting "follows" -- friendships are modeled after real life ones, where the friendship is between two people. I can see why the big networks moved away from that: pushing "content" has a lot more friction when relationships are symmetrical. What I don't understand is why there is no upstart trying to bring that back.

sitkack 8mo ago
What does that mean exactly, how do you see that manifesting itself? Would we even be aware of these networks, sounds like email
- mmclar 8mo ago
  Not email; social networking. Symmetrical just means the relationship is the same from both sides. Imagine a two-way "friendship" relationship (old-school Facebook) vs. a one-way "following" relationship (more recent Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc.).
  - hotOrNot 8mo ago
    A followers graph is much more stable. You can have 1m followers but you can't have 1m friends
- al_borland 8mo ago
  The friendship link on the site would need to go both ways. Request and accept. There is no concept of “Follow”. In addition, I’d say limit the number of “friends” a person can have. Maybe cap it at 200 (Dunbar's number plus a little extra). This eliminates celebrity, news, and meme accounts. It also eliminates people playing the silly game of seeing who can get the most followers or bragging about follower counts. These are your actual friends, who also consider you a friend. Even if a celebrity were to join, the site would be useful for sharing with actual friends, not their fans or casual acquaintances. Facebook started out similarly, but I don’t think it ever had a friend cap. I remember some sorority girls try to get me to make a Facebook account around 2004/5, because they had a contest to see who could get the most friends. I thought this was stupid and said no. Since this happened almost instantly after launch, I think those friend limits are important to make people use it for actual friends and not a popularity contest. Facebook went the opposite way, leaned into it, and created the Follow option. It was all downhill from there.

jrepinc 8mo ago

That's why I am so glad to only be on Mastodon these days, the true social network, without any rich sociopath billionare or some vulture crapitalist behind it. That keeps Mastodon form becoming the attention/propaganda platforms that all these for profit platforms really are.

artzev_ 8mo ago

friction is underrated as an attention design pattern. blocking feels punitive, friction just makes you notice the reach instead of being on autopilot. not saying it solves algorithmic feeds, but the pause before opening apps changes the math for most people

bravoetch 8mo ago

My family has moved to group chats. It's great.

lizknope 8mo ago
Same here. My father is 1 of 8 children and my mom is 1 of 12 children. I have tons of aunts, uncles, 30 first cousins, and they have lots of kids that I know as well. It's lots of birthday pics, graduations, weddings, vacations, and especially when some of us get together.
esafak 8mo ago
I assume you mean SMS?

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

jwr 8mo ago

Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see. As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me. Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.

al_borland 8mo ago
Facebook’s best feature, at its peak, was that everyone was there. My friends and family aren’t on Mastodon, and likely never will be. If the goal of a social network is to connect with people I know in real life, rather than follow various Internet personalities, it fails at this for me. This isn’t Mastodon’s fault, but it’s the reality of the situation. I’m not on Facebook anymore due to what the site has become, but I found the same emptiness on Mastodon, as my friends aren’t there. I’m not influential enough to get everyone to move to a new platform just for me. When I joined Mastodon, I ended up following a bunch of developers, but ultimately felt like a fly on the wall to a friend group I wasn’t part of, as a lot of these people had been real-life friends or co-workers. I guess if your friend group is all geeky enough to join Mastodon, it can work. I have very few real-life connections that fall into that bucket, which I think is the case for most people. The people I know who still use social media seem more than happy with Meta’s products. The others just stopped using these things all together and don’t seem to care about finding an alternative.
- hotOrNot 8mo ago
  Yup, feeling the same way. Mastodon needs to leverage a friends graph somehow
- Skidaddle 8mo ago

