When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.
> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world.
I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!
But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.
What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.
Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group.
Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback).
The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.
The over generalization of the term social media drives me bonkers. In the olden days we had things like message boards, forums, and chat rooms. Then came social networks. All of those terms reflect some sort of connection between people.
When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting self-promoters (for the lack of a better term) to an audience, not the other way around. As you said: the focus is on the individual, may that be a person or a business.
Perhaps we should be making an effort to distinguish between the two environments, to avoid associating connecting businesses and self-promoters to customers with connecting people to each other.
The self-promoters, 90% of the time, are either operating an entertainment business, advertising products, or both. So we can still just call it connecting businesses to customers, otherwise known as marketing.
It should all be called social marketing, not social media, as it really just a thin veneer over the Google and Meta ad monopolies.
Your attention was once in other places and it moved onto the Internet. The ad monopolists figured out a way to turn the Internet into a marketing platform, by purchasing their competitors and then gradually changing the features their services offered. They then converted you from a human being into a unit of advertising inventory. Doctorow's reverse centaur aptly describes the phenomenon; the simian body is slaved to the ad machine brain and now follows its command through the magic of cheap psychological tricks.
> It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around.
A pet peeve of mine is when businesses reject the marketing channel they own (their websites) to adopt platforms like X or Instagram. Use them, yes, but do publish on your own site (and adopt RSS along the way).
The way I look at it: social media makes you aware of their presence. Actually conducting business usually happens elsewhere. That elsewhere may be physical or virtual.
Another way to look at it is that depending upon social media for anything beyond promotion leaves you at the whim of those companies. Facebook only let's viewers see a limited slice of information unless they log in. Places that used Twitter as a newsfeed ended up showing chaotic junk when Twitter became X, unless the user was logged in. I was doing a web search yesterday that turned up a lot of Yelp results. I didn't realize that Yelp was still a thing. Judging from the content, it probably isn't. The list goes on. As a potential customer, it leaves me with a very dim view of the companies that rely upon social media instead of supplementing their presence with social media.
> Another way to look at it is that depending upon social media for anything beyond promotion leaves you at the whim of those companies.
Another instance of that is when your account at these proprietary companies simply disappears for no reason. It is far too risky to depend on them.
A long-time friend, for example, has a decades old business which had a 15+ year presence on facebook. A few weeks ago the account just silently disappeared. Obviously any response from facebook is impossible to obtain.
Luckily they also have their own website with all the content.
What do you want as a business? The void of platforms like X? Or the actual people that took the time to goes to your website to learn more about your offering.
Agreed. I consider traditional "virtual communities" (lie Usenet, IRC, BBSes, web message boards, etc.) to be something quite different from modern "social media", and I find the former to be far preferable to the latter.
> When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships
I agree entirely with this. I think that it's helpful to remember that "social media" arose to differentiate itself from "traditional media", the social piece is a descriptor not a function. Traditional media has been one-way, and the goal of corporations has been to make social media largely one-way as well but to make it feel like it's not. Social media exists mostly to serve influencers, brands, and celebrities and all of us are eyeballs to monetize.
One: algorithmic feeds (etc) are engineered to addict you
Two: virality stats (views and likes) allow senders to hone message effectiveness based on structure (funny GIF, misspelling, "this you", etc), completely separate from content (white supremacy, authoritarian communism, etc)
This is why Reddit is maybe barely social media, and HN, other forums, IRC, etc, aren't.
Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page.
Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted before you, and before messages posted after. Everyone's view and message was equal, so pile-ons or hive-mind "this is the right way of thinking" seemed less common.
I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.
In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
> I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.
> In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
The following was built and deployed in Taiwan and proved to be very capable at sidestepping policy gridlock.
I've often wondered if some of the concepts that power it could be applied to help facilitate more generalized discussion and debate (which could also optionally tie into instances of the original political purpose it was built for).
You're right, but we also underestimated how easy it would be to game these systems and how the owners of these platforms would be incentivized to allow or even assist in gaming these systems. Voting solved a problem that existed, but created another one that is arguably worse.
Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.)
I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about.
You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people.
Yes, fortunately. Email should always be used, at least as an available option, because it is the only truly open way to communicate electronically.
Recently I bought something and had some hiccups getting it to work and found that the vendor only provides support in one single place: discord. A proprietary platform I can't get access to.
> Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then.
I still read usenet most days ;-)
But no, it is very small compared to the good times. It would take me hours to read through my list of newsgroups in 1990, now at most 10 minutes.
I loved using chat rooms on AOL in the late 90s, later I moved to IRC (dalnet, efnet) and made some close friends. The interactions saved me from horrible depression as in my suburban area I had trouble making friends.
The reason I believe things are different is that the Internet was tech people. People more likely to be logical and rational. Once "regular" people came on they brought their stupidity with them.
Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community.
Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.
Building "reputation" and building yourself a "brand" are the worst things from the forum-era. I will not miss power-tripping mods and users with 20,000 posts writing the dumbest replies possible into every thread asking "why would you do this?", "have you used the search function?", etc. Just because you have many posts doesn't mean the posts are good. Many users ignored high-quality posts from new accounts for example.
Just because the forums you hanged around were like that, doesn't mean every forum was like that. Probably the web forum I hanged around the most on (which is where my HN username originally comes from) has strict rules about each individual post's quality (although enforced bit unevenly), and their contribution to the discussions, in one way or another. Make enough off-topic/shit posts and eventually you'll get banned because of it. The users with a lot of posts usually made well-argued posts.
Each started thread also needed a "basis for discussion" to remain open, and necrobumping was encouraged. The forum still has decade old threads actively being discussed in.
AFAIK, it's still the largest forum in the Nordics, although the moderation team (and voluntary) seem to unfortunately be shrinking rather than increasing, and the forum isn't without its controversies.
Of course not all forums are like that, "only" the vast majority of it is. Even niche-forums suffered from this (or especially they suffered from it). I would not count Hacker News as a forum though. There is no reputation here, no visible karma unless you explicitly click on a profile, no avatar, no signature, etc.
Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem?
Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.
Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.
Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.
This is my theory too. The internet made it easier to connect with diverse cultures... and then ignore all of them in favor of the one that agreed with you on every point so you could ignore anything that went against your thoughts
Yes that's true. Everyone gets to interact with people that are closer to their ideals but it makes society less homogeneous and disconnected locally because there is no geographical grouping.
At the same time people are more mobile than ever because of technological, opportunity and work reasons as well. So, there is a lack of real grounding. Why bother being friends with your neighbors or local people when you can just travel for not very long and visit people you prefer?
It leads to tensions because people live close together but have a very different way of life and sometimes radically different values, even in close quater communities. They end up hating each other secretly because without communication you cannot even begin to empathise.
The social media groups reflect that; they are an echo chamber to cry about people and behaviors you don't like and reinforce your own opinions, behaviors and their superior validity.
There is also the part where large government of the providence state are to be blamed for favoring rampant individualism. Instead of having to deal with friends and family you deal with soulless corporation and obtuse bureaucracy to get your needs met.
When 50 years ago you could drop by to see your doctor, now you call a number, a robot answers and gives you an appointment in one month. It's not just social media that is to blame it's just technology in general that has allowed and basically created a massive bureaucracy for everything, pretending to focus on making things efficient when it basically only consumes value and is just a means of control/surveillance.
Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.
Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.
We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
Interesting. Did it get eaten by general baseline interests and lost the focus, ultimately moving to cater to lowest common denominator?
Failed or sold?
We built scape in 9 months and ran it for 9 months, if I recall. We were all young and naive — it just felt like we failed to make something that “clicked.” Facebook had very few features (pokes and the wall), but they weren’t competing on features. We struggled to get more than a thousand people to sign up across a few NE colleges.
We had this whole social blogging and communication system — it was really very cool in concept. But we had too much of a “if you build it, they will come” marketing plan.
We gave up after a year and a half. We ended up selling a version of it to Teach for America.
I’d consider it a failure — we gave up. I rather wish we’d have tried to raise money, though.. I can’t believe we got as far as we did — different times
When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.
This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.
The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.
The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.
Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.
Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.
I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely.
Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others.
Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.
I think there is something to be said about the value of the amateur. About not treating everything as a entrepreneurial side project where everything is sacrificed to the financial gods and you make the same choices as everybody else, because everything else would be a risk. Amateurs do things for the heck of it. They don't need it to be polished, they just love what they are doing and want to share that love. If you ever thought about doing anything, a blog, a band, a podcast, a youtube channel, a forum, a new type of thing for which a name has to be found: Do now, think about polish later (if at all).
Places like forums are great, but I don't even think it is strictly necessary need to make one (unless there is a niché that you care for which hasn't been covered). Maybe it is already enough to pick one that exists and to actively participate in it. I remember reading threads where I went like: "Man, these people are really, really into that topic, this is great!"
Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.
