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creamyhorror
baxuz
If it's media, it should be regulated like media.
jMyles
Is this code for, "I want the cops to stop people from doing things online I don't like" or "we need more regularity / predictability"?
simonask
Traditional (so-called “legacy”) media have legal rights and obligations in most countries. They are required to live up to certain standards, for example by distinguishing between opinion and fact, by disclosing political affiliations, and so on.
Journalist is more than a job title, and so is editor.
baxuz
No, it's code for "a company giving a platform for disinformation gobbled up by billions of people should be held accountable".
dhruv3006
I guess social networking service is actually a more appropiate name for the thing.
Nevermark
That makes sense in the case where people are mindfully connecting with particular individuals or organizations, and paying for that.
Not for where algorithms select media for you. That's not a "networking service", even if that is one of its hooks. Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service".
"Attention media" is more accurate.
But that also describes traditional advertisement based "media". Which earned its keep via attention access, by including unintegrated ads as a recognizable second component.
A description specific to the new form is "surveillance/manipulation media" or "SM media".
Attention-access funded media lacked pervasive unpermissioned surveillance and seamlessly integrated individualized manipulation. Where dossier-leveraged manipulation, not simply attention access, has become the defining product.
butlike
You got me thinking. "Social media" is like a catalog you used to receive via snail mail in the mailbox. You kind of thumb through for something interesting, but there's no real substance there.
j16sdiz
> Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service".
sb should tell those linkedin folks this.
lukeschlather
The funny thing about Facebook is that it's got a perfectly good social network in there, I think the only one that exists. In the menu is "Feeds" which is what you want. It only shows friends and followed things. If they made that the default when you go to facebook.com I don't think I'd have any complaints feature-wise, though an ad-free option would be nice. It's a genuine social network.
Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.
godot
Wow, I did not know about this Feeds page despite being a daily FB user for 20 years (yes, to the ridicule of most people, I know). Thanks for pointing this out. I wish this was the default homepage or at least a way to set it as default.
Zak
Each feed has a unique URL, so you can bookmark it in your browser. For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser.
anonymars
> Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity
> For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser
Related (2025): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115
hapticmonkey
Annoyingly I can not get it to work on mobile (iOS Safari). Loading the url cause the page to refresh and take me to the main page.
zythyx
Goes to show how much my 300 friends use Facebook, I had to scroll at least 3 pages before I found a post from my grandma in law about her dog, and that was all for the next few scrolls. Everything else was followed pages that I actually don't care about and ads.
debo_
> or at least a way to set it as default
Ctrl+D?
kelvinjps10
The only thing I used Facebook, is for marketplace and groups you can buy cheap stuff on there.
throawayonthe
facebook does have an ads-free paid option: https://www.facebook.com/help/262038446684066/
in europe
alex1138
I could be wrong but I think they were basically forced to add Feeds by regulation (out of Europe?)
For ages it was Top Stories vs Most Recent. Most Recent didn't even work, and of course it would always change you back to Top Stories
With all the potential of the internet, we got stuck with fucking Zuckerberg? We know what he thinks about people.
thaumasiotes
> I think the only one that exists
Wechat moments show you the things that your contacts post. There are theoretically ads too, but ever since they forcibly converted me to a US-based account I don't get ads because no one is interested in advertising to me.
It's too bad; I liked seeing the Chinese ads.
Comments on wechat follow the Maplestory system where you can see comments (on anyone's posts) from your own contacts, but not from other people.
kelvinjps10
WhatsApp too is my only social media, you can see the updates from your contacts
socalgal2
oMg thank you for pointing this out. I knew instagram had this as it’s top center. (X has to too). I didn’t know fb had it. So much better!
stevage
Wow, that Feeds page is great! Did not know.
asim
Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails.
What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.
everdrive
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.
vladms
Alcohol is bad health wise but probably is used to reduce the harm of social imposed stress between people.
