"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. "
It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.
“Who is left on Facebook besides dopamine junkies and bots?”
“I only use it in this limited circumstance”
You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.
> Take a 2002 Times/CNN poll on the eating habits of 10,000 Americans. Six percent of the individuals surveyed said they considered themselves vegetarian. But when asked by the pollsters what they had eaten in the last 24 hours, 60% of the self-described "vegetarians" admitted that that had consumed red meat, poultry, or fish the previous day.
I'm happy they've been able to build a $1,660,000,000,000 company on the back of me logging in once every two months, scrolling 3 posts, getting disgusted with slop, and closing the tab. Gives me hope that my harebrained ventures may also succeed!
> who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
Political activists, like a former partner of mine.
… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …
… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …
… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
I take poorly directed targeting advertisements as a performance indicator for how well my data privacy efforts are working. When the ad targeting has you dead to rights is when you need to worry.
Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.
hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.
I was always perturbed by the shift from calling them "social networks" to "social media". It signalled a friends-to-famous shift (plus ads) that I didn't particularly want.
Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.)
They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)
This might be controversial. Please disagree with me.
When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.
So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
"We deserve it" is the tldr I gather from you here, just like people addicted to opiates are ultimately responsible for the way those drug companies systematically set them up for that, right?
I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.
Between the history of crack cocaine in inner cities, safe injection sites and the current trajectory of American governance, I’m flummoxed by your incredulous posture here.
Unrelated to the topic described in the blog itself, I overall like the theme of `susam.net`. The name itself reminded me of a sesame seed in Turkish for a while. (I think author had recently mentioned one of the recent posts that they wanted to get susam.com but that was already taken by a Turkish company selling some spices...)
The content (that shows up in HN) is also good. Since I am on mobile device, I cannot tell the exact font used, but seems like Georgia to me. While https://github.com/susam/susam.net hosts the actual source code of the website.
Another remark: Would be really nice to have a same theme adaptation for BearBlog and similar places.
I myself started making the same distinction when I talk about these things in English, except it's "social media" vs "social networks". Though I have no idea how to make that distinction in Russian, social "media" never caught on as a term there.
An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.
Sure you can. You can not post political things on social networks. They're not doing any good anyway. They're not changing anyone's mind. They're not providing depth or width to the discussion. I don't say this to be insulting, but rather a realist.
My point is that I just want to be able to discuss any topic with my followers without self-policing lest a bunch of anonymous accounts butts into the conversation and completely derails it.
Politics is a complex topic. If you want to learn more, social media is not the way to do it. Well reasoned books and essays are. If you want to convince others of your positions, social media is not the way to do it. Personal relationships in real life are.
Again, you seem to insist on an ulterior motive, completely discounting the value or pleasure of conversation. In contrast, reading is a solitary activity. Have you heard of book clubs? People read books, and then they get together to discuss the books.
Hacker News itself is all about reading articles, and then discussing the articles with others. "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time.
To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks
I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me.
Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails.
What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.
I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time makes your life actively worse even if in the moment you feel good. Social media should be thought of through that lens -- if you think you want to preserve "the good parts," you're like an alcoholic who keeps finding a reason to continue drinking. "No, the problem was just drinking alone. Now that I'm drinking at the bar, socially, it's OK!" To an extent, but mostly it's harming you.
When you say leave behind...do you mean you lose something by not interacting with them, or do you mean that you have some kind of duty to help get them un-addicted? I don't think you are obligated to go hangout at your local bar once a week just because alcoholics exist.
I think the challenge is that the addictive formats will naturally outcompete the healthy ones because they’re, well, addicting. They exert a force pulling people into their orbit and starving anything designed for healthier (less frequent) engagement.
I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.
Lemmy is mostly a clone of reddit with a lot less people on it. That is to say it works fairly well and doesn't yet seem filled with bots, but its got the same issues as Reddit since its based on the same design.