People existed as username and their signature, but you already know that’s not the real person behind (it could be a dog or a cat for all you know). Now it’s the cult of the persona and the brand.
Which ones are the best for the anglophone world currently? I'm struggling to find traditional forums that are still "alive", general enough to cover a broad spectrum and well-moderated to remove all noise.
It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends.
There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.
Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall.
It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
> HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.
That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead.
That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble.
> If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.
Just, FTR, there's always been the problem of how much moderation is required to keep the discourse (in a group) flowing without being so restrictive as to only be about the moderators.
See IRC, which (IMO) can be over-moderated, channel ops used to be very much about themselves, vs Usenet, which had no moderation at all (and was "destroyed" by google groups making access trivial for troublemakers), through to current things like Reddit which have some moderators.
It's (IMO) exactly like governance IRL - some countries overdo it, and some underdo it.
Old-school fora and mailing lists could avoid being bubbles when moderation allowed dissenting views to surface instead of burying them. Of course, biased moderation could still create bubbles by pruning dissent.
Social platforms built on voting, like HN, will almost always drift into bubbles of like-minded posts and comments. The only variation is in which views get upranked.
That isn’t necessarily bad. YC clearly prefers HN to filter for a certain entrepreneurial mindset. Bubbles can serve a purpose, but it’s worth recognising that this is a manipulated environment - in many ways hollow - and not a reflection of the broader world.
It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.
Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account.
It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential.
Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations.
In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification.
> It just sucks
I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.
> You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).
Yeah, I had one of those myself when I was under 18 too, I think it was called Maestro or something similar. However, it didn't work like a normal credit card (which I think only 18+ can have), platforms were clearly able to reject it, as most things I wanted to buy online didn't work at the time with it (this was early 2000s though), only with my mom's debit card.
Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block? Then requiring credit card "donation" of $N would still basically act as a age verification. I think debit cards might in general be available to people under 18, so filtering to only allow credit cards sounds like a start at least.
> 2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.
Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.
> One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts
Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs. I feel like they get lots of stuff right, from transparent moderation to trying to keep it small but high-quality. The judge is still out on if they got it right or not :)
> Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block?
Nope, there’s nothing “youth” about them, they’re more like safety features. The cards I’m talking about act as real credit cards. Plus, I forgot to mention but there are also services (even provided by the banking networks in the countries themselves) which allow you to connect an account (or deposit some money in) and get temporary credit card numbers for online payments. I’ve used them and know multiple people (also adults) who still do.
> Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.
My point is that maybe that’s enough in the UK (is it?) but you probably wouldn’t be able to rely on it for every jurisdiction.
To be clear, I like your idea in general and would not want to discourage you from it—quite the contrary—I’m just alerting to the fact it might need further though so you don’t end up sinking time on something which wouldn’t work.
> Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs.
I wasn’t aware that’s how they worked. I’ll have a read. For anyone else curious:
Thanks a bunch for describing it in more detail, actually very helpful!
And no worries, nothing discouraging, discussing the idea with others no matter their reaction tends to do the opposite for me, so thanks again for taking the time :)
And people that are not in the "cool kids" group are economically disadvantaged because, even if their contributions are valued, they get on the offside with the powers that be?
When you have people with power over someone else, power to ban, power to economically injure, you end up, almost without fail, with sycophantic groupings.
People only praise those with the power, and anyone foolish enough to disagree, no matter how accurate, are punished.
Something Awful pulled this off with a $10 lifetime subscription, cheap enough that most can afford it, but it's expensive enough that a bot farm wouldn't bother, and the admins are quick with suspensions and bans if you act like an asshole.
I'm not so sure. Every so often I browse Metafilter (remember Metafilter?) out of morbid fascination, and it's a total trainwreck. I don't think it's a model for success.
When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.
That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)
> I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.
Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.
There’s a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.
I do wonder if this is just a symptom of monetization. Free advertising with viral posts was possible for talented marketers until the early 2010s. Now you have to pay.
OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger. Meeting this person in person sometime later, it turned out this message was never delivered. They'd thought I was working for the company that sued them.
An AI chatbot is just the next stage on "like-minded people" continuum. It's a machine that bends over backwards to match what the user wants from it. (Maybe unhealthy but it's just the next step after interacting with anon posters over a shared niche interest)
I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm.
Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
Mastodon literally has a trending feed. Is that not an "algorithm"? It has algorithmic popular hashtags, news feed, and user recommendations. Just a bog standard handful of algorithmic surfaces, so why are they still pretending like it's "algorithm free" is beyond me. "Absolute lack", right.
The Trending feature is not pushed into the home (or any) timeline. In the Web UI it sits unobtrusively in the corner of the window and on some apps simply does not exist. It can also be easily disabled.
In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people. Nothing about any of the Fediverse services is designed this way because they're not chasing money or engagement, they're made to help people converse in a human way.
If you're not logged in, the evil algorithmic trending feed is literally the first thing you'll see being pushed onto you. (seems like it's a default setting, because it's that way across several different instances.) So what's the truth? Seems like an incoherent position to me, especially given how mastodon itself advertises it as "no algorithms". It doesn't hold true when you can immediately see algorithmic feeds, at most charitable it's confused, at worst it's just a barefaced lie.
So it's literally just "bad algorithms" (the ones other platforms make) and "good algorithms" (the good algorithms good platforms make, like us). Which is kind of literally how it is, there are good ones and bad ones, except both of these kinds of platforms employ "bad" engagement driving discovery algorithms, so it's really just 'us vs them'. The trending and news algorithms are literally just driving engagement and discovery, and top hashtags feed is proudly clamoring how much engagement there is. Doesn't seem like they're not "chasing" it.
You seem to be purposefully mixing the two opposing uses of the word "algorithm". On the non-abusive platforms, an algorithm is a fairly simplistic set of criteria that are designed to be useful to the human beings that use a service. If you want to, you can inspect the code used to generate them; the likes of Mastodon don't hide how these work because they aren't trying to harm anyone.
These sorts of algorithms tend to promote posts or people that have recently been popular for the purpose of being useful to folk. On the likes of tiktok, facebook and twitter they are the culmination of very large sums of money and an ocean of professional psychological collaborators with the aim to purposefully harm and addict people, e.g. to manipulate public opinion and democracy, incite the suicide of transgender people and the perpetration of genocide. For money. I find it difficult to believe that you're arguing, in good faith, that the two types of "algorithm" have much in common.
I am not sure how it is "evil" showing recently-popular posts on a social media server's home page to logged-out people, and how that's pushing anything. It's not an agenda, it's not a series of posts that are picked because they are likely to addict and enrage people. I do suspect that there's some ragebait that shows up, because some people are still having to unlearn the indoctrination they're suffering from.
It's totally fine if people would just say it like "bad algorithms" or "good algorithms", but somehow the meaning of the word "algorithm" in itself got so twisted that it apparently means "bad" just on its own. Which looks idiotic if you realize that everywhere there are algorithms, even in those platforms that claim to be "no algorithm/algorithm-free" or whatever other meaningless duplicitous marketing drivel they dress it up with. From where I see it, it's some other people that purposely mix the meanings there, while also overlooking how some arbitrary "good" or "unremarkable" things just kinda silently get a pass, despite being functionally the same thing. Almost to the point where you could just advertise as "no algorithms" (whatever that means) and just have algorithms anyway, and it's kind of whatever.
It's not "evil" to be showing an algo feed per se. But mastodon and a bunch of other platforms refer to algo feeds as "bad/evil" or something of the sort, market themselves as not having them, and yet thoroughly employ multiple algo feeds. Is that not just hypocritical? It looks glaringly dishonest. They could at least have some integrity to say "we don't like the yucky algorithms, but here we only have good™ algorithms", when that's literally what it is.
> In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people.
But I feel like it misses the point. What about a service where you can design and use your own "algorithms", and it's built into the platform?
Such a platform would have thousands of algorithms, but none of them designed for chasing money or engagement, just different preferences. But Mastodon could still claim "We don't use The Algorithm and is therefore better than other places" while a platform with custom user-owned algorithms could get the best of both worlds.
Was kind of hoping it'd take people longer time to notice where the idea came from :) But also kind of cheating for you to bring it up, but understand it's hard to resist.
In this context, "algorithm" means something that gives you the endorphin hit and keeps you scrolling. Facebook is "algorithmic social media", whereas Mastodon is not.
That trending feed on mastodon would still literally be that, ranking posts on how much they're engaged with and further driving engagement on the platform. So I'm just wondering what hairs are even there to split.
Not to mention "sort by most recent from accounts I follow" is an algorithm too.
I feel like the wording needs a bit of rewording/rework. I agree chronological order facilitates better discussions, but just saying that "Mastodon lacks algorithms" doesn't really help people understand things better.
Mastodon and fediverse despite not running on algorithms sadly aren't free of spam and bots - probably nothing nowadays is. Last year in February there was a flood of messages attacking less populated instances, with... Spam can image in message body.
What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.
