> [TikTok]'s addiction-based advertising machine is probably close to the theoretical maximum of how many advertisements one can pour down somebody’s throat.
Well put. It's interesting that we pivoted in my adult lifetime from:
1. Myspace's emphasis on sharing things on your own webpage, essentially a hosted blog
2. Facebook's evolution from "hosted blog" to "friend update aggregator" to "chat client" to "friend update & ad aggregator"
3. Instagram's callback to simple update sharing (with pictures) and a chronological ad-free news feed
4. Snap's emphemeral sharing
5. Facebook's slow agglomeration and bastardization of all of the features that made Instagram and Snap distinct.
6. TikTok's addictive advertising machine that barely includes any friend connections at all.
Initially I was concerned that this would mean the death of real social media, just like the article initially suggests. But I really like the conclusion the article ultimately comes to: we basically don't have social media right now, we have advertising engines masquerading as social media. Better that Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat show their true colors and become disgusting advertising machines just like TikTok.
If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet. microblog seems promising, but I think even mastodon could provide the experience I'm looking for.
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet.
I don't have as much hope for such a thing. To me, this trend is also a reflection of perhaps the societal devaluing of IRL social connections.
In a world where encountering "new people" was novel, and typically done only In Real Life, maintaining that connection using an online component had value. You may not encounter that person again, and good connections are rare, so you want to keep in touch. However, over time, the internet has made it trivial to encounter new people, even if the encounters themselves are more trivial than the previous In Real Life meetings were. Perhaps there was a two-way conversation before. Well now, you just read their tweets or watch their videos and click a button to follow.
Tracking real-life encounters isn't as valuable as it once was, especially when you can find an online substitute who is actively creating "content" to keep you engaged.
The newer connections are also way more transactional than they used to be. Just about everyone is selling something or trying to use their channels to promote themselves somehow.
I think there's an interesting overall trend in here between the fall of social networks and societal devaluing of real life connections (as well as a trend of them being more transactional), but I'm not an academic, so these are all just hunches.
This isn’t fundamentally different than urbanization. And this has been bemoaned as far back as we have history.
I’m older. I used PCs without modems. I didn’t have access to the internet until I was 15, and I was ahead of the curve. So I didn’t grow up with social media. But I was a heavy user. Now this an a relatively anonymous Twitter account are all I have left. Every time one evolves past me being able to have conversations, I move on.
But through all of that, nothing has really changed. I have my handful of friends. I have the restaurants where they know my order when I walk in. My kids still play with the neighbor 2 doors down.
In urban settings where people are swarmed by other people, they form little communities. The dynamic isn’t much different than a small town. There’s just irrelevant people moving around and through it.
That all said, I’m thinking about moving to “the sticks.” So maybe that’s just my family and I maintaining an old world view I’m attracted to.
I lived very briefly in Manhattan near Lincoln Center. There was a bar about three blocks from the apartment that was very pleasant, and it was 90% always the same people from the neighborhood. We all knew each other. It was weird being in this city of about six million (at that time) and still have this very small conclave (forty people?) that frequented this one bar.
Personally I've just stopped using social media because there's no reason to have the type of reach it gives you unless you're, well, advertising (whether that's yourself and/or personal brand, a product, a political position, etc.). However, even though rare, every once in a few years I really do need to reach out to someone I don't regularly talk to digitally or get in touch with someone I was much more connected to previously. I think there's truly a place for a hyper pared down "global phone book" type of application.
In terms of real connections: I prefer to share things that matter in my life directly with people who care to hear about it. And, notably it has advantages you lose on social platforms like being able to read the room, having a pretense of trust and assumption of goodwill and intent, synchronous engagement that makes true debate possible, and most importantly speech is not regulated. You can have a beer and speak your mind amongst real friends.
In my opinion, it's not real connections that are being devalued, it's needing to uphold the illusion that you have 1600 of them that is tiring and obnoxious (and simply not possible). Where I think you're onto something is that I'd say it's less important that real connections start IRL. It's perfectly normal to meet someone online and become close, possibly eventually turning into an IRL friendship, too. So I agree that it's less important to maintain "friendships" in the way that those of us who had FB in HS thought was going to matter in a social media world. But I don't agree that that means "real" connections are being devalued. Most people are just fine with ~10 real good friends and some family here and there.
>I think there's truly a place for a hyper pared down "global phone book" type of application.
We have this: Facebook. At least that's what I use it for. I keep a list of most of my friends there, and use it to chat with many of them, including video chat. I don't post anything, ever, and almost never look at anyone else's posts. It's just a glorified "friend phone book and chat app".
I don't have a problem with people using Facebook this way -- that's cool if it fills this function for you!
It is unfortunate though that as "a glorified phone book" Facebook engages in so many practices that are creepy and intrusive. I think that if Facebook did just provide phonebook-like functionality I would be so interested in using it. Instead, it feels more like an application(s) built to serve ads that happens to provide some phonebook functionality.
But, ultimately Meta's business model won't change for users like me -- and I don't blame them. And they don't necessarily need to change because although everyone seems to dislike the practices they engage in, nobody really quits Facebook.
IMO there is little value in actually quitting facebook.
If you aren't using their apps and block their embeds on third-party sites it just sits there and allows you to be what our parents described as a global phone book.
I deleted everything I uploaded, unfollowed everyone, locked it down and made a backup. Most of their indeed very creepy practices are optional.
edit: this is also probably a good learning for other services: have a working non obstrusive mode to retain almost-off users.
>I think that if Facebook did just provide phonebook-like functionality I would be so interested in using it. Instead, it feels more like an application(s) built to serve ads that happens to provide some phonebook functionality.
For me, this is exactly how it works. I never see any ads.
Sure, that's how I use it too. I'm saying it would be nice to have an application that's just that without all the other abusive BS. I think everyone could get onboard that train. Right now FB doesn't fully work because a non-trivial portion of people I know refuse to use FB anymore. That's great! But something needs to fill the "global phonebook" void. I'd pay $3 a month to have my name in a global phonebook and in return get access to one with the sole feature of being able to make my own list and govern who is allowed to see certain fields. Maybe I should just put my details in DNS...
But by participating in Facebook (even just leaving your account there!) you contribute to the network effect and make Facebook seem more useful to others.
This helps Facebook snare other, less tech-savvy individuals in their dark patterns of ads and engagement. I don't it goes without saying that people who spend too much time on Facebook these days suffer psychologically for it.
I know that for you it's just a "friend phone book and chat app" but for others it's basically a casino. Consider deleting your account and keeping in touch with your friends via other mediums (email, text, letters, and phone calls go a long way!) instead, for the good of the community at large.
>But by participating in Facebook (even just leaving your account there!) you contribute to the network effect and make Facebook seem more useful to others. This helps Facebook snare other, less tech-savvy individuals
That sucks, but there's no better alternative just yet.
>Consider deleting your account and keeping in touch with your friends via other mediums (email, text, letters, and phone calls go a long way!)
Ok, I've considered it. No. It's stupid. Phone calls are horrifically expensive and don't have video, and letters cost a fortune to send across oceans. If you want to be a Luddite, go ahead.
This is probably the reason I was trying to limit my friend count to the very minimal figure (a little over 100), as I wanted to share my story to those who cared to listen to it. Though since Facebook started to deploy Discovery Engine, I have decided to stop using it (Deactivate the main account, leave Messenger available for contacts). I wanted to be more "connected", not having them scattered.
There are actual close friends, and then there are people you know or care about to some degree. Dunbar's number (somewhere between 100 and 250) describes the latter.
That may include extended family, neighbors, coworkers, your acquaintances from hobbies/bar/church/whatever. They're not all close friends or immediate family, but still people that you sometimes interact with, and might want to contact.
Not really care for, but the number of relationships you can keep track of:
"By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships."
I wouldn't say that the figure of Facebook friends is an indication of number of people I really cared. I do care some of them (sometimes sending wishes for them), but a majority of them are either my classmate in high school, a junior in university, a (former) co-worker, or someone whom I met in social gathering that shared common interests and wanted to hear/talk with them. It's like the use of Facebook as a directory since everyone has one.
Conversely, there are plenty of friends whom I know personally, but did not connect via Facebook (we use IM for that). This may probably be counted towards the close friends I really cared for; only few (no more than 10) people fits this criteria of mine.
At the time I deleted my Facebook account, I had a total of twenty friends. And all of them were people from where I moved away from, or people that moved away from me.
Family, and local friends, I did not friend on Facebook, because I was going to see you anyway.
My mom asked why I wouldn't 'friend' her, and I responded that I talked to her on the phone for 60-90 minutes every single weekend. Without fail. Plus, I used to snail mail her printed photos on a regular basis.
When she died, I found two boxes crammed with every photo I ever sent her.
I had a difficult time trying to understand your writing, but in the end it seems that you’re actually proving the point of the person that you’re disagreeing with? Your example of having 1600 friends and then most people being content with ~10 friends is exactly what the commenter meant with devaluing social connections.
I dunno, it made sense to me. The simplified thesis (perhaps with my own slight spin on it) is that a huge number of connections never really existed, and what's observed as a devaluation of things with inherent value is really more like a realization that the things in question had little to no real value, and a calculus that does assign them great value (without significantly diluting the word "friend") is flawed.
> The newer connections are also way more transactional than they used to be. Just about everyone is selling something or trying to use their channels to promote themselves somehow.
Boy is this off-putting. Even amateur athletes and nobodies in hobbies I follow on Instagram are pimping anything and everything. I can't hate someone for trying to make a buck, especially as full-time athletes in non-lucrative sports, but it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But not as bad as the taste of protein from anywhere other than Mega Protein Source! Use code THISSHTSUX for 10% off of your next purchase!
Instagram has spiraled down a hole with the introduction of reels.
I was an early adopter of Instagram, and where it has headed, sucks.
I deleted my Facebook account pre-COVID, and I don't miss it at all. And my Instagram account is next. It brings me no joy anymore. It has not for several months now.
My only online 'social' activity now doesn't involve any IRL friends at all. About three or four really pleasant Reddit groups that actually help people learning new skills, or trading ideas they have tried. So little snark, it is refreshing as can be.
For me it seems that social media services encourage people to build huge social networks with people you barely know. I visit facebook, it suggests me to add to friends some people I worked with 15 years ago and barely talked to back then, but it detected that we had many common friends and assumes that I want to connect to those people.
Well, I don't. I don't care about them.
But I guess that most people do connect. When I inspect other people profiles, they might have 100 or even more "friends". I have may be 5 friends in my life and may be 20 people I barely know.
The solution is simple. Social network services should develop algorithms to reduce that clutter. Unfriend everyone, keep only those that you actively engage with often. People should keep their social circles small by default and social network services must encourage this behaviour. This is natural for human. Yes, I guess some people do have 100 friends in their real life, but that must be a rare exception.
Just because I know that guy name and he was introduced to me 10 years ago, does not mean that I want to have any connection to that guy in facebook. If facebook knows that we have friends in common, very well, present me that information when I stumble upon this guy. Like I saw his comment in some public community and next to his name add "1 common friend". But don't push that information to me without reason.
May be we should get rid of this "friends" feature at all. Just add ability to follow someone and that's about it. It must be asymmetrical and there must not be a way for someone to know whether am I following him or not. And, I'll repeat it again, never do not suggest me who I should follow. I'll find out it myself.
I think that messengers like telegram are winning because they follow this model. Telegram never asked me to add a "friend". I naturally have some chats that I'm interested with and that's better way to communicate.
Look at monica crm https://github.com/monicahq/monica. I've yet to offer to start hosting it for people, but that could be a neat conversation piece for changing the tides there.
I think the GP’s point was that social relationships are increasingly becoming irrelevant to people. Having a personal relationship CRM seems cool, but this shift in society is happening not for lack of good social tools.
In my view this shift is happening because of social media. The social media short cut to having friends turned out to not really work, and now people are trying to figure out how to have friends again. It's the same with dating.
Is it because it's impossible to maintain meaningful relationships over the internet? My experience in the online forum and gaming communities implies otherwise -- some of my most meaningful friendships started (and continue) in those communities.
I suspect, instead, that it didn't work because Facebook murdered it. They abused dark patterns, injected ads, suggested content, radicalized grandmothers, and hacked engagement to the point where relationships didn't just stagnate, they withered and died because they were hidden and forgotten.
I have a lot of chats and friends in Telegram, and it's very easy to maintain those chats over time because I have a chronological feed of interactions right in the app. Facebook hid and diluted an entire medium, their original focus, "posts from friends" in favor of content they thought you might engage with more. Facebook chat exists, sure, but app invite spam diluted that to hell just the same, so it doesn't have the same chronological list of meaningful conversations that I have in Telegram. And notification spam diluted the meaning of any new developments on Facebook -- comment replies, messages, whatever.
And now, Facebook pushes videos, "TV", reels, stories, and god only knows what else instead of just letting me see posts from my friends and family. I think it's fair to say that online social relationships can work... they just don't work in a hostile environment. It's kind of like maintaining your friendships only in the middle of Times Square, surrounded by ads, tourists, and costumed performers trying to scam you out of $20 for a picture. Not impossible, but eventually you'll get tired of it.
Yeah, it seems like people are doubling down on a losing strategy. The real solution is usually involves going outside your front door and meet people. The same is true with dating.
Over the last 25 years, all but one of the people I've dated, have been people I met online, including the mother of my son. Most of them have been people who I'd never have crossed paths with if it wasn't for meeting them online.
Under no circumstance do I want to go back to the horror of relying on meeting people offline, without being able to quickly filter out people I'm not compatible with first.
I don't think most people actually get to know like minded individuals on social media. They just flock together on specific topics and don't associate where they disagree. When you meet people in the real world, chances are you are unlike in some ways by default. People just don't express their differences in superficial context. You don't find the differences unless you ask and listen. At least that's been my experience meeting people.
I wonder where the split is, and for what demographics this is/isn't true for. It's been true for at least a few years for my (small) circle and I.
I also wonder if this is a (temporary) side effect of larger societal issues. It certainly feels like all of my old relationships are trending towards hyperpolitical interactions (even ones where we agree on most topics) and/or transactional/performative obligations. In the city I live in now, I've yet to meet anyone that feels like a decent enough human being to even want to be friends with. Maybe the problem is me, or widespread cynicism, or people concerned with bigger issues than just friendships. I don't know, but I don't really see any reason to put effort into making and tending friendships (especially IRL friendships) anymore. I'd much rather have relationships where I can come and go as I want or have time (online groups, meetups, hobbies, being friendly to strangers, etc) without worrying about all the added context of "are we friends?" and everything that entails.
My wife and I are in our mid-30’s and have a young child. Both of those transitions have led to the depreciation of some old friendships and the blossoming of new ones. Life is too full to be social to the same extent as when we were younger, but the friendships we have now (though fewer) are stronger in some important ways and more diverse in age, ethnic background, etc and so on.
I would say add that we tend to hang with people that engage in active hobbies and probably consume somewhat less media than average. But maybe I’m just reasoning backwards there…
Aside: if you happen to live in Minneapolis - I’d be happy to buy you a coffee sometime.
The risk of focusing on more transient relationships is that in the long run you won't reap the benefits of compounding interest, which is arguably where all the best stuff in life comes from: https://nav.al/long-term
An interesting concept, but towards the end they chop the very foundation right out from under their argument with a brief rant about socialists with guns and knives wanting pie.
Someone who is antisocial, and just in it for their own profit would say exactly that, and that's exactly the type of person you don't want long-term relationships with.
I was looking into using this recently, but the project seems to be somewhat stalled. It’s gone from regular monthly releases, up to February this year, to nothing for months, not a good sign for something I’m considering adopting to maintain an important part of my life.
Between this and some syncing issues that didn’t yet have fixes, I dropped it before putting in the effort to get fully on board and I still need to find a replacement.
Stalled or relatively stable? If the software changed out from under you every single day with daily updates, would that make it more worthy of considering adopting for long-term use? Or would you still think it was not a good sign because you hadn't gotten an update in the last few hours? If they did hourly releases, would you still look askance at it because it had been 6 minutes since the last release?
People's ideas of update cadence are interesting. I find it really odd that people want to have to run frequent updates and want to use unstable software for the important things nowadays. For important things, I prefer stuff that'll still run and work the same in 20 years.
I think having a regular scheduled monthly update to a PHP web application with a web based UI as well as using WebDAV features intended to synchronise with an array of third party (often proprietary) software that you probably have exposed on the internet… isn’t that weird. You want to make sure you keep up with security updates and have a chance to regularly incorporate contributions from an active community of users.
A contributing factor to the “stalled” impression was that the original team/developers had publicly announced a new product March 2022… the exact same month that regular updates stopped.
> I don't have as much hope for such a thing. To me, this trend is also a reflection of perhaps the societal devaluing of IRL social connections.
I see it instead as a recalibration of traditional social interaction. We didn't used to be obsessed with the lives of 500 loosely related people. We cared very narrowly about our immediate friends and families. Occasionally someone would mention a funny anecdote about a friend of a friend. Without social media we go back to our evolutionary default. I've already embraced this way of living again and it's wonderful.
I think it might just be that that’s not needed anymore.
The social networks of the past were useful as a way to keep in touch with people. MySpace, early Facebook, and the countless others from back then. Now everyone’s online 24/7, and accessible on multiple services all at the same time, all the time. You don’t need social networks to keep in touch with anyone anymore, their original raison d'être is gone.
What’s sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and whatnot. People want their bubbles. We’re all here on HN for that exact purpose.
> People want their bubbles. We’re all here on HN for that exact purpose.
100% disagree. I'm here to find ideas I disagree with and tell people how they're wrong. I'm not looking for an agreeable experience here. I'm also here to learn about new tech.
I 100% disagree with your idea that you, or anyone for that matter, is just here to disagree with other people’s ideas. Nobody disagrees with stuff just for the sake of disagreement. Who would do such a thing?
Don’t bother answering that question though because you’d be wrong.
> I 100% disagree with your idea that you, or anyone for that matter, is just here to disagree with other people’s ideas. Nobody disagrees with stuff just for the sake of disagreement. Who would do such a thing?
Bubbles don't need to be harmful. HN is a bubble. There are ideas that are not allowed here. There are other ideas that are explicitly promoted. This is the value proposition of HN. You are free to go elsewhere to get other perspectives or interactions. This is as it should be.
You can't use any title you want, for example, they will regularly edit the title and thus effectively change the general meaning of the submission as read by most folks who just skim titles. Which has the knock on effect of making the post less (or more) desirable for users to read/upvote.
For example titles starting with "How I ..." are auto stripped to "I ..." there are quite a few other similar auto editorial changes.
There is no way round this that I know of, so those parts of an idea are non-negotiable and not re-workable.
I have seen instances where this practice completely ruins an otherwise excellent submission that would have been #1 on HN in days of old.
I'm not convinced the title rules on HN are having a major impact on which stories get upvotes on a frequent basis, but that's just my intuition and you may be massively right.
In which case I urge you to, when you see an example where you think the policy has indeed had a negative effect (which I'd also suggest isn't quite as basic as "did it lower the expected number of upvotes" but also "and not because it removed clickbait from the title"), either comment mentioning dang's name and saying why you feel that, or send him an email to the same effect (hn@ycombinator.com)
Not only have I often seen him engage in discussion and be open to changes for a submission when people felt a title shouldn't exactly fit HN's usual rules, but I'd also expect him to be open to changing the rules themselves if your feedback leads to his agreeing that there's a trend of submissions having the meaning of their title unfairly changed due to the generally good rules.
All that said, it's not really an example of a "HN bubble", nor of an "idea" that isn't allowed on HN.
But have you considered the countless lives that were lost due to bugs from memory-unsafe languages over the past ~70 years? A murder-for-hire app in Rust would still cost us less lives overall, if it increases the popularity and adoption of memory-safe languages elsewhere. It's a just cause, one could say.
I, for one, am very happy with how the assassination story of Rust is coming along!
I think it would actually probably hit the top spot if it was a legitimate attempt that used crypto, E2E, provable security, maybe TOR. There's only one example in history AFAIK and it only lasted a short while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
I’m not sure there are ideas that aren’t allowed so much as the way you speak, structure, and present them. I’ve tested many different ideas on topics here and some have received far more positive feedback than I’d imagine and some have been buried too.
I think so long as you follow guidelines generally and don’t outright attack individuals then you’re mainly ok. The community might downvote your idea to invisible but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t allowed - just that not enough people thought it was good. That’s fair.
No it doesn't. The rules can be based around the effort, structure, and tone of your comments. Not the ideas expressed within them. I think the only "idea" not allowed is asking for violence and I've even seen those allowed.
Politics as a subject is strongly discraged on HN.
It isn’t about Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian ideas it’s about their red button talking points. So you can discuss say taxes or abortion as long as you don't bring politics into it or get repetitive.
What most often confuses people is you can get heavily downvoted or upvoted for expressing the same idea depending on who shows up to a given discussion about say Nuclear power, Bitcoin, etc.
No I can't, because my account would get banned. Probably under the pretext of the stated rule, "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes."
Those seem to be based around the relationship of the comment to the post it is in rather than any specific idea in the comment itself. As if any comment flagged for those reasons could have the same idea expressed in a relevant post and not be flagged.
@dang has been explicit that they deem certain topics “inherent flame wars” and ban discussion because it upsets people.
Certain ideas aren’t allowed here — even when calmly stated and cited with evidence.
For example, citing the clip of the BLM founder saying she’s a “trained Marxist” would get you banned: HN was in flat out denial, even though it was her own words on film [1]. She is literally answering a question about the ideology behind BLM.
Unfortunately, that kind of censorship enabled BLM to commit the fraud they did [2].
What's hilarious is that this is still up three hours after posting with not even a reply. So much for censorship. You're totally allowed to post that here, even while conflating one charity with a continent-wide protest movement, one leader's out of context quote with the goals of that movement, and one enforcement action by Amazon Smile with an accusation of "fraud".
It was flagged and dead almost immediately then zmgsabst made another post [1] linking to the dead post and someone vouched for the dead post you see here.
Again, ignoring and censoring aren't the same thing.
Part of the reason I come to HN is that I know there are entire classes of content and ideas that I will not be exposed to at all so I don't have to waste brain cycles on sorting them.
If I wanted to provide a similar experience, targeting a different narrative, and then worked to create my own safe platform, would you disagree with that?
"Ignoring" is just choice. And that concept can either promote or extinguish fair and free communication.
I assume you and I share similar political beliefs. Call it censorship, or call it "choice", it ia clear today not all people have fair and free access.
If the government uses its power to extinguish speech (or to burden channels through unfair promotion of counter ideas), then that is censorship. And that is a problem we should all want to fix.
The "trained Marxist" phrase is so strange to me - how does one become 'trained' in Marxism? Trained in guerilla warfare, perhaps. But to be trained in Marxism has the same meaning as being "trained in Platonism" or "trained in Hayekism". The other answers she gave in the interview also indicate to me that she doesn't really know what she's talking about, and is using this language either as a LARP to claim some theoretical legitimacy or basis, or as a way to attract on-the-fence old school Marxists.
At no point did any of this 'trained Marxism' show other than in a small handful of the organization's goals, generally the most neglected ones.
To add to that, stating the fact that one of the tech titans of today, Bill Gates, was in cahoots with a convicted pedophile is either met with "this is just hearsay!" or "you're jumping to conclusions", when it's not ignored and down-voted altogether.
Even more important (not that many of us receiving our wages and dividends from probably pedophiles isn't important), the strong connection between Silicon Valley of days past, and, most importantly, from today, with the Military and Security Complex is also shunned.
> the strong connection between Silicon Valley of days past, and, most importantly, from today, with the Military and Security Complex is also shunned.
Whole valley at one time was off limits to anyone from the Soviet Block.
And of course that The Economist just published this article in their latest issue: "After a long break-up, Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex are getting back together" [1] . Maybe I should submit it as a dedicated post.
Honestly I have no interest in discussing politics. It’s the social media of conversation.
I prefer to talk to people about what interests them. Sometimes it is interesting. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I agree with them. Sometimes I don’t. With most people all four are true. I form my own opinions from there. They change frequently. I vote based on my best current mental model.
A bubble can be less about topics and more about how we communicate - if I ask about sources on HN I'll get links and pdfs in return. If I do that on reddit, I'll get insults.
HN has broad tolerance for a lot of ideas - and a lot of subgroups exist here that don't exist on other platforms. No matter what you believe, someone on HN holds a counter view and can probably give you a good debate about it.
There might be some "Three or so core values are enough" pattern being played out in relatively good success here. E.g. respond to a favorable or valliant interpretation of a post, bring in new data and information and references, leave the place better than you found it. Then maybe a few emergent rules of etiquette.
You want an audience for your disagreements and maybe to cause a rise in people (trolling). But that's not fun for the audience which is why a lot of communities become insular bubbles to keep the annoyers away.
That may be true, but I doubt you’re actually too interested in people with completely different interests. Just like utilitarians and deontologists might be interested in finding and talking with each other but not someone who is wholly uninterested in ethics as a simple example.
> You don’t need social networks to keep in touch with anyone anymore, their original raison d'être is gone.
In what sense? The underlying social motivation/interest is still present. And it's not like fundamental communications capabilities have actually changed. Chat's been around since the 90s and SMS is the new email. And social network applications grew and thrived in those situations because pull-and-scan-social-feed across multiple circles has some distinct effort-reward profiles.
I could see the argument that the algorithmic and advertising imposition eventually drive out enough of the value that people opt out, but that's a statement about the business lifecycle of a social network app, not the underlying reason people might use / like them.
Today's chat systems are far more accessible to people with minimal to no technical background. Install an app on your phone and you're good to go. Almost anyone can and does use them.
The level of technical knowledge required to connect to IRC or a BBS in the 80s was far higher, which meant that only a tiny fraction of people bothered.
One of my first childhood memories was my brother showing me a real-time chat with someone in Germany. It was 1982. The letters appeared one... by... one... on the screen. It was probably a subconscious part of why I went on to study German later.
Part of that is increased accessibility, but I think the larger part is increased technical background. If I kidnapped a computer scientist from the 1960s and locked them in a room with a smartphone (turned off), it might be a while before they posted their first meme. Now almost everyone accepts that they need to learn how to use a smartphone, while the in 80s/90s it was very possible to live life without touching a computer or mobile phone.
In any event, the fact that chat programs are different or more common now doesn't mean they didn't exist in the 80s and 90s. IRC is and was chat as much as Slack or Discord are.
The point is that today you are always online on your phone. Whatsapp, Viber or Messenger always work. No need to log onto a mainframe and type forum.
I feel that the point made is a good one. Given that we can share what we want directly via instant messengers that everyone has "turned on" all the time, value proposition of Facebook drops dramatically. Anything you want to share you can share directly and immediately get it to whoever you want to see it.
Agreed, the closest thing to filling that general keeping in touch for me is WhatsApp groups (other group chat apps are available). In my social group that's where pics get shared, things get organised and general life updates go. Groups form quite naturally along lines that mirror real life and groups fall apart and people move on as they do in real life.
Facebook had a short lived glory when we were all open with ourselves. But inevitably it wasn't long before the issues came. Someone posts a pic on a night out with some friends and another mutual friend gets upset they weren't invited. That creepy friend of a friend starts liking all your bikini pics. The nice friend of a friend starts posting attention seeking stuff that makes you like them a bit less. Family politics get aired in public.
People shared less of their lives and except for a few egotists there isn't much of that old genuine content we all loved. It's all content aggregation filler now.
Chat groups allow for keeping in touch but allows us to those groups like the 'No Homers Club'
That was exactly my assertion from couple of weeks ago [1]
In India WA does an excellent job of being that social graph. There are segregated groups of family, colleagues, collage friends and what not. Messages, memes, updates are shared on those groups. Lot of commercial transactions also take place.
So Facebook usage has dropped significantly. Of course WA is owned by FB.
Social networks aren't that important to stay connected. In countries where there's still load shedding or shitty internet, people connect via whatsapp and gmail and you'll see advertising signs and paint on buildings and even cargo ships that just contain a whatsapp number and a gmail address.
That's their form of the internet, because everything else won't even load with speeds less than 100kBit/s.
Also: Whatsapp somehow works on dumbphones. I don't know how (yet) but there's apps for KaiOS, Samsung Bada and other old phones. I wonder if vendors reverse engineered the APIs and implemented their own clients.
> Also: Whatsapp somehow works on dumbphones. I don't know how (yet) but there's apps for KaiOS, Samsung Bada and other old phones. I wonder if vendors reverse engineered the APIs and implemented their own clients.