The idea that community votes will result in the best content floating to the top is flawed, because what happens is the most popular content gets upvoted and not necessarily the most insightful or pertinent. This effect is magnified as the network or communities grow and welcome more a more general audience. The most prominent commentary is often useless jokes, memes, reactions etc. Slashdot, HN, lobsters have similar flaws with different strategies to overcome them.
Yep - true I do see things being easily gamed but then also lemmyverse does seem to be a personal favourite now - i hope things don't change down the line.
I'll answer - too many bots and most communities don't demand high quality comments. I still use it though - it's my only social network (although I don't think it's really a social network since I have no durable social connections with anybody there and I presume most other people don't either).
I still think it's worth reflecting which of the toxic patterns we want to, or don't want to reproduce on non-commercial networks like mastodon. Infinite scroll, quote reply, the like button... all these aren't neutral, and discussions were rightly heated about introducing them.
Sure, the modern Twitter/X feed is not like the original reverse chronological timeline but the latter is still available right next to it. Maybe it's the power of the default but I find the algorithmic feed much better.
The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok.
The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.
Thank you for posting this. Despite being an old video, I had never come across it, and it almost made me tear up. It showed me the hope that I wished the web would be, despite it never realizing that ambition, with businesses that only pursued engagement metrics, and governments who saw value in vassalizing tech companies to pursue their political goals.
"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. "
It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.
While number of active users still grows, one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
“Who is left on Facebook besides dopamine junkies and bots?”
“I only use it in this limited circumstance”
You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.
> It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/20110...
> Take a 2002 Times/CNN poll on the eating habits of 10,000 Americans. Six percent of the individuals surveyed said they considered themselves vegetarian. But when asked by the pollsters what they had eaten in the last 24 hours, 60% of the self-described "vegetarians" admitted that that had consumed red meat, poultry, or fish the previous day.
I'm happy they've been able to build a $1,660,000,000,000 company on the back of me logging in once every two months, scrolling 3 posts, getting disgusted with slop, and closing the tab. Gives me hope that my harebrained ventures may also succeed!
> who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
Political activists, like a former partner of mine.
… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …
… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …
… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
I take poorly directed targeting advertisements as a performance indicator for how well my data privacy efforts are working. When the ad targeting has you dead to rights is when you need to worry.
To an extent, sure, but I think also a sign their analytics were never as good as they claimed.
For example, so far as I know my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?
> my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?
Probably so you can suggest it to your partner.
Plot twist: all old folks were also on Facebook only to chat with other old folks. Once this fact was spotted, they all just moved to Discord.
Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.
hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.
Too late. (And I don't do mobile anyway.)
I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.
People seek novelty. Real social networks do not change as fast as that.
I was always perturbed by the shift from calling them "social networks" to "social media". It signalled a friends-to-famous shift (plus ads) that I didn't particularly want.
Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.)
They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)
I guess social networking service is actually a more appropiate name for the thing.
This might be controversial. Please disagree with me.
When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.
So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
"We deserve it" is the tldr I gather from you here, just like people addicted to opiates are ultimately responsible for the way those drug companies systematically set them up for that, right?
I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.
That’s nonsense. Nobody asked for algorithmic feed pushing schizo agenda on you.
> They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
Imagine the government saw the fentanyl crisis and started making fentanyl to support the habits of its citizens.
Not every single trend humans take on should be encouraged. We can be dumb as individuals, as well as collectively. At least in bursts.
Between the history of crack cocaine in inner cities, safe injection sites and the current trajectory of American governance, I’m flummoxed by your incredulous posture here.
Unrelated to the topic described in the blog itself, I overall like the theme of `susam.net`. The name itself reminded me of a sesame seed in Turkish for a while. (I think author had recently mentioned one of the recent posts that they wanted to get susam.com but that was already taken by a Turkish company selling some spices...)
The content (that shows up in HN) is also good. Since I am on mobile device, I cannot tell the exact font used, but seems like Georgia to me. While https://github.com/susam/susam.net hosts the actual source code of the website.
Another remark: Would be really nice to have a same theme adaptation for BearBlog and similar places.
Agreed! I thought this site was generated in Hugo for some reason. Never knew Lisp was used until I saw that GitHub you linked.
