Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

by pseudolus • 10 months ago

346 221 10 months ago

Social media was built on the romance of authenticity.

It never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.

sedgjh23• 10 months ago

I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.

gausswho• 10 months ago

Facebook died with the like button. Twitter died with retweets.

pndy2• 10 months ago

The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming. We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies. People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.

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ahartmetz• 10 months ago

You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start.

There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.

IshKebab• 10 months ago

It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash.

Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...

By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).

The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.

esafak8• 10 months ago

Facebook always had the ability to organize contacts, but few people use it. https://www.facebook.com/help/200538509990389/

riffraff3• 10 months ago

There was no algorithm in the original Facebook and Twitter.

The echo chamber you got was the same you get in real life: your friends and family may share your pov and bias.

tgv• 10 months ago

My take on this kind of view: it wasn't built on authenticity or social connection. That was what the enthusiasts were claiming it would be. It was a reference to something known, very superficial in nature, only meant to to increase the appeal.

chmod775• 10 months ago

Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's going away.

erxam• 10 months ago

So long as the same incentives stay in place, we're going to get the same results. Change the names yet it's all the same.

pineaux• 10 months ago

Just like drugs, but most people understand you should have respect for them.

atleastoptimal• 10 months ago

The same problems people cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.

egeozcan• 10 months ago

Nitpick: Around 60% of the world population live in urban areas, and if a lot of people decide to live in a particular rural area, then it quickly faces urbanization.

CommenterPerson• 10 months ago

I went to NYC the other day. There was lots of diverse interesting stuff. Not full of people who looked just like me.

jajko• 10 months ago

Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute.

Triple that for families with small kids.

Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).

rufus_foreman• 10 months ago

> people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas

If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census.

If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)

ookblah2• 10 months ago

unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.

SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.

anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.

jbm2• 10 months ago

Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.)

What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.

It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.

(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)

ookblah2• 10 months ago

reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).

everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.

yusyusyus• 10 months ago

reddit has a lot of sick puppies of all sorts and kinds. that is not a place of wellness in any sense ime.

matesz3• 10 months ago

FB is a ghost town

I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.

Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.

It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.

Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.

JumpinJack_Cash• 10 months ago

> FB is a ghost town

FB is not a ghost town, you think that it is because no "thought leader" of the stuff you are interested in (tech, finance, business, stock market etc.) has their major presence or main channel of distribution of content on FB as they are mostly on YT and Twitter.

roomey2• 10 months ago

Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this.

The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.

It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.

I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back

close04• 10 months ago

Doesn’t this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your “editor” only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see.

And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?

roomey2• 10 months ago

You have hit the nail on the head there! The point in the book was that depending on your editor, you were essentially living in different realities.

There was the east and west coasts, and then there was Ameristan (or something I can't remember exactly) in between, which was fundamentalist

fullshark• 10 months ago

Algorithmic feeds, search result pages, and LLM responses with web citations are all different editors. It's just a computer doing the editing.

avereveard2• 10 months ago

eh, I'd say monetization/gamification was the issue.

bet a social media without likes, organized in circles, would be way less toxic.

esafak8• 10 months ago

Without advertising you would have to pay for it. But that would not sufficiently deter bad actors. What you need is culture to repel and moderation to exclude them.

avereveard2• 10 months ago

circles cover moderation's need.

of course sustainability of the whole thing is questionable

mattikl• 10 months ago

When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.

mantas2• 10 months ago

And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers

TheOtherHobbes• 10 months ago

It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends.

There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.

neiman• 10 months ago

I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great.

It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.

atoav2• 10 months ago

When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.

This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.

The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.

The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.

Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.

Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.

I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.

diggan14• 10 months ago

I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely.

Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others.

Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.

Terr_• 10 months ago

Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces.

Reminds me of the succinctly-demonstrated problem of: https://webcomicname.com/post/185588404109

vkou• 10 months ago

they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that).

When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

dr_dshiv2• 10 months ago

Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.

