Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20260520-how-social-media-ceased-to-be-social

by 1vuio0pswjnm7 • 1 month ago

688 455 1 month ago

Insanity3• 1 month ago

Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.

blitzar• 1 month ago

I 'member when facebook was campus only. For about 5 minutes my friends were friends.

10 minutes later it was just a frenzy of (trying to) poke people that I thought I might have seen at some point that year, and conversations about how many "friends" people had.

LtWorf• 1 month ago

It was quite social if you only added your actual friends instead of everyone.

Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see someone I know.

skydhash2• 1 month ago

As someone that was raised in a small town, the feed was very shallow compared to my actual interactions with friends. It was great for status updates (especially for friends in foreign countries), but messenger was way more popular than the feed.

piva00• 1 month ago

For a brief period it was social. Even if you had hundreds of people you had barely interacted with there were still people you continued to interact in real life from that lot.

Getting updates helped me even to form friendships long after the first interaction where we had added each other, I'd see someone I had connected with visiting a place nearby, and could go grab a beer with them while they are around. Or the other way around, I'd be visiting their city and would try to catch up, more often than not it helped to keep in touch, develop a deeper friendship, etc.

That is absolutely dead nowadays, it's drowned in noise on any "social" feature (feeds, Instagram stories [and similar features in other "social" apps], etc.), just a barrage of ads, influencer bullshit, and the odd friend update that isn't just a meme...

The worst part for me is that it was a deliberate choice from these companies to disappear with most social aspects of these apps in favour of the money printing scheme that created the whole influencer culture.

I still have hopes for the rebound, when people get extremely fed up with how these apps work, and something different appears to retake what "social" means, not this doublespeak-esque meaning it came to be.

pryelluw• 1 month ago

I wrote a humor post about it https://open.substack.com/pub/yelluwcomedy/p/old-school?r=7c...

estearum• 1 month ago

Curious how old you are?

There was definitely a sweet spot if you were in highschool or college in like 2004 - 2010 (so born something like 1986 - 1994?) where online social media was almost painstakingly manicured to mirror real-life social dynamics.

Many people remember the drama of deciding who your "top friends" were on MySpace.

Insanity3• 1 month ago

I was in high school when Facebook took off in my country (2008). And fair enough, first few years were maybe more “social-ish”. I left the platform by 2012 though.

Might also say more about me and my social behaviour than the social media platforms themselves, I never cared about it too much.

austin-cheney4• 1 month ago

I was in college at that time and I did not get this feeling in any possible way.

Instead I can remember online topic focused forum boards, of which some I had numerous daily interactions with the same people over years. These online forums made no pretense about replacing real life social dynamics and yet they were still so much better for real social experiences than the social media that replaced them at that time.

To me social media has always felt artificial for people who shout into a vortex hoping for attention.

cjrp• 1 month ago

It's been downhill since FB removed pokes.

trollbridge3• 1 month ago

Yeah - MySpace accurately mirrored high school circa 2004, and Facebook accurately mirrored college circa 2007 (complete with it being elitist where it was hard to get into when it first launched, just like real colleges).

But that was 20 years ago.

semitones• 1 month ago

This was my experience - when I was in high school was right around the time that Facebook started to replace Myspace. Who you were friends with online and who/how many people liked your photos was a big deal, and it very much mirrored the actual IRL dynamics/relationships we had in school - what happened online was directly related to what happened in real life. Around 2013 it felt like that started to change as the social media sites shifted more towards algorithmically recommended content, like joke sites and videos, with some ads. At that time it was still fun to watch it and share it with friends, because it was so new.

wraptile• 1 month ago

I regret not taking advantage of this sweet spot. In that time I took a strong stance against Facebook etc. due to privacy violation and consolidation of the web - who knew that it would get a million times worse and my boycott meant absolutely nothing.

At least I got to experience irc, forum boards and other early group chat apps - that was some of the best internet experience. Early Reddit was incredible as well.

It's sad that today's youth will likely never get anything remotely similar to this.

bamboozled2• 1 month ago

I think early instagram was like this for about 12 months.

tantalor• 1 month ago

You're confusing social networks and social media.