Unfortunately, we discovered that people would rather be told what to watch, rather that self-discover their interests, because that’s a lot of “work”.
I hope it’s not that black-and-white, that it’s possible to have a sane social network with algorithmic feed, only we need to design the algorithms around users’ needs first.
If you judge users’ needs by “things they’ll pay attention on and engage with”, well… it is exactly what all the current algorithms are good at right now. It’s just, in my opinion, bad for the society at large, as rage baiting, slop-posting and etc. is great in achieving that.
The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
"The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.
> The problem is that people are addicted to tension
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
I would argue that financialization of the social media is what made it fail. Once there’s direct dollar cost to your posts, ideas and etc., the incentives change from “fun” to “commercial”. That started heavily around 2017ish, where every social media switched to algorithm-first, and heavily started tracking engagement/attention per post.
You are literally topping that comment on a peer to peer social media website right now. It's hardly dead, it just happens away from meta and X. Discord is absolutely popping off, for example. HN and other forums are still very lively.
This is hobby project for a billionaire, not a social media website. It doesn't need to generate a dime. It runs very efficiently because it was coded well (and cared for), but there are salaries paid to people to watch it that are just a gift to the people who post here.
Social media isn't defined by the business model. Straight from Wikipedia: "Social media are new media technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks." That perfectly describes HN.
What makes it not a social media website? Social media is a function of what it does, and it's a place people comment, converse, share links, there's a user scoring system, there's a feed of recent events on the front page... how is it not social media?
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
There is a neurotic personality type that doomscrolls out of a compulsion. A lot of it is hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Where will the next shoe drop? We feel threatened, then some feel like they need to take some kind of drastic action.
Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.
Exhaustion is absolutely the first word that comes to mind for me. Even when I'm not using it myself, I'm exhausted of all the oxygen it takes up in the room
It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.
I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
Yeah I recall when they started porting it to WordPress's infrastructure and then gave up. But I think that doesn't imply their profitable, so Matt could wake up one day and shut it down.
The algorithmic feed should be banned for all public discourse.
That is what’s killing us (quite literally).
Let topics be searchable and people should find what they need.
Very simple algorithms such as “most recent conversation” may be allowed.
I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff.
I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
In a way I see these algorithms as segregstionist, their goal is ultimately to isolate certain groups and perniciously expose them only to the rage inducing bad aspects of the other group(s) to generate more posts/likes/comment.
Segregation applied to public spaces should indeed be banned, when these platforms become so huge, they become a defacto public square that you can hardly avoid effectively without missing a good share of the conversations that need to happen in public for a healthy flow of information, so I would not see an issue with law makers to regulate this... obviously as long as it's applied fairly.
The issue is that currently even platforms that are getting regulate, for even more concerning aspect (national security, undue foreign influence on fair elections) like Tiktok seem to be exempt of the law itself and the US Congress seem unable to get the laws they voted in a bipartisan manner enforced... the only reason I see is that a certain tangerine tinted individual sees it as a tool to control the American discourse in his favor, and thus refuses to enforce the law. So these concerns about healthy public spaces are taking the backseat for now.
While I agree, forums are also easily derailed and destroyed by trolls. I'm in a few political threads and they're totally ruined by a few people that the mods do nothing about.
The problem is - it's not "social" and it's pure "media" at this point. It's almost impossible to have social aspect on the platforms where you only have real people with sane number of connections that interact with eachother. Rather you have a bunch of huge "pages" that simply push their news publications...
IMHO it would be awesome to have again sane, SOCIAL-media. Probably with the correct regulation it could be done… And the current SM platforms could use the regulation as well (force viewing only what one follows, make it transparent like other media - i.e. if someone has more than 10k "followers" it's just a media so put same requirements: full ID disclosure and having to respond to the takedowns immediatelly…)
I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.
Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
> Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy.
Not for everybody. Me and a work friend are considered "highly energetic" by our colleagues when we are at the office in person, to the point that people and things soon find themselves in orbit around us. But the truth is that when we come home, we both feel drained and exhausted for the next day or two. For me, it's as if my entire mind and soul got washed and diluted by those interactions.
I'm not saying it's all bad, in the same way that running a marathon is probably not all bad. But "boost your energy" wouldn't be a term I would ever use for it.
You well as with anything you can definitely go overboard, and the type of social interaction matters fairly significantly. There's a difference between spending all day at work, and spending a few hours with a good friend.
IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the “true” subreddits)
I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.
Thanks, I was interested and enjoyed you blog post! It's definitely complex- I really liked your observation that even on the same platform (say youtube comments) the quality of interactions can vary hugely based on the amount of traction something gains.
I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience.
I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.
Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
My fingers are not fully compatible with touch screens so I'm not a big phone guy, so I can't speak for them, but I've been trying to make my computer more task oriented, to make choices more explicit.
I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities.
It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront.
My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).
> someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
It’s is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I don’t think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.
No, indeed, but^W and that would be an interesting use case. What would a dedicated social media device work, and look like? (actually, that may depend a lot on what privacy one can expect out of it)
The acceleration (into automation) of language and images - both arbitrary units - requiring cost-benefit for shareholders inevitably reduces the input to noise and then chaos. Because the dark matter of language is control, bias, manipulation for status, status becomes the central factor, not the sharing.
That we bemoan sub-industries of media, rather than notice the system effects across it is suspicious.
“… if we say that linguistic structure "reflects" social structure, we are really assigning to language a role that is too passive ... Rather we should say that linguistic structure is the realization of social structure, actively symbolizing it in a process of mutual creativity. Because it stands as a metaphor for society, language has the property of not only transmitting the social order but also maintaining and potentially modifying it. (This is undoubtedly the explanation of the violent attitudes that under certain social conditions come to be held by one group towards the speech of others.)”
Excerpts from Halliday Language and Society Volume 10
A couple people have mentioned this but I think it's worth isolating (no pun intended) for emphasis
We started social media with chats that connected people across the world.
Then we handed over the majority of the Internet to Google who, in their pursuit to build out personally useful services, inadvertently jailed us into a hyper localized bubble
That bubble then became the standard of the Internet, and all sorts of pipes of toxic gas hooked in to the bubble and started poisoning us en masse.
Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this.
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
Doesn’t this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your “editor” only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see.
And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
This is why we started Favs - social network for close friends only. No ads, no brands, no influencers. Of course though we’ve had the cold start problem but fundamentally it’s what you’d want if your favorite people wanted to stay connected beyond a group chat.
- one to many posts
- maps of which city you’re in
- upcoming plans
- no new inbox either
I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response.
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.
Unfortunately it's an incredible tool, especially for industries which pray on people's insecurities like beauty - botox, fillers etc. This person I know puts instagram story and gets instantly booked for all free slots she has for the entire week.
She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".
If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.
This piece makes a great point about needing "architectures of intention." The default social media experience is pure passive consumption, and I felt my own intentions for the day slipping away.
As a personal project, I built an extension to create my own little architecture of intention. It introduces a 20-second pause before I enter distracting sites, and during the pause, it nudges me with a positive micro-habit, like fixing my posture or taking a deep breath.
It's called The 20s Rule (Chrome/Firefox) if anyone else finds that idea useful.
I don't agree that Substack is a place for small niche communities. It seems to me that they are trying hard to turn into a social network - notes, DMs and other features are pushed while more writing related features like code syntax highlighting or tables are ignored.
> A few creators do append labels disclaiming that their videos depict “no real events,” but many creators don’t bother, and many consumers don’t seem to care.
I enjoy watching movie trailers on youtube and I've noticed in the last month all these ai-created fake movie trailers for upcoming movies where the actual trailer isn't out yet. It's infuriating when I watch it, realize something is off and then at the end it's like "Fan-made!"
If this ai-slop keeps up I'm going to just probably stop watching youtube altogether, it sucks getting tricked by fake content.
I recently spent over an hour listening to a channel whose description starts with "This channel shares real stories of life, love, and heartbreak in Thailand. I focus on honest experiences from foreigners living here."
Then I realized that these stories are entirely AI-generated! I know that because of the lack of personal idiosyncracies in narrative style, lifestyle and background (the stories purport to be autobiographical, where idiosyncracies show up more than in other kinds of writing) and the high rate at which the stories appear on the channel (namely, one 30-minute story every day for the last 70 days). Someone collecting actual true stories would not be able to collect stories at that rate -- at least not when just starting out (i.e., before becoming known and trusted by many expats) and the oldest video / story on the channel is only 2 months old.
Does social media mean Facebook? And how Zuckerberg may have just stolen it from other people and he thinks the idea of a good product is one where the feed is wildly non chronological and showing-actual-posts-from-friends-optional? Because that's not connection
Mastodon shows that when a network is relieved of pressure to monetize it evolves to serve its users. Otherwise it evolves to serve the investors in the platform. It’s just that simple.