How "dumb" are those dumbphones? I ask because since around 2002 (prior to smartphones), some phones allowed apps to be downloaded. From around 2005, most phones supported downloadable apps, written by third parties.
They were called "midlets", written in Java, and I wrote a few of them myself.
> What’s sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and whatnot.
yeah, but meeting people there isn't really meeting people. the friends you have on those aren't real friends. you can stay in touch with a friend on social media, but if your friendship is only there it's only pretend.
I like my bubbles on reddit because I have a lot of niche interests. Geography, airplanes, retro computers, 1980's toys and cartoons. Reddit is great because there are multiple subreddits for these things. It's great that after 30+ years of never meeting someone who liked maps as much as I do I can share and discuss strange maps and talk about toys from my childhood.
>What’s sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and whatnot.
None of those sites are good for that any more. All the interesting people on reddit have been banned. No one sane uses twitter. And finding people to talk to on tiktok is plain impossible.
IMHO Social Media is a toxic mutation of the capabilities offered by the Internet and is the opposite of federated, open communication. I don't consider blogs, forums, or IRC to be "Social Media". When you add the idea of followers and audience and attention seeking (both from participants and the platform) that's when you get "Social Media".
We live in the Infinite September. Scale is not conducive to valuable or fulfilling communication. Decentralization, variety, and focus are. When I want to read about motorcycles I have a forum for that. When I want to plan a vacation with the family we use email. When I have a question about a software project I get on their IRC channel. At no point is my racist uncle (or yours!) involved. This is the potential of the Internet and it is not social media.
When I want to be depressed by all the things that other people have better than me I go to Social Media. I can't think of a single fulfilling experience I ever had on Facebook or any other social media platform. It's just not possible when you put everyone in a room. It's like studying philosophy on a bus.
Social Media is by (my) definition the valueless corruption of the Internet. In that sense I am glad it is dead, I hope it stays that way. Facebook and Tik Tok are the inevitable end-state of "Social Media". There's no "good" social media and there never was. Anyone who builds a platform for "everyone" is doomed to die the death of social media.
> There's no "good" social media and there never was.
As much as I hate Facebook/Meta and everything it stands for, I got a lot of value out of Facebook and Instagram during my teenage years. I lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere, not very walkable/bikeable but also without any other kids my age to hang out nearby. My school was really small (I graduated with a class of less than 30 people) and there weren't many like-minded students.
During the 2000s, Facebook was an absolute lifeline for me. It's where I lived. It's where I met new friends. It's where I shared (cringey) posts about my passions, my interests, books and TV shows and movies and games. And my friends talked about that cringey stuff with me on Facebook, over chat and in comments.
But that was a world before Facebook killed the chronological feed, before they introduced ads in the feed (remember sidebar ads? Not enough $$$ to pay tens of thousands of engineers, I suppose), before they started "recommending" content. They were still manipulative, but they provided a valuable service.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that early-stage simple social media was useful to many people, and that's likely why late-stage social media remains popular today -- people want that core functionality. I made lifelong friends on there, just like you did on blogs, forums, and IRC. At the early stage, it wasn't about influencers and ads. Just slightly-more-than-local attention seeking.
I recently friend requested a bunch of people I went to high school with who all thought I was a weird loser and I am very excited that I am doing much better than all of them. It’s made me like my social media feed a lot more seeing the school bully who loved ICP post about how “he’s ready to find the right girl and settle down (at 35)
So I guess I use social media for the exact reason you don’t like social media. Nobody’s supposed to like that stuff, but I mean, why else would you care what everyone else is doing other than to compare status?
If you come from a wealthy background, you get the really depressing version: the school bully who loved ICP posts about how they got a new job with McKinsey, the slimy moron who used to spread shit about you is the CEO of a up-and-coming startup, and the guy who was too dumb to understand how truly dumb he was is now at a senior position in a thinktank.
A more positive one would be those people actually got better at their skills and improved as people. I'd like to think I'm a better person than I was in high school.
But if you're constantly exposed to their social feeds, you would have the data and probably know better. :)
I guess from plain statistics, you could say that the number of talented people from wealthy backgrounds is roughly the same as talented people generally, so my feeling is that there is a sizable slice of jobs where you just secure rents through connections and you don't actually need to be talented.
From my observations, some industries (film, for instance) will give people a chance, then get rid of them if they don't work out - so a lot of people I vaguely knew had very brief acting careers.
Other companies seem to trundle along with really dysfunctional leadership, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, I suspect it's because the explicit aim of the company (say, mining) is not what the company is actually doing (say, some kind of rent extraction) so it doesn't matter that the CEO has no skills to speak of.
Also, when you know the people, and you see like an interview they've given, you can usually tell if they're bullshitting.
I mean I don’t actually revel in it, I was being a bit cheeky. I just wanted to reconnect with high school people during Covid so I friend requested a ton of people.
It’s sad seeing a guy who was in the “gifted and talented program” with me is apparently now a janitor who posts pictures every day about what concert or sports game he’s at and he’s always alone. I was excited for him because he took a picture with a woman and I thought he’d met someone but it turned out to be his sister.
I suspect that that what really ate up personal social networking was very simple: private group messaging finally got good enough.
15 years ago, we’d lost touch with old friends and acquaintances because there are a ton of people in our lives that mean something to us but that don’t warrant much 1-to-1 contact through phone calls or messaging.
Myspace and early Facebook reinvigorated those relationships with relaxed, casual networked update blasts, but then iMessage, What’s App, were able to make the same connections more private, more personally shaped, and more collaborative.
So social networks drifted towards public feeds and commercialized feeds, which is what TikTok — as a well-funded latecomer — had the luxury of aiming for directly.
I completely agree. In my view group chats on apps like WhatsApp much more accurately mirror how humans actually communicate in real life. That is to say it's more like a spontaneous conversation rather than social media which is more like a narcissistic advertising board for your life.
My dad frequently shares jokes in real life, some of them I've heard more than once during all these years. When I was younger, late teens, early 20s, I thought them cumbersome, "come on, dad! you've told me that joke countless times", now, when I'm in early 40s, I cherish those retellings of jokes.
> When I was younger, late teens, early 20s, I thought them cumbersome, "come on, dad! you've told me that joke countless times", now, when I'm in early 40s, I cherish those retellings of jokes.
Reminds me of:
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.
Yep. I think it is useful to have a list of people you know incase you ever need to connect them, which is basically Facebook Messenger.
The blasting life updates at everyone know ever knew part of it though is just so unnatural. It was a novelty for a while but that stage is well over now. Facebook eventually got features to allow people to be more granular about updates but they have never really pushed them.
At one point I would use Skype with friends which was terrible. Discord now though is basically everything I could ever want for group messaging.
I think it's because of a critical mass of users. I can communicate with my parents and my entire circle of friends on WhatsApp, they weren't there 10 years ago.
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media ...
It's never going to happen.
Federation is a solution to a problem no one actually cares about. Obviously "no one" here is somewhat hyperbolic but so few people actaully care about this you may as well round it to zero.
We haven't had an at-scale federated network since POTS (and, by extension, SMS). That's a historical artifact. And look at all the problems POTS/SMS has with spam, caller impersonation, robocalls, etc. Now part of that is due to these being open addressable networks rather than the opt-in networking that has become dominant now.
But to say that's th eonly reason would be to miss the point that any federated systems will always have bad actors.
In the 2000s we had XMPP as an effort to make IM services interoperable. Remember how Google got flak for removing the ability to talk to non-Google services? That was mostly misplaced because the reason it was removed was that Microsoft allowed its IM users to talk to Google Chat but not the reverse.
Spam exists on POTS/SMS largely because smaller exchanges "launder" bad traffic with good traffic (and charge higher rates for it) to make it harder to filter or even identify who the bad actors are.
As for open? There's really no incentive for this except from the "losers" (in the market).
> Federation is a solution to a problem no one actually cares about. Obviously "no one" here is somewhat hyperbolic but so few people actaully care about this you may as well round it to zero.
I think this conflates two things: the number of people who are familiar with a problem as a discussion topic (yes, that’s very niche in this case), and the number of people who are affected by a problem and might be receptive to a solution to it if one was available and understandable to them.
Didn’t have time to read other comments, but based on anecdotal experience I’d say the interpersonal connections have migrated into the private corners of chat via WhatsApp, Meta apps’ chat, or snap (highly dependent on age and location).
I’d add on to the idea of social media is over by saying the age of social networking in public is going through a rethink (or is just over for a while).
And as much as one wants to take it as a turn towards the networks becoming an ad machine and blame it on networks themselves, I’d also say it’s a human thing. The moment a platform gains escape velocity and starts growing, we immediately see the influencers, hustlers, and businesses approach it with a “grow your brand and audience” mentality. This eventually skews the network towards serving them because they actually bring money and shortly after, tadaaaa. It’s an ad machine laid on top of a content network rather than a social network.
Chats don’t suffer from this so in my experience, that’s where “social” networks are going for now. I’ll hold my breath on federated networks being the next step.
Personally I've migrated from sharing things with friends and family on Facebook/Instagram, to a few group chats where friends and family share photos, life moments, etc.
Somewhere along the line Facebook and Instagram made me feel like my personal photos and updates were competing against ads and other more engaging content in people's feeds, and I felt like I wasn't communicating with the people that I was on those platforms to communicate with in the first place.
Judging by the increase in messages I get through more private channels with casual update content, I don't feel alone.
I would be curious if others have had similar experiences.
I think the market simply came to the conclusion that "real social media" (friend-centric) was not a thing that many people needed or wanted. People moved friend-to-friend communication to private messaging apps: FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Signal, Discord, etc. and that space is very alive and well.
There is no great unfulfilled demand for a version of that which is also semi-public because then you get your public and private spheres mixed up. Younger users appear to have looked at the mistakes of older users and figured out that this is not the right move - they know that Tiktok/IG/etc. is fake and not friend based, the fakeness is sort of the point, they're there to watch the 2022 version of TV, and participate in a popularity contest and stroke the ego/receive affirmation from a Like count.
This internet kid of 90s fever dream of an internet thats free and federated is just not gona happen. All evidence we have so far suggests that the scale at which internet is at, the larges opportunities will be in solving for the "non-technical" user. In my view this non technical user now understands that if something is free then that means ads. Thus the next age of social media should be about exploring what business models can work that align themselves with user's own interests.
what about Wikipedia? Maybe it's the exception that proves the rule. But as far as I can tell, no online knowledge store has come close to the comprehensiveness and cultural cache of Wikipedia. And it's not showing ads constantly, it relies on donations entirely.
I remain hopeful that a federated social media service that offloads the hosting costs to passionate individuals (with modest ad support to keep the lights on) could survive just fine without venture capital or advertising creep. Think: WoW servers, AKA "blessed" federation.
Venture capital-driven business models will never align with my interest of keeping in touch with friends and family. The desire for profit and revenue growth (what us filthy plebeians call "greed") is simply too strong.
Here are some trends that could drive a fundamental shift in social media:
1) Trust is the scarcest element in social media today. Any social media company that is built on advertising will never have the trust of a subscription-based social media company. Companies that address scarcity tend to be successful.
2) What's no longer scarce: the underpinning technologies of social media: capturing and displaying photos and videos on multiple types of devices, recommending new social connections and posts. What was cutting-edge in 2004 is now well-known.
3) Meanwhile, users are getting increasing used to paying for subscriptions: app stores, streaming services, SaaS applications, cloud services, etc.
4) Connecting socially with others is a basic human need. This only increases as some kinds of jobs can be done from anywhere, and friends relocate far away.
5) As Facebook/Meta and others pursue the novelty-driven user experience of TikTok -- "show me what's interesting from people I don't know" -- it creates room for companies that want to get back to meeting the need for keeping in touch with friends and family, even when remote.
6) Large tech fortunes have created a donor class focused on legacy, not profit. Example: MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos. Or Craig Newmark, of Craigslist.
--
Put all these together, and it seems like new social media companies could be created along the following lines:
1) Mission-focused. Focus on social connection first, not whatever drives the most revenue. In other words, don't get pulled into the latest fads, as Facebook is doing with TikTok.
2) Subscription business model. This eliminates the conflicts of interest that drives Facebook's trust-eroding privacy practices. Again -- trust is the scarcest element.
3) Subscriber-owned business. Each subscriber owns a portion of the company, and thus the company has a fiduciary, legal obligation to protect their interests. This is similar to what Vanguard does -- investors each own a portion of the company -- which forces Vanguard to act in their interests. It's the opposite of Facebook/Meta's ownership structure, where Mark Zuckerberg controls 90% of class B shares, giving him control over the company. [1]
4) To fix the cold-start problem [2] inherent in building a business with network effects, make the service free until it gets to a critical mass of subscribers. We can debate if critical mass is 10 million users, 100M, 1B, or some other measure. But be transparent about the threshold, and the subscription price once its hit. Speaking of price...
5) Keep entry level prices low to be point of being negligible for the vast majority of users. Maybe one dollar a month. Whatever it is, keep it lower than most other subscription services in order to encourage adoption, but not to shift back to the problematic ad-driven model.
6) A very low subscription price, at scale, can fund innovation. 100M users at $1/month is $1.2 billion per year. That's enough to pay cloud infrastructure and the engineers to build and run apps. Back-of-the-envelope path: suppose for argument's sake that half of that, $600M, goes towards cloud service providers. That's approaching the $1B/year that Netflix spends. The other $600M could fund 2000 engineers at $300k/year/engineer. That's enough to build a great deal of capabilities and bring them to emerging platforms (like AR glasses, cars, IoT/smart home...).
7) A business like this probably might not attract traditional venture capital funding. Even if every one of Facebook's 3 billion users all switched to this business and paid 1 USD/month, that would be $36B per year. That's well short of Facebook's $120B/year [5]. Who might fund it? A set of mission-driven investors, who wants their legacy to include a trusted, self-sustaining organization that socially connects the world. Craig Newmark could be one such investor (at least advisor), having built one such Internet institution (Craigslist) that facilitates community and commerce in an economically-sustaining manner. But there could be many other investors as well. Again, the technologic acumen and capital required aren't what's scarce; trust is.
I suspect there's a lot more subversive ad content on TikTok -- influencers who are paid or gifted by advertisers to namedrop or show a product in a post that TikTok recommends to millions. The "ad" label feels inherently dirty, and people tend to tune out. But if an influencer sips a coke in a video, without even an explicit mention of the brand, I'm sure a lot of people start craving coke.
I'm sure subversive ads happen, but in my experience people are pretty straightforward about marking posts as paid.
Then, there's also a lot of small and medium sized manufacturers/artists where their whole channel is showing off their stuff. Kind of ad-like, but quality tends to be good and it doesn't feel sneaky like subtle product placement. Ex. there's a chinese factory that manufactures polycarbonate dome houses, they'll post montages of their domes, nicely decorated in beautiful locations. I think the product is cool, so I intentionally follow and consume their 'ad' content.
I've seen people claim that they show a variable amount of ads depending on the user, which I imagine would be based on your clickthrough rate or other metrics. The ratio between ads and content also seems to vary over time for me so I feel there's some form of optimization happening
I think Mastodon or the other Fediverse projects do provide all we need, but the problems with getting there are awareness, intransigence, and excitement which the advertising networks provide. Most people are unaware of this free alternative because it doesn't advertise itself. Effort to change and migrate is too much for many people. Entertainment creation does not provide much if any revenue on free platforms.
So we have this divide of advertising products and the rest of us who do not participate in advertising networks. The trend toward the latter is growing but slowly.
Jabber failed versus MSN Messenger and that was not because advertising.
Propietary products are usually more curated in features and stability than the free options, and those reach the market quickly. Big companies have money, free comunities do not.
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet.
Worth mentioning is Jimmy Wales' effort in this vein: https://wt.social/
Mastodon is anything but high-latency. If you missed a post in the stream of other posts it is gone forever, unless you were glued to the screen in hopes of not missing anything. I don't think it is better than Tiktok really, same basic principle of keeping people in the app.
Forums and blogs with comment sections are the only high-latency mediums, and I guess we will keep reinventing them every five years.
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet. microblog seems promising, but I think even mastodon could provide the experience I'm looking for.
might be true for people like us. the other 7 billions out there won’t care
That's OK by me. I'd very much enjoy a small community of passionate people like us. My family and friends are fed up with Facebook enough that I could probably persuade them to switch. I don't need everyone on there -- just the people I care about and respect.
Of course I think the whole world would benefit if everyone switched away from Facebook, but no need to rush anything.
You're answering your own question with your own essay on this-here social network for essays. Yeah there's no pictures, yeah there's no private messages, yeah there's very little of meeting someone and becoming friends. (And in fact, on BookFace which is for YC founders, I divine there are all those things, as options, this is the public-facing everyone's-welcome version of that. They share software.) But I have made some friends, like alisonkisk to some extent, and who else, cercatrova, and recently Cyberdog. And a few others reaching each other over email, there's some people. It's not a totally deserted wasteland, like you'd think from the purity of text. A literally Islamic degree to which it's iconoclastic, just pure text, like not even ASCII art, this is fully compatible with the most extreme forms of literalist Christianity and Islam.
I don't think too people actively use them, but some people do. I'm actually unsure how Classmates actually works --is it a subscription model, what's it's business model and could it end up morphing into the TheFB of old but subscription based? Maybe the draw of advertising money is too strong to resist.
Not just social media. Look at news sites. Evolution from news aggregator to news plus well-placed ads to now where half the page is the Outbrain ads embedment. You could see a well-written story and then scroll down your struck with cognitive dissonance wondering how reputable organizations still put the Outbrain junk at the bottom.
I'm curious how you can to this conclusion. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were always vehicles for advertisers. I suppose it was more acceptable because it was from "influencer marketing," which was taken so far that the FTC had to step in and start fining influencers for dishonest marketing.
I guess it is different than "we are interrupting your current show for this important topic," but to be honest, I think the new style of marketing is more sinister. We can expect a TV or radio station to show ads and understand it doesn't exactly reflect the thoughts of the stations. In "influencer marketing," we are led to believe that some 16 year old really knows more about the stock market and crypto than those Wall Street guys.
TV created influencer marketing. Since before social networks existed products would make appearances in shows. See Sheldon drink a coke in big bang theory, that was paid for. See someone shopping at a particular store in a mall, paid for.
At least Tiktok doesn't force me to watch their stupid ads like YouTube does. I am too lazy to install adbockers on my mobile and tablet. But the force-watching of Youtube ads is one of the worst ideas in advertising.
From my experience TikTok has nothing compared to Snapchat. Snapchat videos have so many adds I was getting too frustrated and finally vowed never to return. I don’t get that feeling with TikTok
The problem of "who pays for this?" still remains.
If it's free to the user, it has to be ad-supported (or I guess donation-driven; the Wikipedia/Guardian model, but I don't see that working so well for social media). If it's ad-supported that means the advertiser becomes the customer and the point of the thing gets subverted to maximise ad revenue.
If it's not free to the user, then we have to educate everyone that they need to pay for their social media. Not an easy task.
- host your own instance, no limits on usage because you're paying your own way, hosting your own images and content, running your own server
- use someone else's instance, they can show you whatever ads they like (though preferably in a sidebar, not integrated into your main feed) and subject you to space limitations. In a truly federated environment where users can easily switch between instances, those instances can compete based on ad and space efficiency. Some folks, like myself, might shell out for their own instance and host friends and family with no ads and ample space just to be nice.
Facebook as of 2009 was damn near "feature complete" social media. Messaging, photos, videos, comments, chronological feed. It's not that complicated. You could run the whole thing as an open source + donation based project, like Wikipedia or Mozilla. You don't need tens of thousands of engineers and venture capital that forces you to employ dark patterns and inject more and more ads and growth. Hell, I think that governments could even donate to a project like this since it's essentially a public service and (compared to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok) an investment in public mental health.
yeah, those are the options. And I agree, FB in 2009 was great.
But that's my point: companies have to keep moving, and optimising, and growing (because shareholders). If the revenue is supplied by advertisers, then they're the customers, and any optimisation is aimed to increase lock-in/revenues/etc based on their experience. The actual users get a worse experience as time goes on because their needs are secondary to the advertisers. Eventually the whole thing ends up where we are with FB: the user experience is shitty and people start leaving.
If this is really going to work properly, then we have to persuade people to pay for their social media service.
Discord is picking up steam, and doesn't seem to be relying on advertising. They're also way more explicit about making communities rather than friend networks.
The scary part is how much real interpersonal communication data they have on users and what could be done with it in the wrong hands. What is their real business model? It can't just be selling Nitro.
Discord watches what apps you launch, primarily games, and sells this data to others to determine what games to make, or what games people are playing. It’s the same purpose of all the game launchers out there that run even when you’re not playing a game from that company.
This is an interesting perspective and evolution I’d not considered before. And it makes me wonder if the trend of LinkedIn showing ever more personal and less professional content is because it’s the place people have turned to fill the void. It being the main remaining place where people have connections they are least have a somewhat passing personal acquaintance with rather than just a collection of performing strangers.
This reminds me of a video I watched the other day about how nobody asks you to "share" anymore. In the early days of social networks every site and app had front page ad copy asking you to "share". Nowadays most don't even tell you what they are because it's assumed that you already know. And even those that try to explain themselves no longer talk about "sharing".
This article filled me with hope, but I already see a danger:
A threadmill of products to "bring the world together" under different names and mottos but all sooner or later devolving into advertisement machines. Maybe next: WhatsApp, then Signal then Mastodon? For this to happen, founders just need to sell out, for example to Meta. WhatsApp already sold out but did not yet pivot.
That being said, I'm strongly considering switching to a Matrix client these days, since I like the idea of encrypted chat that works across whatever client I prefer. If you're knowledgeable in the encrypted chat space I'd love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons.
> I would desperately like Signal to have a commercial service offering you can pay for which would of offer the possibility of sustainment.
That will kill it even quicker. What does this look like? All users have to pay to have an account? Now you’ll have less users and miss out on network effects. If only some users have to pay, what do they get besides feel goods? Ad removal? They’re stuck, Signal must continue being free. So agreed, Signal has a finite lifespan
We don’t really need social media because we’ve discovered we actually hate a lot of people once we see their opinions on full display. Just stick to good content please. Most people though aren’t great content creators anyway.
A lot of people do post uninteresting, cringey, or downright embarrassing content when given the opportunity. I've done so myself plenty of times.
But I think social media brings out the worst in people right now. By constantly "recommending" content that radicalizes people into tiny niche opinions and conspiracy theories and incentivizing "sharing" links and video spam, we're amplifying the worst opinions that people have.
But I'm sure those same people have interesting thoughts too -- something as simple as a cute picture of their dog, or a nice sunset, or information about a hobby they enjoy like woodworking or bike riding. Maybe I'm just an optimist who wants to believe the best in people.
When I look at Facebook these days, I don't assume that my relatives are actually JUST hateful, conservative, xenophobic conspiracy theorists. I assume that's what Facebook brings out of them -- it's what it suggests to them, it's what it suggests to their friends, it's what they see in their feed so it's ultimately what they share and what they end up thinking about more often as a result. But it isn't who they are. I know these people: they love kayaking, and gin & tonics by the ocean, and their pets, and their kids, and fireworks, and campfires, and boating, and books, and gardening, and a million other things. But you'll never see posts about those other things on Facebook because they aren't "engaging."
Have you ever read Neil Postman's Amusing ourselves to Death? It doesn't quite hone in on the advertising engine piece of this, but I think it hits the nail right on the head about mainstream media's longtime masquerade as "news."
I think the "social" part of social networks just moved to group chats. All my friends share updates of their family events, kids' stuff etc.. over Whatsapp and Telegram. Strangers gather over topics that interest them and want to talk about it seem to have moved to discord, slack etc.
The whole "broadcast yourself to the world" part of social networks just moved to Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram etc.. I think.
Some people are moving back to anonymous communication with limited audiences.
Twitter is anonymous, but 100% public. There is no way to limit your audience to a smaller group.
FB is not anonymous and mostly public. Private groups do exist, but you still mostly need to have an actual name on your account.
TikTok & Snapchat are mostly for people who show their faces, not anonymous.
WhatsApp shows everyone everyone's phone numbers if they are in the same group, not anonymous. You can also be forcibly added to a group of hundreds of people you don't know without permission.
Telegram and Discord are more like old-school IRC was. Just a nickname and that's it, no personal info needed. (IRC did have the hostname, but some networks masked it)
Telegram uses phone numbers just as UIDs, they're not shared to anyone without your permission.
As for Discord, I've got a few accounts and have been asked for telephone numbers 0 times. It's only needed when a specific server demands it, haven't seen any yet.
If discord has too few selectors (IP, email, browser fingerprint, useragent, behavior) to identify you from or they are too generic, they will demand that you use a phone number. Low-reputation IP addresses do this especially, you'll be locked right out of an account for using one. I'd rather be able to just pay them money for an account than have to go use a VPS or residential proxy in order to avoid the phone requirement.
Unless it has changed, the phone number verification is server-based. If an admin sets the verification level to Highest you will be prompted if you attempt to join their server:
Google Circles was a good concept but I presume poorly implemented. Facebook fails outside the school/university environment because most people do not want their private social lives to be public, and the start of Facebook was limited to young people.
LinkedIn is what the adult version of a social media would be, because most people are happy to share some aspect of their professional life to the public, and professional life is usually fake and a mirage.
Aside from locking your account so that only followers can see your tweets, I’ve been offered the option to restrict the audience of tweets on twitter (although I’m not sure if that was a transient experiment or if I’ve blocked my noticing the offer of the option or if I’ve asked it to stop asking).
Lol, the reason the phone number is used as an identifier is because because it's a pain to have more than 1 or 2. It's an anti spam measure not a technology problem. You can key a database by anything unique. Icq used chronological numbers for fuck sake. Blockchain doesn't solve anything here.
It's not the ID, it's that a phone number is relatively difficult to obtain (not hard, but still a limited resource) and unique. A crypto stake / wallet / something of value on the blockchain could easily meet such a criteria if well designed.
Yes could, but why? Why when any topic comes up “Blockchain zomg!!!!111”?
I used to be real hardcore into bitcoin, around the $1-10 range. You people need to give it up already and quit annoying the rest of us by trying to force fit an insanely inefficient technology into every aspect of life.
“Preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
A development I'm quite thankful for. It's nice being able to participate to the degree expected of me by the people I actually know without being a terminally-online internet personality.
Yeah same for me. If I want to talk to someone, or share info with friends, I create a Messages group. If there’s more than a few people, then it’s a Telegram channel. If it’s work related or networking with colleagues then it’s Slack. If it’s gaming related then it’s Discord.
I look back at my Instagram and my last post was 2 years ago. All of the people that I used to see pop up, the people that would like my photos, and I would like their’s, those people seem to be gone. Friends from college, and high school have all been replaced by short videos of strangers, ads, and influencers.
I think the biggest missing piece for me is keeping up with people I know, but wouldn’t otherwise talk to (by any means listed above). It was nice to see those people pop up sometimes, but I have no way of serendipitously finding them anymore. That’s what social media was to me.
Watch Facebook/Meta ruin that as well soon. It's just to the monopoly of 1 company that we need 3 apps to communicate versus having a common protocol like email for IM
TikTok is winning because it is video first. The more immersive the media, the more profitable the ads. Facebook is having trouble pivoting it's products to video. Facebook is betting big that the next more-immersive medium after video will be VR. That's basically the whole story.
Notice I didn't use the word "algorithm" or "social"? These takes are tired and naive, TikTok isn't addictive in any operationally useful sense of the word, people just like it and use it. You may as well write a blog post saying "TV is addictive and it's dying because of commercials". It's just not an accurate conceptualization if the landscape.
While you aren't using the words "algorithm" or "social", another perspective to see is that the "medium" is not just video. It is a specific type of short, repeatable, and trivialized pieces of video content. Created by mostly individual creators in niche social networks that convey extreme feelings of pain and pleasure in an infinite feed.
TikTok is addictive in every category. People are addicted to it just like people are addicted to other mediums like books, radio, and tv. Creators are also addicted to creating for it manipulated by incentives and sponsorship opportunities. It is a borderline technological narcotic.
To be human is to be addicted to something. We are addicted to the many "wants" in our lives being sold through these 15s-3 minute videos.
> You may as well write a blog post saying "TV is addictive and it's dying because of commercials"
When the going gets tough, the tough goes shopping.
There's actually a few books on this! i.e. consumerism and advertising
Four arguments for the elimination of television by Jerry Mander
Also Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The addictive quality of entertainment is a central theme, and the book contains the memorable Samizdat videotape that’s so entertaining you watch it immobilised until you die. The Samizdat is the reduction ad absurdim of TikTok era social media addiction.