Social media was never meant to be a virtual extension of social life. It's what it says on the tin: media created by users, and shared from user to user. Old-school BBS were social media.

Of course you can have actual social experiences, make friends, etc. on social media. But that almost never happens.

Online social networks on the other hand basically do not exist any more.

mbesto3• 1 month ago

I am very critical of social media but this is far too of a myopic take. There is a ton of real life social benefit to these platforms.

Simplest example - someone posts a picture/video of them in a city that I also am in and now I know they live there / traveling there and I can meet up with them.

PaulHoule7• 1 month ago

I fell out of touch with my relatives in New England and got back in touch because I got back on Facebook so something social does come out of it once in a while.

pwndByDeath• 1 month ago

Sounds like adict talk to me ;) Seriously though, the legit claims of benefits are from people who need outreach and don't want to pay for advertising. But your favorite taco truck gets attention while you get to slip into depressive oblivion.

everforward3• 1 month ago

This is bizarre to me, because anyone I know well enough to link up with on a trip also knows where I live and vice versa.

That’s just a really odd relationship to me. Maybe it’s a social media thing.

FWIW, I hear things like this but have never heard of any of my friends that use social media actually doing it. In the same way that you could use an Emmy as hammer, but nobody does.

IshKebab2• 1 month ago

Facebook definitely was social before about 2010. Especially if you were at uni in the golden era before they left everyone in.

You pretty much only had people you actually knew as friends. People posted photos and messages about real life. No sharing of posts, memes, few stupid people. It was great.

We'll probably never get that back.

microtonal• 1 month ago

For a window, it was really social, early to late 2000s (anyone in NL remember Hyves?). It was a great way for keeping up with friends as you went to different schools, when they were traveling, etc.

There were a bunch of things that destroyed it: Ajax [1], async tech made it possible to continuously push new dopamine shots when viewing a page; the rise of smartphones, since before smartphones you could only check social media when you were behind a computer, which was not true for most people most of the day; and the realization that dopamine shots + ads can bring in a lot of money.

Even though we had cell phones in the early 2000s, in most countries it was just for calling and some SMS (which was expensive outside the US). You would only go to Hyves, Myspace, or whatever when you had some time in the evening. I am sure some people got addicted, but it was much harder than having a device that tries to entice you all day to look.

That said, I still find social networks like Mastodon very useful. Not so much as a replacement for keeping up with friends/family, but it makes it very easy to discover what people who are in niches I'm interested in are up to. And since it does not have an algorithmic feed or ads, the addiction factor is much lower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

nehal3m• 1 month ago

I’d krabbel your HN profile if it let me. Respect!

emodendroket2• 1 month ago

When I was in college it served as a useful directory of everyone I met (like, "oh, who was that guy again?" type of questions) and also essentially every offline event was organized through Facebook. It served a clear social function that posting in meme groups does not.

overgard3• 1 month ago

Facebook, when it was only-for-college-students was a much nicer/more social experience. Once it became a general social network it really fell off the cliff in quality, in my opinion. Like, when I had 30 friends and I actually knew them and cared it was a lot different than having like 1000 friends and regularly being like "who is this person?"

everdrive4• 1 month ago

Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.

Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

austin-cheney4• 1 month ago

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

I am thrilled you pointed this out. I also get tired of seeing that.

yifanl• 1 month ago

We keep saying it, because it's what it is. There's some black box (that can _sometimes_ be reached via dang) that determines what you see on HN's front page, and this place is just as susceptible to trends and rabbit holes as any short form video app, it just doesn't have the funny sound effects.

malfist6• 1 month ago

Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.

Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears. Back then I said facebook was bad for my mental health, and I quit reddit when they made it harder for me to prevent what I called amygdala-bait. But it's totally the same thing.

These days I love to watch nuanced explanations on youtube of complex issues, but youtube's algorithm desperately wants to feed me stuff like How Money Works and other channels where it's dressed up as nuanced explanations of the world, but every single episode is how X is screwing you over or how the Y is going to blow up the economy any second now.