neogodless 8mo ago

> I stumbled upon Mastodon and it reminded me of the early days of Twitter. Back in 2006, I followed a small number of folks of the nerd variety on Twitter and received genuinely interesting updates from them. Personally, I never got into Twitter. I'm on the Fediverse now, and check in on it occasionally, but it never draws me in. I don't connect with people on that kind of platform. Some forums work for me, mostly because there's a small enough number of participants, or, importantly, there's a place I can go to read content from specific people. Even if we don't become friends (or IRL friends), I still feel like I know them to some degree. The people matter. Twitter / Fediverse / Bluesky seem to be about topics, and as such, I lose interest quickly. Because no matter how much I like photography, birding, cars, board games, computers, software, etc... I don't really care what the masses have to say on those topics. I want to know about Alice, Bob, and Carol have to say on things that interest me. Early Facebook was, as described in the article, people you knew, who held some sway in your life, sharing their life events (however inane), or their opinions. I care more about that than I care about a celebrity or complete stranger declaring some thing as good or bad or interesting. But the network effect was always going to matter. LiveJournal/Xanga/MySpace all had some network effect where some of your friends were there, and you wanted to be there, too. But Facebook figured out monetization, and they still seem to hold the greatest network effect despite how terrible the experience has become. I can post photos there, and dozens will respond, all people I know. If I post in literally any other place, I will get less than dozens of responses, and almost none of them will be from people I know. There is no new place like early Facebook, or even current Facebook. But of course what I want is a place where I can share with the people I know, and no one has to pay for it, but the monetization doesn't drive the service towards enshittification. This isn't a very realistic desire. Discord has been the closest for me, where I have dozens of contacts in a shared space, and very frequently get interaction with people I know about things I care about. But it also feels like enshittification of Discord is also inevitable even though there's a paid subscription option.

Trickery5837 8mo ago

The final transition happened with the death of online forums. I still miss those dearly. I've met extremely interesting and competent people with a true desire to interact with passionate peers. They thought me how to ask for and give advice, how to express opinions in public, the value of growing a community around common interest, and the joy of laughing and getting angry on the OT section.

anonu 8mo ago

My mental model for all of this is that my attention is valuable. I can choose where to spend my attention and it should cost something to these platforms and their advertisers to command that attention. Unfortunately, these platforms have figured how to lower their cost by triggering lizard brain reflexes. The best solution is to simply remove any pathways they have to command that attention: uninstall apps and turn off all notifications. My attention is more under my control in this way.

keepsmiling77 8mo ago

Modern large platforms are no longer social networks in the original sense, but media platforms optimized for attention. Real social networks are characterized by the fact that users themselves determine whose content they see.

dev1ycan 8mo ago

I would tend to agree with this, I vibidly remember when facebook had a feed on the top right that told you what your friends were doing, playing games, listening to music on soundcloud, etc. That was social media, not whatever the hell we have today... it's antisocial and attention grabbing.

ulrischa 8mo ago

I wonder why the author did not mention bluesky as his critisism is on the timeline algo and bluesky allows to create custom timelie algos

didgetmaster 8mo ago

>It feels closer to how social networks used to work originally. I hope it stays that way. Is there something about it (it's architecture or the company behind it) that is fundamentally different than other social networks? If not, it is doomed to follow them all eventually.

isodev 8mo ago
I think the fact that there is no one company behind it helps a great deal. Monetising user attention is simply incompatible with the architecture of the fediverse - even Meta couldn’t twist it into that and eventually decided to give up.

cmrdporcupine 8mo ago

The failure of Mastodon to thrive even when Twitter itself became very vulnerable unfortunately tells me that people actually want this pathologically bad behaviour. Lots of friends who slagged Twitter and Facebook etc for its anti-social aspects turned around and tried Mastodon for a few days and then came back to me with a "there's nothing happening there" and it's "boring" etc because they were fundamentally expecting to be force fed entertainment just like Twitter. Lots of comments on hackernews to that effect, too. That's fine. I never liked Twitter anyways, but I do think it's interesting how two faced we can be about this. The engagement hackers found a market and met it. Not good, but true.

pks016 8mo ago

I was active on FB, Insta, Goggle +, and Orkut during their early days. My brother and I were the first few people from our circle to have these social media account. Looking back, the incentives have changed. Back then, there was some openness, rawness, and genuine curiosity about people and things. And of course, the signal-noise ratio was much higher. Influencer culture ruined everything, consciously or subconsciously. I still use Insta for photography. But, it's a sinking ship. Insta could have made a different app for reels.

isodev 8mo ago

I’m quite literally experiencing a physical reaction whenever I need to browse some algorithmic timeline. Even YouTube, what used to be a couple of related videos is now a wall full of “recommendations” - the unskippable ads on every video are more relevant than the actual videos… Mastodon and related (for me Loops mainly) are a breath of fresh air and I wish more people can (re)learn to enjoy that.