My wife deleted TikTok after a few weeks because she just couldn’t handle how addictive it was. All she wanted to do was watch TikTok. Then she started getting Shorts on YouTube now she wants to completely stop watching YouTube even if the old creators she enjoyed are still making philosophy videos and stuff, it’s just not worth it to stick around when the goal has become quite clearly to keep you hooked.
Same here. I completely blocked myself from accessing to YouTube on my smartphone and MacBook, just because of the shorts. This stuff is so addictive that I couldn't avoid it in my free time for dozens of minutes every single time I've opened youtube.
Perhaps too late for you unless you open a new account, but I seriously recomend everyone here to never ever click on a YouTube short while logged in.
YouTube will proceed to show that content down your throat and if you are like most people you will let it. It will make your experience miserable though.
There are no ads on new pipe. It just has a stupid trending tab with crap that is confusing. Ignore it, this is not your feed. Go to subscriptions which is what we used to have before tech giants convinced us otherwise with curated content.
Seriously, NewPipe is what all apps should aim to be like.
I had the same experience, but hopping over to F-Droid from the Play Store provided a different NewPipe (instead of 'Newpipe') that I believe is the pertinent one.
I think TikTok is winning because their objective algorithm optimizes for a different outcome.
Facebook and YouTube optimize for time spent on the site. Youtube famously cut ad revenue for content that is watched for fewer than 10 minutes. They both make decisions based on what will increase time spent on the site, thinking that's the best way to sell ads.
TikTok optimizes for content that people love by giving the most reach to items that commenters buy gifts for. This has the side effect of making content that consumers really connect with get paid the most. There is a big difference between what people love and what makes people spend a lot of their time.
Facebook does not optimize directly for time spent, it's too hard. I know because I worked on these algorithms. Time spent is a metric Facebook monitors and works to increase over time, but basically no work is done to increase time spent directly. Facebook also tries to give more reach to content that people like. There are whole teams of people that work on that, they are just less good at it than TT.
Tiktok optimizes for similar metrics. There's no difference there. The main difference is that they are more focused and have been doing short form video from the ground up.
Could you share what metrics they optimistize or monitor? Or how do they improve their algorithms? I don't know how much you can tell but I always wanted to hear it from someone who has worked with them
100% this. Everyone else is trying to make a tiktok clone and bolt it on to a maze of existing, and in some cases very similar, social media offerings. TikTok works because it's video only from the ground up.
they both had implementation differences and primarily execution differences that had little to do with their platform, and more so finances
its not just video, its video+algorithm, its video+algorithm+content-subsidies
a lot of popular content creators on TikTok are still from the vine days, getting paid a lot more directly by the platforms now, as well as from whatever they can monetize on and off the platform.
Bytedance (TikTok) is willing to throw a lot of money at this, and they've been extremely high on compensation for engineers for years before TikTok reached critical mass.
Phone hardware and telecommunications networks have only recently been powerful enough to support a TikTok-like social network. Video wouldn't have worked in 2015 in an era of 3G/4G phones and 4 inch iPhone 5's.
Social media cannibalized itself to death in pursuit of ad revenue via increased engagement. The harder they pushed, with content assumption algorithms, the more toxic it became. The more toxic it becomes the more it appeals to extreme personalities while alienating everyone else, a poisonous viper eating itself.
It’s only market lag between the revenue source, media source agencies, and the realization that better markets for their business. When that occurs the death spiral hyper accelerates to rapid finality.
Like all death spirals this could have been avoided had they treated their users as a potential revenue source instead of a product. I was watching a history video yesterday about the Aztecs who completely alienated the tribes in their empire in their own death spiral. The empire was already dead before the Spanish arrived, but the Aztecs just didn’t see it yet.
I genuinely believe that AB testing as practiced by every major tech company (and the incentives it creates) has caused much of this. AB testing is a really unsophisticated way of measuring extremely short-term incremental gains in isolation. That's how we've ended up with products which have gradually become so hostile to users. Because individually the changes seem like small wins, but taken together and over the long term they are deeply destructive to the core product. AB testing doesn't capture long-term changes to user behavior from the accumulation of disparate features. The incentive structures within these companies are all set up to be able to prove these small wins in dollar values to get a raise or promotion which has led to a race to the bottom as teams create features nobody wants to justify their existence.
Anecdotally I and many people I know have reached a kind of breaking point where these apps have become so demanding in terms of attention that we have to stop using them entirely. Whether it's YouTube's incessant advertisements, TikTok's infinite scroll or Facebook's insane jumble of a UI/feed these products are demonstrably inferior to their incarnations 5-7 years ago.
I was the A/B test engineer for one of the most well known dot com brands about a decade ago.
A/B testing media (advertising) is extremely misleading compared to testing against something transactional. The goal of a transactional sequence, called a conversion (payment in exchange for a product or defined service), is a supremely simple metric. Although the goal is simple to define and recognize the costs associated are wildly complex. Media is the inverse of this where the goals and consequences are not immediately clear or known but both the costs and revenue are immediately straight forward.
The reason the financials of conversion are complex is because you need to account for the expenses to third parties to pull a user in, the purchasing horizon in time, potential for cannibalism against other purchasing decisions, and various other factors that cost the business money.
The reason metrics associated with media are complex is because users HATE it. Increased advertising presence drives traffic away. Shifts in traffic occur over a wide duration due to a variety of factors so it is almost impossible to measure just how toxic advertising is to a given product oriented business in isolation in accordance with a variable time horizon. Its actually much worse than that for a variety of technical factors. In the past legitimate ad placements have been delivery vectors for content and logic of malicious criminal activity. Advertising logic is frequently poorly written. Many websites will isolate their advertisements into iframes in order to protect their website from accidental defacement of presentation and/or broken logic. Advertisements come into the page super slowly which completely pushes out the waterfall for what might have been a quick loading page.
When I did A/B testing I would describe the media side of the business in terms of illegal job deals. I did this because of so many parallels in the transactions and risks in those markets, not because they are both filthy evil things.
I can't say I understood everything you said (is all usage of word "media" == "advertising"? what are "illegal job deals"?) but just wanted to ask: is A/B testing ever not harmful to end users in the long run? Excluding some very minor UI testing like CTA button color which I presume doesn't really matter.
From a revenue perspective the words media and advertising are interchangeable. The word media is preferred because it speaks to a business segment as opposed to something like an agency.
A/B testing is great when you are helping eliminate confusion and dark patterns nobody can articulate more directly.
Illegal job deals was an autocorrection of my phone. I meant illegal drug deals and didn’t catch the change.
Thank you, I have been reading about dark patterns recently and how damaging they are so you really got my attention now.
I will try to do my own research on how it's done but if you can expand a bit on confusion and dark pattern elimination that would be very much appreciated. I feel like everything I ever stumbled upon regarding A/B testing was "sales funnel optimization" which seems to be the root of much evil.
The goal of any product oriented business is purchase through a point of sale. That is called a conversion. Dark patterns emerge when a seller attempts to influence the behavior of a purchaser beyond decisions most beneficial to the purchaser, which is not always intentional.
One example of dark pattern elimination occurs when steps in a purchase process are dramatically reduced. That reduction eliminates opportunities for messaging but increases the potential for transaction quantity.
Ok I have a clearer picture now but it's still something that would probably need case by case analysis to get a full grasp what is possible and how to use it for the customer and not against him. Thank you.
Ugh I do still remember the chronological feed where posts didn’t get ranked. I enjoyed that product. Feels like every efficiency improvement they did removed a few percentage of users until now when there’s just a few weirdos left posting
I don’t know if you remember or were ever exposed to the “Facebook is going to start charging for its services!” Panic posts that happened in the mid-2010s. It was always false, but when it comes to the internet, people have a strong sense of entitlement. They do not like the idea of paying for things.
I am thinking about it now that I prepare for releasing a small B2C app. I thought about going freemium initially, then changed my thinking to maybe adding ads to the free version, but as I read more and more about dark patterns and sucking clients dry on every occasion (by big corps) I think of going paid only (monthly/yearly or one time) + 1 month free trial (no registration, no credit card). Simple, easy to understand, all cards on the table plus much less incentive for "finding creative revenue streams" (selling user data) in case ad revenue is low.
Perhaps it is a very bad decision which will never work, I don't know. I guess in this ecosystem the only way to at least not lose is not to play, otherwise we will all be eventually brought down to aggressive A/B testing, ad infested, tracking, no-privacy environment, to match other products... I don't want that kind of world.
Mine is a free app, that does nothing without a physical device. The DRM system is no login no account, the device is the key. No update costs. Everything calm. The device is even fungible for its purpose. A tool to do a thing and fucks off.
We’re leaving money on the table, for sure, but I really don’t care. I’m going to make something that is biased to the customer, and they’re going to appreciate it.
Ending this with "tweet your comment" and "discuss this on twitter" is amusingly ironic, given that Twitter has always been a place that's actively hostile to any kind of rich, subtle discussion, and has pivoted away from "keep up with people you want to follow" to an official stance of "keep up with the news" and an actual stance of "here is an endless scroll of engaging content, mostly things to get angry about, that we can slip ads into".
I think that’s entirely dependent on who you follow and if you’re not actively utilizing your blocked/muted accounts and/or muted keywords from your feed.
The amount of value I’ve gained from threads on people I follow on how to do something or learning something is insane and the “rich, subtle discussion” in those threads on that topic is sometimes just as good if not better than the thread itself.
No denying the default Twitter is loud, and just wants to suck you into mindless scrolling of ads and things to get you angry about, but you are in charge of how you curate your feed.
If you're willing to spend a while figuring out how to make Twitter stop showing you conversations your friends are having/stuff they're faving/popular posts/etc then it doesn't suck as much as the default, true, but you're still stuck in a conversational medium that makes it impossible to emit an entire paragraph at one go. I run a Mastodon instance whose post length limit is set to roughly 7k and it's amazing how much I could feel a part of my mind unclenching after years of Twitter as I got used to it.
Twitter is still the only major social media network where alternative views may be tolerated, and hence Musk was trying to buy it. Reddit is probably a better fit for your complaint.
I was just chatting about the “golden years” of Facebook with a friend today. I think it was about 10 years ago. Maybe we’re over-glamorizing the past, but at least the way we recall it:
Around 2012-2014, the newsfeed mostly was just updates from your friends with some ads sprinkled in. Everyone was on Facebook, so if you were hosting a social event, you could just invite everyone on Facebook and they’d hear about it. Birthdays were great because everyone would wish you happy birthday and you would do the same for them. There was a location-based search feature, where you could travel to basically any city and search your friends list to see who was there.
I felt closer to a lot of old friends from growing up than almost any other time, because suddenly everyone was on Facebook and it was super easy to catch up with someone I hadn’t talked to in years.
That’s all vanished these days, sadly. Social events are organized by email again (which is fine but less convenient). I’ve lost touch with old high school friends again because nobody uses Facebook anymore except for a few die hard holdouts.
I really remember thinking “Man, Facebook is just so dominant, I don’t see how they could blow it.”
Turns out, if you keep feeding the growth monster in search of more and more “engagement” (enragement?), eventually the growth monster destroys you.
I would say that the golden years ended by 2012 (depending on age of course).
Facebook was essentially a way to connect to people outside your inner circle, and before 2012 it was a way for younger people to connect to other younger people outside school/college/university. It was similar to what Instagram does now except for the new friends feature.
Facebook works in a social environment where everyone knows your personal details and you maintain a casual-formal image (school, university...) but is useless in most other contexts. Instagram provides flexibility in who you can add, but is bad as a tool for socializing.
> Everyone was on Facebook, so if you were hosting a social event, you could just invite everyone on Facebook and they’d hear about it.
My wife and I have never used Facebook. We would miss invites to things all the time since everyone assumes that everyone was on there and forgot that we were not. We used it as a litmus test to figure out who our true friends were. Fortunately now all of our friends have abandoned social media in favor of group texts.
Users of social media will learn how to deal with righteousness. Until we do, social media will suck big league.
Social Media strongly encourages Hot Takes, because those get clicks. I found myself examining how I comment on reddit, and what people call "The Hivemind".
You can't have nuanced discussions on social media, someone will infer what kind of asshole you exactly are, and that's the end of the discussion.
Some poisoned phrases:
Be Reasonable - "why can't you just be reasonable"
Both Sides - "there are good people on both sides"
Some Responsibility - "she bears some responsibility"
Nuanced Discussion - "you can't have a nuanced discussion on social media"
I'm sure there are some poisoned phrases you react instinctively to.
I think weak arguments are good, actually. You don't need to move someone from the swamp to the mountain, you just need them to get on dry land.
Now I'm sure someone has inferred exactly what kind of asshole I am, and they are correct. This is the kind of asshole I am. The kind that wants reasonable arguments to exist in the real world, even if I have to make them up.
Reddit is horrific because the moderation on the website is so heavily biased towards the current mantra of the US Democrats, regardless of topic and country involved. Why so many of the public ditched forums, where replying to an older comment can continue a conversation for new people to see, with Reddit is a mystery to me as well. Reddit has become a slur in the Indian diaspora for example.
> "Reddit is horrific because the moderation on the website is so heavily biased towards the current mantra of the US Democrats"
Two notes:
1. The moderation on the site is driven by the culture of the people on the site. In sociology and politics you can approach things from the top or the bottom - what does the King say or what does the Populace say. Even a King's powers are not unlimited, they need political support from someone, and those people need political support - you can see this many times in history when a king is de-throned (I'm saying king, but you can substitute any political leader)
2. I don't think it's the moderation or the mantra that make reddit a horrific hellscape. I think it's the feeling of righteousness around certain topics. Righteousness is very useful to leaders. It is very motivating, it gets people to take action and vote or give money to a campaign. It's completely natural to feel righteous about topics of morality.
Social media turns that feeling of righteousness into clicks and interactions. When you have clicks and interactions, you can sell ads. This doesn't even need to be an intentional from the company or platform. People will do it automatically.
Unfortunately, that feeling of righteousness may not be personally or socially rewarding in the long term, and it is very destructive to authentic and meaningful conversations.
I have often wondered if we can turn gamification on its head, so we can optimize for engaging discussion instead of outrage? There's a lot less money in that, so it'll get way less attention, but I wonder if it's doable?
Of course you're still playing in a game theoretic landscape, so it'll be taken advantage of for sure, but it might still be better than this local minima we're in.
Something as simple as a like button leads to this cascade of odd behaviour. HN seems to do ok with its voting scheme. I'd love to see some folks dive deep in this area.
People interpret nuance differently. As the audience size increases, contention about nuance interpretation increases to the point where that overwhelms the original conversation.
I think it is only the beginning of a new age of maturity and de-dinosauring of social networks. Just like the dinosaurs, today's most used social networks kept growing larger and larger until they were too big to sustain themselves. And just like the dinosaurs, they will go extinct and be replaced by smaller, more nimble and competitive social networks, with accessible maintainers, consensual relationships with their users, and features and dynamics we are only beginning to dream of today. I find it very exciting to think about and work on.
Just imagine a social network that combines all of the good things invented in the past 25 years: the customizability of MySpace, the visible social graph of Facebook, the easy sharing of Twitter, the speed of propagation of Friendster, the transparency of Web of Trust, the security and user empowerment of PKI, the distributed and decentralized model of Usenet, the lack of spam of a private tracker, the long-term discussion threads of a forum, the solidity of BitTorrent, the ease of access of AOL, and the compatibility and accessibility of Any Browser Web...
Wouldn't you want something like that for yourself and your communities?
Sounds great, but no one is willing to pay for it. And as long as it has to be ad funded, there will always be pressure to track, monetize, and increase engagement.
Once the software exists, I think it can be easily paid out of pocket by the subscribers. If one focuses on hosting a few hundred or thousand users, it does not have to cost that much.
I agree that it has to be self-funded, not reliant on "monetizing". But if your goal is a stable utility service, not growing to make a profit, I think it is realistic.
I think that the only domain where social networks can be relevant is in the geoloc domain. Dating apps are quite an obvious example where it works very well, but dating is a very limited scope.
So of course, the single problem of anything geoloc is safety and privacy, which is not the strong aspect of any social network right now. Tinder and others work hard to make their users safe, and it's difficult because users are not aware of it.
Social networks always should have been used to meet people OUTSIDE of screens, for discovering other people and things.
I want to meet people through activities (board games, running, walking), (loneliness is a huge problem in the west!) and except bumble BFF, which isn't popular, there is no popular app to do just that. Of course there is meetup and other things, but those are too narrow.
Neighbor apps are nice too, but nobody use them because they're focused on services, which isn't fun.
Don't you think it's a huge contradiction that current social networks don't let people meet?
> Social networks always should have been used to meet people OUTSIDE of screens, for discovering other people and things.
The commercial nature of social media is that there's a perverse incentive to keep people attached to the app or site rather than encourage them to leave the app for physical face to face meetings.
I think the problem is social media in general. As an alternative, a friend of mine recently invited me to a "IT nerds social group" that meets every few weeks at a local pub. There's no agenda other than spending time with like minded people. We have dinner, a few drinks, talk about random stuff, then go home. Sometimes, members will organise between them to meet up for lunch, dinner, or board games.
People are invited by group members if a member thinks they fit the group. The entire thing is a list of email addresses and a regular calendar invites. There's no platform to monetise, no chat groups, no special software.
It's honestly been better than any IT related meetup I've been to.
I have not found the humans on Nextdoor to be particularly terrible of late in my portion of the South Bay. There are occasional bad takes, for sure, but fewer than I would have expected. Mostly just been discussion of neighborhood cats, garbage days, people not picking up dog poop, etc.
Agreed, people act like every neighbor is terrible but they're just talking about a few that they saw years ago. Most of Nextdoor is like, did you see this coyote? Also diverse people taking to each other which is actually rare to observe on social media.
There's also a need to be filled to let your friends know which college you're going to, how awesome your last vacation was, what job you got,... LinkedIn seems to be filling the void left by Facebook. I don't know if many people who used social media other than dedicated apps to find dates.
Facebook fails with the segregation of social groups most humans have. In some countries a person does not make true friends at work, and friends are a personal casual thing. For some cultures a friend can be made in a few days, in other cultures it takes several months or years
Perhaps that's why LinkedIn seems to be doing better: it has some selection of connections built into its premise, plus the information shared there is the minimal set that you usually wouldn't mind too much sharing across most of your social groups (got a new job, hooray!).
I think for dating/sex people are willing to leave their comfort zone and meet new people/take some risks. I not so sure about boardgames and walking... who wants to play a boardgame with a complete stranger ?
but hey, why not? someone should try with the hope to become the new meta in social networking.
I would argue that “play dates” for parents of kids 2-5 would be a (small) niche.
Parents with young kids may have other friends with similarly aged children, but many don’t. It can be isolating because so much of your non-work life/time becomes child focused. Kids that age are too young to have friends from school or activities. Some can strike up conversation at parks, but many find the inertia too much.
Good foundation to expand into clothes/toys reselling/gifting, babysitting co-op scheduling, nanny share, etc. which could all be monetized .
Probably a good niche for Facebook though I would rather see someone else do it.
Betapet is another example in the same vein. Local scandinavian community for playing Scrabble online against strangers, with many stories of people who even got married to each other. https://www.betapet.se/
"What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!"
I really liked the article but am perplexed by the naive ending.
Friends/family and the world are two very distinct use cases. Most people, young people included, are taking the friends/family part private, in chat apps. Then they may or may not engage in a "public square" social network, but probably with a burner account.
The public square part has failed in epic ways. The idea that you can just "build" something that unites people whilst dodging a laundry list of threats and toxic behavior seems optimistic, to say the least.
And yeah, let's not run ads. Ok, fine. But how will you monetize instead? These seem pretty important questions to me.
Some radicals might point out where the expectation, and need, for "monetization" is itself the root of the problem, and wonder if an extractive capitalist mindset could ever solve the problems which itself has created.
Even if you need at least some money to keep the lights on and power the servers you can make the pricing plain and simple (not "free but with ads and 3rd party data sharing").
Free service with 1GB of storage for family photos and movies and 3$/10GB yearly fee if going above that limit. Storage is very cheap if profit is not your main consideration. You don't even need software employees and just make it open source.
Capitalism or not, you need to monetize. Supporting a platform with billions of users requires a huge amount of resources. Resources are not free in any system.
If your stated company mission is not the thing that produces revenue then it will eventually be sacrificed for the mission that does produce revenue.
Examples of mission statements that don't produce revenue: Google, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, most news organizations.
Microsoft's missions in 1980 was "A computer on every desk and in every home". Their mission produced revenue. There are lots of examples of mission/revenue alignment.
Most companies exist for motive X, which they do by providing value Y, then monetizing it via method Z. X is almost always "profit" and Z is something boring like selling physical items, subscriptions, ads, etc, so the mission statement is about Y.
The following statements are true but not very interesting:
Microsoft was never about computers on every desk and in every home, it was really about selling software licenses to make money!
The Super Bowl was never about football, it was really about selling ads to makes money!
Wal-Mart was never about saving people money so they could live better, it was really about selling physical items at retail to make money!
Facebook was never about connecting people, it was really about selling ads to make money!
Is the Facebook one any more insightful because the monetization strategy is advertising?
The comment I replied (and the article itself) seem to imply that, if you monetize via advertising, that your business isn't really about whatever you say it is. I was replying that I fail to see how that's different from non-advertising-fueled businesses.
For example, Facebook isn't really about connecting people, but a hypothetical competitor with the exact same feature set that charged a subscription fee instead of running ads would be about connecting people?
Y’all should read “Amusing ourselves to death” by Neil Postman if you’re interested in how mediums have changed over the years.
As Huxley hinted, our soma is just technological narcotics. With each new medium of technology brings in a plethora of problems that cannot be reformed.
When I think about what social medias are left, I can only think about LinkedIn. Interestingly, there seem to have been a recent surge of interest for that platform (especially all the cringe worthy posts that started to pop up).
After reading this article, I am starting to wonder if people didn't simply migrate to LinkedIn because of the degradation of Facebook's quality as a Social Network and as they still feel the need to share their lives, started sharing those cringe posts.
LinkedIn as a whole is quite cringe though. Even companies share cringe worthy posts, often merely virtue signaling, while individuals hopelessly or needlessly exaggerate the greatness of experiences or other people. Trying to judge any company, I would completely leave their LI posts or profile out if the picture, unless it shows things are bad on the inside.
And then all those recruiters not knowing how to do their job properly and just spamming everyone with unsuitable job offers ...
LI is a strange world in itself and I am not sure it is worth being on the platform at all.
The only utility it provides is giving an overview of your career at a glance in a recognizable way. I feel <10% of the users actually interact with the social network side of it.
LinkenIn is probably a long term social network because a lot of people want to be able to maintain a "professional side" to them in public, but want to be able to keep the personal lives private. Facebook was aimed at college students so was able to be somewhere in the middle.
I want to see more niche social networks that are only for one thing. I actually really like Strava which is for workouts only. There’s no way to share pictures of inspirational text. I’ve never seen anyone abuse the platform by sharing a run that is actually 0.1 miles plus a rant about Fox News or anything like that.
If I were independently wealthy I’d spend my time building a newsfeed for musicians to share music things where it’s similarly impossible to post pictures of text or news articles. You’d need to be vigilant to prevent it from overstepping the way LinkedIn did.
The challenge is that if you can share photos or video or links at all, it becomes terrible.
Agreed. What I love about Strava is it leverages some of the same darker parts of the human psyche that traditional social media does (desire for social status by showing off etc), but in doing so it encourages its users to actually do something extremely positive. It makes me think of how I'd like to see a really well made addictive VR based MMORPG that encouraged its users to exercise in some way to progress.
Not VR, but I’ve been wanting one of these too. Pokémon Go flirted with it with steps and egg hatching but I want a classic fantasy MMORPG where my workout is the grind and then the play part is all fun
My SO openly admits that she logs in more bicycling kms than she would otherwise have done thanks to Strava. She has also just managed to convince one of her close friends to use Strava, that person is also seeing a rise in the number of logged-in kms.
Reddit has destroyed the forum culture that basically owned this concept. The internet was a far less politized place before Reddit came along, and you could have a conversation on a forum between wildly different political opponents without knowing they were political opponents.
This is why I enjoy using Letterboxd. It's a social media silo with its own problems, but overall I find it more enjoyable because everyone is there for one reason: to talk about movies they've watched.
I wouldn't even mind if there were some ads on Strava. Like I've started subscribing with intention to support also this platform. I really like how there are similar-minded people, sharing their activities - photos, I can relax visiting this app. I think Strava will grow, so many features they can add for outdoors activities and so on. No politics, toxic content, great experience.
On the other side, there are social apps which just want me to spend as much time as I can there.
"And because it was never about “bring[ing] the world closer together”, they drop that mission as if they never cared. (That’s because they didn’t. At least MarkZ didn’t, and he is the sole, unaccountable overlord of the Meta empire. A two-class stock structure gives you that.)"
Ahahahaha! As if the normal shareholder of FB, or almost any other company, would tolerate them making less money than they possibly could. There is plenty wrong with Facebook, but the two-class stock structure is not the cause, because a single-class stock structure leads to equally pathological behavior.
I yearn for the old days of what I think of as pull (vs. push) social networking. When one would "get on" or "hang out on" MySpace or early Facebook, approaching the experience actively, rather than receiving and occasionally, interruptively, responding to notifications.
The feed of each of these platforms, if it existed at all, was usually a side feature you might interact with (eg: MySpace bulletins) after getting bored doing what you had gotten on to do in the first place: see if anyone had consciously, deliberately reached out to you specifically by commenting on your meticulously composed profile or pictures, or privately by sending you a direct message. And then reach out to someone yourself.
Short of spam, everything waiting for you when you signed on was signal. No noise. Don't like someone but feel obligated to accept her friend request? No biggie—just don't go to check out her profile. You'd never have to take on the indirect stress of learning your friend's roommate takes pride in being shitty to fast food cashiers. You'd probably harbor less resentment and be more optimistic about prospective social interactions with anyone you meet.
And, most importantly (to me, someone who made most of his best friends online in the '90s and '00s), the pull approach encouraged exploration and discovery of new people, communities, perspectives, hobbies, whatever. You couldn't rely on a feed to keep you busy—you had to seek out new interactions. New drama. Whatever. Find good things, find bad things. At least it was your choice to go find them, rather than having them shoved in your face.
I also think most people have lost track of the distinction between social networking and social media. Where the former is focused on socialization around networking (meeting new people, forming communities, etc.), the latter is focused on socialization around media (liking images, commenting on videos, etc.). It sounds obvious when stated, but I think the conflation of these terms has made it more difficult to discuss the differences between what I see as two fundamentally different social experiences, each with their strengths and weaknesses. In some respect, these must coexist, but platform design can favor either direction. Social networking, I feel, is conducive to conversation; dialogue. Social media, by contrast, is conducive to parallel monologues.
I suspect most people would agree that it's better to talk to each other than over each other.
> Imagine what social networking could be!! The best days of social networking are still ahead. Now that the pretenders are leaving, we can actually start solving the problem. Social networking is dead. Long live what will emerge from the ashes. It might not be called social networking, but it will be, just better.
Not to be pessimistic, but this missing the whole point. Just because social networking is gone doesn’t mean it’s somehow in the hands of the people. They will flock to the ML addiction machines and 20 years from now something even more horribly grotesque.
I care about Mastodon, ActivityPub, PeerTube, BlueSky and all these open standards. But these platforms Are sole dependent on users and at the moment, they all look like programmer/activist-centric wastelands.
I must say I really liked social networking when it started out. Now I barely use it anymore because it has been poisoned. And I do not mean the discourses that happen there, I mean the entities who are running it.
If I meet an old friend in my city I would take them for a walk in a public park for a chat, or sit at a nice cafe. What I would not do is go to a place where I do not trust the people who listen to sell that information. And this is what social media has become.
It must not be like this, and maybe the solution is really aomething like the fediverse, but social media without the people you like is no use.
I think everyone is wrong. We still need something like facebook to keep track of people we meet, and friends. In the west, to my knowledge, facebook is still big, along with whatsapp and instagram, to keep track of friends.
Tiktok is more like youtube. It’s a content platform first. Maybe the new generation uses tiktok to keep in touch, or maybe they use something I haven’t heard of, but social networks are bigger than ever.
I think the future of social networks is still not clear though: VR? Wechat-like app? Something else?
That’s already a dystopia, I wish there were decentralized social platforms, I’m very tired of having all my SV friends on apps that track us like Facebook and Messenger.
I like the analysis and optimism in this article, but it does not answer a key question: who would pay for this social network that truly "brings the world closer together", if not advertisers? What is the business model?