So, If I think about it "like alcohol", it would mean "what is the root cause of not being able to keep contact with people". It might be that common social mixing places are probably much fewer than hundred of years ago - be it the local bar, gathering after a day of work in the field, public bathhouse, etc. Many of activities in the modern world seem very individual - maybe that is the problem, and people being social try to replace it and get tricked into worse things.
tannhaeuser
The difference is the "algorithmic" timeline (meaning ads) you get with Facebook, Insta, and co compared to the strictly chronological timeline you get on the Fediverse equivalents (Mastodon, Pixelfed). That it's less addictive, or at least not in the doom scrolling type of way, is more a consequence. Aka the enshitification argument.
Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation.
For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.
inigyou
[dead]
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__MatrixMan__
I think the problem is that people are lonely in ways that the medium can't address well, but does address to some lesser degree, so it elicits lopsided engagement. You're this whole person but people only ever react to this quirk or that one because those quirks come through better online, and over time those two quirks become a larger share of your personality. We end up with things like looksmaxxing--because pictures go online well, and it happens at the expense of whatever other characteristics of that person don't go online well.
I've been imagining a social medium which finds temporary peers via one of your phone's radios--so it broadcasts and gathers rotating public keys as you ride the same bus with people or share an elevator with them--and then your feed contains whatever they're posting, but only for 48 hours or something (unless you decide to make the connection permanent). That way when you see something cool in your feed, you're well positioned to go be social in meatspace.
Like I get why you don't bring your guitar on the bus, same reason I don't bring my drums on the bus, but if a few hours later I saw a video of you making some music I might be like "hey lets get together and jam" next time I see you.
butlike
The issue is the fantasy of social media doesn't convert well to reality. I've reached out numerous times "to jam" with people who have openly expressed a desire to, and... ...nothing. It's like a full conversation stopper. It's weird.
As far as I can tell the social anxiety takes hold, where someone might have their perceived fear of "being bad" exposed, so they recede back into their insular, online-only personas.
I take it you're a musician, and so I really think the only way is to take your drums (or guitar, or whatever) to the park or a local 'town square' and just get down to business. People will interact with you in whichever way they do, but at least it will be real, and possibly lead to real fruitful relationships.
__MatrixMan__
But wouldn't the insular online-only persona be less insular if it were composed of people that you were likely to run into on a day to day basis?
rapnie
> You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits
There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
Or how in a private group someone who was invited suddenly leaves the group membership, hops off the channel. Comparative to walking out of a meeting without saying a word and provide a reason. A simple "I enjoyed it here, but I have to spend my time elsewhere" is just simply a polite thing to do, and costs only 2 seconds of time.
Social media has strong parasocial tendencies.
Swizec
> you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle
The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.
But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.
Aurornis
> Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response.
Asking someone a question online does not obligate them to take time to answer it, or even explain why they don’t feel like doing so.
You’re not in a conversation with everyone who is online, so the comparison to in person conversations doesn’t hold.
> Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
People are doing other things while using their computers and you should not expect to be able to commandeer their attention on demand by tagging them. Again the comparison to in-person social norms doesn’t hold because you can’t see if this person is busy with something else.
I find this sense of entitlement to other people’s instant time and attention to be very negative for any digital dynamic. Whenever someone with this attitude joins a group chat it leads to people turning their statuses to Do Not Disturb all of the time or even leaving the group because they don’t want to feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond to that one person every time that person drops a tag in chat.
rapnie
It depends on the context and situation. You are right for some random public channel. I am talking about for instance chatrooms where a small remote team joins for the express purpose to collaborate closely, and I often find these weird deviations from how you would behave offline in similar setting to be very detrimental for communication and productivity killers. Part of it is about setting expectations and fostering the 'room culture', and that can help improve things. But there is an overall behavior change to the online world. Comparable perhaps (but different in the details) to "road rage", a general behavior shift people have once they step into a car and are insulated from others by their hotrods window screens. And 'commandeering' never works well, btw.
naravara
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.
dgently7
id say maybe marketing? make a "healthy" social network and frame the other one as really bad for you?