We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.

dmichulke• 10 months ago

Please continue

diggan14• 10 months ago

Ironically, searching "scape web app" today shows "Scape | AI-native CRM that captures all your conversations" which felt very on the nose.

AstralStorm2• 10 months ago

Interesting. Did it get eaten by general baseline interests and lost the focus, ultimately moving to cater to lowest common denominator? Failed or sold?

UmGuys2• 10 months ago

Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.

willtemperley• 10 months ago

I do wonder if this is just a symptom of monetization. Free advertising with viral posts was possible for talented marketers until the early 2010s. Now you have to pay.

OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger. Meeting this person in person sometime later, it turned out this message was never delivered. They'd thought I was working for the company that sued them.

jjav3• 10 months ago

When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world.

I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!

But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.

What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.

skydhash4• 10 months ago

Social media existed before social media. We had forums for permanent collaboration (lecture hall style), and we had IRC for quicker ephemeral discussions (bar style). What we didn’t have was the focus on individuals. To have a brand means you were working on something useful for a group.

Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback).

The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.

jfengel• 10 months ago

Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.)

I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about.

You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people.

Braxton1980• 10 months ago

I loved using chat rooms on AOL in the late 90s, later I moved to IRC (dalnet, efnet) and made some close friends. The interactions saved me from horrible depression as in my suburban area I had trouble making friends.

The reason I believe things are different is that the Internet was tech people. People more likely to be logical and rational. Once "regular" people came on they brought their stupidity with them.

corimaith• 10 months ago

Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.

skydhash4• 10 months ago

People existed as username and their signature, but you already know that’s not the real person behind (it could be a dog or a cat for all you know). Now it’s the cult of the persona and the brand.

enaaem• 10 months ago

Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community.

Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.

sunaookami2• 10 months ago

Building "reputation" and building yourself a "brand" are the worst things from the forum-era. I will not miss power-tripping mods and users with 20,000 posts writing the dumbest replies possible into every thread asking "why would you do this?", "have you used the search function?", etc. Just because you have many posts doesn't mean the posts are good. Many users ignored high-quality posts from new accounts for example.

weregiraffe2• 10 months ago

connect like-minded people around the world

Traditional forums still exist.

diggan14• 10 months ago

Which ones are the best for the anglophone world currently? I'm struggling to find traditional forums that are still "alive", general enough to cover a broad spectrum and well-moderated to remove all noise.

Telemakhos• 10 months ago

Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem?

Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.

Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.

Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.

ranger207• 10 months ago

This is my theory too. The internet made it easier to connect with diverse cultures... and then ignore all of them in favor of the one that agreed with you on every point so you could ignore anything that went against your thoughts

seec• 10 months ago

Yes that's true. Everyone gets to interact with people that are closer to their ideals but it makes society less homogeneous and disconnected locally because there is no geographical grouping.

At the same time people are more mobile than ever because of technological, opportunity and work reasons as well. So, there is a lack of real grounding. Why bother being friends with your neighbors or local people when you can just travel for not very long and visit people you prefer?

It leads to tensions because people live close together but have a very different way of life and sometimes radically different values, even in close quater communities. They end up hating each other secretly because without communication you cannot even begin to empathise.

The social media groups reflect that; they are an echo chamber to cry about people and behaviors you don't like and reinforce your own opinions, behaviors and their superior validity.

There is also the part where large government of the providence state are to be blamed for favoring rampant individualism. Instead of having to deal with friends and family you deal with soulless corporation and obtuse bureaucracy to get your needs met.

When 50 years ago you could drop by to see your doctor, now you call a number, a robot answers and gives you an appointment in one month. It's not just social media that is to blame it's just technology in general that has allowed and basically created a massive bureaucracy for everything, pretending to focus on making things efficient when it basically only consumes value and is just a means of control/surveillance.

HPsquared• 10 months ago

An AI chatbot is just the next stage on "like-minded people" continuum. It's a machine that bends over backwards to match what the user wants from it. (Maybe unhealthy but it's just the next step after interacting with anon posters over a shared niche interest)

artursapek• 10 months ago

Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.

cyanydeez• 10 months ago

Social-mediated capitalism is what they built. Puting AI in there just makes it easier.

matesz3• 10 months ago

I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response.