I've been spending more time on Discord. It is replaced forums and subreddits for many of my interests like synthesizers and music. I don't like that the information is stored in a chat-style vs posts.
It's barely searchable on their native search bars too, and with no scoring or back-linking possible you're stuck searching chronologically. That's only viable on a small enough channel + keyword so that results are limited. Otherwise you don't search, you just ask again.
I really don’t get what is this panic about TikTok. When I used it for the first time, it just kept throwing soft porn videos. I see how people would get “addicted” but I don’t see it becoming any more mainstream than many similar websites. It’s recommendation system left a lot to desire as it simply ignored my preferences and kept throwing at me more of juvenile videos.
So far Social media has strived to be just consumption platform, not utility. Social media can drive every day activities from dating to finding jobs to finding summer camps to garage sale to purchasing gifts etc. There is a lot of untapped potential that FB unfortunately didn’t managed to build upon. The problem with consumption platforms is that they will fall out of fashion eventually. It is astonishing that large swaths of humanity suddenly don’t find FB newsfeed interesting any more. It almost happened to so many people and just over span of months. To me it looks like more of biological saturation rather than anything else.
This website is the only place I find people who say that the TikTok algorithm somehow doesn't work. If that's the case, why is everyone so addicted to it? Talk to any other person and their feed is completely unique from any other person. If you're into comedy, you get comedy videos. If you're into educational stuff, you get that. If you're into sexy girls dancing, you get that.
Admittedly the last one seems to be the default (I assume like in most cases, the most popular stuff of all is softcore porn, and therefore it'll default to showing that), but if you scroll past the sexy girls dancing instead of sitting through the whole video, it'll learn you're not interested. So I can only surmise if you kept getting them it's because you're watching them. I don't think TikTok has a feature to detect HN users and turn the algorithm off just for them for some reason.
it simply ignored my preferences and kept throwing at me more of juvenile videos.
I did not have a similar experience at all. I’d be a little concerned if I had.
As others have said I think most people’s experience is that TikTok is absolutely phenomenal at discerning what people want to watch - even if they are not aware of their preference themselves.
It's better than what Instagram does, and way better than what Twitter does, but it may also be a sign of the biases and politics engineered into algorithms in Instagram and Twitter.
The Path app was a good social network in hindsight. Share your stuff and look at others stuff. All sorted by date. No algorithms. Which is why it probably failed.
Facebook sucks and I‘d hope that politicians in Germany would take action against it. Start with the algorithmic timelines. All content only your friends and interests. Nothing from outside to addict you further.
I wonder if timing may have been off. I'd like to imagine that re-introducing it today there'd be more appetite for a personal social network, now that Facebook/Meta is pivoting away.
But, yes I agree, I used to use Path also with just a group of 5 friends around 2013. The app was cleanly designed and it definitely felt intimate.
Facebook the company will need to buy up all the grassroots social media platforms that sprout up. That costs money and isn't possible in China where they can't buy Tik Tok. That's why there is such a furore by FB backed lobbyist to make Tik Tok a terrorist platform. Long term FB will eventually die as young folk will not want to use the platform old folk do and older folk are less influence by ads on these platforms. It's a slippery slope for FB but there will always be a new platform that sprouts that the cool kids all use.
Just today, a newsletter told me about a "slow" social network called "Be real". Never heard of it.
My message, though, is not that BeReal or anything new is going to be the future of sharing info on the net.
I think the future is looking a lot like the best of the past, with improvement.
Which is why I got this info on a newsletter, that directed me to a blog.
The missing pieces are "personal newsletter made easy" (for producing content), "newsletter discovery made non spammy", and "making all those services sustainable without ads".
Unpopular opinion: So it turns out that while bringing the world closer together is a nice long-term goal, the world isn't ready to be crammed into one giant bull-pen, which was more Facebook's style.
Their utter inability to come up with consistent standards for policing their walled garden, upon having their hand forced to need to try, indicates that maybe that's not a good goal in the first place. Maybe it's okay if not everyone's on your social media engine.
I never used TikTok but from what I heard and saw it is essentially a Vine with better UI and UX e.g. you scroll vertically for new videos and it has very good recommendation system.
P.S. I never used Vine too but then again I read and heard about it.
TikTok won because like other guy said; videos are the most immersive media and I claim that people having short attention span made them hungry for short form of entertainment like short videos.
From time to time I watch compilation of TikTok videos on YouTube and I think "compilation" as a media form is another interesting thing that somebody should experiment with.
Speaking of social networking; my understanding of social networking/media landscape is that Facebook sort of generalized social networking and social networking features and now apps like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are specializing in photos, ephemeral sharing and short videos respectively plus WhatsApp specialized in messaging but Zuck did a great job of making Facebook Messenger a standalone app and then specializing it according to demands of messaging crowd. And yea Zuck acquired Instagram and WhatsApp along the way so competing apps don't hurt Facebook and its family of apps.
private messaging, i.e. telegram/discord seems to be where people are moving. I'm not surprised that Instagram copies TikTok for the algorithmically driven content, what I'm more surprised by is that WhatsApp is still pretty lackluster compared to Telegram given that Mark himself noticed that private groups seem to be what's next. Hard to overstate how much better their UX is compared to anything else.
Do I get this right? Meta is turning Facebook into a TikTok clone just after rolling back a similar change to Instagram? What on earth is their strategy?
Everyone seems pretty wrapped up in the social part. But I think many forget that “media” was actually a big part of this.
Photos weren’t always so easy to share. Having places where media was only based on your friends or people you knew was incredibly novel and useful. A single website you could log in to in order to view photos (and eventually videos) related to you was novel when we all had flip phones and a “camera phone” was special.
Sharing media was tough. Photos - let alone, video - required tech, bandwidth, and a whole-ass computer.
I think that in addition to the social aspect dwindling, changing, or evolving, we must also account for the fact that media is so much easier to create, share, and consume. This is true with friends, relatives, and strangers; locally and afar.
We don’t “need” social media anymore because the media part is mostly solved. Fewer and fewer people don’t have a connected media viewer and creator in their pocket at all times anymore.
Being social with media is as simple as texting someone, or many people. And we do it in high definition all day, every day. No login. No ads. No algorithm.
We've essentially transitioned from 'social networks' to 'content streams'. The evolutionary steps we went through were just pathfinding to get to where consumers always wanted to be: a nonstop amusement drip.
For that reason I think that what we think of as social networks really are dead. It's not what people truly wanted in the first place.
> It's not what people truly wanted in the first place.
The transition towards "a nonstop amusement drip" has been gradual and effective but it doesn't mean that the current situation was what people always wanted from the start. This has been the evolutionary journey of companies in search of maximum profitability. It has never been exclusively about what people want, it's also about what maintains profitable engagement and eyeballs for advertisers.
There's a general sentiment that people don't like the addictive nature of social media (see other comments in this thread). Social media users have become boiled frogs as the heat has been turned up on monetizing attention. I think it's fair to say that we've not landed on the optimal solutions for social networking just yet.
IMHO the current social networking market has reached an evolutionary dead-end. The platforms are all converging on a "content stream" model or group chat. I think that there are plenty more opportunities for digital social networking that get closer to what people really want but these opportunities are hard to see. Functional fixedness[0] is the biggest barrier to imagining what comes next but more possibilities exist than these.
No kidding. Facebook had so much potential, when it was deployed in universities. But then it became a social network about everything. Zuck had a lot of potential when he was thinking about P2P file sharing site Wirehog, but Sean Parker "put a bullet in that thing" and VCs like Peter "competition is for losers, build a monopoly" Thiel shaped it into a money making machine that's less about being social and more about "eyeballs" and mindless cat meme videos. In the endgame, their algorithm selected for clickbait outrage that put peopl[e into echo chambers and tore our society apart.
Imagine what social networking could be!! The best days of social networking are still ahead. Now that the pretenders are leaving, we can actually start solving the problem. Social networking is dead. Long live what will emerge from the ashes. It might not be called social networking, but it will be, just better.
It'll be called "Community". I don't have to imagine. We've been building the Community Operating System for 10 years. And it's available now. No, it's not Mastodon. It's Qbix :)
Yes, it's open source and you can use it now. It's basically a Wordpress for Web 2.0 ... keep in mind that Wordpress powers 40% of the Web 1.0 web. We want to power 40% of the Web 2.0 social web.
Back in 2014 my cofounder and I met with Tim Berners-Lee and his SOLID team. There was a movement underway to decentralize the web. Today, Jack Dorsey is trying to build "Web5" along the same lines but with Microsoft ION / Sidetree protocol, rather than SPARQL (@timbl's obsession) semantic data and JSON-LD.
It's coming along. It's always been coming along. But it's open source so many people don't hear about it, until they do. MySQL took 8 years, NGiNX tooks 10 years but eventually they took over. Open source always does.
The approach at my company is to be group chat first. We think there is a distinction between social media (FB, Instragram, Twitter) and pure social networking. I think social networks that are unbounded and broadcast centric actually demonstrate anti-network effects where the more followers/friends you get the less value you get from your network unless of course you're trying to be an influencer. The ideal network always as a discrete audience anytime you share content or communicate which is exactly what a group chat or direct message provides. But unfortunately, Telegram, Whatsapp, iMessage, etc don't provide the rich interactions that made platforms like FB and Instagram so fun in the beginning.
> What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!
I don't think this will happen. I don't think the failure of existing social networks to do this was a fluke, I think it's a systematic problem that will recur every single time you try it. Like a wagon traveling down a dirt road, any social networking platform will eventually wind up in the same ruts as its predecessors. It may be human nature, it may be economics, it may be the incidental factors related to our current technology and networking structure works. I admit I don't fully understand the mechanism, but I'll go out on a limb anyway.
A very correct observation. Social networking actually feels archaic at this point. The one thing that survived everything is messaging and email. Messaging will be the tool that brings friends together and email remains the one true tool for professional communication.
> This new advertising machine is powered not by friends and family, but by an addiction algorithm
This is like the crack epidemic when I was growing up. China is hitting the west back hard for the Opium wars. First fentanyl and now TicTok addiction algorithms. We are doomed.
This is not the first or second time that humanity has tried 'social networking'. We used to call it "the mob" and long before the time of jesus it was considered that people shouting at each other is no way to run a society. People are dazzled by the shiny touchscreens of their phones, but shouting behind a glossy screen is still shouting, and a mob is still a mob. I don't think 'social networking' will go anywhere, it will be abandoned and foulmouthed as 'loud crazy old people', in favor of curated content, possibly algorithmic if that works. The future of media looks a lot like the media of the past, consolidated , more professional and polished.
My family got me to join Marco Polo recently, and it's really what I want from social media. It's a bit clumsy to use the free version, but there aren't any ads, and it facilitates having meaningful connections with a smaller group of people, which is what I'm really missing from the bigger platforms. Facebook quickly became a giant friend collection for me, which is useful for being able to reach out to anyone when I need to, but it never offered a feed sorted by stuff I actually care about: family and truly close friends, and lifetime events like weddings and deaths for the rest.
I agree with the conclusions, they will definitely be switching to a more addictive model. But it seemed like there is an implication that the previous model was not 'addictive'. Once Facebook figured out how much mentions were driving engagement, they added lots of features to try to drive people towards mentioning their friends in order to send push notifications. Leading to a sort of "addicted to your friend group" situation.
I get that tik tok definitely creates another paradigm shift, likely for the worse, but it's not like social networking is not without issues ina very similar capacity.
This is why we are building Notos[1], most of the photo sharing websites evolved in social networks (or died).
We chose to not make our user's album public by default, where most competitors are doing so and benefit from the SEO involved, but we want to focus on sharing with family and friends, not the whole world.
Now the elephant in the room is monetisation and getting people to pay for their usage, this is not easy but we firmly believe it can be done but probably not with a trajectory allowing you to raise VC money.
Maybe just the end of social networking as we currently know it.
There must still be plenty of room and potential value in more focused social interaction that is more highly aligned with user interests other than viral videos.
In a sense, it's interesting that we (social network users) once found the activities of our friends and acquaintances "interesting", but that's largely been subjugated to simply "interesting things are interesting".
Friendster was interesting, myspace was weird, but facebook just became a boring manicured lawn. Eventually it turned to astroturf; fake green to make it look beautiful.
Perhaps snapchat is the evolution of the social network; a closer "social" live snapshot of people we are close to.
The short answer is – NO. It's not dying. It's changing just like any other marketing or business strategy. Social media users have become savvy to how social media marketing works.
I loved reading this article. TikTok is perhaps the endgame of all entertainment, from 1920s radio straight to Netflix: monetize people’s willingness to pay for the next bit of entertainment.
I miss how it's not more about connecting me with other people. Rather forcing people content they could engage. UX which main purpose is to keep users spend more time on the platform. For example, I love Strava, there are similar-minded people sharing their photos, activities that I can easily follow and get new ideas for trips and so on. Chronological feed without any special algorithm. Like hey, give me good search options and I can search content for my own.
Yes social is changing. The initial value proposition of sites where we needed platforms to stay-up-to-date, meet new people, and communicate with each other can now be replicated easily.
Most social sites have stayed in the UI paradigm of 2003/2004. Just have a look at how much wasted space there is at LinkedIn.
Sites like Lunchclub, Clubhouse, and Finclout are sites where the tools are expanded through social networks (i.e, come for the tool stay for the community)
There is an appeal to TikTok that I haven’t noticed elsewhere, but it is hard to explain. Content trends are like a game of telephone, so it’s interesting to see what creators choose to carry over into their own content and pass along. It’s fascinating to watch trends evolving so quickly and imo those trends are a special kind of authentic content space that advertisers haven’t really been able to break into and ruin yet.
Idk, this article seems hopelessly naive. So, the author would essentially like to go back in time to a less morally ambiguous internet when people (i.e. techies and nerds) had engaging, thoughtful, and respectful conversations where each emerged a better person. Not gonna happen. The future of social networking looks a lot more like Twitter (but meaner) than it does to the halcyon days of IRC.
Making a distinction between social networking and social media is important. We lost this distinction due to the advertising business model. In the social space a company that focuses on the social networking aspect - connecting people, tools to stay in touch, get together in real life, etc - may actually avoid the corrosive nature of the social space by avoiding the 'media' part.
> So Facebook adjusts, and transitions into another addiction-based advertising machine.
Like Facebook hasn't been that and tried to be even more so since their very first day.
The string of articles with threatening undertones about Tiktok should really lead people from the US to question their tendency to give a pass to the most egregious behaviour from tech companies as long as they are US.
no - but the context is shifting, from Chat -> Clips -> Streams. Though it's still mainly a medium to deliver adverts.
Social networking has pretty much replaced TV & traditional press - now it too must morph.
the biggest obstacles though I think to the social network are the app stores - not necessarily their own decisions but what politics of the day may impose on the store.
> Facebook’s rollout of a sweeping TikTok-like redesign
Whose rollout of what now? I updated my app to be sure, even though it only showed fixes and perf in the update. I loaded it in my browser and it looks the same as it has since I last looked months ago. Is this overzealous hypothesizing about being A/B tested or something?
What I mostly see is people retreating from all the noise to closed chat groups in multiple platforms.
If we keep inventing the same things over and over again my bet is that the next big thing will be connecting people in small groups based on geographical location or sub-culture like in the long long ago in the times of IRC.
I'm looking forward to seeing the open source/federated alternatives fill the space.
I can see Telegram broadcast channels (or Signal/Matrix groups with only sending permissions for admin) filling the void for people who'd like to "microblog" short updates like a blog, but just for friends.
I can't avoid thinking how the first mover disadvantage here worked in killing the first mainstream video-first platform: Twitter's vine. Vine wasn't exactly like TikTok, it was 1 generation removed, but it didn't sustained itself - and changed - to become today's tiktok
Meta had $117.9 billion in revenue for 2021, TikTok is estimated to have had $4.8 billion. Social networking is alive and well.
The push into short form is just another way to get users to stay in app longer. Come for your friend's posts/stories (or marketplace, groups, etc), stay for the Reels.
As with all "is this X??" headlines: no. The answer is no. I look forward to the end of SEO nonsense instead, when titles actually describe what the post is going to be about. In this case: concluding that it's not and is in fact better than ever.
We already have this at least gamers do it’s called Discord. It’s invite only. Has lots of streaming and group voice chat features and it# topic or thread based around a community. Plus it’s driven by sales of extra feature sets.
I'm really sympathetic to the author. The thing I want to hear however is what does the author and people who believe him think is an alternative that will be profitable (ie., sustainable) in the current world we live in?
Nah, it's more like the beginning of segregation: people who like social media will stay there but I'm seeing more and more people bail out and setup friend clubs (Meetup, Telegram and such).
It’s time for an open source - community driven - social networking platform then, isn’t it? But sadly the majority of people wouldn’t probably use it ):
He's incapable of dropping it, because despite everything that's said about him living in the future his is a mind that's perpetually trapped in the mid 2000s. That's why Meta's only mode of innovation is through acquisitions and ripping off ideas from elsewhere, and Meta's slowly being torn apart for it.
No.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." The sweeping generalization refers to the poor journalistic practice of writing sensational headlines in the form of a question in order to compensate for the author's lack of facts.
HN is probably the closest to what the old pre-reddit forum culture was like, but obviously structured in the horrible reddit manner. Reddit is probably an unsocial media.
Reddit is the worst of all the social media considering how toxic the moderation is. You just leave the site full of anger and a desire to shout at all the misinformed on that site.
TikTok is similar to TV. People would sit around the TV for hours per day, TikTok is usually in the magnitude of minutes. The algortyhm also does not feel politically or culturally motivated, unlike Reddit.
Probably. We ended up with a completely different internet than the one we still thought should be possible in 2004.
For a brief period of time, the internet genuinely subverted the corporate beetle-men and the gatekeepers who've always owned the "official" or real world. You could send an email to a well-known, accomplished person and there was a 75 percent you'd hear back. There really was a culture of punk equality... of course, we were quite harsh to people who used the platform to say stupid things (and, since I was young, I said stupid things a lot), because that's requisite if you want to stay relatively meritocratic. The internet was smaller in the 1990s and there were far fewer ways to make money from it, but it was legitimately subversive.
We've lost that, though. Twitter used to be a way for nobodies to gain a degree of influence. Now it's the opposite--instead, it measures and ratifies our lack of influence, because every time you apply for a job, the bosses know that you're no threat if mistreated--the fact that you only have 3,000 followers, as opposed to 100,000, proves that.
The internet and the web didn't fix capitalism; instead, to the detriment of all of us, it ended up looking like capitalism. The technology grew up too fast; our moribund economic system hadn't died yet (and still hasn't). This was bad enough, but if capitalism is still around when we see AGI (granted, I don't think that'll actually happen for at least a hundred years) we are properly and irreversibly facefucked.
> [TikTok]'s addiction-based advertising machine is probably close to the theoretical maximum of how many advertisements one can pour down somebody’s throat.
Well put. It's interesting that we pivoted in my adult lifetime from:
1. Myspace's emphasis on sharing things on your own webpage, essentially a hosted blog 2. Facebook's evolution from "hosted blog" to "friend update aggregator" to "chat client" to "friend update & ad aggregator" 3. Instagram's callback to simple update sharing (with pictures) and a chronological ad-free news feed 4. Snap's emphemeral sharing 5. Facebook's slow agglomeration and bastardization of all of the features that made Instagram and Snap distinct. 6. TikTok's addictive advertising machine that barely includes any friend connections at all.
Initially I was concerned that this would mean the death of real social media, just like the article initially suggests. But I really like the conclusion the article ultimately comes to: we basically don't have social media right now, we have advertising engines masquerading as social media. Better that Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat show their true colors and become disgusting advertising machines just like TikTok.
If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet. microblog seems promising, but I think even mastodon could provide the experience I'm looking for.
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet.
I don't have as much hope for such a thing. To me, this trend is also a reflection of perhaps the societal devaluing of IRL social connections.
In a world where encountering "new people" was novel, and typically done only In Real Life, maintaining that connection using an online component had value. You may not encounter that person again, and good connections are rare, so you want to keep in touch. However, over time, the internet has made it trivial to encounter new people, even if the encounters themselves are more trivial than the previous In Real Life meetings were. Perhaps there was a two-way conversation before. Well now, you just read their tweets or watch their videos and click a button to follow.
Tracking real-life encounters isn't as valuable as it once was, especially when you can find an online substitute who is actively creating "content" to keep you engaged.
The newer connections are also way more transactional than they used to be. Just about everyone is selling something or trying to use their channels to promote themselves somehow.
I think there's an interesting overall trend in here between the fall of social networks and societal devaluing of real life connections (as well as a trend of them being more transactional), but I'm not an academic, so these are all just hunches.
This isn’t fundamentally different than urbanization. And this has been bemoaned as far back as we have history.
I’m older. I used PCs without modems. I didn’t have access to the internet until I was 15, and I was ahead of the curve. So I didn’t grow up with social media. But I was a heavy user. Now this an a relatively anonymous Twitter account are all I have left. Every time one evolves past me being able to have conversations, I move on.
But through all of that, nothing has really changed. I have my handful of friends. I have the restaurants where they know my order when I walk in. My kids still play with the neighbor 2 doors down.
In urban settings where people are swarmed by other people, they form little communities. The dynamic isn’t much different than a small town. There’s just irrelevant people moving around and through it.
That all said, I’m thinking about moving to “the sticks.” So maybe that’s just my family and I maintaining an old world view I’m attracted to.
Facebook? I’d rather be fishing.
The lie of social media was that you can replace your social circle entirely with exact copies of yourself. But that’s highly boring as hell.
I lived very briefly in Manhattan near Lincoln Center. There was a bar about three blocks from the apartment that was very pleasant, and it was 90% always the same people from the neighborhood. We all knew each other. It was weird being in this city of about six million (at that time) and still have this very small conclave (forty people?) that frequented this one bar.
Personally I've just stopped using social media because there's no reason to have the type of reach it gives you unless you're, well, advertising (whether that's yourself and/or personal brand, a product, a political position, etc.). However, even though rare, every once in a few years I really do need to reach out to someone I don't regularly talk to digitally or get in touch with someone I was much more connected to previously. I think there's truly a place for a hyper pared down "global phone book" type of application.
In terms of real connections: I prefer to share things that matter in my life directly with people who care to hear about it. And, notably it has advantages you lose on social platforms like being able to read the room, having a pretense of trust and assumption of goodwill and intent, synchronous engagement that makes true debate possible, and most importantly speech is not regulated. You can have a beer and speak your mind amongst real friends.
In my opinion, it's not real connections that are being devalued, it's needing to uphold the illusion that you have 1600 of them that is tiring and obnoxious (and simply not possible). Where I think you're onto something is that I'd say it's less important that real connections start IRL. It's perfectly normal to meet someone online and become close, possibly eventually turning into an IRL friendship, too. So I agree that it's less important to maintain "friendships" in the way that those of us who had FB in HS thought was going to matter in a social media world. But I don't agree that that means "real" connections are being devalued. Most people are just fine with ~10 real good friends and some family here and there.
>I think there's truly a place for a hyper pared down "global phone book" type of application.
We have this: Facebook. At least that's what I use it for. I keep a list of most of my friends there, and use it to chat with many of them, including video chat. I don't post anything, ever, and almost never look at anyone else's posts. It's just a glorified "friend phone book and chat app".
I don't have a problem with people using Facebook this way -- that's cool if it fills this function for you!
It is unfortunate though that as "a glorified phone book" Facebook engages in so many practices that are creepy and intrusive. I think that if Facebook did just provide phonebook-like functionality I would be so interested in using it. Instead, it feels more like an application(s) built to serve ads that happens to provide some phonebook functionality.
But, ultimately Meta's business model won't change for users like me -- and I don't blame them. And they don't necessarily need to change because although everyone seems to dislike the practices they engage in, nobody really quits Facebook.
IMO there is little value in actually quitting facebook.
If you aren't using their apps and block their embeds on third-party sites it just sits there and allows you to be what our parents described as a global phone book.
I deleted everything I uploaded, unfollowed everyone, locked it down and made a backup. Most of their indeed very creepy practices are optional.
edit: this is also probably a good learning for other services: have a working non obstrusive mode to retain almost-off users.
>I think that if Facebook did just provide phonebook-like functionality I would be so interested in using it. Instead, it feels more like an application(s) built to serve ads that happens to provide some phonebook functionality.
For me, this is exactly how it works. I never see any ads.
Sure, that's how I use it too. I'm saying it would be nice to have an application that's just that without all the other abusive BS. I think everyone could get onboard that train. Right now FB doesn't fully work because a non-trivial portion of people I know refuse to use FB anymore. That's great! But something needs to fill the "global phonebook" void. I'd pay $3 a month to have my name in a global phonebook and in return get access to one with the sole feature of being able to make my own list and govern who is allowed to see certain fields. Maybe I should just put my details in DNS...
But by participating in Facebook (even just leaving your account there!) you contribute to the network effect and make Facebook seem more useful to others. This helps Facebook snare other, less tech-savvy individuals in their dark patterns of ads and engagement. I don't it goes without saying that people who spend too much time on Facebook these days suffer psychologically for it.
I know that for you it's just a "friend phone book and chat app" but for others it's basically a casino. Consider deleting your account and keeping in touch with your friends via other mediums (email, text, letters, and phone calls go a long way!) instead, for the good of the community at large.
>But by participating in Facebook (even just leaving your account there!) you contribute to the network effect and make Facebook seem more useful to others. This helps Facebook snare other, less tech-savvy individuals
That sucks, but there's no better alternative just yet.
>Consider deleting your account and keeping in touch with your friends via other mediums (email, text, letters, and phone calls go a long way!)
Ok, I've considered it. No. It's stupid. Phone calls are horrifically expensive and don't have video, and letters cost a fortune to send across oceans. If you want to be a Luddite, go ahead.
This is probably the reason I was trying to limit my friend count to the very minimal figure (a little over 100), as I wanted to share my story to those who cared to listen to it. Though since Facebook started to deploy Discovery Engine, I have decided to stop using it (Deactivate the main account, leave Messenger available for contacts). I wanted to be more "connected", not having them scattered.
How is over 100 friends minimal?
The average person has about 150 people they care about. 100 friends is par for the course imo
Do you have a source for that? From a quick search:
[0] indicates the average number of friends is roughly 9
[1] indicates the number is roughly 5
[2] indicates the number is roughly 16
--
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/10891/americans-satisfied-numbe...
[1] https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/friends-adults-amer...
150? What about 5-10? I don't believe you can have 150 people you really care for.
There are actual close friends, and then there are people you know or care about to some degree. Dunbar's number (somewhere between 100 and 250) describes the latter.
That may include extended family, neighbors, coworkers, your acquaintances from hobbies/bar/church/whatever. They're not all close friends or immediate family, but still people that you sometimes interact with, and might want to contact.
Not really care for, but the number of relationships you can keep track of:
"By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
That's what I meant to say. FB friends = friends + acquaintances, which should be around 150 for average people
I wouldn't say that the figure of Facebook friends is an indication of number of people I really cared. I do care some of them (sometimes sending wishes for them), but a majority of them are either my classmate in high school, a junior in university, a (former) co-worker, or someone whom I met in social gathering that shared common interests and wanted to hear/talk with them. It's like the use of Facebook as a directory since everyone has one.
Conversely, there are plenty of friends whom I know personally, but did not connect via Facebook (we use IM for that). This may probably be counted towards the close friends I really cared for; only few (no more than 10) people fits this criteria of mine.
At the time I deleted my Facebook account, I had a total of twenty friends. And all of them were people from where I moved away from, or people that moved away from me.
Family, and local friends, I did not friend on Facebook, because I was going to see you anyway.
My mom asked why I wouldn't 'friend' her, and I responded that I talked to her on the phone for 60-90 minutes every single weekend. Without fail. Plus, I used to snail mail her printed photos on a regular basis.
When she died, I found two boxes crammed with every photo I ever sent her.
I had a difficult time trying to understand your writing, but in the end it seems that you’re actually proving the point of the person that you’re disagreeing with? Your example of having 1600 friends and then most people being content with ~10 friends is exactly what the commenter meant with devaluing social connections.
I dunno, it made sense to me. The simplified thesis (perhaps with my own slight spin on it) is that a huge number of connections never really existed, and what's observed as a devaluation of things with inherent value is really more like a realization that the things in question had little to no real value, and a calculus that does assign them great value (without significantly diluting the word "friend") is flawed.
This.
I just use discord for friends and WhatsApp for family, Instagram for documenting life
> The newer connections are also way more transactional than they used to be. Just about everyone is selling something or trying to use their channels to promote themselves somehow.