UltraSane4• 1 month ago

"one of them always has a 24 hour news going "

Why didn't you say which one? I bet it is Fox.

nancyminusone3• 1 month ago

I do find it amusing how on the internet the X and Y can be governments or corporations, or the hosted platform itself. Seems like something a competent "we control everything" organization should be able to prevent. But as long as you do nothing but come back for another helping of rage, I guess they're fine with it.

carlosjobim3• 1 month ago

News are for news worthy things - which are things that deviate from everyday life. Wars, disasters, crime, in short things of concern. As well as political struggles, economic struggles, and any kind of conflict.

So all is well in that aspect. That's how news have always been, since the first pyres were constructed to light fires to alert neighbouring communities of enemies arriving.

But the sickening aspect of cable news is the way the presenters talk. The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about. Weak minds are conditioned to feel respect and reverence to those who treat them with despise, and unfortunately also to feel the opposite to people who they believe themselves superior to.

It's completely deliberate, to make people addicted to it.

Consider if a well dressed person came to your house and started talking in the same voice as the TV anchors do. You would instantly think it was a dangerous psychopath on the loose, and try to find a weapon swiftly to ward them off. If somebody at a barbecue started talking like the TV anchors, you'd think they were on drugs and tell them to leave. People would call the police.

The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that. You can practically smell the reptilian from them. Do the same thing with politicians and other leaders too. Many of them say things that on paper seem nice, but with a demeanour that you wonder when they're going to break out into "Who is the boss of you!? I am the boss of you!?"[1]

And I don't think they can see it in themselves or smell it on themselves, like everybody else with a mind can.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QM_AcLBSQM

joseda-hg• 1 month ago

In defense of 'How money works' I don't think there's much in the way of positive anything to cover for his format/field, not for current times in particular

His most famous videos are on the topic of bullshit jobs, the movie Wolf of wallstreet, various X is collapsing and a Money Laundering Explanations

PaulHoule7• 1 month ago

One of my in-laws who immigrated from Italy with a big family has a "command center" with a computer he trades stocks on and a few TVs and it drives me nuts when he watches Fox News and they are talking about the dangers of "chain migration" which is exactly what his family did to great success.

YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost their way", "it all sucks", ...

frantathefranta• 1 month ago

I'm probably a heavier user of reddit than most but I recently deleted the reddit app on my phone because it's just too much. I still use the site though, but now I use an iPad with old.reddit to make using it as difficult as possible.

anal_reactor• 1 month ago

I've noticed that I watch much less funny shit and much more "you should be afraid" but I really don't know how to change this.

chasd00• 1 month ago

but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time.

Don Henley wrote a song about that kind of news:

"We got the bubble headed bleached blonde

Comes on at five

She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye

It's interesting when people die

Give us dirty laundry"

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/donhenley/dirtylaundry.html

nunez2• 1 month ago

I know this works on YouTube Premium, but I have my watch history turned off and use the desktop app with UnTrap for YouTube so that it turns off all of the distracting nonsense I don't use (Shorts and recommendations)

Anthony-G2• 1 month ago

I used to only rarely look at Youtube (repairs, cooking, the odd live concert) but since I started looking at it more often (for guitar and piano tutorials), I’ve found its UI to be too distracting. I added the following custom uBlock filters to make it less annoying:

    ! Remove the "Up next" sidebar (the #secondary container) so that the main content area (#primary) takes up the full width.
    youtube.com##ytd-watch-flexy #secondary:remove()

    ! Ensure the video takes up the full width when playing full screen.
    youtube.com###panels-full-bleed-container:remove()

titzer3• 1 month ago

Ads became the default business model of the web. When people started to get sick of blaring in-your-face blinking banners, it mutated into search ads and placement. The same thing happened to mobile apps and games, YouTube, Facebook, instagram, even Tik Tok. When it becomes too blatant then it embeds itself one level deeper as placements and endorsements.

It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing holding up the edifice anymore. It's crazy to me because ultimately what holds up the economy is money changing hands for services, and ads aren't that. So ads are fundamentally driving people to spend money elsewhere. I just don't understand how the system holds up a multi-hundred billion dollar advertising parasite...everything would be cheaper if there were no ads.

trumpdong17• 1 month ago

According to Cory Doctorow, Proctor&Gamble - one of those giant corporations that each owns 20% of the food supply but doesn't use their own name as branding - cancelled $200m of online ad spend and saw no change in sales.