I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.

I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.

The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.

What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?

Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.

Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.

I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.

PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!

devoutsalsa• 10 months ago

I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.

matesz3• 10 months ago

Unfortunately it's an incredible tool, especially for industries which pray on people's insecurities like beauty - botox, fillers etc. This person I know puts instagram story and gets instantly booked for all free slots she has for the entire week.

She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".

hsbauauvhabzb• 10 months ago

I feel like any quality posts are drowned in the volumes of spam. See also: LinkedIn.

t0lo• 10 months ago

If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.

MrDresden• 10 months ago

I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm.

Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.

The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.

pndy2• 10 months ago

Mastodon and fediverse despite not running on algorithms sadly aren't free of spam and bots - probably nothing nowadays is. Last year in February there was a flood of messages attacking less populated instances, with... Spam can image in message body.

What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.

tokioyoyo3• 10 months ago

Unfortunately, we discovered that people would rather be told what to watch, rather that self-discover their interests, because that’s a lot of “work”.

zoul• 10 months ago

I hope it’s not that black-and-white, that it’s possible to have a sane social network with algorithmic feed, only we need to design the algorithms around users’ needs first.

pxoe5• 10 months ago

Mastodon literally has a trending feed. Is that not an "algorithm"? It has algorithmic popular hashtags, news feed, and user recommendations. Just a bog standard handful of algorithmic surfaces, so why are they still pretending like it's "algorithm free" is beyond me. "Absolute lack", right.

diggan14• 10 months ago

Not to mention "sort by most recent from accounts I follow" is an algorithm too.

I feel like the wording needs a bit of rewording/rework. I agree chronological order facilitates better discussions, but just saying that "Mastodon lacks algorithms" doesn't really help people understand things better.

proactivesvcs3• 10 months ago

The Trending feature is not pushed into the home (or any) timeline. In the Web UI it sits unobtrusively in the corner of the window and on some apps simply does not exist. It can also be easily disabled.

In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people. Nothing about any of the Fediverse services is designed this way because they're not chasing money or engagement, they're made to help people converse in a human way.

beej71• 10 months ago

In this context, "algorithm" means something that gives you the endorphin hit and keeps you scrolling. Facebook is "algorithmic social media", whereas Mastodon is not.

esafak8• 10 months ago

I suggest calling it a 'ranking algorithm' or 'engagement-driven ranking algorithm' to be more precise.

robin_reala• 10 months ago

Exactly. My three internal rules for a good social media experience (ymmv) are:

1. No algorithm beyond most-recent-first

2. Stick to a maximum of ~250 following

3. Pay for the service instead of ad-supported

I can easily do all of those on Mastodon.

3form4• 10 months ago

It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense.

It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.

riffraff3• 10 months ago

Is Tumblr doing fine financially?

I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.

I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.

sprkwd• 10 months ago

Now owned by Automattic.

qingcharles2• 10 months ago

I don't know. I know their ad people have a hard time selling ads. They've been working to bring costs down. It might be profitable.

Juliate2• 10 months ago

Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.

Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.

(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).

marginalia_nu3• 10 months ago

My fingers are not fully compatible with touch screens so I'm not a big phone guy, so I can't speak for them, but I've been trying to make my computer more task oriented, to make choices more explicit.

I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities.

It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront.

My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).

tumdum_• 10 months ago

someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.

It’s is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I don’t think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.

Juliate2• 10 months ago

No, indeed, but^W and that would be an interesting use case. What would a dedicated social media device work, and look like? (actually, that may depend a lot on what privacy one can expect out of it)

ValveFan6969• 10 months ago

These "internet is dead" articles are coming across as more robotic than actual robot content these days.

Popeyes• 10 months ago

The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.

The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.

awesome_dude5• 10 months ago

The problem is that people are addicted to tension

And some.