Boy is this off-putting. Even amateur athletes and nobodies in hobbies I follow on Instagram are pimping anything and everything. I can't hate someone for trying to make a buck, especially as full-time athletes in non-lucrative sports, but it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But not as bad as the taste of protein from anywhere other than Mega Protein Source! Use code THISSHTSUX for 10% off of your next purchase!
Instagram has spiraled down a hole with the introduction of reels. I was an early adopter of Instagram, and where it has headed, sucks.
I deleted my Facebook account pre-COVID, and I don't miss it at all. And my Instagram account is next. It brings me no joy anymore. It has not for several months now.
My only online 'social' activity now doesn't involve any IRL friends at all. About three or four really pleasant Reddit groups that actually help people learning new skills, or trading ideas they have tried. So little snark, it is refreshing as can be.
For me it seems that social media services encourage people to build huge social networks with people you barely know. I visit facebook, it suggests me to add to friends some people I worked with 15 years ago and barely talked to back then, but it detected that we had many common friends and assumes that I want to connect to those people.
Well, I don't. I don't care about them.
But I guess that most people do connect. When I inspect other people profiles, they might have 100 or even more "friends". I have may be 5 friends in my life and may be 20 people I barely know.
The solution is simple. Social network services should develop algorithms to reduce that clutter. Unfriend everyone, keep only those that you actively engage with often. People should keep their social circles small by default and social network services must encourage this behaviour. This is natural for human. Yes, I guess some people do have 100 friends in their real life, but that must be a rare exception.
Just because I know that guy name and he was introduced to me 10 years ago, does not mean that I want to have any connection to that guy in facebook. If facebook knows that we have friends in common, very well, present me that information when I stumble upon this guy. Like I saw his comment in some public community and next to his name add "1 common friend". But don't push that information to me without reason.
May be we should get rid of this "friends" feature at all. Just add ability to follow someone and that's about it. It must be asymmetrical and there must not be a way for someone to know whether am I following him or not. And, I'll repeat it again, never do not suggest me who I should follow. I'll find out it myself.
I think that messengers like telegram are winning because they follow this model. Telegram never asked me to add a "friend". I naturally have some chats that I'm interested with and that's better way to communicate.
Look at monica crm https://github.com/monicahq/monica. I've yet to offer to start hosting it for people, but that could be a neat conversation piece for changing the tides there.
I think the GP’s point was that social relationships are increasingly becoming irrelevant to people. Having a personal relationship CRM seems cool, but this shift in society is happening not for lack of good social tools.
In my view this shift is happening because of social media. The social media short cut to having friends turned out to not really work, and now people are trying to figure out how to have friends again. It's the same with dating.
But why didn't it work?
Is it because it's impossible to maintain meaningful relationships over the internet? My experience in the online forum and gaming communities implies otherwise -- some of my most meaningful friendships started (and continue) in those communities.
I suspect, instead, that it didn't work because Facebook murdered it. They abused dark patterns, injected ads, suggested content, radicalized grandmothers, and hacked engagement to the point where relationships didn't just stagnate, they withered and died because they were hidden and forgotten.
I have a lot of chats and friends in Telegram, and it's very easy to maintain those chats over time because I have a chronological feed of interactions right in the app. Facebook hid and diluted an entire medium, their original focus, "posts from friends" in favor of content they thought you might engage with more. Facebook chat exists, sure, but app invite spam diluted that to hell just the same, so it doesn't have the same chronological list of meaningful conversations that I have in Telegram. And notification spam diluted the meaning of any new developments on Facebook -- comment replies, messages, whatever.
And now, Facebook pushes videos, "TV", reels, stories, and god only knows what else instead of just letting me see posts from my friends and family. I think it's fair to say that online social relationships can work... they just don't work in a hostile environment. It's kind of like maintaining your friendships only in the middle of Times Square, surrounded by ads, tourists, and costumed performers trying to scam you out of $20 for a picture. Not impossible, but eventually you'll get tired of it.
Yeah, it seems like people are doubling down on a losing strategy. The real solution is usually involves going outside your front door and meet people. The same is true with dating.
> The same is true with dating
Over the last 25 years, all but one of the people I've dated, have been people I met online, including the mother of my son. Most of them have been people who I'd never have crossed paths with if it wasn't for meeting them online.
Under no circumstance do I want to go back to the horror of relying on meeting people offline, without being able to quickly filter out people I'm not compatible with first.
It's the aggressive filtering that has caused online dating to fail
And meeting people unlike yourself in at least some ways - social media is designed to help you find identical clones of yourself.
I don't think most people actually get to know like minded individuals on social media. They just flock together on specific topics and don't associate where they disagree. When you meet people in the real world, chances are you are unlike in some ways by default. People just don't express their differences in superficial context. You don't find the differences unless you ask and listen. At least that's been my experience meeting people.
Doesn't social media replace meat-space friendships?
Is there a species of 'Tinder'... for finding friends?
“I think the GP’s point was that social relationships are increasingly becoming irrelevant to people”
I have a hard time believing this is generally true.
I wonder where the split is, and for what demographics this is/isn't true for. It's been true for at least a few years for my (small) circle and I.
I also wonder if this is a (temporary) side effect of larger societal issues. It certainly feels like all of my old relationships are trending towards hyperpolitical interactions (even ones where we agree on most topics) and/or transactional/performative obligations. In the city I live in now, I've yet to meet anyone that feels like a decent enough human being to even want to be friends with. Maybe the problem is me, or widespread cynicism, or people concerned with bigger issues than just friendships. I don't know, but I don't really see any reason to put effort into making and tending friendships (especially IRL friendships) anymore. I'd much rather have relationships where I can come and go as I want or have time (online groups, meetups, hobbies, being friendly to strangers, etc) without worrying about all the added context of "are we friends?" and everything that entails.
My wife and I are in our mid-30’s and have a young child. Both of those transitions have led to the depreciation of some old friendships and the blossoming of new ones. Life is too full to be social to the same extent as when we were younger, but the friendships we have now (though fewer) are stronger in some important ways and more diverse in age, ethnic background, etc and so on.
I would say add that we tend to hang with people that engage in active hobbies and probably consume somewhat less media than average. But maybe I’m just reasoning backwards there…
Aside: if you happen to live in Minneapolis - I’d be happy to buy you a coffee sometime.
The risk of focusing on more transient relationships is that in the long run you won't reap the benefits of compounding interest, which is arguably where all the best stuff in life comes from: https://nav.al/long-term
An interesting concept, but towards the end they chop the very foundation right out from under their argument with a brief rant about socialists with guns and knives wanting pie.
Someone who is antisocial, and just in it for their own profit would say exactly that, and that's exactly the type of person you don't want long-term relationships with.
I was looking into using this recently, but the project seems to be somewhat stalled. It’s gone from regular monthly releases, up to February this year, to nothing for months, not a good sign for something I’m considering adopting to maintain an important part of my life.
Between this and some syncing issues that didn’t yet have fixes, I dropped it before putting in the effort to get fully on board and I still need to find a replacement.
Stalled or relatively stable? If the software changed out from under you every single day with daily updates, would that make it more worthy of considering adopting for long-term use? Or would you still think it was not a good sign because you hadn't gotten an update in the last few hours? If they did hourly releases, would you still look askance at it because it had been 6 minutes since the last release?
People's ideas of update cadence are interesting. I find it really odd that people want to have to run frequent updates and want to use unstable software for the important things nowadays. For important things, I prefer stuff that'll still run and work the same in 20 years.
I think having a regular scheduled monthly update to a PHP web application with a web based UI as well as using WebDAV features intended to synchronise with an array of third party (often proprietary) software that you probably have exposed on the internet… isn’t that weird. You want to make sure you keep up with security updates and have a chance to regularly incorporate contributions from an active community of users.
A contributing factor to the “stalled” impression was that the original team/developers had publicly announced a new product March 2022… the exact same month that regular updates stopped.
I've been using monica for more than a year now, super helpful in keeping track of birthdays and important events.
> I don't have as much hope for such a thing. To me, this trend is also a reflection of perhaps the societal devaluing of IRL social connections.
I see it instead as a recalibration of traditional social interaction. We didn't used to be obsessed with the lives of 500 loosely related people. We cared very narrowly about our immediate friends and families. Occasionally someone would mention a funny anecdote about a friend of a friend. Without social media we go back to our evolutionary default. I've already embraced this way of living again and it's wonderful.
That is a well thought out and incredibly depressing theory.
I think it might just be that that’s not needed anymore.
The social networks of the past were useful as a way to keep in touch with people. MySpace, early Facebook, and the countless others from back then. Now everyone’s online 24/7, and accessible on multiple services all at the same time, all the time. You don’t need social networks to keep in touch with anyone anymore, their original raison d'être is gone.
What’s sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and whatnot. People want their bubbles. We’re all here on HN for that exact purpose.
> People want their bubbles. We’re all here on HN for that exact purpose.
100% disagree. I'm here to find ideas I disagree with and tell people how they're wrong. I'm not looking for an agreeable experience here. I'm also here to learn about new tech.
I 100% disagree with your idea that you, or anyone for that matter, is just here to disagree with other people’s ideas. Nobody disagrees with stuff just for the sake of disagreement. Who would do such a thing?
Don’t bother answering that question though because you’d be wrong.
Oh I'm sorry, is this a five minute argument, or the full half hour?
> Oh I'm sorry, is this a five minute argument, or the full half hour?
It's abuse.
I have a feeling that a lot of people replying to you completely missed what you were doing with your comment. That's a shame, because well done.
This isn't an argument, it's just contradiction!
No it isn't.
I feel like I’m watching you cosplay what I see 20 times a day on Reddit and why I’ve increasingly stopped browsing it.
You're not wrong. But, you're not right either.
Neither of you aren't not wrong.
Everyone is wrong, we live in a wonderful world where everyone can be wrong.
They can't both be not wrong.
I disagree, but I can't agree either. Do we have a deal?
I was going more for getting the classic response, from the old story:
Two men disagree and they bring a local wise man to listen to them. He listens to the first guy making his case, and tells him:
- You're right.
The other guy protests: Hey, here my side too. So the wise man listens to his side of the story too, and then tells him:
- You're right.
A bystandander witnessing this scene then calls out to the wise man:
- They can't both be right!
And the wise man says:
- You're right, too!
So true, reb Tevye.
the right word is "irrelevant".
> I 100% disagree with your idea that you, or anyone for that matter, is just here to disagree with other people’s ideas. Nobody disagrees with stuff just for the sake of disagreement. Who would do such a thing?
You must be new here.
Either that, or you are, having apparently missed the obvious irony (mostly in the sentence you didn't quote)...
Comprehending nuance isn't one of your strong points, is it?
It's ok I'm perfectly ok with my old ance.
It's spelled "newance". ;)
Bubbles don't need to be harmful. HN is a bubble. There are ideas that are not allowed here. There are other ideas that are explicitly promoted. This is the value proposition of HN. You are free to go elsewhere to get other perspectives or interactions. This is as it should be.
> There are ideas that are not allowed here.
It would be more accurate to say that some ideas require more work here. The reasons why are open to debate.
Here's an HN bubble aspect.
You can't use any title you want, for example, they will regularly edit the title and thus effectively change the general meaning of the submission as read by most folks who just skim titles. Which has the knock on effect of making the post less (or more) desirable for users to read/upvote.
For example titles starting with "How I ..." are auto stripped to "I ..." there are quite a few other similar auto editorial changes.
There is no way round this that I know of, so those parts of an idea are non-negotiable and not re-workable.
I have seen instances where this practice completely ruins an otherwise excellent submission that would have been #1 on HN in days of old.
I'm not convinced the title rules on HN are having a major impact on which stories get upvotes on a frequent basis, but that's just my intuition and you may be massively right.
In which case I urge you to, when you see an example where you think the policy has indeed had a negative effect (which I'd also suggest isn't quite as basic as "did it lower the expected number of upvotes" but also "and not because it removed clickbait from the title"), either comment mentioning dang's name and saying why you feel that, or send him an email to the same effect (hn@ycombinator.com)
Not only have I often seen him engage in discussion and be open to changes for a submission when people felt a title shouldn't exactly fit HN's usual rules, but I'd also expect him to be open to changing the rules themselves if your feedback leads to his agreeing that there's a trend of submissions having the meaning of their title unfairly changed due to the generally good rules.
All that said, it's not really an example of a "HN bubble", nor of an "idea" that isn't allowed on HN.
Super helpful reply, thanks! I'm not on the site too much these days but will send any that I notice!
If someone did a show HN, for their murder for hire app to connect assains to clients, i imagine it would (rightly) go over poorly.
At least i would hope...
Unless they wrote it in Rust, in which case it would be received with great praise
Very funny...
But have you considered the countless lives that were lost due to bugs from memory-unsafe languages over the past ~70 years? A murder-for-hire app in Rust would still cost us less lives overall, if it increases the popularity and adoption of memory-safe languages elsewhere. It's a just cause, one could say.
I, for one, am very happy with how the assassination story of Rust is coming along!
Rust has rusted all of your brains. It really does what its name says!
I mean it makes sense. Memory safety >> Human Safety.
I think it would actually probably hit the top spot if it was a legitimate attempt that used crypto, E2E, provable security, maybe TOR. There's only one example in history AFAIK and it only lasted a short while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
Depends, did they write the website in PHP?
People have a lot of sympathy here for Silk Road, which was in this business.
Silk road was primarily in the drug business not the murder for hire business. Drug deregulation is a pretty popular view at hn.
There are definitely ideas that are not allowed here.
I’m not sure there are ideas that aren’t allowed so much as the way you speak, structure, and present them. I’ve tested many different ideas on topics here and some have received far more positive feedback than I’d imagine and some have been buried too.
I think so long as you follow guidelines generally and don’t outright attack individuals then you’re mainly ok. The community might downvote your idea to invisible but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t allowed - just that not enough people thought it was good. That’s fair.
>The community might downvote your idea to invisible but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t allowed
This might be a nitpick, but this depends on your POV of who's allowing/disallowing content.
HN itself allows a lot of comments that the collective HN community does not allow -- by downvoting them into invisibility.
Right, but I do think there’s a general fairness. It isn’t as biased one way or another as any places I feel.
I can't think of any non-rulebreaking comments that would get you banned just for expressing a distasteful idea. Can you give some examples?
“non-rulebreaking” implies that there are rules stating that certain ideas are not allowed.
No it doesn't. The rules can be based around the effort, structure, and tone of your comments. Not the ideas expressed within them. I think the only "idea" not allowed is asking for violence and I've even seen those allowed.
Politics as a subject is strongly discraged on HN.
It isn’t about Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian ideas it’s about their red button talking points. So you can discuss say taxes or abortion as long as you don't bring politics into it or get repetitive.
What most often confuses people is you can get heavily downvoted or upvoted for expressing the same idea depending on who shows up to a given discussion about say Nuclear power, Bitcoin, etc.
No I can't, because my account would get banned. Probably under the pretext of the stated rule, "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes."
Those seem to be based around the relationship of the comment to the post it is in rather than any specific idea in the comment itself. As if any comment flagged for those reasons could have the same idea expressed in a relevant post and not be flagged.
That is what the text of the rules say, but not how they actually operate.
I tried to give you an answer. It only took about 90 seconds for my post to get deleted.
The ideas that break the rules.
There aren't any ideas that break the rules though. Just structure, tone, and context of comments/posts.
I don’t think that’s true.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32432564
Trying expressing certain looked down upon ideas politely and with a good structure, gentle tone, and within context, and see how far you go...
@dang has been explicit that they deem certain topics “inherent flame wars” and ban discussion because it upsets people.
Certain ideas aren’t allowed here — even when calmly stated and cited with evidence.
For example, citing the clip of the BLM founder saying she’s a “trained Marxist” would get you banned: HN was in flat out denial, even though it was her own words on film [1]. She is literally answering a question about the ideology behind BLM.
Unfortunately, that kind of censorship enabled BLM to commit the fraud they did [2].
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM5zUwiCTzw
[2] - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/amazon-boots-black-l...
What's hilarious is that this is still up three hours after posting with not even a reply. So much for censorship. You're totally allowed to post that here, even while conflating one charity with a continent-wide protest movement, one leader's out of context quote with the goals of that movement, and one enforcement action by Amazon Smile with an accusation of "fraud".
For those interested in whether there's any truth in those links (there is! though maybe not nearly as juicy as promised), Wikipedia has a great overview as always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter_Global_Netw...
It was flagged and dead almost immediately then zmgsabst made another post [1] linking to the dead post and someone vouched for the dead post you see here.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32432791
Maybe because it's relevant to the discussion in the thread.
How many other times do you think it'd be appropriate to bring up the same topic? Probably very few, and it would get deleted if not.
Ignoring or de-facto shadow-banning is also a form of censorship.
I’ll keep saying it. Nobody has a right to an audience. Ignoring something isn’t censorship.
Shouldn't I get to decide what I ignore?
Again, ignoring and censoring aren't the same thing.
Part of the reason I come to HN is that I know there are entire classes of content and ideas that I will not be exposed to at all so I don't have to waste brain cycles on sorting them.
Similarly I use a spam filter on my email.
If I wanted to provide a similar experience, targeting a different narrative, and then worked to create my own safe platform, would you disagree with that?
"Ignoring" is just choice. And that concept can either promote or extinguish fair and free communication.
I assume you and I share similar political beliefs. Call it censorship, or call it "choice", it ia clear today not all people have fair and free access.
If the government uses its power to extinguish speech (or to burden channels through unfair promotion of counter ideas), then that is censorship. And that is a problem we should all want to fix.
The "trained Marxist" phrase is so strange to me - how does one become 'trained' in Marxism? Trained in guerilla warfare, perhaps. But to be trained in Marxism has the same meaning as being "trained in Platonism" or "trained in Hayekism". The other answers she gave in the interview also indicate to me that she doesn't really know what she's talking about, and is using this language either as a LARP to claim some theoretical legitimacy or basis, or as a way to attract on-the-fence old school Marxists.
At no point did any of this 'trained Marxism' show other than in a small handful of the organization's goals, generally the most neglected ones.
To add to that, stating the fact that one of the tech titans of today, Bill Gates, was in cahoots with a convicted pedophile is either met with "this is just hearsay!" or "you're jumping to conclusions", when it's not ignored and down-voted altogether.
Even more important (not that many of us receiving our wages and dividends from probably pedophiles isn't important), the strong connection between Silicon Valley of days past, and, most importantly, from today, with the Military and Security Complex is also shunned.
> the strong connection between Silicon Valley of days past, and, most importantly, from today, with the Military and Security Complex is also shunned.
Whole valley at one time was off limits to anyone from the Soviet Block.
And of course that The Economist just published this article in their latest issue: "After a long break-up, Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex are getting back together" [1] . Maybe I should submit it as a dedicated post.
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2022/08/08/can-tech-resha...
It depends on what the bubble is about. If it's for a specific anime who cares but politics is a bubble whose influence exits the bubble
Honestly I have no interest in discussing politics. It’s the social media of conversation.
I prefer to talk to people about what interests them. Sometimes it is interesting. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I agree with them. Sometimes I don’t. With most people all four are true. I form my own opinions from there. They change frequently. I vote based on my best current mental model.
I try to shake that up from time to time. It is nice to see the other side of the discussion. Groupthink is not something to strive for.
I’m not striving for groupthink. I’m seeking out a trusted (collective) voice.
Some ideas are objectively sick regardless of the forum.
A bubble can be less about topics and more about how we communicate - if I ask about sources on HN I'll get links and pdfs in return. If I do that on reddit, I'll get insults.
HN has broad tolerance for a lot of ideas - and a lot of subgroups exist here that don't exist on other platforms. No matter what you believe, someone on HN holds a counter view and can probably give you a good debate about it.
There might be some "Three or so core values are enough" pattern being played out in relatively good success here. E.g. respond to a favorable or valliant interpretation of a post, bring in new data and information and references, leave the place better than you found it. Then maybe a few emergent rules of etiquette.
You want an audience for your disagreements and maybe to cause a rise in people (trolling). But that's not fun for the audience which is why a lot of communities become insular bubbles to keep the annoyers away.
Maybe, but you want to have your disagreements with the people that typically frequent HN about topics that are typically discussed on HN.
That may be true, but I doubt you’re actually too interested in people with completely different interests. Just like utilitarians and deontologists might be interested in finding and talking with each other but not someone who is wholly uninterested in ethics as a simple example.
Nice way to describe your taste in bubbles.
Is HN the digital equivalent of going to a bar looking for a fight?
No, it’s not. And you better be shut up about it if you know what’s good for you, pardner.
This honestly made my day. LOL
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/386/
> You don’t need social networks to keep in touch with anyone anymore, their original raison d'être is gone.
In what sense? The underlying social motivation/interest is still present. And it's not like fundamental communications capabilities have actually changed. Chat's been around since the 90s and SMS is the new email. And social network applications grew and thrived in those situations because pull-and-scan-social-feed across multiple circles has some distinct effort-reward profiles.
I could see the argument that the algorithmic and advertising imposition eventually drive out enough of the value that people opt out, but that's a statement about the business lifecycle of a social network app, not the underlying reason people might use / like them.
Chat has not been around since the 90s, not in the form that is used today.
Now that I think about it, this is correct on at least one front: I can recall chat systems that existed in the 80s.
What's the feature of today's chat systems makes them qualitatively different from those that are 30+ years old?
Today's chat systems are far more accessible to people with minimal to no technical background. Install an app on your phone and you're good to go. Almost anyone can and does use them.
The level of technical knowledge required to connect to IRC or a BBS in the 80s was far higher, which meant that only a tiny fraction of people bothered.
Chat definitely existed in the 80's.
One of my first childhood memories was my brother showing me a real-time chat with someone in Germany. It was 1982. The letters appeared one... by... one... on the screen. It was probably a subconscious part of why I went on to study German later.
Also everyone has smartphones that they bring around literally everywhere they go all the time, no dynamic of signing out.
Part of that is increased accessibility, but I think the larger part is increased technical background. If I kidnapped a computer scientist from the 1960s and locked them in a room with a smartphone (turned off), it might be a while before they posted their first meme. Now almost everyone accepts that they need to learn how to use a smartphone, while the in 80s/90s it was very possible to live life without touching a computer or mobile phone.
In any event, the fact that chat programs are different or more common now doesn't mean they didn't exist in the 80s and 90s. IRC is and was chat as much as Slack or Discord are.
on my university mainframe in the 1980s it was as simple as logging in and typing 'forum'.
had most of the basic features of IRC.
The point is that today you are always online on your phone. Whatsapp, Viber or Messenger always work. No need to log onto a mainframe and type forum.
I feel that the point made is a good one. Given that we can share what we want directly via instant messengers that everyone has "turned on" all the time, value proposition of Facebook drops dramatically. Anything you want to share you can share directly and immediately get it to whoever you want to see it.
The ability to fit them comfortably into a pocket.
emojis?
It didn't have emojis or videos back then, but otherwise it hasn't changed much.
No, we had ascii art and point to point file sharing (DCC).
Agreed, the closest thing to filling that general keeping in touch for me is WhatsApp groups (other group chat apps are available). In my social group that's where pics get shared, things get organised and general life updates go. Groups form quite naturally along lines that mirror real life and groups fall apart and people move on as they do in real life.
Facebook had a short lived glory when we were all open with ourselves. But inevitably it wasn't long before the issues came. Someone posts a pic on a night out with some friends and another mutual friend gets upset they weren't invited. That creepy friend of a friend starts liking all your bikini pics. The nice friend of a friend starts posting attention seeking stuff that makes you like them a bit less. Family politics get aired in public.
People shared less of their lives and except for a few egotists there isn't much of that old genuine content we all loved. It's all content aggregation filler now.
Chat groups allow for keeping in touch but allows us to those groups like the 'No Homers Club'
That was exactly my assertion from couple of weeks ago [1]
In India WA does an excellent job of being that social graph. There are segregated groups of family, colleagues, collage friends and what not. Messages, memes, updates are shared on those groups. Lot of commercial transactions also take place. So Facebook usage has dropped significantly. Of course WA is owned by FB.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32274785
Social networks aren't that important to stay connected. In countries where there's still load shedding or shitty internet, people connect via whatsapp and gmail and you'll see advertising signs and paint on buildings and even cargo ships that just contain a whatsapp number and a gmail address.
That's their form of the internet, because everything else won't even load with speeds less than 100kBit/s.
Also: Whatsapp somehow works on dumbphones. I don't know how (yet) but there's apps for KaiOS, Samsung Bada and other old phones. I wonder if vendors reverse engineered the APIs and implemented their own clients.
> Also: Whatsapp somehow works on dumbphones. I don't know how (yet) but there's apps for KaiOS, Samsung Bada and other old phones. I wonder if vendors reverse engineered the APIs and implemented their own clients.
How "dumb" are those dumbphones? I ask because since around 2002 (prior to smartphones), some phones allowed apps to be downloaded. From around 2005, most phones supported downloadable apps, written by third parties.
They were called "midlets", written in Java, and I wrote a few of them myself.
I’d go further - it’s not just that we don’t need a way to ‘connect’ with people on a platform today (you can ping them in myriad ways).
It’s that we don’t much want to anymore.
The novelty of general-purpose social networking was twofold, in order depending on your circumstances at the time:
- a new angle to seeking a mate
- wow, a way to see what someone you don’t really know anymore is up to and say hi
The former market opportunity is now filled by specialist apps.
The latter, while it was fun for a while, and might still hold some prospect for thrills, is nothing to build a business around.
> What’s sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and whatnot.
yeah, but meeting people there isn't really meeting people. the friends you have on those aren't real friends. you can stay in touch with a friend on social media, but if your friendship is only there it's only pretend.
Reddit is often great for reading nifty content, but the infantile, monoculture avatars turn me off from ever wanting to 'connect' with anyone.
I like my bubbles on reddit because I have a lot of niche interests. Geography, airplanes, retro computers, 1980's toys and cartoons. Reddit is great because there are multiple subreddits for these things. It's great that after 30+ years of never meeting someone who liked maps as much as I do I can share and discuss strange maps and talk about toys from my childhood.
>What’s sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and whatnot.
None of those sites are good for that any more. All the interesting people on reddit have been banned. No one sane uses twitter. And finding people to talk to on tiktok is plain impossible.
IMHO Social Media is a toxic mutation of the capabilities offered by the Internet and is the opposite of federated, open communication. I don't consider blogs, forums, or IRC to be "Social Media". When you add the idea of followers and audience and attention seeking (both from participants and the platform) that's when you get "Social Media".
We live in the Infinite September. Scale is not conducive to valuable or fulfilling communication. Decentralization, variety, and focus are. When I want to read about motorcycles I have a forum for that. When I want to plan a vacation with the family we use email. When I have a question about a software project I get on their IRC channel. At no point is my racist uncle (or yours!) involved. This is the potential of the Internet and it is not social media.
When I want to be depressed by all the things that other people have better than me I go to Social Media. I can't think of a single fulfilling experience I ever had on Facebook or any other social media platform. It's just not possible when you put everyone in a room. It's like studying philosophy on a bus.
Social Media is by (my) definition the valueless corruption of the Internet. In that sense I am glad it is dead, I hope it stays that way. Facebook and Tik Tok are the inevitable end-state of "Social Media". There's no "good" social media and there never was. Anyone who builds a platform for "everyone" is doomed to die the death of social media.
> There's no "good" social media and there never was.
As much as I hate Facebook/Meta and everything it stands for, I got a lot of value out of Facebook and Instagram during my teenage years. I lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere, not very walkable/bikeable but also without any other kids my age to hang out nearby. My school was really small (I graduated with a class of less than 30 people) and there weren't many like-minded students.
During the 2000s, Facebook was an absolute lifeline for me. It's where I lived. It's where I met new friends. It's where I shared (cringey) posts about my passions, my interests, books and TV shows and movies and games. And my friends talked about that cringey stuff with me on Facebook, over chat and in comments.
But that was a world before Facebook killed the chronological feed, before they introduced ads in the feed (remember sidebar ads? Not enough $$$ to pay tens of thousands of engineers, I suppose), before they started "recommending" content. They were still manipulative, but they provided a valuable service.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that early-stage simple social media was useful to many people, and that's likely why late-stage social media remains popular today -- people want that core functionality. I made lifelong friends on there, just like you did on blogs, forums, and IRC. At the early stage, it wasn't about influencers and ads. Just slightly-more-than-local attention seeking.
> When I want to plan a vacation with the family we use email. When I have a question about a software project I get on their IRC channel.
I think matrix.org would be more fitting, especially for your holiday planning.