BloodyIron 8mo ago
YouTube recommendations are very well tuned for me. You need to mark videos "not interested" and downvote stuff you don't actually like, as well as stopping videos when you've decided you're not interested. This and other aspects WILL improve your recommended feed. So if your recommended feed sucks, well that's on you there bud, you can influence it completely.
- vmg12 8mo ago
  Do you use youtube intending to be drawn into watching things you never intended to watch? I don't want a feed but the people operating these sites do not care that they are destroying people's time. Go to twitter, click on "following". Next time you sign in, somehow it's on "For you" (the algorithmic feed). Thankfully on Youtube I can completely disable recommendations on the site and I use it purely as a source of information, not as a dopamine addiction funnel.
- doomslayer999 8mo ago
  I just get the same videos recommended over and over. I liked it when the YT feed would recommend stuff new and different i might find interesting. Now its just hyperoptimized to get me to click on ads.

cwoolfe 8mo ago

Substack has been a welcome alternative in this space as well. It reminds me of my experience on web blogs back in the 2000s. A real sense of community and substance.

TrackerFF 8mo ago

FB is still a social network, but seemingly only when you use groups. And you actively need to moderate those. Public pages, and things like that? AI/bots and ads wasteland.

lukeschlather 8mo ago

The funny thing about Facebook is that it's got a perfectly good social network in there, I think the only one that exists. In the menu is "Feeds" which is what you want. It only shows friends and followed things. If they made that the default when you go to facebook.com I don't think I'd have any complaints feature-wise, though an ad-free option would be nice. It's a genuine social network. Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.

kelvinjps10 8mo ago
The only thing I used Facebook, is for marketplace and groups you can buy cheap stuff on there.
godot 8mo ago
Wow, I did not know about this Feeds page despite being a daily FB user for 20 years (yes, to the ridicule of most people, I know). Thanks for pointing this out. I wish this was the default homepage or at least a way to set it as default.
- Zak 8mo ago
  Each feed has a unique URL, so you can bookmark it in your browser. For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser.
  - hapticmonkey 8mo ago
    Annoyingly I can not get it to work on mobile (iOS Safari). Loading the url cause the page to refresh and take me to the main page.
  - anonymars 8mo ago
    > Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity > For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser Related (2025): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115

1berg 8mo ago

Though that's where a lot of people get their news, ironically.

baxuz 8mo ago

Luckily, the EU is tackling the most impactful feature — the infinite scroll "slot machine". https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagram-brussels-kill-infinite-scrolling/ https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagr...

florakel 8mo ago

I have never used mastodon, but why is it so much better than X (twitter)? I also follow a small group of people on X that I find interesting and I get a chronological feed of their posts in the “following” tab. I know that the “For You” tab abyss is right there. I opened it once, was shocked by all the crap the system assumed I would like, and never went back. The good thing is that nobody forces me to use it. I am perfectly fine in the “following” feed and not exposed at all to recommender systems trying to grab my attention. Only the ads in the feed annoy me - and they are so bad that I wonder how X makes any money.

haunter 8mo ago
> I get a chronological feed of their posts in the “following” tab Which is broken for 2 weeks now. The small drop down to change it to "most recent" have been disappeared for a lot of people both on web and iOS/Android so you see ALL tweets from accounts you follow, even replies you don't care about.

hinkley 8mo ago

But which social networks aren’t attention media these days, and will they remain thus after a few more investment rounds?

throawayonthe 8mo ago

i find this sorta thing very interesting because not only have i never experienced the 'early' social networks as described (too young), i've never even considered using one of these sites as described - why would i voluntarily forgo pseudonymity on the public internet? I don't think this was fully a generational thing, i remember being genuinely baffled when i discovered my peers/classmates were using their real names, posting pictures/videos of themselves, and interacting with each other on these public platforms; wasn't internet safety 101 "Don't Do That?"