We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.

lukan• 10 months ago

"The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.

glial• 10 months ago

I'm increasingly of the opinion that ad-driven media is the root cause of many of our social problems.

tokioyoyo3• 10 months ago

I would argue that financialization of the social media is what made it fail. Once there’s direct dollar cost to your posts, ideas and etc., the incentives change from “fun” to “commercial”. That started heavily around 2017ish, where every social media switched to algorithm-first, and heavily started tracking engagement/attention per post.

acd• 10 months ago

Social media is actually anti social. Meeting real people and making real connections is social.

marginalia_nu3• 10 months ago

I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.

Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.

dsign• 10 months ago

Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy.

Not for everybody. Me and a work friend are considered "highly energetic" by our colleagues when we are at the office in person, to the point that people and things soon find themselves in orbit around us. But the truth is that when we come home, we both feel drained and exhausted for the next day or two. For me, it's as if my entire mind and soul got washed and diluted by those interactions.

I'm not saying it's all bad, in the same way that running a marathon is probably not all bad. But "boost your energy" wouldn't be a term I would ever use for it.

benrutter2• 10 months ago

Like most of the other commenters here, I agree that modern social media is often an echo chamber, and frequently surface level.

I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?

panstromek2• 10 months ago

I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested:

https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/

I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.

benrutter2• 10 months ago

Thanks, I was interested and enjoyed you blog post! It's definitely complex- I really liked your observation that even on the same platform (say youtube comments) the quality of interactions can vary hugely based on the amount of traction something gains.

yoz-y• 10 months ago

IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the “true” subreddits)

Timwi• 10 months ago

I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience.

I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.

manx• 10 months ago

Search for "bridging based ranking". The X community notes algorithm does that. I think it should be applied to all content.

3form4• 10 months ago

These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. ...

I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.

Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.

What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.

lurk2• 10 months ago

These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care.

No one goes to the beach anymore—there are too many people there.

3form4• 10 months ago

Yeah, I think that's also why it's an odd argument to me. If the users spend all the attention on your platform anyway, is it really dead?

kingkawn• 10 months ago

The problem is that ultimately it connects people around ideas because it isn’t taking place in the world, and everyone’s ideas are tired strange remixes of things we happened to grow up around

j_crick• 10 months ago

More regulation and mandatory cool-downs to whatever is called “social media” because AI slop and bot-girls? Sounds reasonable /s

panstromek2• 10 months ago

I love the term "semantic sludge"

weinzierl• 10 months ago

"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.

At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like

"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".

Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?

"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.

softwaredoug2• 10 months ago

There is a neurotic personality type that doomscrolls out of a compulsion. A lot of it is hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Where will the next shoe drop? We feel threatened, then some feel like they need to take some kind of drastic action.

Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.

gipp2• 10 months ago

Exhaustion is absolutely the first word that comes to mind for me. Even when I'm not using it myself, I'm exhausted of all the oxygen it takes up in the room

thrownawaysz• 10 months ago

HN is the same echo chamber though. This same topic posted here every single week from random blogs to The Guardian, everyone posts their anecdotes, group hug, taps on the back and back to nothing. Rinse and repeat next week. You could just copy paste the top comments from the previous posts if you want some free karma.

sidnutulapati• 10 months ago

Funnily enough, I just [wrote a blog post](https://sidnutul.substack.com/p/the-thought-industry) echoing this sentiment around how the algorithms have fractured our shared perceptual reality:

jibal2• 10 months ago

Just because something is bad, that doesn't that these are its last days.

jibal2• 10 months ago

Oops ... "Just because something is bad, that doesn't mean that these are its last days.

Swenrekcah• 10 months ago

The algorithmic feed should be banned for all public discourse. That is what’s killing us (quite literally). Let topics be searchable and people should find what they need. Very simple algorithms such as “most recent conversation” may be allowed.

diggan14• 10 months ago

I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff.

I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.

throw101010• 10 months ago

In a way I see these algorithms as segregstionist, their goal is ultimately to isolate certain groups and perniciously expose them only to the rage inducing bad aspects of the other group(s) to generate more posts/likes/comment.