Social media brought nothing but a bunch of jerks who bully and enslave people. Gonna die alone because of what those people have done. I hope when the people look back at this they try every single one of those people as murderers.
The same problems people
cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.
Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute.
Triple that for families with small kids.
Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).
Nitpick: Around 60% of the world population live in urban areas, and if a lot of people decide to live in a particular rural area, then it quickly faces urbanization.
>> people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas
If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census.
If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)
The problem is that ultimately it connects people around ideas because it isn’t taking place in the world, and everyone’s ideas are tired strange remixes of things we happened to grow up around
unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.
SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.
anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.)
What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.
It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.
(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)
I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.
Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.
It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.
Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.
FB is not a ghost town, you think that it is because no "thought leader" of the stuff you are interested in (tech, finance, business, stock market etc.) has their major presence or main channel of distribution of content on FB as they are mostly on YT and Twitter.
reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).
everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.
I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.
The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming.
We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies.
People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.
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You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start.
There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.
My take on this kind of view: it wasn't built on authenticity or social connection. That was what the enthusiasts were claiming it would be. It was a reference to something known, very superficial in nature, only meant to to increase the appeal.
It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash.
Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...
By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).
The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.
internet too was a great place before there were too many people online. social networks met the same fate. there is a critical mass for the amount of interacting people that when reached, the system becomes the opposite of what it was built for - connection.
i guess it goes back to the Dunbar's Number, but on steroids. on the other hand, too much of anything turn from good to bad so it's not unexpected result either way.
I created an open source tool to help apps stay near the Dunbar Number: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed. I think the concept of social networks is interesting, but the ultimate unbounded result is a disaster.
Politically, social media lately has fractured into ideological spaces. I go on bluesky or truth social or X or a certain subreddit to keep up with the politics as filtered through my tribe.
A lot of people opt out of these spaces because of the huge amount of political content and the lack of nuance in discussion. But it also radicalizes the people who stay as they get their sides view of the political conflicts of the day. And they get addicted to winning arguments for their side.
It used to be that Twitter revolved around whatever Trump did. Now people go online to find a little club they can kanoodle and bemoan how their side is the ultimate victim. And people will justify a lot of horrible things if they think they’re the victim.
I have an extended family and also an extended circle of friends that are spread all over the world. In both cases, numbering dozens of people, what would have previously been a slow erosion of contact and any real knowledge about most of them except those absolutely closest to me by necessity, has been converted into the ability to keep abreast of their daily lives, know when some direct communication might be helpful and generally take joy in being able to see how the good things in their lives move forward (or offer a hand when they don't). All of this almost entirely thanks to social media.
This not to mention the interesting figures it lets me directly follow and the shared interest groups it lets me find.
Is social media a complex and vast thing with its many pitfalls and flaws? Of course it is. The corporate giants that run much of it have some very disgusting habits of passive aggressive manipulation of their users, and grossly parasitic dark patterns of surveillance behavior.
Nonetheless, under and around all of that, there's also a tremendous amount of practical human good being created by so much previously impossible connection between millions of family members, friends, loved ones and people who share things in common. I refuse to throw that baby out with the bath water as some seem to propose.
Political manipulation, factionalism and ideological bickering have always been a part of human culture, for at least as long as we've had written words and means of spreading them. Could anyone have expected any differently to emerge from the massively democratizing landscape of social platforms, which let literally anyone communicate their own two cents of thought to places and context where anyone else at all might instantly see them and respond? Of course not, but to focus only on that is almost elitist in its implied notions of shutting up the masses because they don't communicate and debate "correctly" (even if many of them are indeed stupidly influenced by all kinds of interests, whithin and outside of social media).
While this is an engaging essay, it's premature to claim that social media is dying. The state of social media has been awful for years, and yet billions stuck around. There probably is no depth low enough that the majority of users would abandon it.
The essay also neglects what is possibly the largest part of a solution: systems to guarantee authenticity of users and user claims...
A social media user shouldn't have to wonder if the brain surgeon giving them medical tips actually is a high school dropout, or the fellow Parisian sounding the alarm on French politics actually is a 12 year old Quebecer, or the new fan DM'ing them about their music actually is the same psychopath who online-stalked them two years ago, etc.
Social media isn't going to die. It badly needs a mechanism for users to filter out bad information.
Social media hasn't been social for a while. Personal posts from people I know are buried under the algorithms. It's a high friction action to actually find my friends. All the defaults are pointed at optimized content from generic sources. I have many friends that are artists and musicians. I follow them on these platforms and my engagement with them is captured and funneled into garbage content about art and music instead of letting my see my friends. I hate it.
HN is the same echo chamber though. This same topic posted here every single week from random blogs to The Guardian, everyone posts their anecdotes, group hug, taps on the back and back to nothing. Rinse and repeat next week. You could just copy paste the top comments from the previous posts if you want some free karma.
Without advertising you would have to pay for it. But that would not sufficiently deter bad actors. What you need is culture to repel and moderation to exclude them.
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. ...
I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.
Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.
What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care.
No one goes to the beach anymore—there are too many people there.
When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.
> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world.
I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!
But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.
What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.
Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group.
Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback).
The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.
The over generalization of the term social media drives me bonkers. In the olden days we had things like message boards, forums, and chat rooms. Then came social networks. All of those terms reflect some sort of connection between people.
When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting self-promoters (for the lack of a better term) to an audience, not the other way around. As you said: the focus is on the individual, may that be a person or a business.
Perhaps we should be making an effort to distinguish between the two environments, to avoid associating connecting businesses and self-promoters to customers with connecting people to each other.
The self-promoters, 90% of the time, are either operating an entertainment business, advertising products, or both. So we can still just call it connecting businesses to customers, otherwise known as marketing.
It should all be called social marketing, not social media, as it really just a thin veneer over the Google and Meta ad monopolies.
Your attention was once in other places and it moved onto the Internet. The ad monopolists figured out a way to turn the Internet into a marketing platform, by purchasing their competitors and then gradually changing the features their services offered. They then converted you from a human being into a unit of advertising inventory. Doctorow's reverse centaur aptly describes the phenomenon; the simian body is slaved to the ad machine brain and now follows its command through the magic of cheap psychological tricks.
> It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around.
A pet peeve of mine is when businesses reject the marketing channel they own (their websites) to adopt platforms like X or Instagram. Use them, yes, but do publish on your own site (and adopt RSS along the way).
except no one goes to their website or uses rss. it is unfortunately a waste of time for small niche group that finds it useful
The way I look at it: social media makes you aware of their presence. Actually conducting business usually happens elsewhere. That elsewhere may be physical or virtual.
Another way to look at it is that depending upon social media for anything beyond promotion leaves you at the whim of those companies. Facebook only let's viewers see a limited slice of information unless they log in. Places that used Twitter as a newsfeed ended up showing chaotic junk when Twitter became X, unless the user was logged in. I was doing a web search yesterday that turned up a lot of Yelp results. I didn't realize that Yelp was still a thing. Judging from the content, it probably isn't. The list goes on. As a potential customer, it leaves me with a very dim view of the companies that rely upon social media instead of supplementing their presence with social media.
> Another way to look at it is that depending upon social media for anything beyond promotion leaves you at the whim of those companies.
Another instance of that is when your account at these proprietary companies simply disappears for no reason. It is far too risky to depend on them.
A long-time friend, for example, has a decades old business which had a 15+ year presence on facebook. A few weeks ago the account just silently disappeared. Obviously any response from facebook is impossible to obtain.
Luckily they also have their own website with all the content.
What do you want as a business? The void of platforms like X? Or the actual people that took the time to goes to your website to learn more about your offering.
You want the most customers for the least effort, which is Instagram.
unfortunately… exactly this
Agreed. I consider traditional "virtual communities" (lie Usenet, IRC, BBSes, web message boards, etc.) to be something quite different from modern "social media", and I find the former to be far preferable to the latter.
> When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships
I agree entirely with this. I think that it's helpful to remember that "social media" arose to differentiate itself from "traditional media", the social piece is a descriptor not a function. Traditional media has been one-way, and the goal of corporations has been to make social media largely one-way as well but to make it feel like it's not. Social media exists mostly to serve influencers, brands, and celebrities and all of us are eyeballs to monetize.
For modern types of "social media", I prefer to use the more accurate term: Gossip Engine.
It tells you exactly what it does in a way that "social media" obscures. Nothing drives engagement like a Gossip Engine!
There's two distinguishing characteristics:
One: algorithmic feeds (etc) are engineered to addict you
Two: virality stats (views and likes) allow senders to hone message effectiveness based on structure (funny GIF, misspelling, "this you", etc), completely separate from content (white supremacy, authoritarian communism, etc)
This is why Reddit is maybe barely social media, and HN, other forums, IRC, etc, aren't.
> The old social media was more like going out
>> [Social media] is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around
Originally there were no business accounts, ads, or news feeds on Facebook, for example.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35877603 :
> for the record, e.g. Facebook did originally require a .edu email address at an approving institution
What were the other pivots from that original - textual personal profile and you can only write on other peoples' walls - product to profitability?