I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?
marcus_holmes
I think we're talking fast food rather than nicotine.
We know that fast food is bad for us. But fast food companies keep putting the things that we like into it. So a lot of people, when tasting actual, real, good-for-you, food decide that they prefer fast food. Other people are aware that fast food is bad for them and prefer real food. It's a choice that we leave up to the individual. Unfortunately we then allow the fast food companies to advertise so they can affect the choice.
We don't really have an answer for this as a culture. We should make the fast food companies responsible for the harms they're causing, but we don't have a mechanism for that. We could stop them advertising, as some countries have done, but that starts a whole process of questions about what the government can and can't do that ends up in bad places.
wussboy
And the social media companies, who have essentially unlimited resources, would fight it tooth and nail
procaryote
> Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it.
Don't start drinking or smoking, because with this logic you'll have a really hard time quitting
rsolva
I would like to see social networks that facilitates real life, face-to-face encounters to a much larger extent that the current state of affairs. The Fediverse has the pieces to this puzzle, but I do not know of one project that combines them in the right way yet. We do have Mobilizon for events, we have Mastodon and all the other similar projects for sharing and commenting, but we need something that puts the pieces together in a new configuration.
I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.
But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!
underlipton
VR/Group voice chat/Group messaging is fine too. For centuries, people have created and maintained meaningful relationships while physically and geographically separated. The circumstances of life do not always allow people to meet face-to-face. One of the worst sins of the post-pandemic "return to normalcy" was the wholesale firebombing of remote options for connecting with people.
The problem isn't whether the meeting is digital or not, it's whether the platform (a physical space or an app) facilitates high-fidelity person-to-person and small group communication consistently over time (the norm for healthy human community), or if it's set up to encourage unnatural para-social relationships and dysfunctional, anti-social communication styles.
marcus_holmes
> facilitates high-fidelity person-to-person and small group communication consistently over time
how have we done that while separated for centuries?
Aurornis
Social media is full of in-person events. The only reason I use Facebook lately is to keep up with groups that organize in-person events.
rsolva
I was thinking about social networks that is not Facebook. The challenge is to make something that can compete in this respect. It would be so nice to have the in-person part, but without the ads, scams, data theft and blackbox algorithms!
ageedizzle
What sets Bonfire apart from other federated social media networks?
rsolva
It is modular and built to be adapted to the different needs of online communities. They also have a more fine-grained boundaries system that allows to post only to pre-defined groups (or Circles in Diaspora / Google+ lingo) etc. I don't think they have an Events module yet, but technically speaking, this could be implemented.
OneMorePerson
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.
asim
We have a duty to help them..and I don't think society gets this right in other places. We're not proactive about it. In religion and islam there's something called dawah, effectively preaching, but the idea is you're calling people to something with higher purpose and to eliminate all these bad habits. And I think it's the same whether online or offline. We need to help people. First you have to help yourself but then you have to go back and get everyone else. It speaks to a moral imperative we should all have to help our fellow man.
OneMorePerson
I don't know that you can broadly say "religion" I'm not a Buddhist but from my surface level understanding of Buddhism it might be the case that that person needs to save themselves when they have had some negative experiences with social media. (This is overly simplistic I'm not saying its all on the individual but it's hard to summarize this point in only a couple sentences).
I do think there's some people who have fallen into social media bad habits and can fairly easily be helped to correct bad habits, other people seem to go to social media because it actually aligns with who they are. I've met several people (strangers) who seemed like they brought social media behavior into real life in a way that made me think social media gave them a platform for their personality, not the other way around. They were pretty jarring experiences that really stuck with me.
fortzi
It’s not a small group of people that we can afford to “lose”. It’s widespread in an entire generation (at least), a fact that threatens our society as a whole.
ghostpepper
Yeah the first three paragraphs of the article really resonated strongly and then the fourth was an ad for mastodon, which is only slightly less bad IMHO.
gradus_ad
I will admit, one thing the crowd attention model does exceptionally well is surface the best comments on content. Whether it's HN, Instagram, YouTube, etc... the top comments are usually the "best", depending on how best is defined in the given context. On the silly Instagram meme videos my algo serves up, the top comments are invariably hilarious, often funnier than the actual content, and as you scroll it's impressive how the ordering by like count matches hilarity quite well.
bananaflag
This works on platforms like HN, Less Wrong or niche subreddits, which
i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them) ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations)
Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree.