Modern and secure, but still federated, also you can talk to people across platforms using bridges!
I recently friend requested a bunch of people I went to high school with who all thought I was a weird loser and I am very excited that I am doing much better than all of them. It’s made me like my social media feed a lot more seeing the school bully who loved ICP post about how “he’s ready to find the right girl and settle down (at 35)
So I guess I use social media for the exact reason you don’t like social media. Nobody’s supposed to like that stuff, but I mean, why else would you care what everyone else is doing other than to compare status?
If you come from a wealthy background, you get the really depressing version: the school bully who loved ICP posts about how they got a new job with McKinsey, the slimy moron who used to spread shit about you is the CEO of a up-and-coming startup, and the guy who was too dumb to understand how truly dumb he was is now at a senior position in a thinktank.
That's the disingenuous presupposition.
A more positive one would be those people actually got better at their skills and improved as people. I'd like to think I'm a better person than I was in high school.
But if you're constantly exposed to their social feeds, you would have the data and probably know better. :)
I guess from plain statistics, you could say that the number of talented people from wealthy backgrounds is roughly the same as talented people generally, so my feeling is that there is a sizable slice of jobs where you just secure rents through connections and you don't actually need to be talented.
From my observations, some industries (film, for instance) will give people a chance, then get rid of them if they don't work out - so a lot of people I vaguely knew had very brief acting careers.
Other companies seem to trundle along with really dysfunctional leadership, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, I suspect it's because the explicit aim of the company (say, mining) is not what the company is actually doing (say, some kind of rent extraction) so it doesn't matter that the CEO has no skills to speak of.
Also, when you know the people, and you see like an interview they've given, you can usually tell if they're bullshitting.
I'm not sure continuous exposure to schadenfreude is any healthier than the more depressing topics, to be honest.
I mean I don’t actually revel in it, I was being a bit cheeky. I just wanted to reconnect with high school people during Covid so I friend requested a ton of people.
It’s sad seeing a guy who was in the “gifted and talented program” with me is apparently now a janitor who posts pictures every day about what concert or sports game he’s at and he’s always alone. I was excited for him because he took a picture with a woman and I thought he’d met someone but it turned out to be his sister.
Haha, I don’t take pictures of myself alone, so I guess for anyone you notice like this, there are thousands invisible lonely boys.
Sounds like not much has changed for you since high school.
I mean nowadays I get free lunches from recruiters and at conventions instead of being on the school free lunch program but I suppose not
I suspect that that what really ate up personal social networking was very simple: private group messaging finally got good enough.
15 years ago, we’d lost touch with old friends and acquaintances because there are a ton of people in our lives that mean something to us but that don’t warrant much 1-to-1 contact through phone calls or messaging.
Myspace and early Facebook reinvigorated those relationships with relaxed, casual networked update blasts, but then iMessage, What’s App, were able to make the same connections more private, more personally shaped, and more collaborative.
So social networks drifted towards public feeds and commercialized feeds, which is what TikTok — as a well-funded latecomer — had the luxury of aiming for directly.
I completely agree. In my view group chats on apps like WhatsApp much more accurately mirror how humans actually communicate in real life. That is to say it's more like a spontaneous conversation rather than social media which is more like a narcissistic advertising board for your life.
I don’t remember my extended family sharing jokes and memes non-stop in real life…
My dad frequently shares jokes in real life, some of them I've heard more than once during all these years. When I was younger, late teens, early 20s, I thought them cumbersome, "come on, dad! you've told me that joke countless times", now, when I'm in early 40s, I cherish those retellings of jokes.
> When I was younger, late teens, early 20s, I thought them cumbersome, "come on, dad! you've told me that joke countless times", now, when I'm in early 40s, I cherish those retellings of jokes.
Reminds me of:
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Bowles
Yep. I think it is useful to have a list of people you know incase you ever need to connect them, which is basically Facebook Messenger.
The blasting life updates at everyone know ever knew part of it though is just so unnatural. It was a novelty for a while but that stage is well over now. Facebook eventually got features to allow people to be more granular about updates but they have never really pushed them.
At one point I would use Skype with friends which was terrible. Discord now though is basically everything I could ever want for group messaging.
> I suspect that that what really ate up personal social networking was very simple: private group messaging finally got good enough.
Which was achieved by WeChat since 10 years ago. It's something to think about that why are we so behind technologically.
I think it's because of a critical mass of users. I can communicate with my parents and my entire circle of friends on WhatsApp, they weren't there 10 years ago.
I didn’t know I was supposed to be using iMessage like that. Maybe that’s where everyone went.
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media ...
It's never going to happen.
Federation is a solution to a problem no one actually cares about. Obviously "no one" here is somewhat hyperbolic but so few people actaully care about this you may as well round it to zero.
We haven't had an at-scale federated network since POTS (and, by extension, SMS). That's a historical artifact. And look at all the problems POTS/SMS has with spam, caller impersonation, robocalls, etc. Now part of that is due to these being open addressable networks rather than the opt-in networking that has become dominant now.
But to say that's th eonly reason would be to miss the point that any federated systems will always have bad actors.
In the 2000s we had XMPP as an effort to make IM services interoperable. Remember how Google got flak for removing the ability to talk to non-Google services? That was mostly misplaced because the reason it was removed was that Microsoft allowed its IM users to talk to Google Chat but not the reverse.
Spam exists on POTS/SMS largely because smaller exchanges "launder" bad traffic with good traffic (and charge higher rates for it) to make it harder to filter or even identify who the bad actors are.
As for open? There's really no incentive for this except from the "losers" (in the market).
> Federation is a solution to a problem no one actually cares about. Obviously "no one" here is somewhat hyperbolic but so few people actaully care about this you may as well round it to zero.
I think this conflates two things: the number of people who are familiar with a problem as a discussion topic (yes, that’s very niche in this case), and the number of people who are affected by a problem and might be receptive to a solution to it if one was available and understandable to them.
I see it like Internet Explorer in the 00's.
Did my friends and family hate IE enough to switch away themselves? Nope.
Did I care enough to find out about Firefox? Yup. Did my friends and family hate IE enough to switch to Firefox when I suggested it? Yup.
Social media could be the same situation.
Didn’t have time to read other comments, but based on anecdotal experience I’d say the interpersonal connections have migrated into the private corners of chat via WhatsApp, Meta apps’ chat, or snap (highly dependent on age and location).
I’d add on to the idea of social media is over by saying the age of social networking in public is going through a rethink (or is just over for a while).
And as much as one wants to take it as a turn towards the networks becoming an ad machine and blame it on networks themselves, I’d also say it’s a human thing. The moment a platform gains escape velocity and starts growing, we immediately see the influencers, hustlers, and businesses approach it with a “grow your brand and audience” mentality. This eventually skews the network towards serving them because they actually bring money and shortly after, tadaaaa. It’s an ad machine laid on top of a content network rather than a social network.
Chats don’t suffer from this so in my experience, that’s where “social” networks are going for now. I’ll hold my breath on federated networks being the next step.
Social media for most is your phone's contact list + a group chat. It's just not broadcast for everyone to see and as of now, an ad free experience.
I was just thinking this.
Personally I've migrated from sharing things with friends and family on Facebook/Instagram, to a few group chats where friends and family share photos, life moments, etc.
Somewhere along the line Facebook and Instagram made me feel like my personal photos and updates were competing against ads and other more engaging content in people's feeds, and I felt like I wasn't communicating with the people that I was on those platforms to communicate with in the first place.
Judging by the increase in messages I get through more private channels with casual update content, I don't feel alone.
I would be curious if others have had similar experiences.
I think the market simply came to the conclusion that "real social media" (friend-centric) was not a thing that many people needed or wanted. People moved friend-to-friend communication to private messaging apps: FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Signal, Discord, etc. and that space is very alive and well.
There is no great unfulfilled demand for a version of that which is also semi-public because then you get your public and private spheres mixed up. Younger users appear to have looked at the mistakes of older users and figured out that this is not the right move - they know that Tiktok/IG/etc. is fake and not friend based, the fakeness is sort of the point, they're there to watch the 2022 version of TV, and participate in a popularity contest and stroke the ego/receive affirmation from a Like count.
This internet kid of 90s fever dream of an internet thats free and federated is just not gona happen. All evidence we have so far suggests that the scale at which internet is at, the larges opportunities will be in solving for the "non-technical" user. In my view this non technical user now understands that if something is free then that means ads. Thus the next age of social media should be about exploring what business models can work that align themselves with user's own interests.
This is largely true, except...
what about Wikipedia? Maybe it's the exception that proves the rule. But as far as I can tell, no online knowledge store has come close to the comprehensiveness and cultural cache of Wikipedia. And it's not showing ads constantly, it relies on donations entirely.
I remain hopeful that a federated social media service that offloads the hosting costs to passionate individuals (with modest ad support to keep the lights on) could survive just fine without venture capital or advertising creep. Think: WoW servers, AKA "blessed" federation.
Venture capital-driven business models will never align with my interest of keeping in touch with friends and family. The desire for profit and revenue growth (what us filthy plebeians call "greed") is simply too strong.
Here are some trends that could drive a fundamental shift in social media:
1) Trust is the scarcest element in social media today. Any social media company that is built on advertising will never have the trust of a subscription-based social media company. Companies that address scarcity tend to be successful.
2) What's no longer scarce: the underpinning technologies of social media: capturing and displaying photos and videos on multiple types of devices, recommending new social connections and posts. What was cutting-edge in 2004 is now well-known.
3) Meanwhile, users are getting increasing used to paying for subscriptions: app stores, streaming services, SaaS applications, cloud services, etc.
4) Connecting socially with others is a basic human need. This only increases as some kinds of jobs can be done from anywhere, and friends relocate far away.
5) As Facebook/Meta and others pursue the novelty-driven user experience of TikTok -- "show me what's interesting from people I don't know" -- it creates room for companies that want to get back to meeting the need for keeping in touch with friends and family, even when remote.
6) Large tech fortunes have created a donor class focused on legacy, not profit. Example: MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos. Or Craig Newmark, of Craigslist.
--
Put all these together, and it seems like new social media companies could be created along the following lines:
1) Mission-focused. Focus on social connection first, not whatever drives the most revenue. In other words, don't get pulled into the latest fads, as Facebook is doing with TikTok.
2) Subscription business model. This eliminates the conflicts of interest that drives Facebook's trust-eroding privacy practices. Again -- trust is the scarcest element.
3) Subscriber-owned business. Each subscriber owns a portion of the company, and thus the company has a fiduciary, legal obligation to protect their interests. This is similar to what Vanguard does -- investors each own a portion of the company -- which forces Vanguard to act in their interests. It's the opposite of Facebook/Meta's ownership structure, where Mark Zuckerberg controls 90% of class B shares, giving him control over the company. [1]
4) To fix the cold-start problem [2] inherent in building a business with network effects, make the service free until it gets to a critical mass of subscribers. We can debate if critical mass is 10 million users, 100M, 1B, or some other measure. But be transparent about the threshold, and the subscription price once its hit. Speaking of price...
5) Keep entry level prices low to be point of being negligible for the vast majority of users. Maybe one dollar a month. Whatever it is, keep it lower than most other subscription services in order to encourage adoption, but not to shift back to the problematic ad-driven model.
6) A very low subscription price, at scale, can fund innovation. 100M users at $1/month is $1.2 billion per year. That's enough to pay cloud infrastructure and the engineers to build and run apps. Back-of-the-envelope path: suppose for argument's sake that half of that, $600M, goes towards cloud service providers. That's approaching the $1B/year that Netflix spends. The other $600M could fund 2000 engineers at $300k/year/engineer. That's enough to build a great deal of capabilities and bring them to emerging platforms (like AR glasses, cars, IoT/smart home...).
7) A business like this probably might not attract traditional venture capital funding. Even if every one of Facebook's 3 billion users all switched to this business and paid 1 USD/month, that would be $36B per year. That's well short of Facebook's $120B/year [5]. Who might fund it? A set of mission-driven investors, who wants their legacy to include a trusted, self-sustaining organization that socially connects the world. Craig Newmark could be one such investor (at least advisor), having built one such Internet institution (Craigslist) that facilitates community and commerce in an economically-sustaining manner. But there could be many other investors as well. Again, the technologic acumen and capital required aren't what's scarce; trust is.
[1] https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-facebook-si...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Start-Problem-Andrew-Chen/dp/006...
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/netflix-pays-1-billionyear-am...
[4] https://datareportal.com/essential-facebook-stats
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
Seems like Tiktok has far fewer ads than other social media platforms. Less than 10% of things are ads. Instagram is like 30+% ads for me.
Yeah I was also surprised at that comment, TikTok has significantly less ads than FB/IG, so I don’t understand why it’s being criticized for that.
I suspect there's a lot more subversive ad content on TikTok -- influencers who are paid or gifted by advertisers to namedrop or show a product in a post that TikTok recommends to millions. The "ad" label feels inherently dirty, and people tend to tune out. But if an influencer sips a coke in a video, without even an explicit mention of the brand, I'm sure a lot of people start craving coke.
I'm sure subversive ads happen, but in my experience people are pretty straightforward about marking posts as paid.
Then, there's also a lot of small and medium sized manufacturers/artists where their whole channel is showing off their stuff. Kind of ad-like, but quality tends to be good and it doesn't feel sneaky like subtle product placement. Ex. there's a chinese factory that manufactures polycarbonate dome houses, they'll post montages of their domes, nicely decorated in beautiful locations. I think the product is cool, so I intentionally follow and consume their 'ad' content.
I've seen people claim that they show a variable amount of ads depending on the user, which I imagine would be based on your clickthrough rate or other metrics. The ratio between ads and content also seems to vary over time for me so I feel there's some form of optimization happening
I think Mastodon or the other Fediverse projects do provide all we need, but the problems with getting there are awareness, intransigence, and excitement which the advertising networks provide. Most people are unaware of this free alternative because it doesn't advertise itself. Effort to change and migrate is too much for many people. Entertainment creation does not provide much if any revenue on free platforms.
So we have this divide of advertising products and the rest of us who do not participate in advertising networks. The trend toward the latter is growing but slowly.
Jabber failed versus MSN Messenger and that was not because advertising.
Propietary products are usually more curated in features and stability than the free options, and those reach the market quickly. Big companies have money, free comunities do not.
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet.
Worth mentioning is Jimmy Wales' effort in this vein: https://wt.social/
Imo this depends on your definition of open. Others being allowed to edit your content opens the door for abuse from opposite political parties.
Mastodon is anything but high-latency. If you missed a post in the stream of other posts it is gone forever, unless you were glued to the screen in hopes of not missing anything. I don't think it is better than Tiktok really, same basic principle of keeping people in the app.
Forums and blogs with comment sections are the only high-latency mediums, and I guess we will keep reinventing them every five years.
> If we're lucky, that means a federated, open, mostly-ad-and-suggestion-free open source social media experience can fill the power vacuum for intimate, interpersonal, high-latency communication over the internet. microblog seems promising, but I think even mastodon could provide the experience I'm looking for.
might be true for people like us. the other 7 billions out there won’t care
That's OK by me. I'd very much enjoy a small community of passionate people like us. My family and friends are fed up with Facebook enough that I could probably persuade them to switch. I don't need everyone on there -- just the people I care about and respect.
Of course I think the whole world would benefit if everyone switched away from Facebook, but no need to rush anything.
You're answering your own question with your own essay on this-here social network for essays. Yeah there's no pictures, yeah there's no private messages, yeah there's very little of meeting someone and becoming friends. (And in fact, on BookFace which is for YC founders, I divine there are all those things, as options, this is the public-facing everyone's-welcome version of that. They share software.) But I have made some friends, like alisonkisk to some extent, and who else, cercatrova, and recently Cyberdog. And a few others reaching each other over email, there's some people. It's not a totally deserted wasteland, like you'd think from the purity of text. A literally Islamic degree to which it's iconoclastic, just pure text, like not even ASCII art, this is fully compatible with the most extreme forms of literalist Christianity and Islam.
Where does classmates fit into the picture?
I don't think too people actively use them, but some people do. I'm actually unsure how Classmates actually works --is it a subscription model, what's it's business model and could it end up morphing into the TheFB of old but subscription based? Maybe the draw of advertising money is too strong to resist.
Not just social media. Look at news sites. Evolution from news aggregator to news plus well-placed ads to now where half the page is the Outbrain ads embedment. You could see a well-written story and then scroll down your struck with cognitive dissonance wondering how reputable organizations still put the Outbrain junk at the bottom.
I'm curious how you can to this conclusion. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were always vehicles for advertisers. I suppose it was more acceptable because it was from "influencer marketing," which was taken so far that the FTC had to step in and start fining influencers for dishonest marketing.
I guess it is different than "we are interrupting your current show for this important topic," but to be honest, I think the new style of marketing is more sinister. We can expect a TV or radio station to show ads and understand it doesn't exactly reflect the thoughts of the stations. In "influencer marketing," we are led to believe that some 16 year old really knows more about the stock market and crypto than those Wall Street guys.
TV created influencer marketing. Since before social networks existed products would make appearances in shows. See Sheldon drink a coke in big bang theory, that was paid for. See someone shopping at a particular store in a mall, paid for.
That’s odd, I don’t remember there being any advertising at all on those platforms in the early days.
At least Tiktok doesn't force me to watch their stupid ads like YouTube does. I am too lazy to install adbockers on my mobile and tablet. But the force-watching of Youtube ads is one of the worst ideas in advertising.
At least they provide a premium ad free service.
And they told me about it every damn time I log on to YouTube
From my experience TikTok has nothing compared to Snapchat. Snapchat videos have so many adds I was getting too frustrated and finally vowed never to return. I don’t get that feeling with TikTok
The problem of "who pays for this?" still remains.
If it's free to the user, it has to be ad-supported (or I guess donation-driven; the Wikipedia/Guardian model, but I don't see that working so well for social media). If it's ad-supported that means the advertiser becomes the customer and the point of the thing gets subverted to maximise ad revenue.
If it's not free to the user, then we have to educate everyone that they need to pay for their social media. Not an easy task.
That's easy, honestly. Give people an option:
- host your own instance, no limits on usage because you're paying your own way, hosting your own images and content, running your own server
- use someone else's instance, they can show you whatever ads they like (though preferably in a sidebar, not integrated into your main feed) and subject you to space limitations. In a truly federated environment where users can easily switch between instances, those instances can compete based on ad and space efficiency. Some folks, like myself, might shell out for their own instance and host friends and family with no ads and ample space just to be nice.
Facebook as of 2009 was damn near "feature complete" social media. Messaging, photos, videos, comments, chronological feed. It's not that complicated. You could run the whole thing as an open source + donation based project, like Wikipedia or Mozilla. You don't need tens of thousands of engineers and venture capital that forces you to employ dark patterns and inject more and more ads and growth. Hell, I think that governments could even donate to a project like this since it's essentially a public service and (compared to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok) an investment in public mental health.
yeah, those are the options. And I agree, FB in 2009 was great.
But that's my point: companies have to keep moving, and optimising, and growing (because shareholders). If the revenue is supplied by advertisers, then they're the customers, and any optimisation is aimed to increase lock-in/revenues/etc based on their experience. The actual users get a worse experience as time goes on because their needs are secondary to the advertisers. Eventually the whole thing ends up where we are with FB: the user experience is shitty and people start leaving.
If this is really going to work properly, then we have to persuade people to pay for their social media service.
Discord is picking up steam, and doesn't seem to be relying on advertising. They're also way more explicit about making communities rather than friend networks.
The scary part is how much real interpersonal communication data they have on users and what could be done with it in the wrong hands. What is their real business model? It can't just be selling Nitro.
Discord watches what apps you launch, primarily games, and sells this data to others to determine what games to make, or what games people are playing. It’s the same purpose of all the game launchers out there that run even when you’re not playing a game from that company.
This is an interesting perspective and evolution I’d not considered before. And it makes me wonder if the trend of LinkedIn showing ever more personal and less professional content is because it’s the place people have turned to fill the void. It being the main remaining place where people have connections they are least have a somewhat passing personal acquaintance with rather than just a collection of performing strangers.
This reminds me of a video I watched the other day about how nobody asks you to "share" anymore. In the early days of social networks every site and app had front page ad copy asking you to "share". Nowadays most don't even tell you what they are because it's assumed that you already know. And even those that try to explain themselves no longer talk about "sharing".
This article filled me with hope, but I already see a danger:
A threadmill of products to "bring the world together" under different names and mottos but all sooner or later devolving into advertisement machines. Maybe next: WhatsApp, then Signal then Mastodon? For this to happen, founders just need to sell out, for example to Meta. WhatsApp already sold out but did not yet pivot.
Signal very obviously has a finite lifespan, but in the moment it's best in class for privacy.
Very obviously? Am I missing something?
That being said, I'm strongly considering switching to a Matrix client these days, since I like the idea of encrypted chat that works across whatever client I prefer. If you're knowledgeable in the encrypted chat space I'd love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons.
Signal is anti-federation, so it's limited to the quality that moxie can enforce so long as he can enforce it.
Realistically, if he steps down for any reason and someone decides they need to layer in ads to support it...that'll be the end.
I would desperately like Signal to have a commercial service offering you can pay for which would of offer the possibility of sustainment.
> I would desperately like Signal to have a commercial service offering you can pay for which would of offer the possibility of sustainment.
That will kill it even quicker. What does this look like? All users have to pay to have an account? Now you’ll have less users and miss out on network effects. If only some users have to pay, what do they get besides feel goods? Ad removal? They’re stuck, Signal must continue being free. So agreed, Signal has a finite lifespan
Matrix has a very complicated server setup. I tried and failed. It's only for people who know Matrix deeply or have a lot of time to troubleshoot.
Very obviously - not to me. Why?
We don’t really need social media because we’ve discovered we actually hate a lot of people once we see their opinions on full display. Just stick to good content please. Most people though aren’t great content creators anyway.
A lot of people do post uninteresting, cringey, or downright embarrassing content when given the opportunity. I've done so myself plenty of times.
But I think social media brings out the worst in people right now. By constantly "recommending" content that radicalizes people into tiny niche opinions and conspiracy theories and incentivizing "sharing" links and video spam, we're amplifying the worst opinions that people have.
But I'm sure those same people have interesting thoughts too -- something as simple as a cute picture of their dog, or a nice sunset, or information about a hobby they enjoy like woodworking or bike riding. Maybe I'm just an optimist who wants to believe the best in people.
When I look at Facebook these days, I don't assume that my relatives are actually JUST hateful, conservative, xenophobic conspiracy theorists. I assume that's what Facebook brings out of them -- it's what it suggests to them, it's what it suggests to their friends, it's what they see in their feed so it's ultimately what they share and what they end up thinking about more often as a result. But it isn't who they are. I know these people: they love kayaking, and gin & tonics by the ocean, and their pets, and their kids, and fireworks, and campfires, and boating, and books, and gardening, and a million other things. But you'll never see posts about those other things on Facebook because they aren't "engaging."
> we basically don't have social media right now, we have advertising engines masquerading as social media
And that's been true of mainstream media for a long time also.
Have you ever read Neil Postman's Amusing ourselves to Death? It doesn't quite hone in on the advertising engine piece of this, but I think it hits the nail right on the head about mainstream media's longtime masquerade as "news."
https://solidproject.org/
TikTok is an entertainment platform, not really social media.
Therefore, social media is not entertaining. Hence the downfall of social media.
I think the "social" part of social networks just moved to group chats. All my friends share updates of their family events, kids' stuff etc.. over Whatsapp and Telegram. Strangers gather over topics that interest them and want to talk about it seem to have moved to discord, slack etc.
The whole "broadcast yourself to the world" part of social networks just moved to Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram etc.. I think.
Some people are moving back to anonymous communication with limited audiences.
Twitter is anonymous, but 100% public. There is no way to limit your audience to a smaller group.
FB is not anonymous and mostly public. Private groups do exist, but you still mostly need to have an actual name on your account.
TikTok & Snapchat are mostly for people who show their faces, not anonymous.
WhatsApp shows everyone everyone's phone numbers if they are in the same group, not anonymous. You can also be forcibly added to a group of hundreds of people you don't know without permission.
Telegram and Discord are more like old-school IRC was. Just a nickname and that's it, no personal info needed. (IRC did have the hostname, but some networks masked it)
Both telegram and discord need phone numbers though - telegram upfront and discord after your used it for about ten mimutes.
Telegram uses phone numbers just as UIDs, they're not shared to anyone without your permission.
As for Discord, I've got a few accounts and have been asked for telephone numbers 0 times. It's only needed when a specific server demands it, haven't seen any yet.
If discord has too few selectors (IP, email, browser fingerprint, useragent, behavior) to identify you from or they are too generic, they will demand that you use a phone number. Low-reputation IP addresses do this especially, you'll be locked right out of an account for using one. I'd rather be able to just pay them money for an account than have to go use a VPS or residential proxy in order to avoid the phone requirement.
Unless it has changed, the phone number verification is server-based. If an admin sets the verification level to Highest you will be prompted if you attempt to join their server:
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/216679607
Telegram accepts Google Voice, and Discord doesn't seem to require a phone number (I never added one to either of my accounts).
Google Circles was a good concept but I presume poorly implemented. Facebook fails outside the school/university environment because most people do not want their private social lives to be public, and the start of Facebook was limited to young people.
LinkedIn is what the adult version of a social media would be, because most people are happy to share some aspect of their professional life to the public, and professional life is usually fake and a mirage.
Aside from locking your account so that only followers can see your tweets, I’ve been offered the option to restrict the audience of tweets on twitter (although I’m not sure if that was a transient experiment or if I’ve blocked my noticing the offer of the option or if I’ve asked it to stop asking).
That’s Twitter Circle:
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-circle
> Twitter is anonymous, but 100% public. There is no way to limit your audience to a smaller group.
This isn't true anymore. You can choose your audience now and there's even more features like that in test.
No, but you can limit the conversation to only the people you follow or mention. That reduces the discussion blast radius.
Interestingly, I mostly see this sort of limiting or disabling of discussion when the information in a tweet is clearly false.
Twitter is no more anonymous or than FB, Twitter requires a phone number these days. And they verify if it’s an actual number or voip.
Reddit is anonymous and doing well..
web3 is taking a stab at reinventing this without the need of phone numbers.
see
[1] https://spkz.io/
[2] https://nftychat.xyz/
[3] https://gm.xyz/
*disclosure i'm a co-founder of #2
Lol, the reason the phone number is used as an identifier is because because it's a pain to have more than 1 or 2. It's an anti spam measure not a technology problem. You can key a database by anything unique. Icq used chronological numbers for fuck sake. Blockchain doesn't solve anything here.
It's not the ID, it's that a phone number is relatively difficult to obtain (not hard, but still a limited resource) and unique. A crypto stake / wallet / something of value on the blockchain could easily meet such a criteria if well designed.
Yes could, but why? Why when any topic comes up “Blockchain zomg!!!!111”?
I used to be real hardcore into bitcoin, around the $1-10 range. You people need to give it up already and quit annoying the rest of us by trying to force fit an insanely inefficient technology into every aspect of life.
“Preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
ok, I'll bite, how does blockchain solve spam, and how does it do it better than that same process using an email as an identifier?
A development I'm quite thankful for. It's nice being able to participate to the degree expected of me by the people I actually know without being a terminally-online internet personality.
Yeah same for me. If I want to talk to someone, or share info with friends, I create a Messages group. If there’s more than a few people, then it’s a Telegram channel. If it’s work related or networking with colleagues then it’s Slack. If it’s gaming related then it’s Discord.
I look back at my Instagram and my last post was 2 years ago. All of the people that I used to see pop up, the people that would like my photos, and I would like their’s, those people seem to be gone. Friends from college, and high school have all been replaced by short videos of strangers, ads, and influencers.
I think the biggest missing piece for me is keeping up with people I know, but wouldn’t otherwise talk to (by any means listed above). It was nice to see those people pop up sometimes, but I have no way of serendipitously finding them anymore. That’s what social media was to me.
time is a flat circle, were back to forums. tbh they never left, forums rule
Watch Facebook/Meta ruin that as well soon. It's just to the monopoly of 1 company that we need 3 apps to communicate versus having a common protocol like email for IM
Group chats are the last place that is chronologically ordered, advert free and semi private.
I'd say move back even. We simply got back to basic usage. The web2 didn't improve relationship more than the technological novelty phase.
TikTok is winning because it is video first. The more immersive the media, the more profitable the ads. Facebook is having trouble pivoting it's products to video. Facebook is betting big that the next more-immersive medium after video will be VR. That's basically the whole story.