"social media" is forums, IRC, blogs, etc, but through the lens of advertisers.
Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?
> Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?
Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page.
Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted before you, and before messages posted after. Everyone's view and message was equal, so pile-ons or hive-mind "this is the right way of thinking" seemed less common.
I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.
In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
> I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.
> In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
The following was built and deployed in Taiwan and proved to be very capable at sidestepping policy gridlock.
I've often wondered if some of the concepts that power it could be applied to help facilitate more generalized discussion and debate (which could also optionally tie into instances of the original political purpose it was built for).
https://www.plurality.net
https://github.com/pluralitybook
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...
You're right, but we also underestimated how easy it would be to game these systems and how the owners of these platforms would be incentivized to allow or even assist in gaming these systems. Voting solved a problem that existed, but created another one that is arguably worse.
Neither does not have the same shared consistent group of participants.
A forum ultimately ends up a group of more or less known individuals with a focus.
Reddit and HN don't have that feel, chatrooms and such as Discord usually do, unless they get huge and overwhelm Dunbar's number.
The friend feeds like Facebook's are less anonymous, but they do not form topical discussions nor feel like hangouts with the person.
Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.)
I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about.
You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people.
> Email is still completely open.
Yes, fortunately. Email should always be used, at least as an available option, because it is the only truly open way to communicate electronically.
Recently I bought something and had some hiccups getting it to work and found that the vendor only provides support in one single place: discord. A proprietary platform I can't get access to.
> Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then.
I still read usenet most days ;-)
But no, it is very small compared to the good times. It would take me hours to read through my list of newsgroups in 1990, now at most 10 minutes.
I loved using chat rooms on AOL in the late 90s, later I moved to IRC (dalnet, efnet) and made some close friends. The interactions saved me from horrible depression as in my suburban area I had trouble making friends.
The reason I believe things are different is that the Internet was tech people. People more likely to be logical and rational. Once "regular" people came on they brought their stupidity with them.
Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community.
Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.
Building "reputation" and building yourself a "brand" are the worst things from the forum-era. I will not miss power-tripping mods and users with 20,000 posts writing the dumbest replies possible into every thread asking "why would you do this?", "have you used the search function?", etc. Just because you have many posts doesn't mean the posts are good. Many users ignored high-quality posts from new accounts for example.
Just because the forums you hanged around were like that, doesn't mean every forum was like that. Probably the web forum I hanged around the most on (which is where my HN username originally comes from) has strict rules about each individual post's quality (although enforced bit unevenly), and their contribution to the discussions, in one way or another. Make enough off-topic/shit posts and eventually you'll get banned because of it. The users with a lot of posts usually made well-argued posts.
Each started thread also needed a "basis for discussion" to remain open, and necrobumping was encouraged. The forum still has decade old threads actively being discussed in.
AFAIK, it's still the largest forum in the Nordics, although the moderation team (and voluntary) seem to unfortunately be shrinking rather than increasing, and the forum isn't without its controversies.
Forums aren’t all like that, as the HN comment section demonstrates. While not a full-featured forum, it would be prone to the same effects.
Of course not all forums are like that, "only" the vast majority of it is. Even niche-forums suffered from this (or especially they suffered from it). I would not count Hacker News as a forum though. There is no reputation here, no visible karma unless you explicitly click on a profile, no avatar, no signature, etc.
Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem?
Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.
Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.
Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.
This is my theory too. The internet made it easier to connect with diverse cultures... and then ignore all of them in favor of the one that agreed with you on every point so you could ignore anything that went against your thoughts
Yes that's true. Everyone gets to interact with people that are closer to their ideals but it makes society less homogeneous and disconnected locally because there is no geographical grouping.
At the same time people are more mobile than ever because of technological, opportunity and work reasons as well. So, there is a lack of real grounding. Why bother being friends with your neighbors or local people when you can just travel for not very long and visit people you prefer?
It leads to tensions because people live close together but have a very different way of life and sometimes radically different values, even in close quater communities. They end up hating each other secretly because without communication you cannot even begin to empathise.
The social media groups reflect that; they are an echo chamber to cry about people and behaviors you don't like and reinforce your own opinions, behaviors and their superior validity.
There is also the part where large government of the providence state are to be blamed for favoring rampant individualism. Instead of having to deal with friends and family you deal with soulless corporation and obtuse bureaucracy to get your needs met.
When 50 years ago you could drop by to see your doctor, now you call a number, a robot answers and gives you an appointment in one month. It's not just social media that is to blame it's just technology in general that has allowed and basically created a massive bureaucracy for everything, pretending to focus on making things efficient when it basically only consumes value and is just a means of control/surveillance.
Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.
Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.
We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
Ironically, searching "scape web app" today shows "Scape | AI-native CRM that captures all your conversations" which felt very on the nose.
Interesting. Did it get eaten by general baseline interests and lost the focus, ultimately moving to cater to lowest common denominator? Failed or sold?
Please continue
We built scape in 9 months and ran it for 9 months, if I recall. We were all young and naive — it just felt like we failed to make something that “clicked.” Facebook had very few features (pokes and the wall), but they weren’t competing on features. We struggled to get more than a thousand people to sign up across a few NE colleges.
We had this whole social blogging and communication system — it was really very cool in concept. But we had too much of a “if you build it, they will come” marketing plan.
We gave up after a year and a half. We ended up selling a version of it to Teach for America.
I’d consider it a failure — we gave up. I rather wish we’d have tried to raise money, though.. I can’t believe we got as far as we did — different times
When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.
This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.
The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.
The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.
Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.
Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.
I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely.
Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others.
Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.
I think there is something to be said about the value of the amateur. About not treating everything as a entrepreneurial side project where everything is sacrificed to the financial gods and you make the same choices as everybody else, because everything else would be a risk. Amateurs do things for the heck of it. They don't need it to be polished, they just love what they are doing and want to share that love. If you ever thought about doing anything, a blog, a band, a podcast, a youtube channel, a forum, a new type of thing for which a name has to be found: Do now, think about polish later (if at all).
Places like forums are great, but I don't even think it is strictly necessary need to make one (unless there is a niché that you care for which hasn't been covered). Maybe it is already enough to pick one that exists and to actively participate in it. I remember reading threads where I went like: "Man, these people are really, really into that topic, this is great!"
> Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces.
Reminds me of the succinctly-demonstrated problem of: https://webcomicname.com/post/185588404109
> they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that).
When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.
People existed as username and their signature, but you already know that’s not the real person behind (it could be a dog or a cat for all you know). Now it’s the cult of the persona and the brand.
>connect like-minded people around the world
Traditional forums still exist.
Which ones are the best for the anglophone world currently? I'm struggling to find traditional forums that are still "alive", general enough to cover a broad spectrum and well-moderated to remove all noise.
And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers
It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends.
There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.
Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
So… FB with like and no dislike button?
Youtube does not expose the number of down votes any more. LinkedIn has no dislike button and I find it positively toxic.
Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.
Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
> to me the difference is plain to see.
Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall.
It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
> HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong.
That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead.
That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble.
> If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.
> That's is due to active moderation,
Just, FTR, there's always been the problem of how much moderation is required to keep the discourse (in a group) flowing without being so restrictive as to only be about the moderators.
See IRC, which (IMO) can be over-moderated, channel ops used to be very much about themselves, vs Usenet, which had no moderation at all (and was "destroyed" by google groups making access trivial for troublemakers), through to current things like Reddit which have some moderators.
It's (IMO) exactly like governance IRL - some countries overdo it, and some underdo it.
Please describe what it would be like if it were not a bubble. If everything is a bubble, the concept is worthless.
Old-school fora and mailing lists could avoid being bubbles when moderation allowed dissenting views to surface instead of burying them. Of course, biased moderation could still create bubbles by pruning dissent.
Social platforms built on voting, like HN, will almost always drift into bubbles of like-minded posts and comments. The only variation is in which views get upranked.
That isn’t necessarily bad. YC clearly prefers HN to filter for a certain entrepreneurial mindset. Bubbles can serve a purpose, but it’s worth recognising that this is a manipulated environment - in many ways hollow - and not a reflection of the broader world.
It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.
> It seems like paid communities
Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account.
It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential.
Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
> Would serve as an automatic "You're 18"
You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).
https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/
https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a...
And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations.
In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification.
> It just sucks
I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.
> You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).
Yeah, I had one of those myself when I was under 18 too, I think it was called Maestro or something similar. However, it didn't work like a normal credit card (which I think only 18+ can have), platforms were clearly able to reject it, as most things I wanted to buy online didn't work at the time with it (this was early 2000s though), only with my mom's debit card.
Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block? Then requiring credit card "donation" of $N would still basically act as a age verification. I think debit cards might in general be available to people under 18, so filtering to only allow credit cards sounds like a start at least.