In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.
fritzo
Right, hn is 50% collaborative filtering and 50% dang
state_less
HN and other social media sites are closer to 99% free labor, 1% paid labor, like dang. Free labor writing comments, blog posts, voting/moderating, posting videos and so on. Imagine if HN or Youtube had to pay people to generate all that content[1].
I think the only pay most get, is that you get to enjoy the site content. But in the case of Youtube, they slap so many ads in front of it that you often end up paying for this free labor content just to get rid of the ads. HN doesn't do Ad walls, but is more of a sales funnel for YCombinator and harvesting whatever value they can from the data, so not so intrusive.
[1] Youtube does pay some of the more popular content creators
p_ing
> the top comments are invariably hilarious,
Sadly that is all that reddit is, now. Have a serious question? Expect multiple top replies to be some sort of [un]funny joke answer.
It's a wasteland and devalues the platform when everyone competes for Internet Points.
/r/aviation is just one example of being full of this crap.
Oddly enough, I don't see it as much in gaming subreddits, even the more generic ones.
cloverich
reddit lacks consistent moderation and the worst is location based subreddits, where all dissenting takes are effectively hidden.
Yet one can imagine a limited set of filters that could in theory fix this:
- eliminate obvious bots
- eliminate low content / metoo / naysaying
- eliminate memes
- detect and promote high quality controversial posts equally to unilaterally upvoted ones
still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.
ageedizzle
> still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.
This is why it's a good idea to make the switch to federated alternatives like Lemmy/Piefed. The more people who do this the more people will see it as a viable alternative, making it easier to get away from the ad-driven model of social media.
FeteCommuniste
Retvrn to oldschool forums with chronological posting.
NegativeK
Excepting small communities: if you're looking for anything but humor, sort by best typically ruins the comments.
Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.
PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.
Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.
throwaway290
I regularly see pretty bad/misinformed takes upvoted to the top though.
brianpan
This is a way to tell if something is social media or attention media.
"Surfacing the best comments" is only a problem at scale. And attention media demands scale whereas your social circles break down at scale. Commerce sites (like Yelp or Amazon) also demand scale, so they also have a "surfacing the best" mechanism.
jwr
> depending on how best is defined in the given context
That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).
"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.
esafak
Slashdot let you rate content across multiple dimensions.
I see no specifics about the scoring in the wikipedia article, but a search revealed that it was a simple, single five star rating scale. The same as on Amazon, and formerly Netflix?
jwr
Yes, as simple as can be. It's the recommender system that made the difference, and that was dead simple, too, but resulted in a subjective "weighting" of scores: your recommendations would depend more on people who were like you.
dhruv3006
Speaking of instagram - i have found the ads sometimes incredibly helpful - sometimes exactly the thing i am looking for.
Facebook on the other hand has become too very bad.
AndrewKemendo
You have simply redefined “best” as “hilarious” “often funnier” or “hilarity”
Is it your intention to suggest that the highest possible form of commenting is humorous?
PaulKeeble
"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.
steveBK123
Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me. For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years.
Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.
It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
Aurornis
> Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form
Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.
If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.
However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.
steveBK123
> Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.
I think unfortunately for IG in particular, it evolved for a segment of people into a status flexing game more than genuinely keeping in touch.
sylos
You can say porn. It's an adult website
lizknope
10 years ago Instagram was great. I would see 10 posts from friends, 1 ad, and 0 posts from people I didn't know.
I gave up about 4 years ago as I was seeing 1 post from a friend, 3 ads, and then lots of random stranger posts.