Notice I didn't use the word "algorithm" or "social"? These takes are tired and naive, TikTok isn't addictive in any operationally useful sense of the word, people just like it and use it. You may as well write a blog post saying "TV is addictive and it's dying because of commercials". It's just not an accurate conceptualization if the landscape.
While you aren't using the words "algorithm" or "social", another perspective to see is that the "medium" is not just video. It is a specific type of short, repeatable, and trivialized pieces of video content. Created by mostly individual creators in niche social networks that convey extreme feelings of pain and pleasure in an infinite feed.
TikTok is addictive in every category. People are addicted to it just like people are addicted to other mediums like books, radio, and tv. Creators are also addicted to creating for it manipulated by incentives and sponsorship opportunities. It is a borderline technological narcotic.
To be human is to be addicted to something. We are addicted to the many "wants" in our lives being sold through these 15s-3 minute videos.
> You may as well write a blog post saying "TV is addictive and it's dying because of commercials"
When the going gets tough, the tough goes shopping.
There's actually a few books on this! i.e. consumerism and advertising
Four arguments for the elimination of television by Jerry Mander
Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman
The shallows by Nicolas Carr
And the classic, brave new world by Aldous Huxley
Also Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The addictive quality of entertainment is a central theme, and the book contains the memorable Samizdat videotape that’s so entertaining you watch it immobilised until you die. The Samizdat is the reduction ad absurdim of TikTok era social media addiction.
I guess it’s not a new idea but it is a more potent version of the same. DFW himself had a serious TV addiction which is where that idea comes from.
My wife deleted TikTok after a few weeks because she just couldn’t handle how addictive it was. All she wanted to do was watch TikTok. Then she started getting Shorts on YouTube now she wants to completely stop watching YouTube even if the old creators she enjoyed are still making philosophy videos and stuff, it’s just not worth it to stick around when the goal has become quite clearly to keep you hooked.
Same here. I completely blocked myself from accessing to YouTube on my smartphone and MacBook, just because of the shorts. This stuff is so addictive that I couldn't avoid it in my free time for dozens of minutes every single time I've opened youtube.
Perhaps too late for you unless you open a new account, but I seriously recomend everyone here to never ever click on a YouTube short while logged in.
YouTube will proceed to show that content down your throat and if you are like most people you will let it. It will make your experience miserable though.
I've found quite effective blocking channels and actively informing yt "don't show me more like this"
I guess I'm lucky that the algorithm associates me with a very different crowd that I want to avoid at all costs.
All I get is Family Guy, sigma grindset nonsense, and military stuff. I hate all of those.
I deleted the browser and all but the most basic IM apps from my phone because every online experience seemed to be trending towards this.
Life is better, now. I highly recommend it. Your phone doesn't need a browser.
She can use custom apps for YouTube like Newpipe, which offer YouTube experiences without ads and Shorts.
I hadn't heard of newpipe before so just installed it and found that it had much more intrusive ads than regular YouTube.
I think you download a clone of new pipe.
There is no Newpipe on the Play store, it breaks the T&S of the play store.
Here is the official website for Newpipe https://newpipe.net/
Git repo https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
There are no ads on new pipe. It just has a stupid trending tab with crap that is confusing. Ignore it, this is not your feed. Go to subscriptions which is what we used to have before tech giants convinced us otherwise with curated content.
Seriously, NewPipe is what all apps should aim to be like.
I had the same experience, but hopping over to F-Droid from the Play Store provided a different NewPipe (instead of 'Newpipe') that I believe is the pertinent one.
I think you download a clone of new pipe.
There is no Newpipe on the Play store, it breaks the T&S of the play store.
Here is the official website for Newpipe https://newpipe.net/
Git repo https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
I wish I could filter out "shorts" from my Youtube subscriptions page/tab.
YouTube is video first.
I think TikTok is winning because their objective algorithm optimizes for a different outcome.
Facebook and YouTube optimize for time spent on the site. Youtube famously cut ad revenue for content that is watched for fewer than 10 minutes. They both make decisions based on what will increase time spent on the site, thinking that's the best way to sell ads.
TikTok optimizes for content that people love by giving the most reach to items that commenters buy gifts for. This has the side effect of making content that consumers really connect with get paid the most. There is a big difference between what people love and what makes people spend a lot of their time.
Facebook does not optimize directly for time spent, it's too hard. I know because I worked on these algorithms. Time spent is a metric Facebook monitors and works to increase over time, but basically no work is done to increase time spent directly. Facebook also tries to give more reach to content that people like. There are whole teams of people that work on that, they are just less good at it than TT.
Tiktok optimizes for similar metrics. There's no difference there. The main difference is that they are more focused and have been doing short form video from the ground up.
Could you share what metrics they optimistize or monitor? Or how do they improve their algorithms? I don't know how much you can tell but I always wanted to hear it from someone who has worked with them
Youtube is also a website first, whereas TikTok is an app first. Apps on mobile are usually harder to leave.
YouTube is losing (for me) because every video is now 12+ minutes long, and my sweet spot is closer to 5.
Sometimes you don't want long form content.
100% this. Everyone else is trying to make a tiktok clone and bolt it on to a maze of existing, and in some cases very similar, social media offerings. TikTok works because it's video only from the ground up.
then why didn't vine or snapchat or whatever other video first platform from yesteryear catch on as big too?
clearly there's more to it than "it's simply video first"
The fact that it's video first was necessary but not sufficient
yes thanks, that is much more clear
vine did
snapchat isn't the same
they both had implementation differences and primarily execution differences that had little to do with their platform, and more so finances
its not just video, its video+algorithm, its video+algorithm+content-subsidies
a lot of popular content creators on TikTok are still from the vine days, getting paid a lot more directly by the platforms now, as well as from whatever they can monetize on and off the platform.
Bytedance (TikTok) is willing to throw a lot of money at this, and they've been extremely high on compensation for engineers for years before TikTok reached critical mass.
snap is not video first — yes it supports video, but it supports pictures just as well or better since they integrate into chats.
vine was literally killed by twitter.
vine did! twitter mothballed it.
Twitter mothballed it’s because it didn’t catch on like TikTok did.
Vine was forced to intergrade into Twitter.
Phone hardware and telecommunications networks have only recently been powerful enough to support a TikTok-like social network. Video wouldn't have worked in 2015 in an era of 3G/4G phones and 4 inch iPhone 5's.
Vine launched in 2013, Periscope in 2015. I'm sure there are others. TikTok definitely takes advantage of the new hardware with their filters though.
Social media cannibalized itself to death in pursuit of ad revenue via increased engagement. The harder they pushed, with content assumption algorithms, the more toxic it became. The more toxic it becomes the more it appeals to extreme personalities while alienating everyone else, a poisonous viper eating itself.
It’s only market lag between the revenue source, media source agencies, and the realization that better markets for their business. When that occurs the death spiral hyper accelerates to rapid finality.
Like all death spirals this could have been avoided had they treated their users as a potential revenue source instead of a product. I was watching a history video yesterday about the Aztecs who completely alienated the tribes in their empire in their own death spiral. The empire was already dead before the Spanish arrived, but the Aztecs just didn’t see it yet.
I genuinely believe that AB testing as practiced by every major tech company (and the incentives it creates) has caused much of this. AB testing is a really unsophisticated way of measuring extremely short-term incremental gains in isolation. That's how we've ended up with products which have gradually become so hostile to users. Because individually the changes seem like small wins, but taken together and over the long term they are deeply destructive to the core product. AB testing doesn't capture long-term changes to user behavior from the accumulation of disparate features. The incentive structures within these companies are all set up to be able to prove these small wins in dollar values to get a raise or promotion which has led to a race to the bottom as teams create features nobody wants to justify their existence.
Anecdotally I and many people I know have reached a kind of breaking point where these apps have become so demanding in terms of attention that we have to stop using them entirely. Whether it's YouTube's incessant advertisements, TikTok's infinite scroll or Facebook's insane jumble of a UI/feed these products are demonstrably inferior to their incarnations 5-7 years ago.
I was the A/B test engineer for one of the most well known dot com brands about a decade ago.
A/B testing media (advertising) is extremely misleading compared to testing against something transactional. The goal of a transactional sequence, called a conversion (payment in exchange for a product or defined service), is a supremely simple metric. Although the goal is simple to define and recognize the costs associated are wildly complex. Media is the inverse of this where the goals and consequences are not immediately clear or known but both the costs and revenue are immediately straight forward.
The reason the financials of conversion are complex is because you need to account for the expenses to third parties to pull a user in, the purchasing horizon in time, potential for cannibalism against other purchasing decisions, and various other factors that cost the business money.
The reason metrics associated with media are complex is because users HATE it. Increased advertising presence drives traffic away. Shifts in traffic occur over a wide duration due to a variety of factors so it is almost impossible to measure just how toxic advertising is to a given product oriented business in isolation in accordance with a variable time horizon. Its actually much worse than that for a variety of technical factors. In the past legitimate ad placements have been delivery vectors for content and logic of malicious criminal activity. Advertising logic is frequently poorly written. Many websites will isolate their advertisements into iframes in order to protect their website from accidental defacement of presentation and/or broken logic. Advertisements come into the page super slowly which completely pushes out the waterfall for what might have been a quick loading page.
When I did A/B testing I would describe the media side of the business in terms of illegal job deals. I did this because of so many parallels in the transactions and risks in those markets, not because they are both filthy evil things.
I can't say I understood everything you said (is all usage of word "media" == "advertising"? what are "illegal job deals"?) but just wanted to ask: is A/B testing ever not harmful to end users in the long run? Excluding some very minor UI testing like CTA button color which I presume doesn't really matter.
From a revenue perspective the words media and advertising are interchangeable. The word media is preferred because it speaks to a business segment as opposed to something like an agency.
A/B testing is great when you are helping eliminate confusion and dark patterns nobody can articulate more directly.
Illegal job deals was an autocorrection of my phone. I meant illegal drug deals and didn’t catch the change.
Thank you, I have been reading about dark patterns recently and how damaging they are so you really got my attention now.
I will try to do my own research on how it's done but if you can expand a bit on confusion and dark pattern elimination that would be very much appreciated. I feel like everything I ever stumbled upon regarding A/B testing was "sales funnel optimization" which seems to be the root of much evil.
The goal of any product oriented business is purchase through a point of sale. That is called a conversion. Dark patterns emerge when a seller attempts to influence the behavior of a purchaser beyond decisions most beneficial to the purchaser, which is not always intentional.
One example of dark pattern elimination occurs when steps in a purchase process are dramatically reduced. That reduction eliminates opportunities for messaging but increases the potential for transaction quantity.
Ok I have a clearer picture now but it's still something that would probably need case by case analysis to get a full grasp what is possible and how to use it for the customer and not against him. Thank you.
Ugh I do still remember the chronological feed where posts didn’t get ranked. I enjoyed that product. Feels like every efficiency improvement they did removed a few percentage of users until now when there’s just a few weirdos left posting
Chronological feeds is how they lure us in to the circus. Engagement algorithms is how they turn is into donkeys.
I don’t know if you remember or were ever exposed to the “Facebook is going to start charging for its services!” Panic posts that happened in the mid-2010s. It was always false, but when it comes to the internet, people have a strong sense of entitlement. They do not like the idea of paying for things.
Which is exactly where I would focus if I was making a product. I’m so sick to death of these awful “free” services. I can’t be the only one.
I am thinking about it now that I prepare for releasing a small B2C app. I thought about going freemium initially, then changed my thinking to maybe adding ads to the free version, but as I read more and more about dark patterns and sucking clients dry on every occasion (by big corps) I think of going paid only (monthly/yearly or one time) + 1 month free trial (no registration, no credit card). Simple, easy to understand, all cards on the table plus much less incentive for "finding creative revenue streams" (selling user data) in case ad revenue is low.
Perhaps it is a very bad decision which will never work, I don't know. I guess in this ecosystem the only way to at least not lose is not to play, otherwise we will all be eventually brought down to aggressive A/B testing, ad infested, tracking, no-privacy environment, to match other products... I don't want that kind of world.
Mine is a free app, that does nothing without a physical device. The DRM system is no login no account, the device is the key. No update costs. Everything calm. The device is even fungible for its purpose. A tool to do a thing and fucks off.
We’re leaving money on the table, for sure, but I really don’t care. I’m going to make something that is biased to the customer, and they’re going to appreciate it.
Looks like a good way to go, I hope you succeed and have fun in the process!
Ending this with "tweet your comment" and "discuss this on twitter" is amusingly ironic, given that Twitter has always been a place that's actively hostile to any kind of rich, subtle discussion, and has pivoted away from "keep up with people you want to follow" to an official stance of "keep up with the news" and an actual stance of "here is an endless scroll of engaging content, mostly things to get angry about, that we can slip ads into".
I think that’s entirely dependent on who you follow and if you’re not actively utilizing your blocked/muted accounts and/or muted keywords from your feed.
The amount of value I’ve gained from threads on people I follow on how to do something or learning something is insane and the “rich, subtle discussion” in those threads on that topic is sometimes just as good if not better than the thread itself.
No denying the default Twitter is loud, and just wants to suck you into mindless scrolling of ads and things to get you angry about, but you are in charge of how you curate your feed.
If you're willing to spend a while figuring out how to make Twitter stop showing you conversations your friends are having/stuff they're faving/popular posts/etc then it doesn't suck as much as the default, true, but you're still stuck in a conversational medium that makes it impossible to emit an entire paragraph at one go. I run a Mastodon instance whose post length limit is set to roughly 7k and it's amazing how much I could feel a part of my mind unclenching after years of Twitter as I got used to it.
Twitter is still the only major social media network where alternative views may be tolerated, and hence Musk was trying to buy it. Reddit is probably a better fit for your complaint.
"anonymously dunk on other people with no repercussions"
"distribute misinformation to rile people up"
I was just chatting about the “golden years” of Facebook with a friend today. I think it was about 10 years ago. Maybe we’re over-glamorizing the past, but at least the way we recall it:
Around 2012-2014, the newsfeed mostly was just updates from your friends with some ads sprinkled in. Everyone was on Facebook, so if you were hosting a social event, you could just invite everyone on Facebook and they’d hear about it. Birthdays were great because everyone would wish you happy birthday and you would do the same for them. There was a location-based search feature, where you could travel to basically any city and search your friends list to see who was there.
I felt closer to a lot of old friends from growing up than almost any other time, because suddenly everyone was on Facebook and it was super easy to catch up with someone I hadn’t talked to in years.
That’s all vanished these days, sadly. Social events are organized by email again (which is fine but less convenient). I’ve lost touch with old high school friends again because nobody uses Facebook anymore except for a few die hard holdouts.
I really remember thinking “Man, Facebook is just so dominant, I don’t see how they could blow it.”
Turns out, if you keep feeding the growth monster in search of more and more “engagement” (enragement?), eventually the growth monster destroys you.
I would say that the golden years ended by 2012 (depending on age of course).
Facebook was essentially a way to connect to people outside your inner circle, and before 2012 it was a way for younger people to connect to other younger people outside school/college/university. It was similar to what Instagram does now except for the new friends feature.
Facebook works in a social environment where everyone knows your personal details and you maintain a casual-formal image (school, university...) but is useless in most other contexts. Instagram provides flexibility in who you can add, but is bad as a tool for socializing.
> Everyone was on Facebook, so if you were hosting a social event, you could just invite everyone on Facebook and they’d hear about it.
My wife and I have never used Facebook. We would miss invites to things all the time since everyone assumes that everyone was on there and forgot that we were not. We used it as a litmus test to figure out who our true friends were. Fortunately now all of our friends have abandoned social media in favor of group texts.
Users of social media will learn how to deal with righteousness. Until we do, social media will suck big league.
Social Media strongly encourages Hot Takes, because those get clicks. I found myself examining how I comment on reddit, and what people call "The Hivemind".
You can't have nuanced discussions on social media, someone will infer what kind of asshole you exactly are, and that's the end of the discussion.
Some poisoned phrases:
Be Reasonable - "why can't you just be reasonable"
Both Sides - "there are good people on both sides"
Some Responsibility - "she bears some responsibility"
Nuanced Discussion - "you can't have a nuanced discussion on social media"
I'm sure there are some poisoned phrases you react instinctively to.
I think weak arguments are good, actually. You don't need to move someone from the swamp to the mountain, you just need them to get on dry land.
Now I'm sure someone has inferred exactly what kind of asshole I am, and they are correct. This is the kind of asshole I am. The kind that wants reasonable arguments to exist in the real world, even if I have to make them up.
Reddit is horrific because the moderation on the website is so heavily biased towards the current mantra of the US Democrats, regardless of topic and country involved. Why so many of the public ditched forums, where replying to an older comment can continue a conversation for new people to see, with Reddit is a mystery to me as well. Reddit has become a slur in the Indian diaspora for example.
> "Reddit is horrific because the moderation on the website is so heavily biased towards the current mantra of the US Democrats"
Two notes:
1. The moderation on the site is driven by the culture of the people on the site. In sociology and politics you can approach things from the top or the bottom - what does the King say or what does the Populace say. Even a King's powers are not unlimited, they need political support from someone, and those people need political support - you can see this many times in history when a king is de-throned (I'm saying king, but you can substitute any political leader)
2. I don't think it's the moderation or the mantra that make reddit a horrific hellscape. I think it's the feeling of righteousness around certain topics. Righteousness is very useful to leaders. It is very motivating, it gets people to take action and vote or give money to a campaign. It's completely natural to feel righteous about topics of morality.
Social media turns that feeling of righteousness into clicks and interactions. When you have clicks and interactions, you can sell ads. This doesn't even need to be an intentional from the company or platform. People will do it automatically.
Unfortunately, that feeling of righteousness may not be personally or socially rewarding in the long term, and it is very destructive to authentic and meaningful conversations.
So what you're saying is ...? :)
I have often wondered if we can turn gamification on its head, so we can optimize for engaging discussion instead of outrage? There's a lot less money in that, so it'll get way less attention, but I wonder if it's doable?
Of course you're still playing in a game theoretic landscape, so it'll be taken advantage of for sure, but it might still be better than this local minima we're in.
Something as simple as a like button leads to this cascade of odd behaviour. HN seems to do ok with its voting scheme. I'd love to see some folks dive deep in this area.
I think authentic and engaging discussion requires a small audience. I'm reminded of an essay "Do things that don't scale"
Why is a small audience a requirement?
People interpret nuance differently. As the audience size increases, contention about nuance interpretation increases to the point where that overwhelms the original conversation.
Couldn't the conversation simply be between two people?
One person is a small audience.
In other words, yes. The original post was about social media. You can chat on social media platforms, but that's not what most people think of.
> so we can optimize for engaging discussion instead of outrage
The way to do this might be to engage people, who are so interested, in email threads. But that doesn't drive dopamine cycles in the same way.
I think it is only the beginning of a new age of maturity and de-dinosauring of social networks. Just like the dinosaurs, today's most used social networks kept growing larger and larger until they were too big to sustain themselves. And just like the dinosaurs, they will go extinct and be replaced by smaller, more nimble and competitive social networks, with accessible maintainers, consensual relationships with their users, and features and dynamics we are only beginning to dream of today. I find it very exciting to think about and work on.
Just imagine a social network that combines all of the good things invented in the past 25 years: the customizability of MySpace, the visible social graph of Facebook, the easy sharing of Twitter, the speed of propagation of Friendster, the transparency of Web of Trust, the security and user empowerment of PKI, the distributed and decentralized model of Usenet, the lack of spam of a private tracker, the long-term discussion threads of a forum, the solidity of BitTorrent, the ease of access of AOL, and the compatibility and accessibility of Any Browser Web...
Wouldn't you want something like that for yourself and your communities?
Sounds great, but no one is willing to pay for it. And as long as it has to be ad funded, there will always be pressure to track, monetize, and increase engagement.
Once the software exists, I think it can be easily paid out of pocket by the subscribers. If one focuses on hosting a few hundred or thousand users, it does not have to cost that much.
I agree that it has to be self-funded, not reliant on "monetizing". But if your goal is a stable utility service, not growing to make a profit, I think it is realistic.
the dinosaurs didn't die out though. there are birds. they make a tweet-tweet-tweet noise.
I think that the only domain where social networks can be relevant is in the geoloc domain. Dating apps are quite an obvious example where it works very well, but dating is a very limited scope.
So of course, the single problem of anything geoloc is safety and privacy, which is not the strong aspect of any social network right now. Tinder and others work hard to make their users safe, and it's difficult because users are not aware of it.
Social networks always should have been used to meet people OUTSIDE of screens, for discovering other people and things.
I want to meet people through activities (board games, running, walking), (loneliness is a huge problem in the west!) and except bumble BFF, which isn't popular, there is no popular app to do just that. Of course there is meetup and other things, but those are too narrow.
Neighbor apps are nice too, but nobody use them because they're focused on services, which isn't fun.
Don't you think it's a huge contradiction that current social networks don't let people meet?
> Social networks always should have been used to meet people OUTSIDE of screens, for discovering other people and things.
The commercial nature of social media is that there's a perverse incentive to keep people attached to the app or site rather than encourage them to leave the app for physical face to face meetings.
I think the problem is social media in general. As an alternative, a friend of mine recently invited me to a "IT nerds social group" that meets every few weeks at a local pub. There's no agenda other than spending time with like minded people. We have dinner, a few drinks, talk about random stuff, then go home. Sometimes, members will organise between them to meet up for lunch, dinner, or board games.
People are invited by group members if a member thinks they fit the group. The entire thing is a list of email addresses and a regular calendar invites. There's no platform to monetise, no chat groups, no special software.
It's honestly been better than any IT related meetup I've been to.
My experience is that Neighbour apps are exactly as miserable as Facebook and equally populated only by people my parents age.
I have not found the humans on Nextdoor to be particularly terrible of late in my portion of the South Bay. There are occasional bad takes, for sure, but fewer than I would have expected. Mostly just been discussion of neighborhood cats, garbage days, people not picking up dog poop, etc.
Agreed, people act like every neighbor is terrible but they're just talking about a few that they saw years ago. Most of Nextdoor is like, did you see this coyote? Also diverse people taking to each other which is actually rare to observe on social media.
There's also a need to be filled to let your friends know which college you're going to, how awesome your last vacation was, what job you got,... LinkedIn seems to be filling the void left by Facebook. I don't know if many people who used social media other than dedicated apps to find dates.
Facebook fails with the segregation of social groups most humans have. In some countries a person does not make true friends at work, and friends are a personal casual thing. For some cultures a friend can be made in a few days, in other cultures it takes several months or years
Perhaps that's why LinkedIn seems to be doing better: it has some selection of connections built into its premise, plus the information shared there is the minimal set that you usually wouldn't mind too much sharing across most of your social groups (got a new job, hooray!).
I think for dating/sex people are willing to leave their comfort zone and meet new people/take some risks. I not so sure about boardgames and walking... who wants to play a boardgame with a complete stranger ?
but hey, why not? someone should try with the hope to become the new meta in social networking.
I would argue that “play dates” for parents of kids 2-5 would be a (small) niche.
Parents with young kids may have other friends with similarly aged children, but many don’t. It can be isolating because so much of your non-work life/time becomes child focused. Kids that age are too young to have friends from school or activities. Some can strike up conversation at parks, but many find the inertia too much.
Good foundation to expand into clothes/toys reselling/gifting, babysitting co-op scheduling, nanny share, etc. which could all be monetized .
Probably a good niche for Facebook though I would rather see someone else do it.
Wordfeud was/is very successful and it's a Scrabble type boardgame played with a stranger. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/why-wordfeud-worked-
Betapet is another example in the same vein. Local scandinavian community for playing Scrabble online against strangers, with many stories of people who even got married to each other. https://www.betapet.se/
"What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!"
I really liked the article but am perplexed by the naive ending.
Friends/family and the world are two very distinct use cases. Most people, young people included, are taking the friends/family part private, in chat apps. Then they may or may not engage in a "public square" social network, but probably with a burner account.
The public square part has failed in epic ways. The idea that you can just "build" something that unites people whilst dodging a laundry list of threats and toxic behavior seems optimistic, to say the least.
And yeah, let's not run ads. Ok, fine. But how will you monetize instead? These seem pretty important questions to me.
> But how will you monetize instead?
Some radicals might point out where the expectation, and need, for "monetization" is itself the root of the problem, and wonder if an extractive capitalist mindset could ever solve the problems which itself has created.
Even if you need at least some money to keep the lights on and power the servers you can make the pricing plain and simple (not "free but with ads and 3rd party data sharing").
Free service with 1GB of storage for family photos and movies and 3$/10GB yearly fee if going above that limit. Storage is very cheap if profit is not your main consideration. You don't even need software employees and just make it open source.
Capitalism or not, you need to monetize. Supporting a platform with billions of users requires a huge amount of resources. Resources are not free in any system.
If your stated company mission is not the thing that produces revenue then it will eventually be sacrificed for the mission that does produce revenue.
Examples of mission statements that don't produce revenue: Google, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, most news organizations.
Microsoft's missions in 1980 was "A computer on every desk and in every home". Their mission produced revenue. There are lots of examples of mission/revenue alignment.
Most companies exist for motive X, which they do by providing value Y, then monetizing it via method Z. X is almost always "profit" and Z is something boring like selling physical items, subscriptions, ads, etc, so the mission statement is about Y.
The following statements are true but not very interesting:
Microsoft was never about computers on every desk and in every home, it was really about selling software licenses to make money!
The Super Bowl was never about football, it was really about selling ads to makes money!
Wal-Mart was never about saving people money so they could live better, it was really about selling physical items at retail to make money!
Facebook was never about connecting people, it was really about selling ads to make money!
Is the Facebook one any more insightful because the monetization strategy is advertising?
> Microsoft was never about computers on every desk and in every home, it was really about selling software licenses to make money!
And how would they have made money without lots of computers on lots of desks paying subscriptions?
All companies exist to make money, that’s the point.
X === make money. Y === sell something to make money. Z === make money.
I’m really struggling to understand your point.
The comment I replied (and the article itself) seem to imply that, if you monetize via advertising, that your business isn't really about whatever you say it is. I was replying that I fail to see how that's different from non-advertising-fueled businesses.
For example, Facebook isn't really about connecting people, but a hypothetical competitor with the exact same feature set that charged a subscription fee instead of running ads would be about connecting people?
Y’all should read “Amusing ourselves to death” by Neil Postman if you’re interested in how mediums have changed over the years.
As Huxley hinted, our soma is just technological narcotics. With each new medium of technology brings in a plethora of problems that cannot be reformed.
yes! thank you. huxley was right about a scary number of things...
this debate between will self and adam gopnik on 'brave new world' vs '1984' is really good if anybody has 1.5 hours to indulge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31CcclqEiZw
just grabbed 'amusing ourselves to death' from libby, thanks for the recommendation!
perhaps that video was inspired by postman's famous comparison. here's the comic form:
https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...
Huxley + Rand sure seem to have shared the same crystal ball.
When I think about what social medias are left, I can only think about LinkedIn. Interestingly, there seem to have been a recent surge of interest for that platform (especially all the cringe worthy posts that started to pop up).
After reading this article, I am starting to wonder if people didn't simply migrate to LinkedIn because of the degradation of Facebook's quality as a Social Network and as they still feel the need to share their lives, started sharing those cringe posts.
LinkedIn as a whole is quite cringe though. Even companies share cringe worthy posts, often merely virtue signaling, while individuals hopelessly or needlessly exaggerate the greatness of experiences or other people. Trying to judge any company, I would completely leave their LI posts or profile out if the picture, unless it shows things are bad on the inside. And then all those recruiters not knowing how to do their job properly and just spamming everyone with unsuitable job offers ... LI is a strange world in itself and I am not sure it is worth being on the platform at all.
The only utility it provides is giving an overview of your career at a glance in a recognizable way. I feel <10% of the users actually interact with the social network side of it.
LinkenIn is probably a long term social network because a lot of people want to be able to maintain a "professional side" to them in public, but want to be able to keep the personal lives private. Facebook was aimed at college students so was able to be somewhere in the middle.
I want to see more niche social networks that are only for one thing. I actually really like Strava which is for workouts only. There’s no way to share pictures of inspirational text. I’ve never seen anyone abuse the platform by sharing a run that is actually 0.1 miles plus a rant about Fox News or anything like that.
If I were independently wealthy I’d spend my time building a newsfeed for musicians to share music things where it’s similarly impossible to post pictures of text or news articles. You’d need to be vigilant to prevent it from overstepping the way LinkedIn did.
The challenge is that if you can share photos or video or links at all, it becomes terrible.