Segregation applied to public spaces should indeed be banned, when these platforms become so huge, they become a defacto public square that you can hardly avoid effectively without missing a good share of the conversations that need to happen in public for a healthy flow of information, so I would not see an issue with law makers to regulate this... obviously as long as it's applied fairly.

The issue is that currently even platforms that are getting regulate, for even more concerning aspect (national security, undue foreign influence on fair elections) like Tiktok seem to be exempt of the law itself and the US Congress seem unable to get the laws they voted in a bipartisan manner enforced... the only reason I see is that a certain tangerine tinted individual sees it as a tool to control the American discourse in his favor, and thus refuses to enforce the law. So these concerns about healthy public spaces are taking the backseat for now.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 10 months ago

While I agree, forums are also easily derailed and destroyed by trolls. I'm in a few political threads and they're totally ruined by a few people that the mods do nothing about.

tannhaeuser• 10 months ago

Yeah, original title I upvoted was the actual title of TFA "The Last Days Of Social Media". Why is it different now? This is against HN rules.

thefz• 10 months ago

Because everything must be profited off, so the platform itself is a vehicle for products.

toasted-subs• 10 months ago

Social media brought nothing but a bunch of jerks who bully and enslave people. Gonna die alone because of what those people have done. I hope when the people look back at this they try every single one of those people as murderers.

full-stack-dev• 10 months ago

This piece makes a great point about needing "architectures of intention." The default social media experience is pure passive consumption, and I felt my own intentions for the day slipping away.

As a personal project, I built an extension to create my own little architecture of intention. It introduces a 20-second pause before I enter distracting sites, and during the pause, it nudges me with a positive micro-habit, like fixing my posture or taking a deep breath.

It's called The 20s Rule (Chrome/Firefox) if anyone else finds that idea useful.

StopDisinfo910• 10 months ago

Social media was nice when it was mostly you connecting to people, going to their page to check on them and a shared calendar.

The feed was honestly the beginning of the end. It turns people from actor of their experience to mindless consumer.

spamjavalin• 10 months ago

Social media and social networking are two very distinct things.

ogou• 10 months ago

Social media hasn't been social for a while. Personal posts from people I know are buried under the algorithms. It's a high friction action to actually find my friends. All the defaults are pointed at optimized content from generic sources. I have many friends that are artists and musicians. I follow them on these platforms and my engagement with them is captured and funneled into garbage content about art and music instead of letting my see my friends. I hate it.

nottorp• 10 months ago

First of all, social media has stopped being social long ago.

Now it's just a platform for content mills. Producer to consumer.

Social media was peer to peer and it's dead.

sniffers2• 10 months ago

You are literally topping that comment on a peer to peer social media website right now. It's hardly dead, it just happens away from meta and X. Discord is absolutely popping off, for example. HN and other forums are still very lively.

pessimizer• 10 months ago

This is hobby project for a billionaire, not a social media website. It doesn't need to generate a dime. It runs very efficiently because it was coded well (and cared for), but there are salaries paid to people to watch it that are just a gift to the people who post here.

ktosobcy• 10 months ago

The problem is - it's not "social" and it's pure "media" at this point. It's almost impossible to have social aspect on the platforms where you only have real people with sane number of connections that interact with eachother. Rather you have a bunch of huge "pages" that simply push their news publications...

IMHO it would be awesome to have again sane, SOCIAL-media. Probably with the correct regulation it could be done… And the current SM platforms could use the regulation as well (force viewing only what one follows, make it transparent like other media - i.e. if someone has more than 10k "followers" it's just a media so put same requirements: full ID disclosure and having to respond to the takedowns immediatelly…)

cynicalsecurity• 10 months ago

It's still social and it still connects people. You are simply on the wrong platforms.

mallowdram• 10 months ago

The acceleration (into automation) of language and images - both arbitrary units - requiring cost-benefit for shareholders inevitably reduces the input to noise and then chaos. Because the dark matter of language is control, bias, manipulation for status, status becomes the central factor, not the sharing.