My friends gave up too.
I have tons of private groups chats and share stuff with people I care about there.
Brog_io
You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/
squidsoup
Foto is good, provided you want a community exclusively made up of other photographers. If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option.
The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.
uhoh-itsmaciek
+1 for Foto. I was also using Instagram through a photography lens and fell off when it got totally unsuitable for that. Foto is pretty good so far.
zukzuk
Or Pixelfed, for a decentralized fediverse option.
throwaway270925
For anyone who doesnt know: unlike in Facebook you can switch off/pause random strangers posts in your feed by going to "content preferences" in your settings. Of course being Meta this reenables every 30 days, but makes for a way cleaner feed in between.
Zak
I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.
It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.
wolrah
> I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.
I agree with this 100%, on top of what you said remember that Instagram launched in 2010 as an iOS exclusive during a time where Apple was not particularly focused on camera quality, ignoring Android where there were numerous devices with substantially better cameras. IIRC someone was even selling one with an optical system in the ballpark of a low-end mirrorless. They also limited image resolution to 640 pixels square until 2015.
keyraycheck
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.
ericmay
“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.
thaumasiotes
> 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 [they] had consumed red meat, poultry, or fish the previous day.
theodric
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!
ben_w
> who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
Political activists, like a former partner of mine.
… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …
… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …
… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
naravara
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.
p_ing
> I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery
There is some percentage of the world-wide population that would find interest in both ads simultaneously.
loloquwowndueo
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.
grvdrm
Around me I see this usage:
- Older folks.
- People using marketplace
- People exchanging inter-personal tips and info: best stroller, contractor, etc.
Not saying FB is best for those things but it doesn’t seem dead at all.
Aurornis
The cognitive dissonance in some of these posts is strange.
> 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.
How are you confused about who still uses Facebook in one sentence and then immediately in the next sentence you describe yourself as a user and explain why it’s useful to you and the people you know.
CraigRood
The growth is across the family of products (inc Instagram and WhatsApp) not Facebook itself. Facebook itself is a zombie, and I don't believe they have a way to innovate out of it. I'm not going to predict the end of Meta, they have more than enough products, but agreed that it's actually quite difficult to understand who's really left.
bjelkeman-again
There are some apparent niche communities both on Facebook and Instagram. Heavy metal and hardrock music fans is one group that hasn’t migrated anywhere else yet. I both play in a band and promote events, and both are still required in my geographic area to reach out.
skirge
it's like wondering why pubs or restaurants exists if I'm not visiting them everyday, but they do because they have other businesses (birthday parties, company events etc.). Look at Facebook for business.
hippo22
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.
a123b456c
It's not complicated. That random garbage increases advertising revenues. Maybe not from every user, but certainly in the aggregate.
baby
Twitter followed the same way ad well. All political rubbish now
atmosx
It’s the worse. The algo will feed anything that makes you cheer or infuriates you. No middle ground. And God forbid if you dig to some disunion and you “like” something or stop scrolling in the “wrong” tweet… you’ll be getting similar content for months.
It’s crazy how bad it has become.
baby
I really think youtube did a good job there. No thirst trap, no outraging content. Praise to the youtube algorithm.
BorisMelnik
hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.
JKCalhoun
Too late. (And I don't do mobile anyway.)
I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.
Barbing
and keep your kids away from it too before Mark’s robots get handsy
https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat...
Warning: truly disgusting
magicmicah85
The funny thing about the friends feed is that it highlights for me who is extremely active on the platform. People resharing stuff all the time. And, it's one of the few feeds you can't endlessly scroll through. It will tell you to "check back later" once you get to 3-4 days of updates. No money in showing people their friends feeds, so why let them endlessly scroll.