If more companies realise this, what happens?

close046• 1 month ago

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

For an arbitrary definition of "normal"? The last remark is unwarranted and can only have a chilling effect on the conversation. Or outrage bait, a typical sign on social media.

Why is it not social media? It exhibits the same signs as seen on any social media platform. Can you define social media so we can all follow the same play sheet?

I see the same opinions here as I see on Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, or X even from the same people here as there. The topics that reach the front page are the most popular, or divisive, or "addictive". A lot of people post for the karma, there's a lot of pandering to popular opinion. There's an opaque algorithm that decides which topic stays on the front page and for how long, which comment stays on top and for how long, when a post or comment gets flagged or reappears, etc. that dictates how the conversation can be carried and on which topics. There are a lot of political topics where some voices or opinions are buried while others are pinned to the top. Some people spend hours and days posting here. There's a lot of astroturfing. The parallels can go on. The main difference is scale and at this small scale it can maintain a higher level of quality... most times. But quality isn't what defines social media, is it?

Many on HN see themselves as better than the "simpletons" who fall for "normal" social media, and any view that challenges that is tiresome. But your dismissal of whether HN is social media holds water like a sieve.

chownie3• 1 month ago

Is it not clear at this point that the real issue is how lacking the term "social media" even is? We have people here arguing that BBSs were social media, it will not be long until email is considered social media.

At this point it's a vague term meaning "a place where you talk to another person online" and nothing more than that.

I'm solidly of the opinion especially after seeing so many arguments of this form on HN that the whole world has accidentally forgotten the term "social network" at some point, because "social media" means nothing.

anonymars• 1 month ago

I think it can become diluted to a meaningless term, or co-opted to mean different things to different audiences (not to sidetrack from the point but the first two examples I can think of what I mean are "fake news" or "woke")

So you're not wrong at all, but I think there's also a significant difference when the personalized algorithms come into play, which can segregate people into their own epistemological echo chambers

I suppose I'd summarize as

1. I don't think we have a precise term for the actual thing, and "social media" is one loose term people use for it

2. There's a spectrum for this, maybe multidimensional:

* Does it display the same reality for everyone? For example obviously true social media will be different depending on your friends, but chronological vs engagement are different. Even new reddit and old reddit I think differ here too

* Infinite scrolling? Or specific page advancement?

* Text? Pictures? Video? (Video duration?) Each one is different

So in that respect, sure, they're all social media, but they're very different, and I think there's probably combinations of those features that result in very different effects/harms

jquery• 1 month ago

Well said. But I think when people say “HN isn’t social media” what they’re really saying is “HN is nutritious social media, not junk food social media”. Not sure I agree with that, but there’s some arguments to be made at least. HN generally doesn’t let itself get too political. Anyone who posts too much political or polemic stuff will get put on a “cooldown list” that rate limits their posting (ask me how I know).

HN is also highly resistant to jokes and memes dominating the conversation. On other social media sites, the top comments are generally jokes or jabs.

HN also lacks pictures or video or ads or infinite scrolling, and makes self-promotion quite difficult.

Is HN social media? Yes. So were BBS’s back in the day. But is it the omnipresent toxic social media that’s currently rotting society’s collective brain on a generational level? At the very least, it’s not that.

nancyminusone3• 1 month ago

I really forgot how stupid cable tv was 20 years ago. In my area, that old stuff is now getting broadcast over the air, which is the only kind of tv I get. It's not the history channel's Ancient Aliens exactly, but it is all the 2nd tier offshoot stuff that didn't air on the big cable channels. About half of them are "about" Hitler, and the topics are treated so unseriously you get things like "Dude, look! This door has an H on it! This must have been where he went!"

It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.

jmye• 1 month ago

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.

That it's less destructive than Meta doesn't make it less "social media" - and I'd argue that it's style (links fall off the page quickly and discussion becomes impossible after a relatively short period of time, solely to foster a sense of "missing out") is part of what defines current "social media".