Newgrounds literally employed the same strategy for automatically validating a bunch of users, from https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1548205:
> 2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.
Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.
> One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts
Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs. I feel like they get lots of stuff right, from transparent moderation to trying to keep it small but high-quality. The judge is still out on if they got it right or not :)
> Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block?
Nope, there’s nothing “youth” about them, they’re more like safety features. The cards I’m talking about act as real credit cards. Plus, I forgot to mention but there are also services (even provided by the banking networks in the countries themselves) which allow you to connect an account (or deposit some money in) and get temporary credit card numbers for online payments. I’ve used them and know multiple people (also adults) who still do.
> Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.
My point is that maybe that’s enough in the UK (is it?) but you probably wouldn’t be able to rely on it for every jurisdiction.
To be clear, I like your idea in general and would not want to discourage you from it—quite the contrary—I’m just alerting to the fact it might need further though so you don’t end up sinking time on something which wouldn’t work.
> Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs.
I wasn’t aware that’s how they worked. I’ll have a read. For anyone else curious:
https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
Thanks a bunch for describing it in more detail, actually very helpful!
And no worries, nothing discouraging, discussing the idea with others no matter their reaction tends to do the opposite for me, so thanks again for taking the time :)
And people that are not in the "cool kids" group are economically disadvantaged because, even if their contributions are valued, they get on the offside with the powers that be?
When you have people with power over someone else, power to ban, power to economically injure, you end up, almost without fail, with sycophantic groupings.
People only praise those with the power, and anyone foolish enough to disagree, no matter how accurate, are punished.
Something Awful pulled this off with a $10 lifetime subscription, cheap enough that most can afford it, but it's expensive enough that a bot farm wouldn't bother, and the admins are quick with suspensions and bans if you act like an asshole.
I'm not so sure. Every so often I browse Metafilter (remember Metafilter?) out of morbid fascination, and it's a total trainwreck. I don't think it's a model for success.
When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.
That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)
There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars
I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
> I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.
> is often called "brigading" instead
Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.
I never heard of the Meow Wars, but I do remember antiorp, a net-art mailing list disruption organisation:
https://everything2.com/title/antiorp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)
EDIT: clarity
I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great.
It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.
There’s a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.
Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.
I do wonder if this is just a symptom of monetization. Free advertising with viral posts was possible for talented marketers until the early 2010s. Now you have to pay.
OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger. Meeting this person in person sometime later, it turned out this message was never delivered. They'd thought I was working for the company that sued them.
The shift was the news feed IMO. You have to consider the profit model. Users are the product.
An AI chatbot is just the next stage on "like-minded people" continuum. It's a machine that bends over backwards to match what the user wants from it. (Maybe unhealthy but it's just the next step after interacting with anon posters over a shared niche interest)
Social-mediated capitalism is what they built. Puting AI in there just makes it easier.
I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm.
Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
Mastodon literally has a trending feed. Is that not an "algorithm"? It has algorithmic popular hashtags, news feed, and user recommendations. Just a bog standard handful of algorithmic surfaces, so why are they still pretending like it's "algorithm free" is beyond me. "Absolute lack", right.
The Trending feature is not pushed into the home (or any) timeline. In the Web UI it sits unobtrusively in the corner of the window and on some apps simply does not exist. It can also be easily disabled.
In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people. Nothing about any of the Fediverse services is designed this way because they're not chasing money or engagement, they're made to help people converse in a human way.
If you're not logged in, the evil algorithmic trending feed is literally the first thing you'll see being pushed onto you. (seems like it's a default setting, because it's that way across several different instances.) So what's the truth? Seems like an incoherent position to me, especially given how mastodon itself advertises it as "no algorithms". It doesn't hold true when you can immediately see algorithmic feeds, at most charitable it's confused, at worst it's just a barefaced lie.
So it's literally just "bad algorithms" (the ones other platforms make) and "good algorithms" (the good algorithms good platforms make, like us). Which is kind of literally how it is, there are good ones and bad ones, except both of these kinds of platforms employ "bad" engagement driving discovery algorithms, so it's really just 'us vs them'. The trending and news algorithms are literally just driving engagement and discovery, and top hashtags feed is proudly clamoring how much engagement there is. Doesn't seem like they're not "chasing" it.
You seem to be purposefully mixing the two opposing uses of the word "algorithm". On the non-abusive platforms, an algorithm is a fairly simplistic set of criteria that are designed to be useful to the human beings that use a service. If you want to, you can inspect the code used to generate them; the likes of Mastodon don't hide how these work because they aren't trying to harm anyone.
I think this is the part of Mastodon's code that calculates the Trending page: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/tree/main/app/models/tr...
These sorts of algorithms tend to promote posts or people that have recently been popular for the purpose of being useful to folk. On the likes of tiktok, facebook and twitter they are the culmination of very large sums of money and an ocean of professional psychological collaborators with the aim to purposefully harm and addict people, e.g. to manipulate public opinion and democracy, incite the suicide of transgender people and the perpetration of genocide. For money. I find it difficult to believe that you're arguing, in good faith, that the two types of "algorithm" have much in common.
I am not sure how it is "evil" showing recently-popular posts on a social media server's home page to logged-out people, and how that's pushing anything. It's not an agenda, it's not a series of posts that are picked because they are likely to addict and enrage people. I do suspect that there's some ragebait that shows up, because some people are still having to unlearn the indoctrination they're suffering from.
It's totally fine if people would just say it like "bad algorithms" or "good algorithms", but somehow the meaning of the word "algorithm" in itself got so twisted that it apparently means "bad" just on its own. Which looks idiotic if you realize that everywhere there are algorithms, even in those platforms that claim to be "no algorithm/algorithm-free" or whatever other meaningless duplicitous marketing drivel they dress it up with. From where I see it, it's some other people that purposely mix the meanings there, while also overlooking how some arbitrary "good" or "unremarkable" things just kinda silently get a pass, despite being functionally the same thing. Almost to the point where you could just advertise as "no algorithms" (whatever that means) and just have algorithms anyway, and it's kind of whatever.
It's not "evil" to be showing an algo feed per se. But mastodon and a bunch of other platforms refer to algo feeds as "bad/evil" or something of the sort, market themselves as not having them, and yet thoroughly employ multiple algo feeds. Is that not just hypocritical? It looks glaringly dishonest. They could at least have some integrity to say "we don't like the yucky algorithms, but here we only have good™ algorithms", when that's literally what it is.
> In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people.
But I feel like it misses the point. What about a service where you can design and use your own "algorithms", and it's built into the platform?
Such a platform would have thousands of algorithms, but none of them designed for chasing money or engagement, just different preferences. But Mastodon could still claim "We don't use The Algorithm and is therefore better than other places" while a platform with custom user-owned algorithms could get the best of both worlds.
That's not something that I have any interest in, but I'm not opposed to it as I know other people have asked about it.
A very quick peruse of the Mastodon issue tracker came up with information about this on the ActivityPub level (albeit in an old toot): https://mastodon.social/@reiver/113668493283013849 and someone kindly rounded up similar feature requests here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/33098#issuecomme...
I like the idea of it not being related to a platform or implementer, but baked into the spec ala a feature of ActivityPub.
Such a platform is not a hypothetical: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
Was kind of hoping it'd take people longer time to notice where the idea came from :) But also kind of cheating for you to bring it up, but understand it's hard to resist.
In this context, "algorithm" means something that gives you the endorphin hit and keeps you scrolling. Facebook is "algorithmic social media", whereas Mastodon is not.
I suggest calling it a 'ranking algorithm' or 'engagement-driven ranking algorithm' to be more precise.
That trending feed on mastodon would still literally be that, ranking posts on how much they're engaged with and further driving engagement on the platform. So I'm just wondering what hairs are even there to split.
Yes, but trending posts are a sidebar, not the main show, right?
Not to mention "sort by most recent from accounts I follow" is an algorithm too.
I feel like the wording needs a bit of rewording/rework. I agree chronological order facilitates better discussions, but just saying that "Mastodon lacks algorithms" doesn't really help people understand things better.
Exactly. My three internal rules for a good social media experience (ymmv) are:
1. No algorithm beyond most-recent-first
2. Stick to a maximum of ~250 following
3. Pay for the service instead of ad-supported
I can easily do all of those on Mastodon.
Mastodon and fediverse despite not running on algorithms sadly aren't free of spam and bots - probably nothing nowadays is. Last year in February there was a flood of messages attacking less populated instances, with... Spam can image in message body.
What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.
Unfortunately, we discovered that people would rather be told what to watch, rather that self-discover their interests, because that’s a lot of “work”.
I hope it’s not that black-and-white, that it’s possible to have a sane social network with algorithmic feed, only we need to design the algorithms around users’ needs first.
If you judge users’ needs by “things they’ll pay attention on and engage with”, well… it is exactly what all the current algorithms are good at right now. It’s just, in my opinion, bad for the society at large, as rage baiting, slop-posting and etc. is great in achieving that.