That we bemoan sub-industries of media, rather than notice the system effects across it is suspicious.

“… if we say that linguistic structure "reflects" social structure, we are really assigning to language a role that is too passive ... Rather we should say that linguistic structure is the realization of social structure, actively symbolizing it in a process of mutual creativity. Because it stands as a metaphor for society, language has the property of not only transmitting the social order but also maintaining and potentially modifying it. (This is undoubtedly the explanation of the violent attitudes that under certain social conditions come to be held by one group towards the speech of others.)” Excerpts from Halliday Language and Society Volume 10

gethly• 10 months ago

internet too was a great place before there were too many people online. social networks met the same fate. there is a critical mass for the amount of interacting people that when reached, the system becomes the opposite of what it was built for - connection.

i guess it goes back to the Dunbar's Number, but on steroids. on the other hand, too much of anything turn from good to bad so it's not unexpected result either way.

darkpicnic• 10 months ago

I created an open source tool to help apps stay near the Dunbar Number: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed. I think the concept of social networks is interesting, but the ultimate unbounded result is a disaster.

Edit (missing link to github repo): https://github.com/darkpicnic/ten_cubed

coolThingsFirst• 10 months ago

There's still a lot of room for progress in social networks.

I'm planning an app where people are forced to talk to each other and learn more about each other, if they do not they are banned from the platform.

Going on Tinder to gather likes and never talk to anyone should be forbidden.This is the issue with social sites, they make it as generic as possible.

citizenkeen• 10 months ago

I just want Discord but a forum. I would pay good money to that

esafak8• 10 months ago

Discord has "forum channels". https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

What aspects of conventional forums are you looking for?

layer82• 10 months ago

The absence of chat channels, I suppose.

cantor_S_drug• 10 months ago

A few creators do append labels disclaiming that their videos depict “no real events,” but many creators don’t bother, and many consumers don’t seem to care.

https://youtu.be/kLyuNo3vEuQ?t=346

AI videos as propaganda. In this clip, the guy can be seen passing through a missile transport railing.

300K views.

randycupertino• 10 months ago

I enjoy watching movie trailers on youtube and I've noticed in the last month all these ai-created fake movie trailers for upcoming movies where the actual trailer isn't out yet. It's infuriating when I watch it, realize something is off and then at the end it's like "Fan-made!"

If this ai-slop keeps up I'm going to just probably stop watching youtube altogether, it sucks getting tricked by fake content.

hollerith• 10 months ago

I recently spent over an hour listening to a channel whose description starts with "This channel shares real stories of life, love, and heartbreak in Thailand. I focus on honest experiences from foreigners living here."

Then I realized that these stories are entirely AI-generated! I know that because of the lack of personal idiosyncracies in narrative style, lifestyle and background (the stories purport to be autobiographical, where idiosyncracies show up more than in other kinds of writing) and the high rate at which the stories appear on the channel (namely, one 30-minute story every day for the last 70 days). Someone collecting actual true stories would not be able to collect stories at that rate -- at least not when just starting out (i.e., before becoming known and trusted by many expats) and the oldest video / story on the channel is only 2 months old.

https://www.youtube.com/@InsideThailandStories

qingcharles2• 10 months ago

YouTube started demonetizing these channels a few months back. Last year they had practically taken over the platform.

thomassmith65• 10 months ago

While this is an engaging essay, it's premature to claim that social media is dying. The state of social media has been awful for years, and yet billions stuck around. There probably is no depth low enough that the majority of users would abandon it.

The essay also neglects what is possibly the largest part of a solution: systems to guarantee authenticity of users and user claims...

A social media user shouldn't have to wonder if the brain surgeon giving them medical tips actually is a high school dropout, or the fellow Parisian sounding the alarm on French politics actually is a 12 year old Quebecer, or the new fan DM'ing them about their music actually is the same psychopath who online-stalked them two years ago, etc.