It's a noisy attention sink, whatever high-mindedness people want to pretend it has.

reactordev• 1 month ago

I love me some knowledge forums and sites like HN that allow for general discourse. I’m afraid an entire generation doesn’t know what that is like.

shimman2• 1 month ago

I always delineated the two as one being corporate social media, I do wonder if there is a better word/phrase for it but IME if you use the phrase two describe it as such to those that were online pre-2008 they immediately grasp the difference; but these people are likely a minority.

amelius• 1 month ago

It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation.

What baffles me is that they call this manipulation "influencing" and they consider this a positive word.

djeastm• 1 month ago

Similar is when people refer to themselves or others as "content creators"

Not filmmakers or artists or writers... "content creators".

Like they exist just to produce a continual stream of this amorphous "content" for consumption.

Now, perhaps that's all that art/writing, etc ever was. But to just abandon even the pretense is another in a long line of surrenders we've made to commoditization.

ThrowawayTestr• 1 month ago

I must be using social media wrong because all I see on my timeline are funny pics and niche porn.

KellyCriterion2• 1 month ago

Are you on the correct site/app?? :-P

geophph• 1 month ago

(Pedantry erupts below)

grvdrm2• 1 month ago

HN has plenty of social media components.

Think a better version is: HN is not an advertising-controlled social media website. That specific version makes most sense to me.

tekla2• 1 month ago

HN is literally an ad.

Kiro• 1 month ago

It's not tiresome. It's spot on. Nothing is as addictive as HN.

throw-the-towel2• 1 month ago

Wikipedia is.

KellyCriterion2• 1 month ago

- And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. -

Thats right in that sense - but in a sense of doom scrolling, it is for me: Very often Im clicking through dozends auf pages, fortunately I have to activly do a click to get to the next site, so this dampens a little bit :-D

everforward3• 1 month ago

There’s also an end to the feed. I forget the limit, but at one point I think I hit the maximum number of pages at like 50 (quality drops pretty dramatically, by like page 10 there was almost nothing interesting or notable).

Tangurena2• 1 month ago

Social media was first (that I know of) weaponized in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate Facebook users to vote for Brexit & Trump. I'm surprised that the article left those totally out.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

hedora5• 1 month ago

That incident was definitely ahead of its time, but before that, targeted ads for scams were propping the industry up. For instance, Experian used to spend $$$ to funnel people into credit card scams -- one year, they stole our CC#, and I called our top 5 US bank to dispute the charges. The bank fraud department rep said Experian drove most of their case load, to the point where they had a special flow to block just Experian affiliates because physically reissuing stolen cards was too expensive. You can back estimate how many predatory ad dollars that involved. Of course, there was also a long tail of smaller companies that wanted to sell supplements, useless other useless services, etc.

Before that, you could pay for placement on all the major search engines except early Google, which basically just broke search. (Google does similar stuff now, in the same way they "don't" sell personal information or read your gmail, but somehow make lots of money off it anyway, and target things only mentioned in private correspondence).

LLMs will be next. The only solution is to refuse to pay for access with your attention. That means no copilot, gemini, alexa or siri, since those are all ad supported or adjacent now. ChatGPT and Claude are on borrowed time. I suspect the open weight models will be the last ones to fall.

intended4• 1 month ago

Social media was weaponized from the days of PHP forums. I remember Palantir shilling sock puppet management technology at a time where most people didn’t even know what a moderator was.

AFAIK, Russia’s Internet Research Agency was the first organization to weaponize social media and the internet.

bryanlarsen• 1 month ago

HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word.

The article's main claim is that traditional social media is not social media any more. That Facebook et al are now junk entertainment. So IMO HN hews much closer to the traditional role of social media than Facebook et al do.

eszed• 1 month ago

That's what I took away from it, too. Facebook circa 2008 was great: your friends talked what were up to; everyone posted their pictures from that party last night; you didn't see anything from anyone who wasn't at most a second-degree connection. There were problems - people were jerks, and worse, and some people got pulled into chasing clout, and promoted bullshit - but they were human-scale problems, and you could largely scrub your feed from things / people like that. Unfortunately for the entire world, that sort of use wasn't profitable enough.