Xiol
The amount of shady stuff Facebook has tried with their app over the years has resulted in it, and other Meta apps, being banned from my devices.
dyauspitr
For many people, the alternative would be that their feeds are completely empty since a lot of folks don’t post any updates on Facebook really.
xnx
Everyone wants to be TikTok. The generated feed is much better than following "creators"/influencers.
isodev
I’m quite literally experiencing a physical reaction whenever I need to browse some algorithmic timeline. Even YouTube, what used to be a couple of related videos is now a wall full of “recommendations” - the unskippable ads on every video are more relevant than the actual videos…
Mastodon and related (for me Loops mainly) are a breath of fresh air and I wish more people can (re)learn to enjoy that.
BloodyIron
YouTube recommendations are very well tuned for me. You need to mark videos "not interested" and downvote stuff you don't actually like, as well as stopping videos when you've decided you're not interested. This and other aspects WILL improve your recommended feed. So if your recommended feed sucks, well that's on you there bud, you can influence it completely.
vmg12
Do you use youtube intending to be drawn into watching things you never intended to watch? I don't want a feed but the people operating these sites do not care that they are destroying people's time. Go to twitter, click on "following". Next time you sign in, somehow it's on "For you" (the algorithmic feed).
Thankfully on Youtube I can completely disable recommendations on the site and I use it purely as a source of information, not as a dopamine addiction funnel.
doomslayer999
I just get the same videos recommended over and over. I liked it when the YT feed would recommend stuff new and different i might find interesting. Now its just hyperoptimized to get me to click on ads.
Almondsetat
IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time.
To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks
Forgeties79
I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me.
Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
Gooblebrai
> Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
How do you discover new people? I'd say some people I followed I discovered them thanks for the feed
Forgeties79
Why do I need to discover new people? If I like your podcast or your art or whatever, I will find you on the platform. Other than that, I only want to follow friends and family
Almondsetat
Suggestions from friends? The network of people even without a feed is extremely vast on its own. You'd be surprised how far "a friend of a friend" can go.
amatecha
> the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time
I guess you joined a crappy instance. The Explore feed on my instance is freakin' awesome and full of a constant stream of interesting and enjoyable posts by cool people. Mastodon isn't very optimal when you join the biggest instances on the network (like mastodon.social or similar). The tech is best experienced with invite-only communities of people who agree on a basic set of standards for their social experience.
Jeff_Brown
This feels like the most important comment here. Do other Mastodon users feel the same? The OP Madden me want to try Mastodon.
Tom1380
What extensions do you recommend?
adithyassekhar
This might be controversial. Please disagree with me.
When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.
So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
blurbleblurble
"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.
NitpickLawyer
I appreciate your comment, and how you argued your disagreement. Yet I think you missed something in GPs post.
First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on.
I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted.
Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature.
Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things.
I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.
morissette
Capitalism at work…
SecretDreams
> 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.
tolerance
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.
SecretDreams
I imagine this is not the first time you've been flummoxed given the take you've just presented.
wiseowise
That’s nonsense. Nobody asked for algorithmic feed pushing schizo agenda on you.
jjk166
Of course we did. We all switched from early social media sites that didn't employ such algorithms to those that did, and when new social media platforms came around we progressively moved to more algorithmic ones. Hell half the reason I switched from myspace to facebook was the opportunity to do all the facebook quizzes which were just "let's see how much information I can feed the algorithm". We all want a steady stream of content we find personally interesting and engaging, why wouldn't we? Our issue with most of these sites is when the algorithm fails to give us what we want, and we complain "I didn't ask to see this" but the fact is we are asking to see something, and we receive it often enough to stay on these platforms.
wiseowise
> Of course we did. We all
Speak for yourself. I was quite content with the separation of social life and video platforms/engagement media. And don't make it sound like poor Facebook was forced to invent algorithm because of users.
magicmicah85
I think your experiment was valid, even if anecdotal. This article from January 2009 was talking about the phenomena of what it actually meant to have friends on facebook. Are you a "loser" or a "social slut"? This was at least a few years before most of the algorithms that we perceive as dangerous and enshittifying became core to the platform. The specific study they referenced (new link below) argued that there is genetic components in how we perceive our social networks.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/200901/faceb... https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0806746106
Where FB and Instagram are to blame is not just being aware of the psychological impact but amplifying it make it worse, especially onto a teen audience that has no capability of distinguishing the real world from social media. To them, it's the exact same. Your online social circle may be all you have in real life, not to mention the cyber bullying, unrealistic body standards and all the other awful parts that come when you gamify and reward capturing people's attention.