Social media isn't going to die. It badly needs a mechanism for users to filter out bad information.

softwaredoug2• 10 months ago

I think this is right but not quite.

Politically, social media lately has fractured into ideological spaces. I go on bluesky or truth social or X or a certain subreddit to keep up with the politics as filtered through my tribe.

A lot of people opt out of these spaces because of the huge amount of political content and the lack of nuance in discussion. But it also radicalizes the people who stay as they get their sides view of the political conflicts of the day. And they get addicted to winning arguments for their side.

It used to be that Twitter revolved around whatever Trump did. Now people go online to find a little club they can kanoodle and bemoan how their side is the ultimate victim. And people will justify a lot of horrible things if they think they’re the victim.

southernplaces7• 10 months ago

I have an extended family and also an extended circle of friends that are spread all over the world. In both cases, numbering dozens of people, what would have previously been a slow erosion of contact and any real knowledge about most of them except those absolutely closest to me by necessity, has been converted into the ability to keep abreast of their daily lives, know when some direct communication might be helpful and generally take joy in being able to see how the good things in their lives move forward (or offer a hand when they don't). All of this almost entirely thanks to social media.

This not to mention the interesting figures it lets me directly follow and the shared interest groups it lets me find.

Is social media a complex and vast thing with its many pitfalls and flaws? Of course it is. The corporate giants that run much of it have some very disgusting habits of passive aggressive manipulation of their users, and grossly parasitic dark patterns of surveillance behavior.

Nonetheless, under and around all of that, there's also a tremendous amount of practical human good being created by so much previously impossible connection between millions of family members, friends, loved ones and people who share things in common. I refuse to throw that baby out with the bath water as some seem to propose.

Political manipulation, factionalism and ideological bickering have always been a part of human culture, for at least as long as we've had written words and means of spreading them. Could anyone have expected any differently to emerge from the massively democratizing landscape of social platforms, which let literally anyone communicate their own two cents of thought to places and context where anyone else at all might instantly see them and respond? Of course not, but to focus only on that is almost elitist in its implied notions of shutting up the masses because they don't communicate and debate "correctly" (even if many of them are indeed stupidly influenced by all kinds of interests, whithin and outside of social media).

alex1138• 10 months ago

Does social media mean Facebook? And how Zuckerberg may have just stolen it from other people and he thinks the idea of a good product is one where the feed is wildly non chronological and showing-actual-posts-from-friends-optional? Because that's not connection

bentt• 10 months ago

Mastodon shows that when a network is relieved of pressure to monetize it evolves to serve its users. Otherwise it evolves to serve the investors in the platform. It’s just that simple.

sabakarimmm• 10 months ago

This is why we started Favs - social network for close friends only. No ads, no brands, no influencers. Of course though we’ve had the cold start problem but fundamentally it’s what you’d want if your favorite people wanted to stay connected beyond a group chat. - one to many posts - maps of which city you’re in - upcoming plans - no new inbox either

I hope it people give it a shot one day.

ArcHound• 10 months ago

I don't agree that Substack is a place for small niche communities. It seems to me that they are trying hard to turn into a social network - notes, DMs and other features are pushed while more writing related features like code syntax highlighting or tables are ignored.

radar1310• 10 months ago

It’s absolutely one of the worst things to happen to society.

homeonthemtn2• 10 months ago

A couple people have mentioned this but I think it's worth isolating (no pun intended) for emphasis

We started social media with chats that connected people across the world.

Then we handed over the majority of the Internet to Google who, in their pursuit to build out personally useful services, inadvertently jailed us into a hyper localized bubble

That bubble then became the standard of the Internet, and all sorts of pipes of toxic gas hooked in to the bubble and started poisoning us en masse.

gipp2• 10 months ago

Not to say they're fully innocent, but it seems really strange to point to Google specifically on this issue, rather than like... Meta.

homeonthemtn2• 10 months ago

I pick Google because they ended up centralizing services hyper locally. Facebook, to me, came after that

Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion

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