Gigachad5• 1 month ago

HN is more like a forum where strangers discuss ideas. Old school social media was a place you posted life updates to your friends and family. New social media is content creator short form video while the majority of users are entirely passive consumers.

stephenhuey• 1 month ago

When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch. Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained how much new generations would benefit from what he called interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn anything of interest instead of being forced to consume whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted that fictional plot as believable?

https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/

lfuller• 1 month ago

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

This is claimed by users of Reddit regularly as well and I think most people here would consider Reddit to be a typical example of social media.

Gigachad5• 1 month ago

You could argue back in the day reddit was a forum rather than a social media. But after the new UI and several years of changes, particularly when they started to ignore your subscribed subreddits and just showing whatever in the home feed, it’s now fully social media.

RC_ITR• 1 month ago

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

The amount of times I've read a very thoughtful article only for the comments to be political drivel (the worst was peak-COVID SF discourse) weakens your argument quite a bit.

It's even more foolish to think outside forces aren't using bots/tech to sway the discourse.

Just because it's not engineered for the mainstream's dopamine addiction doesn't mean it doesn't do the same thing.

alphazard2• 1 month ago

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

Whatever you want to call it, HN has followed a similar trend. It's rare to see the authors of small, but interesting/innovative, projects show up in the comments, surprised to see their work on the front page. That used to be common, even the default, if you look far enough back.

Now the front page is current events and marketing campaigns. I don't think I've seen a single software project here in the last year that wasn't already extremely popular, or being pushed by a company with a marketing budget.

In theory AI should have helped. I know people are still making cool stuff, faster now with AI, but it's harder and harder to find it.

grey-area• 1 month ago

In theory AI should have helped.

Why would generative AI help stop enshittification? If anything AI has made low-effort slop far more common on the front page and sometimes it gets voted up because of a snappy headline and few people attempting to read it, particularly if long-form and initially convincing.

Gud• 1 month ago

HN is not and never has been “social media”. It’s a threaded discussion forum.

Aurornis3• 1 month ago

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

I came here after reading the comment section for the "Dopamine Fracking" story right below this one. In that comment section there are arguments that Hacker News isn't social media because it doesn't have social features like friending people you know. The argument is that it's a place to discover cool content and comment on it.

Which is precisely the argument being made in this BBC article: That traditional social media is becoming less about communicating with friends and more about discovering content and commenting on it. Which is the exact purpose of sites like Hacker News and Reddit.

"I spend a lot of time scrolling through videos made by content-creators," says Lucie, also 16. "They're more interesting than the posts of people I know."
"What we're seeing is social media splitting in two," says social media consultant Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout Newsletter. "Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming more about entertainment and discovery. WhatsApp is becoming the place people go to actually be social.

EDIT: I had to use Wayback Machine to find this:

7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.

That's from https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...

That has been erased from the internet, but it was widely understood that sites like Reddit and HN could were social and had addictive properties for people without strong self control.

post-it• 1 month ago

The content here is very different. I can kill maybe an hour a day reading HN, which is a lot, but the feed does end. Most days, I don't want to spend an hour here, because the feed is designed to push popular content to the top, and a lot of it is content I don't care about. Other sites have infinite feeds designed to keep me personally hooked as long as possible.

whateveracct3• 1 month ago

HN is a secret third thing: A forum

haunter3• 1 month ago

HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word

Hard disagree. The upvote/downvote system and the algorithmic front page makes it a social media to me.

jandrese2• 1 month ago

IMHO both of these problems stem from the same source: Engagement.

Anything that attempts to maximize engagement will inevitably optimize for outrage, anger, and disgust. You will end up handing the platform over to trolls and propagandists. Platforms need to optimize instead of quality and sanity, but unfortunately that is expensive will never get as many views and advertiser dollars as cheap outrage content. It's a big reason why our current media landscape is so hellish, the other main reason being the continual takeover of more and more media outlets by billionaire aligned interests.

rockskon• 1 month ago

HN has its own share of enticement/manipulation - most recently with regards to AI.

Plenty of variants of "people who don't use AI will be left behind" are sprinkled around various threads about AI. It's an attempt to both manipulate via fear as well as sell.

icepush2• 1 month ago

This is so different from my personal experience that I feel like one of those kids being told chickens used to be dinosaurs.