The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
"The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.
> The problem is that people are addicted to tension
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
I would argue that financialization of the social media is what made it fail. Once there’s direct dollar cost to your posts, ideas and etc., the incentives change from “fun” to “commercial”. That started heavily around 2017ish, where every social media switched to algorithm-first, and heavily started tracking engagement/attention per post.
First of all, social media has stopped being social long ago.
Now it's just a platform for content mills. Producer to consumer.
Social media was peer to peer and it's dead.
You are literally topping that comment on a peer to peer social media website right now. It's hardly dead, it just happens away from meta and X. Discord is absolutely popping off, for example. HN and other forums are still very lively.
This is hobby project for a billionaire, not a social media website. It doesn't need to generate a dime. It runs very efficiently because it was coded well (and cared for), but there are salaries paid to people to watch it that are just a gift to the people who post here.
Social media isn't defined by the business model. Straight from Wikipedia: "Social media are new media technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks." That perfectly describes HN.
What makes it not a social media website? Social media is a function of what it does, and it's a place people comment, converse, share links, there's a user scoring system, there's a feed of recent events on the front page... how is it not social media?
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
There is a neurotic personality type that doomscrolls out of a compulsion. A lot of it is hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Where will the next shoe drop? We feel threatened, then some feel like they need to take some kind of drastic action.
Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.
Exhaustion is absolutely the first word that comes to mind for me. Even when I'm not using it myself, I'm exhausted of all the oxygen it takes up in the room
It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
Is Tumblr doing fine financially?
I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.
I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
I don't know. I know their ad people have a hard time selling ads. They've been working to bring costs down. It might be profitable.
Now owned by Automattic.
Yeah I recall when they started porting it to WordPress's infrastructure and then gave up. But I think that doesn't imply their profitable, so Matt could wake up one day and shut it down.
The algorithmic feed should be banned for all public discourse. That is what’s killing us (quite literally). Let topics be searchable and people should find what they need. Very simple algorithms such as “most recent conversation” may be allowed.
I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff.
I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
In a way I see these algorithms as segregstionist, their goal is ultimately to isolate certain groups and perniciously expose them only to the rage inducing bad aspects of the other group(s) to generate more posts/likes/comment.
Segregation applied to public spaces should indeed be banned, when these platforms become so huge, they become a defacto public square that you can hardly avoid effectively without missing a good share of the conversations that need to happen in public for a healthy flow of information, so I would not see an issue with law makers to regulate this... obviously as long as it's applied fairly.
The issue is that currently even platforms that are getting regulate, for even more concerning aspect (national security, undue foreign influence on fair elections) like Tiktok seem to be exempt of the law itself and the US Congress seem unable to get the laws they voted in a bipartisan manner enforced... the only reason I see is that a certain tangerine tinted individual sees it as a tool to control the American discourse in his favor, and thus refuses to enforce the law. So these concerns about healthy public spaces are taking the backseat for now.
While I agree, forums are also easily derailed and destroyed by trolls. I'm in a few political threads and they're totally ruined by a few people that the mods do nothing about.
The problem is - it's not "social" and it's pure "media" at this point. It's almost impossible to have social aspect on the platforms where you only have real people with sane number of connections that interact with eachother. Rather you have a bunch of huge "pages" that simply push their news publications...
IMHO it would be awesome to have again sane, SOCIAL-media. Probably with the correct regulation it could be done… And the current SM platforms could use the regulation as well (force viewing only what one follows, make it transparent like other media - i.e. if someone has more than 10k "followers" it's just a media so put same requirements: full ID disclosure and having to respond to the takedowns immediatelly…)
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's going away.
So long as the same incentives stay in place, we're going to get the same results. Change the names yet it's all the same.
Just like drugs, but most people understand you should have respect for them.
Social media is actually anti social. Meeting real people and making real connections is social.
I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.
Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
> Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy.
Not for everybody. Me and a work friend are considered "highly energetic" by our colleagues when we are at the office in person, to the point that people and things soon find themselves in orbit around us. But the truth is that when we come home, we both feel drained and exhausted for the next day or two. For me, it's as if my entire mind and soul got washed and diluted by those interactions.
I'm not saying it's all bad, in the same way that running a marathon is probably not all bad. But "boost your energy" wouldn't be a term I would ever use for it.
You well as with anything you can definitely go overboard, and the type of social interaction matters fairly significantly. There's a difference between spending all day at work, and spending a few hours with a good friend.
Like most of the other commenters here, I agree that modern social media is often an echo chamber, and frequently surface level.
I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?
IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the “true” subreddits)
I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested:
https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/
I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.
Thanks, I was interested and enjoyed you blog post! It's definitely complex- I really liked your observation that even on the same platform (say youtube comments) the quality of interactions can vary hugely based on the amount of traction something gains.
I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience.
I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.
Search for "bridging based ranking". The X community notes algorithm does that. I think it should be applied to all content.
Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
My fingers are not fully compatible with touch screens so I'm not a big phone guy, so I can't speak for them, but I've been trying to make my computer more task oriented, to make choices more explicit.
I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities.
It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront.
My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).
> someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
It’s is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I don’t think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.
No, indeed, but^W and that would be an interesting use case. What would a dedicated social media device work, and look like? (actually, that may depend a lot on what privacy one can expect out of it)
The acceleration (into automation) of language and images - both arbitrary units - requiring cost-benefit for shareholders inevitably reduces the input to noise and then chaos. Because the dark matter of language is control, bias, manipulation for status, status becomes the central factor, not the sharing.
That we bemoan sub-industries of media, rather than notice the system effects across it is suspicious.
“… if we say that linguistic structure "reflects" social structure, we are really assigning to language a role that is too passive ... Rather we should say that linguistic structure is the realization of social structure, actively symbolizing it in a process of mutual creativity. Because it stands as a metaphor for society, language has the property of not only transmitting the social order but also maintaining and potentially modifying it. (This is undoubtedly the explanation of the violent attitudes that under certain social conditions come to be held by one group towards the speech of others.)” Excerpts from Halliday Language and Society Volume 10
A couple people have mentioned this but I think it's worth isolating (no pun intended) for emphasis
We started social media with chats that connected people across the world.
Then we handed over the majority of the Internet to Google who, in their pursuit to build out personally useful services, inadvertently jailed us into a hyper localized bubble
That bubble then became the standard of the Internet, and all sorts of pipes of toxic gas hooked in to the bubble and started poisoning us en masse.
Not to say they're fully innocent, but it seems really strange to point to Google specifically on this issue, rather than like... Meta.
I pick Google because they ended up centralizing services hyper locally. Facebook, to me, came after that
Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this.
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
Doesn’t this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your “editor” only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see.
And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
You have hit the nail on the head there! The point in the book was that depending on your editor, you were essentially living in different realities.
There was the east and west coasts, and then there was Ameristan (or something I can't remember exactly) in between, which was fundamentalist
Algorithmic feeds, search result pages, and LLM responses with web citations are all different editors. It's just a computer doing the editing.
This is why we started Favs - social network for close friends only. No ads, no brands, no influencers. Of course though we’ve had the cold start problem but fundamentally it’s what you’d want if your favorite people wanted to stay connected beyond a group chat. - one to many posts - maps of which city you’re in - upcoming plans - no new inbox either
I hope it people give it a shot one day.
Social media was nice when it was mostly you connecting to people, going to their page to check on them and a shared calendar.
The feed was honestly the beginning of the end. It turns people from actor of their experience to mindless consumer.
I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response.
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.
Unfortunately it's an incredible tool, especially for industries which pray on people's insecurities like beauty - botox, fillers etc. This person I know puts instagram story and gets instantly booked for all free slots she has for the entire week.
She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".
I feel like any quality posts are drowned in the volumes of spam. See also: LinkedIn.
If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.
This piece makes a great point about needing "architectures of intention." The default social media experience is pure passive consumption, and I felt my own intentions for the day slipping away.
As a personal project, I built an extension to create my own little architecture of intention. It introduces a 20-second pause before I enter distracting sites, and during the pause, it nudges me with a positive micro-habit, like fixing my posture or taking a deep breath.
It's called The 20s Rule (Chrome/Firefox) if anyone else finds that idea useful.
I don't agree that Substack is a place for small niche communities. It seems to me that they are trying hard to turn into a social network - notes, DMs and other features are pushed while more writing related features like code syntax highlighting or tables are ignored.
> A few creators do append labels disclaiming that their videos depict “no real events,” but many creators don’t bother, and many consumers don’t seem to care.
https://youtu.be/kLyuNo3vEuQ?t=346
AI videos as propaganda. In this clip, the guy can be seen passing through a missile transport railing.
300K views.
I enjoy watching movie trailers on youtube and I've noticed in the last month all these ai-created fake movie trailers for upcoming movies where the actual trailer isn't out yet. It's infuriating when I watch it, realize something is off and then at the end it's like "Fan-made!"