TrailingArbutus 8mo ago

The problem is that a functional social network is a bad business model. A chronological feed has a "stop" point. You catch up, you feel satisfied, and you close the app. Meta’s revenue depends on you never feeling caught up. That’s why the "Feeds" tab is buried three menus deep—it’s there so they can say it exists, but hidden so you stay stuck in the algorithmic slop. Even if they made it the default, you’re still left with the trust issue. You aren’t the customer; you’re the data being mined. At this point, the brand is probably too far gone for a simple UI tweak to fix the underlying rot.

smohare 8mo ago

[dead]

umairnadeem123 8mo ago

[dead]

fHr 8mo ago

they try hard to obfuscate this

CalChris 8mo ago

Social Networks ⊆ Attention Media.

dizhn 8mo ago

Recently I realized something. Back in the day in the early 2000s people were talking about this thing called social media that didn't really exist but would be the future. (That and micro transactions) I never got what was so hot about it. Looking back I am realizing that the techno elite did not coopt something that used to be nice. This whole narrative control and private information funnel was designed from the beginning with what it became today already on their crosshairs. We just went through the phases and ate all of it up.

thaumasiotes 8mo ago
Good news! Microtransactions really were the future. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/05/30/noony-nokuni https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/05/30/noony-nokuni
- dizhn 8mo ago
  They used to be hung up on the fact that the transaction cost of a microtransaction (5 cents to read the new york times for a day) was the show stopper. Boy did they solve that issue. :)

orsenthil 8mo ago

Everything evolved into a marketing platform right now. It is innately driven by the human desire for power, control and greed. There are very humans that recognize it and act in beneficial ways when power is given to them. With the rest, we get what we have right now. That’s normal thing with humans. We want to market to others, show our power, and we want to be marketed by powerful hoping we will become like them.

kelvinjps10 8mo ago

My only "social network" I'd say is WhatsApp, only people I have added I can see their posts(updates) and since you need their phone I only give it to people that are close to me.

kazinator 8mo ago

> Attention Media I like this and will use it from now on, reserving "social network" only for Usenet, Mastodon and IRC and such.

strix_varius 8mo ago

When our first child was born, we wanted to share photos with family. So I set up a Google photos album and shared it with parents, aunts, grandparents, etc. It supports general chat plus comments and reactions linked to posted media. It's exactly what I wish social networks became... Something like the "circles" idea that Google abandoned years ago. Now with several thousand images and videos and comments we're hitting the limits of what Google seems to have designed for with however shared albums sync. This community feature though is the only reason I haven't self hosted all this stuff...

MarcLore 8mo ago

[dead]

nanobuilds 8mo ago

Yea since the old FB the dial of human/friends posts vs human attention harvesting posts & ads has been slowly changing so that users wouldn't notice it immediately.

with 8mo ago

The real social network is the group chat / friend group you already have. Everything else is algorithmic brainrot with some kind of "friends list" for "legitimacy". The problem isn't the feed, it's that people actually use "social" networks instead of just talking to actual friends. Just close the apps, lol

pipeline_peak 8mo ago

Let’s not forgot the emerging deity-esque “content creator” and “influencer”. A far stretch from the humble “vlogger” or “YouTuber”. The latter two sound like a jolly guy with a camcorder and a backpack. I remember when social networks were at the very least portrayed in the interest of “connecting people from around the world”. I’ll often hear something along the lines of these services being engineered to pin us all against each other. Jaron Lanier’s “ Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” likes to claim this, but I never see any actual evidence. Either way, when I visit social media site these days, people are definitely nastier. There’s more snark, a need to ridicule others for not knowing niche little factoids. “You still use tea bags?” something something cast iron pans and dish soap. There’s a lot more capitalizing through hoarding trivial information. They know something you don’t, and they love it. It’s like joining an MMORPG and realizing you have to put more time in to reach the same level as everyone else.

alphadelphi 8mo ago

"Attention Media" is the perfect definition of what those platforms are, the term "social network" is deceiving