I have an account on facebook, on which I am pretty active. If I attend some infrequent event (Which I do fairly often) I will take a picture of it and post it there, with a description of what it's about. That's pretty much the extent of what I put on facebook. Sometimes I see similar posts from people in my friends list, or videos about whatever facebook thinks I am interested in this month (Right now it's showing me lots of people taking apart pumps and motors). What sites are you using, and what exactly are they showing you ?

wuliwong2• 1 month ago

So you infrequently post on FB, that is exactly in line with the article. You didn't mention whether or not the content you see in your feed is from people that you know in real life or not, so I can't evaluate if your experience is inline with the article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

da_chicken• 1 month ago

Not just television. Also the supermarket checkout aisle magazines. Not just tabloids, although that, too. Also the "glossy" magazines. Vogue, People, Us, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, McCall's, Seventeen, etc.

The commercialization of the engines of culture continues.

red-iron-pine4• 1 month ago

HN is absolutely social media in all senses of the word and meets your definition of cable TV pretty well -- it's a news blog run by a startup incubator as a way to increase discussion and submarine in their concept and products.

"if you're not paying for it, you're the product" and that is just as true here as anywhere.

zuzululu• 1 month ago

I agree half way. While recent years HN seems to have imported much of Reddit, it still has an anti-establishment undertone and decent moderation to keep it from sprawling

nunez2• 1 month ago

Not in the sense that's disucssed in the article. Social media like a forum (which is "old school" social media IMO) instead of like Instagram (short video clips, reactions, designed for max engagement and dopamine hits).

Yes, HN is a front for YC. However, HN is still very much about longform submissions and nuanced discussion. There aren't very many places like that anymore, and those that still exist are dying, with some exceptions (mostly car forums, for some reason).

(Instagram wasn't always this way! It was originally an alternative to Flickr, but focusing on sharing images and discussion instead of photography. It gradually became the psychological gateway drug that it is now, though even that was a response to threats like Vine and Quibi that unlocked short-form video at scale.)

cautiouscat2• 1 month ago

I agree but there’s definitely room for nuance. I follow a lot of artists because I genuinely like seeing their work. I follow a lot of miniature painters for their tips and tricks. I follow my close friends to see what they’re up to.

I think the folks you’re talking about are influencers. Which I wholeheartedly agree with your take in that case.

ambicapter• 1 month ago

That’s just advertising. Yes, mom and pop stores can advertise “just like” the multinational corporations can. Guess who gets the lion’s share of airtime and guess who has armies of men+machines crafting the most convincing messaging.

pessimizer4• 1 month ago

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

What's probably tiresome is trying to come up with a proof that it is not. Your frustration and the insult "pedantry" will not suffice.

If you had a real proof, you would simply include it, instead of performing emotion about being so lowered to even have to discuss HN being social media. The idea that people shouldn't argue with you because it might injure or tire you to be argued with is so 2022.

If you have something specific to say about the actual actions that are taken in what you call social media (but does not include HN), there's plenty to discuss - in fact the difference which you insult as pedantic is the most important thing to talk about. Why is one mediated talking to people good, and the other mediated talking to people bad? And if we try to make it an argument about something other than vocabulary, or even worse the vague-assed "changes in technology," it might accomplish something.

It's insane how this is enough to begin a thread on HN. Vague negative handwaving and insults (nerd-sniping, I guess?). That's not going to hurt whoever you think is doing evil, that's going to help them.

"Social Media" isn't a thing. It's a bag of techniques for mediating communication between people who are usually not asking for a mediator. Talking about those specific techniques and their applications is always going to be more useful than arguing about the referent of some term that you have no obligation to sign onto unless you find it useful.

But god if you're so tired could you just not participate?

xnx• 1 month ago

Additionally, "social media" is as inaccurate a name "ride sharing". A better name would be "targeted ad scroll media".

jimbo808• 1 month ago

It's worse in many ways but also better in one way, which is that buried in all the propaganda and manipulation is usually the truth somewhere in there. Before, the truth was simply not available.

bluesounddirect• 1 month ago

I completely get the cable tv bit. Grew up without cable just OTA tv and Radio . I remembered how i would feel left out of the cable tv connection / conversations . Then I eventually moved on to living in the city and not really watching TV except simpons reruns and the news hour on pbs for many years . The parallels reveal how we just need to go out to social place outside of our homes . The pool, a restaurant, bar , library, a club a religious place and be involved. But more importantly we all need our own opinions again, and not to be so offended when you disagree.