Agreed. What I love about Strava is it leverages some of the same darker parts of the human psyche that traditional social media does (desire for social status by showing off etc), but in doing so it encourages its users to actually do something extremely positive. It makes me think of how I'd like to see a really well made addictive VR based MMORPG that encouraged its users to exercise in some way to progress.
Not VR, but I’ve been wanting one of these too. Pokémon Go flirted with it with steps and egg hatching but I want a classic fantasy MMORPG where my workout is the grind and then the play part is all fun
My SO openly admits that she logs in more bicycling kms than she would otherwise have done thanks to Strava. She has also just managed to convince one of her close friends to use Strava, that person is also seeing a rise in the number of logged-in kms.
Reddit has destroyed the forum culture that basically owned this concept. The internet was a far less politized place before Reddit came along, and you could have a conversation on a forum between wildly different political opponents without knowing they were political opponents.
This is why I enjoy using Letterboxd. It's a social media silo with its own problems, but overall I find it more enjoyable because everyone is there for one reason: to talk about movies they've watched.
I wouldn't even mind if there were some ads on Strava. Like I've started subscribing with intention to support also this platform. I really like how there are similar-minded people, sharing their activities - photos, I can relax visiting this app. I think Strava will grow, so many features they can add for outdoors activities and so on. No politics, toxic content, great experience.
On the other side, there are social apps which just want me to spend as much time as I can there.
"And because it was never about “bring[ing] the world closer together”, they drop that mission as if they never cared. (That’s because they didn’t. At least MarkZ didn’t, and he is the sole, unaccountable overlord of the Meta empire. A two-class stock structure gives you that.)"
Ahahahaha! As if the normal shareholder of FB, or almost any other company, would tolerate them making less money than they possibly could. There is plenty wrong with Facebook, but the two-class stock structure is not the cause, because a single-class stock structure leads to equally pathological behavior.
I yearn for the old days of what I think of as pull (vs. push) social networking. When one would "get on" or "hang out on" MySpace or early Facebook, approaching the experience actively, rather than receiving and occasionally, interruptively, responding to notifications.
The feed of each of these platforms, if it existed at all, was usually a side feature you might interact with (eg: MySpace bulletins) after getting bored doing what you had gotten on to do in the first place: see if anyone had consciously, deliberately reached out to you specifically by commenting on your meticulously composed profile or pictures, or privately by sending you a direct message. And then reach out to someone yourself.
Short of spam, everything waiting for you when you signed on was signal. No noise. Don't like someone but feel obligated to accept her friend request? No biggie—just don't go to check out her profile. You'd never have to take on the indirect stress of learning your friend's roommate takes pride in being shitty to fast food cashiers. You'd probably harbor less resentment and be more optimistic about prospective social interactions with anyone you meet.
And, most importantly (to me, someone who made most of his best friends online in the '90s and '00s), the pull approach encouraged exploration and discovery of new people, communities, perspectives, hobbies, whatever. You couldn't rely on a feed to keep you busy—you had to seek out new interactions. New drama. Whatever. Find good things, find bad things. At least it was your choice to go find them, rather than having them shoved in your face.
I also think most people have lost track of the distinction between social networking and social media. Where the former is focused on socialization around networking (meeting new people, forming communities, etc.), the latter is focused on socialization around media (liking images, commenting on videos, etc.). It sounds obvious when stated, but I think the conflation of these terms has made it more difficult to discuss the differences between what I see as two fundamentally different social experiences, each with their strengths and weaknesses. In some respect, these must coexist, but platform design can favor either direction. Social networking, I feel, is conducive to conversation; dialogue. Social media, by contrast, is conducive to parallel monologues.
I suspect most people would agree that it's better to talk to each other than over each other.
> Imagine what social networking could be!! The best days of social networking are still ahead. Now that the pretenders are leaving, we can actually start solving the problem. Social networking is dead. Long live what will emerge from the ashes. It might not be called social networking, but it will be, just better.
Not to be pessimistic, but this missing the whole point. Just because social networking is gone doesn’t mean it’s somehow in the hands of the people. They will flock to the ML addiction machines and 20 years from now something even more horribly grotesque.
I care about Mastodon, ActivityPub, PeerTube, BlueSky and all these open standards. But these platforms Are sole dependent on users and at the moment, they all look like programmer/activist-centric wastelands.
I must say I really liked social networking when it started out. Now I barely use it anymore because it has been poisoned. And I do not mean the discourses that happen there, I mean the entities who are running it.
If I meet an old friend in my city I would take them for a walk in a public park for a chat, or sit at a nice cafe. What I would not do is go to a place where I do not trust the people who listen to sell that information. And this is what social media has become.
It must not be like this, and maybe the solution is really aomething like the fediverse, but social media without the people you like is no use.
I think everyone is wrong. We still need something like facebook to keep track of people we meet, and friends. In the west, to my knowledge, facebook is still big, along with whatsapp and instagram, to keep track of friends.
Tiktok is more like youtube. It’s a content platform first. Maybe the new generation uses tiktok to keep in touch, or maybe they use something I haven’t heard of, but social networks are bigger than ever.
I think the future of social networks is still not clear though: VR? Wechat-like app? Something else?
That’s already a dystopia, I wish there were decentralized social platforms, I’m very tired of having all my SV friends on apps that track us like Facebook and Messenger.
I like the analysis and optimism in this article, but it does not answer a key question: who would pay for this social network that truly "brings the world closer together", if not advertisers? What is the business model?
I've been spending more time on Discord. It is replaced forums and subreddits for many of my interests like synthesizers and music. I don't like that the information is stored in a chat-style vs posts.
I don't like that all the info is locked up and not indexable and searchable on search engines.
>on search engines
It's barely searchable on their native search bars too, and with no scoring or back-linking possible you're stuck searching chronologically. That's only viable on a small enough channel + keyword so that results are limited. Otherwise you don't search, you just ask again.
Yes. I have to use a search engine to find YT videos because YT search is so bad.
A startup backed by YC tries to make Discord (and Slack) Google-searchable:
https://www.linen.dev/
I like it for precisely that reason.
I really don’t get what is this panic about TikTok. When I used it for the first time, it just kept throwing soft porn videos. I see how people would get “addicted” but I don’t see it becoming any more mainstream than many similar websites. It’s recommendation system left a lot to desire as it simply ignored my preferences and kept throwing at me more of juvenile videos.
So far Social media has strived to be just consumption platform, not utility. Social media can drive every day activities from dating to finding jobs to finding summer camps to garage sale to purchasing gifts etc. There is a lot of untapped potential that FB unfortunately didn’t managed to build upon. The problem with consumption platforms is that they will fall out of fashion eventually. It is astonishing that large swaths of humanity suddenly don’t find FB newsfeed interesting any more. It almost happened to so many people and just over span of months. To me it looks like more of biological saturation rather than anything else.
This website is the only place I find people who say that the TikTok algorithm somehow doesn't work. If that's the case, why is everyone so addicted to it? Talk to any other person and their feed is completely unique from any other person. If you're into comedy, you get comedy videos. If you're into educational stuff, you get that. If you're into sexy girls dancing, you get that.
Admittedly the last one seems to be the default (I assume like in most cases, the most popular stuff of all is softcore porn, and therefore it'll default to showing that), but if you scroll past the sexy girls dancing instead of sitting through the whole video, it'll learn you're not interested. So I can only surmise if you kept getting them it's because you're watching them. I don't think TikTok has a feature to detect HN users and turn the algorithm off just for them for some reason.
it simply ignored my preferences and kept throwing at me more of juvenile videos.
I did not have a similar experience at all. I’d be a little concerned if I had.
As others have said I think most people’s experience is that TikTok is absolutely phenomenal at discerning what people want to watch - even if they are not aware of their preference themselves.
It's better than what Instagram does, and way better than what Twitter does, but it may also be a sign of the biases and politics engineered into algorithms in Instagram and Twitter.
The Path app was a good social network in hindsight. Share your stuff and look at others stuff. All sorted by date. No algorithms. Which is why it probably failed.
Facebook sucks and I‘d hope that politicians in Germany would take action against it. Start with the algorithmic timelines. All content only your friends and interests. Nothing from outside to addict you further.
I wonder if timing may have been off. I'd like to imagine that re-introducing it today there'd be more appetite for a personal social network, now that Facebook/Meta is pivoting away.
But, yes I agree, I used to use Path also with just a group of 5 friends around 2013. The app was cleanly designed and it definitely felt intimate.
Facebook the company will need to buy up all the grassroots social media platforms that sprout up. That costs money and isn't possible in China where they can't buy Tik Tok. That's why there is such a furore by FB backed lobbyist to make Tik Tok a terrorist platform. Long term FB will eventually die as young folk will not want to use the platform old folk do and older folk are less influence by ads on these platforms. It's a slippery slope for FB but there will always be a new platform that sprouts that the cool kids all use.
Just today, a newsletter told me about a "slow" social network called "Be real". Never heard of it.
My message, though, is not that BeReal or anything new is going to be the future of sharing info on the net.
I think the future is looking a lot like the best of the past, with improvement.
Which is why I got this info on a newsletter, that directed me to a blog.
The missing pieces are "personal newsletter made easy" (for producing content), "newsletter discovery made non spammy", and "making all those services sustainable without ads".
BeReal is buggy as hell, but it makes me happy and excited to see what friends and family are up to in a way I haven't for a decade or more
Unpopular opinion: So it turns out that while bringing the world closer together is a nice long-term goal, the world isn't ready to be crammed into one giant bull-pen, which was more Facebook's style.
Their utter inability to come up with consistent standards for policing their walled garden, upon having their hand forced to need to try, indicates that maybe that's not a good goal in the first place. Maybe it's okay if not everyone's on your social media engine.
I never used TikTok but from what I heard and saw it is essentially a Vine with better UI and UX e.g. you scroll vertically for new videos and it has very good recommendation system.
P.S. I never used Vine too but then again I read and heard about it.
TikTok won because like other guy said; videos are the most immersive media and I claim that people having short attention span made them hungry for short form of entertainment like short videos.
From time to time I watch compilation of TikTok videos on YouTube and I think "compilation" as a media form is another interesting thing that somebody should experiment with.
Speaking of social networking; my understanding of social networking/media landscape is that Facebook sort of generalized social networking and social networking features and now apps like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are specializing in photos, ephemeral sharing and short videos respectively plus WhatsApp specialized in messaging but Zuck did a great job of making Facebook Messenger a standalone app and then specializing it according to demands of messaging crowd. And yea Zuck acquired Instagram and WhatsApp along the way so competing apps don't hurt Facebook and its family of apps.
private messaging, i.e. telegram/discord seems to be where people are moving. I'm not surprised that Instagram copies TikTok for the algorithmically driven content, what I'm more surprised by is that WhatsApp is still pretty lackluster compared to Telegram given that Mark himself noticed that private groups seem to be what's next. Hard to overstate how much better their UX is compared to anything else.
Do I get this right? Meta is turning Facebook into a TikTok clone just after rolling back a similar change to Instagram? What on earth is their strategy?
Everyone seems pretty wrapped up in the social part. But I think many forget that “media” was actually a big part of this.
Photos weren’t always so easy to share. Having places where media was only based on your friends or people you knew was incredibly novel and useful. A single website you could log in to in order to view photos (and eventually videos) related to you was novel when we all had flip phones and a “camera phone” was special.
Sharing media was tough. Photos - let alone, video - required tech, bandwidth, and a whole-ass computer.
I think that in addition to the social aspect dwindling, changing, or evolving, we must also account for the fact that media is so much easier to create, share, and consume. This is true with friends, relatives, and strangers; locally and afar.
We don’t “need” social media anymore because the media part is mostly solved. Fewer and fewer people don’t have a connected media viewer and creator in their pocket at all times anymore.
Being social with media is as simple as texting someone, or many people. And we do it in high definition all day, every day. No login. No ads. No algorithm.
I do see myself going old tech, back to IRC clients and chatrooms like the 90's.
Yes, please. It’s been sad to see Freenode disappear. I’m afraid I don’t know where to call home in the IRC world anymore.
We've essentially transitioned from 'social networks' to 'content streams'. The evolutionary steps we went through were just pathfinding to get to where consumers always wanted to be: a nonstop amusement drip.
For that reason I think that what we think of as social networks really are dead. It's not what people truly wanted in the first place.
> It's not what people truly wanted in the first place.
The transition towards "a nonstop amusement drip" has been gradual and effective but it doesn't mean that the current situation was what people always wanted from the start. This has been the evolutionary journey of companies in search of maximum profitability. It has never been exclusively about what people want, it's also about what maintains profitable engagement and eyeballs for advertisers.
There's a general sentiment that people don't like the addictive nature of social media (see other comments in this thread). Social media users have become boiled frogs as the heat has been turned up on monetizing attention. I think it's fair to say that we've not landed on the optimal solutions for social networking just yet.
IMHO the current social networking market has reached an evolutionary dead-end. The platforms are all converging on a "content stream" model or group chat. I think that there are plenty more opportunities for digital social networking that get closer to what people really want but these opportunities are hard to see. Functional fixedness[0] is the biggest barrier to imagining what comes next but more possibilities exist than these.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness
No kidding. Facebook had so much potential, when it was deployed in universities. But then it became a social network about everything. Zuck had a lot of potential when he was thinking about P2P file sharing site Wirehog, but Sean Parker "put a bullet in that thing" and VCs like Peter "competition is for losers, build a monopoly" Thiel shaped it into a money making machine that's less about being social and more about "eyeballs" and mindless cat meme videos. In the endgame, their algorithm selected for clickbait outrage that put peopl[e into echo chambers and tore our society apart.
Imagine what social networking could be!! The best days of social networking are still ahead. Now that the pretenders are leaving, we can actually start solving the problem. Social networking is dead. Long live what will emerge from the ashes. It might not be called social networking, but it will be, just better.
It'll be called "Community". I don't have to imagine. We've been building the Community Operating System for 10 years. And it's available now. No, it's not Mastodon. It's Qbix :)
https://qbix.com/platform
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
Yes, it's open source and you can use it now. It's basically a Wordpress for Web 2.0 ... keep in mind that Wordpress powers 40% of the Web 1.0 web. We want to power 40% of the Web 2.0 social web.
Back in 2014 my cofounder and I met with Tim Berners-Lee and his SOLID team. There was a movement underway to decentralize the web. Today, Jack Dorsey is trying to build "Web5" along the same lines but with Microsoft ION / Sidetree protocol, rather than SPARQL (@timbl's obsession) semantic data and JSON-LD.
It's coming along. It's always been coming along. But it's open source so many people don't hear about it, until they do. MySQL took 8 years, NGiNX tooks 10 years but eventually they took over. Open source always does.
Watch the video and feel free to spend some time on the weekend playing with it. https://qbix.com/platform/guide :)
Only web 2.0?! We're up to like web 5.0 now! /s
The approach at my company is to be group chat first. We think there is a distinction between social media (FB, Instragram, Twitter) and pure social networking. I think social networks that are unbounded and broadcast centric actually demonstrate anti-network effects where the more followers/friends you get the less value you get from your network unless of course you're trying to be an influencer. The ideal network always as a discrete audience anytime you share content or communicate which is exactly what a group chat or direct message provides. But unfortunately, Telegram, Whatsapp, iMessage, etc don't provide the rich interactions that made platforms like FB and Instagram so fun in the beginning.
Give us a shot if you want to try to a new form of social networking: https://www.aspen.cloud/
Not even a Windows desktop option--just Apple and Google Play.
We have launched web app that is in beta and actually have windows and Mac(M1) apps that just not published yet.
Tried to download the app but it seems to be geo-restricted
Which country are you coming from? We initially restricted to the US because we haven't done any translations / internationalization yet.
I'm from Hong Kong. English is pretty widely used here.
> What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!
I don't think this will happen. I don't think the failure of existing social networks to do this was a fluke, I think it's a systematic problem that will recur every single time you try it. Like a wagon traveling down a dirt road, any social networking platform will eventually wind up in the same ruts as its predecessors. It may be human nature, it may be economics, it may be the incidental factors related to our current technology and networking structure works. I admit I don't fully understand the mechanism, but I'll go out on a limb anyway.
A very correct observation. Social networking actually feels archaic at this point. The one thing that survived everything is messaging and email. Messaging will be the tool that brings friends together and email remains the one true tool for professional communication.
> This new advertising machine is powered not by friends and family, but by an addiction algorithm
This is like the crack epidemic when I was growing up. China is hitting the west back hard for the Opium wars. First fentanyl and now TicTok addiction algorithms. We are doomed.
This is not the first or second time that humanity has tried 'social networking'. We used to call it "the mob" and long before the time of jesus it was considered that people shouting at each other is no way to run a society. People are dazzled by the shiny touchscreens of their phones, but shouting behind a glossy screen is still shouting, and a mob is still a mob. I don't think 'social networking' will go anywhere, it will be abandoned and foulmouthed as 'loud crazy old people', in favor of curated content, possibly algorithmic if that works. The future of media looks a lot like the media of the past, consolidated , more professional and polished.
My family got me to join Marco Polo recently, and it's really what I want from social media. It's a bit clumsy to use the free version, but there aren't any ads, and it facilitates having meaningful connections with a smaller group of people, which is what I'm really missing from the bigger platforms. Facebook quickly became a giant friend collection for me, which is useful for being able to reach out to anyone when I need to, but it never offered a feed sorted by stuff I actually care about: family and truly close friends, and lifetime events like weddings and deaths for the rest.
I agree with the conclusions, they will definitely be switching to a more addictive model. But it seemed like there is an implication that the previous model was not 'addictive'. Once Facebook figured out how much mentions were driving engagement, they added lots of features to try to drive people towards mentioning their friends in order to send push notifications. Leading to a sort of "addicted to your friend group" situation.
I get that tik tok definitely creates another paradigm shift, likely for the worse, but it's not like social networking is not without issues ina very similar capacity.
Does anyone remember sixdegrees.com?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com
As far as I remember that was the first social media website.
This is why we are building Notos[1], most of the photo sharing websites evolved in social networks (or died).
We chose to not make our user's album public by default, where most competitors are doing so and benefit from the SEO involved, but we want to focus on sharing with family and friends, not the whole world.
Now the elephant in the room is monetisation and getting people to pay for their usage, this is not easy but we firmly believe it can be done but probably not with a trajectory allowing you to raise VC money.
[1] https://www.notos.co/
Love the video explaining how it works.
Wanted to throw in "Haven" because they offer a timely way out: https://havenweb.org/screenshots.html
It's basically a private timeline, written in Markdown and with optional pictures. Also provides a RSS feed.
Not affiliated, but was in touch with the author this week to help him with his Docker setup and hosting: https://havenweb.org/2022/08/10/pikapods.html
Maybe just the end of social networking as we currently know it.
There must still be plenty of room and potential value in more focused social interaction that is more highly aligned with user interests other than viral videos.
I thought those were pretty well serviced one or two decades ago by niche hobbyist forums and the like, more recently by specific subreddits.
Personally I lament the demise of forums and BBs.
In a sense, it's interesting that we (social network users) once found the activities of our friends and acquaintances "interesting", but that's largely been subjugated to simply "interesting things are interesting".
Friendster was interesting, myspace was weird, but facebook just became a boring manicured lawn. Eventually it turned to astroturf; fake green to make it look beautiful.
Perhaps snapchat is the evolution of the social network; a closer "social" live snapshot of people we are close to.
Or perhaps its something else.
The short answer is – NO. It's not dying. It's changing just like any other marketing or business strategy. Social media users have become savvy to how social media marketing works.
I loved reading this article. TikTok is perhaps the endgame of all entertainment, from 1920s radio straight to Netflix: monetize people’s willingness to pay for the next bit of entertainment.
I miss how it's not more about connecting me with other people. Rather forcing people content they could engage. UX which main purpose is to keep users spend more time on the platform. For example, I love Strava, there are similar-minded people sharing their photos, activities that I can easily follow and get new ideas for trips and so on. Chronological feed without any special algorithm. Like hey, give me good search options and I can search content for my own.
Yes social is changing. The initial value proposition of sites where we needed platforms to stay-up-to-date, meet new people, and communicate with each other can now be replicated easily.
Most social sites have stayed in the UI paradigm of 2003/2004. Just have a look at how much wasted space there is at LinkedIn.
Sites like Lunchclub, Clubhouse, and Finclout are sites where the tools are expanded through social networks (i.e, come for the tool stay for the community)
There is an appeal to TikTok that I haven’t noticed elsewhere, but it is hard to explain. Content trends are like a game of telephone, so it’s interesting to see what creators choose to carry over into their own content and pass along. It’s fascinating to watch trends evolving so quickly and imo those trends are a special kind of authentic content space that advertisers haven’t really been able to break into and ruin yet.
this author can't see the forest for the trees. "Social networking", for all intents and purposes is just a facet of the internet:
https://www.tumblr.com
https://www.instagram.com
https://www.twitter.com
https://minus.social/
https://www.blogspot.com
https://news.yombinator.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_serv...
↑ it's a long list
https://makeawebsitehub.com/social-media-sites/ ← "101 social networking sites you 'need to know about' (ugh) in 2022"
Idk, this article seems hopelessly naive. So, the author would essentially like to go back in time to a less morally ambiguous internet when people (i.e. techies and nerds) had engaging, thoughtful, and respectful conversations where each emerged a better person. Not gonna happen. The future of social networking looks a lot more like Twitter (but meaner) than it does to the halcyon days of IRC.
Making a distinction between social networking and social media is important. We lost this distinction due to the advertising business model. In the social space a company that focuses on the social networking aspect - connecting people, tools to stay in touch, get together in real life, etc - may actually avoid the corrosive nature of the social space by avoiding the 'media' part.
> So Facebook adjusts, and transitions into another addiction-based advertising machine.
Like Facebook hasn't been that and tried to be even more so since their very first day.
The string of articles with threatening undertones about Tiktok should really lead people from the US to question their tendency to give a pass to the most egregious behaviour from tech companies as long as they are US.
no - but the context is shifting, from Chat -> Clips -> Streams. Though it's still mainly a medium to deliver adverts.
Social networking has pretty much replaced TV & traditional press - now it too must morph.
the biggest obstacles though I think to the social network are the app stores - not necessarily their own decisions but what politics of the day may impose on the store.
Site seems down:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mQK-J2Y...
There was a similar piece[1] by Cal Newport recently
But what is next? Long tail social networks?
1: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/08/01/tiktoks-poison-pi...
Archive Link for those experiencing the hug of death like me
https://web.archive.org/web/20220811190332/https://reb00ted....
> Facebook’s rollout of a sweeping TikTok-like redesign
Whose rollout of what now? I updated my app to be sure, even though it only showed fixes and perf in the update. I loaded it in my browser and it looks the same as it has since I last looked months ago. Is this overzealous hypothesizing about being A/B tested or something?
What I mostly see is people retreating from all the noise to closed chat groups in multiple platforms.
If we keep inventing the same things over and over again my bet is that the next big thing will be connecting people in small groups based on geographical location or sub-culture like in the long long ago in the times of IRC.
Like Reddit but with more geographic subdivision. I wouldn’t be too surprised if that was big one day
I'm looking forward to seeing the open source/federated alternatives fill the space.
I can see Telegram broadcast channels (or Signal/Matrix groups with only sending permissions for admin) filling the void for people who'd like to "microblog" short updates like a blog, but just for friends.
I can't avoid thinking how the first mover disadvantage here worked in killing the first mainstream video-first platform: Twitter's vine. Vine wasn't exactly like TikTok, it was 1 generation removed, but it didn't sustained itself - and changed - to become today's tiktok
Meta had $117.9 billion in revenue for 2021, TikTok is estimated to have had $4.8 billion. Social networking is alive and well.
The push into short form is just another way to get users to stay in app longer. Come for your friend's posts/stories (or marketplace, groups, etc), stay for the Reels.
You mean end of classic fb social networking. Social networking in general is going to be big always
As with all "is this X??" headlines: no. The answer is no. I look forward to the end of SEO nonsense instead, when titles actually describe what the post is going to be about. In this case: concluding that it's not and is in fact better than ever.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Not the end. Just the beginning.
we can only hope
We already have this at least gamers do it’s called Discord. It’s invite only. Has lots of streaming and group voice chat features and it# topic or thread based around a community. Plus it’s driven by sales of extra feature sets.
I'm really sympathetic to the author. The thing I want to hear however is what does the author and people who believe him think is an alternative that will be profitable (ie., sustainable) in the current world we live in?
Nah, it's more like the beginning of segregation: people who like social media will stay there but I'm seeing more and more people bail out and setup friend clubs (Meetup, Telegram and such).
James Williams (Time Well Spent) on Why and How to End the Attention Economy: https://youtu.be/vR9EvD0QfEs
It’s time for an open source - community driven - social networking platform then, isn’t it? But sadly the majority of people wouldn’t probably use it ):
Of course not. Tying such general terms to specific companies is naive, diagnoses of 'the end of ubiquitous thing' are little more than clickbait.
Server melted under the HN onslaught. https://archive.ph/bA9rS
It's really simple. All Zuckerberg has to do is drop the "dominate everyone" facade. But I think he's incapable of doing that
He's incapable of dropping it, because despite everything that's said about him living in the future his is a mind that's perpetually trapped in the mid 2000s. That's why Meta's only mode of innovation is through acquisitions and ripping off ideas from elsewhere, and Meta's slowly being torn apart for it.
I think that the "tree of replies" format, like we have here and reddit, is pretty much perfect.
We just need a better way to filter/trollkill.
What more do we need?
Kuro5hin.org had the filtering figured out.
I read something once, that questioned whether social media was working to make us happy, or were we working to make the AI more intelligent.
we're all just data generating processes
"Tweet your comments", oh sweet irony.
I keep hearing about this new Facebook, but as an (infrequent) iOS app user everything looks the same. When does doom hit me?
https://archive.ph/bA9rS
How on earth does Meta get $50 per user per quarter in ad revenue? How many ad clicks is that per user?
"Now that the pretenders are leaving"
Unpunished? To continue committing their moral (at least) crimes?
Discord is becoming huge - just people, chatting.
Like it was when I started using internet and IRC
Doesn't everything on Discord go into a black hole? You can't search it with search engines.
Can't search Facebook or TikTok with a search engine. For a lot of people this is a benefit.
Right. Why do I want every community searched?
To find stuff. If most of the stuff is unsearchable, search engines become useless.
They can't find stuff on Facebook or TikTok now. Not really useless though.
Yes, but at the moment the good communities are about gaming, porn, and not much more.
No. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." The sweeping generalization refers to the poor journalistic practice of writing sensational headlines in the form of a question in order to compensate for the author's lack of facts.
Aren't forums and websites like HN and Reddit also social media?
HN is probably the closest to what the old pre-reddit forum culture was like, but obviously structured in the horrible reddit manner. Reddit is probably an unsocial media.
I use forums on a daily basis and that culture isn't dead at all :)
How come I’m not seeing any tiktok like redesign on my fb app?
Dear god no. But wouldn't it be nice if it was?
Social network posts are just becoming ads now.
Is this the end of reb00ted.org?
Reddit is the worst of all the social media considering how toxic the moderation is. You just leave the site full of anger and a desire to shout at all the misinformed on that site.
TikTok is similar to TV. People would sit around the TV for hours per day, TikTok is usually in the magnitude of minutes. The algortyhm also does not feel politically or culturally motivated, unlike Reddit.
Agreed. Reddit is complete trash now. I think reddit peaked in 2013. Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.
God I hope so
>Is this the end of X?
No.
No.
Probably. We ended up with a completely different internet than the one we still thought should be possible in 2004.
For a brief period of time, the internet genuinely subverted the corporate beetle-men and the gatekeepers who've always owned the "official" or real world. You could send an email to a well-known, accomplished person and there was a 75 percent you'd hear back. There really was a culture of punk equality... of course, we were quite harsh to people who used the platform to say stupid things (and, since I was young, I said stupid things a lot), because that's requisite if you want to stay relatively meritocratic. The internet was smaller in the 1990s and there were far fewer ways to make money from it, but it was legitimately subversive.
We've lost that, though. Twitter used to be a way for nobodies to gain a degree of influence. Now it's the opposite--instead, it measures and ratifies our lack of influence, because every time you apply for a job, the bosses know that you're no threat if mistreated--the fact that you only have 3,000 followers, as opposed to 100,000, proves that.
The internet and the web didn't fix capitalism; instead, to the detriment of all of us, it ended up looking like capitalism. The technology grew up too fast; our moribund economic system hadn't died yet (and still hasn't). This was bad enough, but if capitalism is still around when we see AGI (granted, I don't think that'll actually happen for at least a hundred years) we are properly and irreversibly facefucked.