I won't deny that individuals are also responsible to guard themselves and especially parents, but these platforms have been accused (and are currently in US court) over the fact that they knew about the addictive potential of their platforms and made no safeguards over improving that. As a platform owner, you are responsible for all aspects of its success and failures, its highs and lows.
grishka
I myself started making the same distinction when I talk about these things in English, except it's "social media" vs "social networks". Though I have no idea how to make that distinction in Russian, social "media" never caught on as a term there.
An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.
wussboy
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.
grishka
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.
aspenmayer
Twitter has settings for who can reply to tweets, which are configurable per post. You can make it so that only people you follow can reply.
dredmorbius
What you're probably looking for is closer to a closed discussion group or mailing list than "social media", which is presently universally-readable, algorithmically-targeted, feed-based, advertising-supported, and increasingly, saturated with AI slop (which itself has replace clickbait and ragebait).
Which reminds me of Kitman's Law: Pure drivel tend to drive off the TV screen ordinary drivel.
From Marvin Kitman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Kitman#Television_criti...>
Cited in Arthur Bloch, *Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Things Go Wrong!" (1977) p. 30.
<https://www.scribd.com/document/672553711/Arthur-Bloch-Murph...>
lapcat
Why do you assume that there needs to be a purpose other than discussing a topic that you're interested in?
wussboy
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?
black_puppydog
I still think it's worth reflecting which of the toxic patterns we want to, or don't want to reproduce on non-commercial networks like mastodon. Infinite scroll, quote reply, the like button... all these aren't neutral, and discussions were rightly heated about introducing them.
ceayo
You're so right... Some of these patterns are, to their very core, parts of what make these social media bad.
mmclar
I'm surprised there's not more discussion here and in general about symmetric- vs. asymmetric-relationship networks. Facebook worked in the beginning because relationships were symmetric and there was no concept of getting "follows" -- friendships are modeled after real life ones, where the friendship is between two people.
I can see why the big networks moved away from that: pushing "content" has a lot more friction when relationships are symmetrical. What I don't understand is why there is no upstart trying to bring that back.
knallfrosch
The problem is obvious: People spend much more attention on cat videos from strangers than on their own friends' posts. Ads turn this attention into money.
sitkack
What does that mean exactly, how do you see that manifesting itself? Would we even be aware of these networks, sounds like email
mmclar
Not email; social networking. Symmetrical just means the relationship is the same from both sides. Imagine a two-way "friendship" relationship (old-school Facebook) vs. a one-way "following" relationship (more recent Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc.).
hotOrNot
A followers graph is much more stable. You can have 1m followers but you can't have 1m friends
al_borland
The friendship link on the site would need to go both ways. Request and accept. There is no concept of “Follow”.
In addition, I’d say limit the number of “friends” a person can have. Maybe cap it at 200 (Dunbar's number plus a little extra). This eliminates celebrity, news, and meme accounts. It also eliminates people playing the silly game of seeing who can get the most followers or bragging about follower counts.
These are your actual friends, who also consider you a friend. Even if a celebrity were to join, the site would be useful for sharing with actual friends, not their fans or casual acquaintances.
Facebook started out similarly, but I don’t think it ever had a friend cap. I remember some sorority girls try to get me to make a Facebook account around 2004/5, because they had a contest to see who could get the most friends. I thought this was stupid and said no. Since this happened almost instantly after launch, I think those friend limits are important to make people use it for actual friends and not a popularity contest. Facebook went the opposite way, leaned into it, and created the Follow option. It was all downhill from there.
dangus
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.
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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.)