I struggle to see anything "social" about social media. Look at short videos of others and ads is anything but social activity.
I myself started making the same distinction when I talk about these things in English, except it's "social media" vs "social networks". Though I have no idea how to make that distinction in Russian, social "media" never caught on as a term there.
An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.
Sure you can. You can not post political things on social networks. They're not doing any good anyway. They're not changing anyone's mind. They're not providing depth or width to the discussion. I don't say this to be insulting, but rather a realist.
My point is that I just want to be able to discuss any topic with my followers without self-policing lest a bunch of anonymous accounts butts into the conversation and completely derails it.
Why do you assume that there needs to be a purpose other than discussing a topic that you're interested in?
Politics is a complex topic. If you want to learn more, social media is not the way to do it. Well reasoned books and essays are. If you want to convince others of your positions, social media is not the way to do it. Personal relationships in real life are.
What's left?
Again, you seem to insist on an ulterior motive, completely discounting the value or pleasure of conversation. In contrast, reading is a solitary activity. Have you heard of book clubs? People read books, and then they get together to discuss the books.
Hacker News itself is all about reading articles, and then discussing the articles with others. "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time.
To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks
This feels like the most important comment here. Do other Mastodon users feel the same? The OP Madden me want to try Mastodon.
I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me.
Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails.
What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.
I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time makes your life actively worse even if in the moment you feel good. Social media should be thought of through that lens -- if you think you want to preserve "the good parts," you're like an alcoholic who keeps finding a reason to continue drinking. "No, the problem was just drinking alone. Now that I'm drinking at the bar, socially, it's OK!" To an extent, but mostly it's harming you.
When you say leave behind...do you mean you lose something by not interacting with them, or do you mean that you have some kind of duty to help get them un-addicted? I don't think you are obligated to go hangout at your local bar once a week just because alcoholics exist.
I think the challenge is that the addictive formats will naturally outcompete the healthy ones because they’re, well, addicting. They exert a force pulling people into their orbit and starving anything designed for healthier (less frequent) engagement.
I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.
And the social media companies, who have essentially unlimited resources, would fight it tooth and nail
Any other platforms like Mastodon which are doing things well - are you guys on lemmy?
Lemmy is mostly a clone of reddit with a lot less people on it. That is to say it works fairly well and doesn't yet seem filled with bots, but its got the same issues as Reddit since its based on the same design.
What were the main issues of reddit according to you?
The idea that community votes will result in the best content floating to the top is flawed, because what happens is the most popular content gets upvoted and not necessarily the most insightful or pertinent. This effect is magnified as the network or communities grow and welcome more a more general audience. The most prominent commentary is often useless jokes, memes, reactions etc. Slashdot, HN, lobsters have similar flaws with different strategies to overcome them.
Yep - true I do see things being easily gamed but then also lemmyverse does seem to be a personal favourite now - i hope things don't change down the line.
I'll answer - too many bots and most communities don't demand high quality comments. I still use it though - it's my only social network (although I don't think it's really a social network since I have no durable social connections with anybody there and I presume most other people don't either).
Reddit does give a lot of value - despite the shortcomings.
I still think it's worth reflecting which of the toxic patterns we want to, or don't want to reproduce on non-commercial networks like mastodon. Infinite scroll, quote reply, the like button... all these aren't neutral, and discussions were rightly heated about introducing them.
Sure, the modern Twitter/X feed is not like the original reverse chronological timeline but the latter is still available right next to it. Maybe it's the power of the default but I find the algorithmic feed much better.
The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok.
The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.
This reminded me of this video from a more optimistic time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
Thank you for posting this. Despite being an old video, I had never come across it, and it almost made me tear up. It showed me the hope that I wished the web would be, despite it never realizing that ambition, with businesses that only pursued engagement metrics, and governments who saw value in vassalizing tech companies to pursue their political goals.
Why won’t their stock crash and burn already???
The title of the article is arguing semantics. Like it or not, the term “social media” is what we use to describe scroll apps like TikTok.
The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else.
I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.