If this ai-slop keeps up I'm going to just probably stop watching youtube altogether, it sucks getting tricked by fake content.
I recently spent over an hour listening to a channel whose description starts with "This channel shares real stories of life, love, and heartbreak in Thailand. I focus on honest experiences from foreigners living here."
Then I realized that these stories are entirely AI-generated! I know that because of the lack of personal idiosyncracies in narrative style, lifestyle and background (the stories purport to be autobiographical, where idiosyncracies show up more than in other kinds of writing) and the high rate at which the stories appear on the channel (namely, one 30-minute story every day for the last 70 days). Someone collecting actual true stories would not be able to collect stories at that rate -- at least not when just starting out (i.e., before becoming known and trusted by many expats) and the oldest video / story on the channel is only 2 months old.
https://www.youtube.com/@InsideThailandStories
YouTube started demonetizing these channels a few months back. Last year they had practically taken over the platform.
There's still a lot of room for progress in social networks.
I'm planning an app where people are forced to talk to each other and learn more about each other, if they do not they are banned from the platform.
Going on Tinder to gather likes and never talk to anyone should be forbidden.This is the issue with social sites, they make it as generic as possible.
Does social media mean Facebook? And how Zuckerberg may have just stolen it from other people and he thinks the idea of a good product is one where the feed is wildly non chronological and showing-actual-posts-from-friends-optional? Because that's not connection
Funnily enough, I just [wrote a blog post](https://sidnutul.substack.com/p/the-thought-industry) echoing this sentiment around how the algorithms have fractured our shared perceptual reality:
These "internet is dead" articles are coming across as more robotic than actual robot content these days.
Mastodon shows that when a network is relieved of pressure to monetize it evolves to serve its users. Otherwise it evolves to serve the investors in the platform. It’s just that simple.
Social media brought nothing but a bunch of jerks who bully and enslave people. Gonna die alone because of what those people have done. I hope when the people look back at this they try every single one of those people as murderers.
The same problems people cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.
Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute.
Triple that for families with small kids.
Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).
Nitpick: Around 60% of the world population live in urban areas, and if a lot of people decide to live in a particular rural area, then it quickly faces urbanization.
>> people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas
If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census.
If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)
I went to NYC the other day. There was lots of diverse interesting stuff. Not full of people who looked just like me.
Just because something is bad, that doesn't that these are its last days.
Oops ... "Just because something is bad, that doesn't mean that these are its last days.
I just want Discord but a forum. I would pay good money to that
Discord has "forum channels". https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
What aspects of conventional forums are you looking for?
The absence of chat channels, I suppose.
Forums had chat channels too; e.g., https://chat.stackoverflow.com/
Sometimes it just did not have live updates: https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/general/chit-chat
The problem is that ultimately it connects people around ideas because it isn’t taking place in the world, and everyone’s ideas are tired strange remixes of things we happened to grow up around
unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.
SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.
anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.)
What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.
It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.
(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)
> FB is a ghost town
I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.
Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.
It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.
Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.
> > FB is a ghost town
FB is not a ghost town, you think that it is because no "thought leader" of the stuff you are interested in (tech, finance, business, stock market etc.) has their major presence or main channel of distribution of content on FB as they are mostly on YT and Twitter.
I called it a "ghost town" because none of my friends post on it anymore. There is nothing social about it, it is like a message board at this time.
reddit has a lot of sick puppies of all sorts and kinds. that is not a place of wellness in any sense ime.
reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).
everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.
> Social media was built on the romance of authenticity.
It never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.
I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.
Facebook died with the like button. Twitter died with retweets.
The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming. We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies. People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.
Subscribe and hit that bell notification button for more content.
You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start.
There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.
My take on this kind of view: it wasn't built on authenticity or social connection. That was what the enthusiasts were claiming it would be. It was a reference to something known, very superficial in nature, only meant to to increase the appeal.
There was no algorithm in the original Facebook and Twitter.
The echo chamber you got was the same you get in real life: your friends and family may share your pov and bias.
It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash.
Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...
By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).
The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.
Facebook always had the ability to organize contacts, but few people use it. https://www.facebook.com/help/200538509990389/
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internet too was a great place before there were too many people online. social networks met the same fate. there is a critical mass for the amount of interacting people that when reached, the system becomes the opposite of what it was built for - connection.
i guess it goes back to the Dunbar's Number, but on steroids. on the other hand, too much of anything turn from good to bad so it's not unexpected result either way.
I created an open source tool to help apps stay near the Dunbar Number: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed. I think the concept of social networks is interesting, but the ultimate unbounded result is a disaster.
Edit (missing link to github repo): https://github.com/darkpicnic/ten_cubed
Yeah, original title I upvoted was the actual title of TFA "The Last Days Of Social Media". Why is it different now? This is against HN rules.
I love the term "semantic sludge"
It’s absolutely one of the worst things to happen to society.
It's still social and it still connects people. You are simply on the wrong platforms.
Because everything must be profited off, so the platform itself is a vehicle for products.
I think this is right but not quite.
Politically, social media lately has fractured into ideological spaces. I go on bluesky or truth social or X or a certain subreddit to keep up with the politics as filtered through my tribe.
A lot of people opt out of these spaces because of the huge amount of political content and the lack of nuance in discussion. But it also radicalizes the people who stay as they get their sides view of the political conflicts of the day. And they get addicted to winning arguments for their side.
It used to be that Twitter revolved around whatever Trump did. Now people go online to find a little club they can kanoodle and bemoan how their side is the ultimate victim. And people will justify a lot of horrible things if they think they’re the victim.
Social media and social networking are two very distinct things.
I have an extended family and also an extended circle of friends that are spread all over the world. In both cases, numbering dozens of people, what would have previously been a slow erosion of contact and any real knowledge about most of them except those absolutely closest to me by necessity, has been converted into the ability to keep abreast of their daily lives, know when some direct communication might be helpful and generally take joy in being able to see how the good things in their lives move forward (or offer a hand when they don't). All of this almost entirely thanks to social media.
This not to mention the interesting figures it lets me directly follow and the shared interest groups it lets me find.
Is social media a complex and vast thing with its many pitfalls and flaws? Of course it is. The corporate giants that run much of it have some very disgusting habits of passive aggressive manipulation of their users, and grossly parasitic dark patterns of surveillance behavior.
Nonetheless, under and around all of that, there's also a tremendous amount of practical human good being created by so much previously impossible connection between millions of family members, friends, loved ones and people who share things in common. I refuse to throw that baby out with the bath water as some seem to propose.
Political manipulation, factionalism and ideological bickering have always been a part of human culture, for at least as long as we've had written words and means of spreading them. Could anyone have expected any differently to emerge from the massively democratizing landscape of social platforms, which let literally anyone communicate their own two cents of thought to places and context where anyone else at all might instantly see them and respond? Of course not, but to focus only on that is almost elitist in its implied notions of shutting up the masses because they don't communicate and debate "correctly" (even if many of them are indeed stupidly influenced by all kinds of interests, whithin and outside of social media).
While this is an engaging essay, it's premature to claim that social media is dying. The state of social media has been awful for years, and yet billions stuck around. There probably is no depth low enough that the majority of users would abandon it.
The essay also neglects what is possibly the largest part of a solution: systems to guarantee authenticity of users and user claims...
A social media user shouldn't have to wonder if the brain surgeon giving them medical tips actually is a high school dropout, or the fellow Parisian sounding the alarm on French politics actually is a 12 year old Quebecer, or the new fan DM'ing them about their music actually is the same psychopath who online-stalked them two years ago, etc.
Social media isn't going to die. It badly needs a mechanism for users to filter out bad information.
Social media hasn't been social for a while. Personal posts from people I know are buried under the algorithms. It's a high friction action to actually find my friends. All the defaults are pointed at optimized content from generic sources. I have many friends that are artists and musicians. I follow them on these platforms and my engagement with them is captured and funneled into garbage content about art and music instead of letting my see my friends. I hate it.
HN is the same echo chamber though. This same topic posted here every single week from random blogs to The Guardian, everyone posts their anecdotes, group hug, taps on the back and back to nothing. Rinse and repeat next week. You could just copy paste the top comments from the previous posts if you want some free karma.
eh, I'd say monetization/gamification was the issue.
bet a social media without likes, organized in circles, would be way less toxic.
Without advertising you would have to pay for it. But that would not sufficiently deter bad actors. What you need is culture to repel and moderation to exclude them.
circles cover moderation's need.
of course sustainability of the whole thing is questionable
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More regulation and mandatory cool-downs to whatever is called “social media” because AI slop and bot-girls? Sounds reasonable /s
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. ...
I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.
Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.
What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care.
No one goes to the beach anymore—there are too many people there.
Yeah, I think that's also why it's an odd argument to me. If the users spend all the attention on your platform anyway, is it really dead?