TulliusCicero• 1 month ago

I miss the early days of FB where people just wrote thoughts about what they were feeling or doing.

I wish we had something like that where there was no reposting/resharing, and links & photos were allowed but deemphasized in the UI. Also, no like button, that just encourages empty engagement.

snthd• 1 month ago

The product is you?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM

45612987• 1 month ago

Given that even reaction videos from modern Jerry Springer figures with 20 million subscribers can attract 20,000 comments that all parrot their guru and demand doxxing of the target or worse, it is no longer a mystery how totalitarian states form.

Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.

gwbas1c• 1 month ago

I (mostly) stopped looking at Facebook around 2016. It just wasn't fun anymore; and at least for me, my feed was all political nonsense trying to manipulate me.

SirFatty• 1 month ago

And this is a revelation to the BBC? Who doesn't know this?

sublinear• 1 month ago

What we're seeing is social media splitting in two [...] young people publish a lot of content but it's more funny parodies and remixes of existing material. The goal is to make people laugh, not to tell people about their lives. [...] Whether it's TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, we are a long way from the "digital town square" of personal interaction that social media was even just a few years ago.

I don't understand why this article has to play dumb. This is how most of the internet always was until commercial interest invaded social media. They yelled their billions of dollars worth of messaging so loudly for over a decade that it drowned out anything authentic.

Now that there's a political break away from all the tone deaf pseudoprogressive messaging and the money for it has dried up, what did they expect to see there? Most people never posted sincere "life updates" unless they had something to sell or were a naive part of the bandwagon.

avaer• 1 month ago

Imagine if everyone called it "fad media" or something more accurate. It would be dead overnight.

The only thing keeping it afloat is the lie that it's social.

Towaway692• 1 month ago

"Fantasy Media" or "Social Fantasy"?

After all, the advertising powering the media is all about creating a fantasy around a future you will be living once you have bought the product.

holistio• 1 month ago

Or just f ad media.

lo_zamoyski• 1 month ago

In other news, water is wet.

This has virtually always been the case and it is only "social media" is an Orwellian sense. It is an antisocial consumerist machine.

In consumerism, everything is for sale.

IshKebab2• 1 month ago

Now? It's been like that for a decade.

lenerdenator2• 1 month ago

Friends haven't been a focus of social media feeds for almost 20 years now.

There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations, engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division.

Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge companies purely by profitability and why you shouldn't ever let the CEO also be the primary shareholder and chairman of the board that's meant to govern the company's behavior.

hedora5• 1 month ago

Twitter was similarly bad.

A better heuristic is market share. We should reintroduce media ownership rules that cap audience share to something < 10% per distribution channel. Meta, Disney, Paramount, etc should not exist.

lenerdenator2• 1 month ago

In a way, I'd argue Twitter was the thing that motivated social media to take the path it's currently on.

Facebook was originally about people you were acquainted with in real life. You had a pre-existing reason to engage with them. That engagement wasn't as lucrative as SV investors wanted, but it was there.

Twitter never had that premise, or lost it very early on. You screamed into the ether, and people either responded or they didn't. One way to increase the chance of receiving a response is to say outrageous things. Once people figured that out and how to put ads adjacent to the outrageous thing, there was at least some pressure on Facebook (later Meta) to do the same thing, because we're here to make money, not friends.

And really, there are elements of that in old media, too. Their business model was to have captivating programming on TV and radio that would keep you tuned in to see what was happening in the next part of the show after the ad break. Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, every 24-hour news channel, etc. were all very good at this, coarsening of the discourse be damned.

Regardless of who owns it, if you introduce a motive to constantly and eternally increase the value of a media company, you will see a move towards slop content at some point if you have a long enough timeline. It's inevitable.

armchairhacker6• 1 month ago

HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum.

You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate).

(But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the caveat.)

titzer3• 1 month ago

You don't see pictures and videos directly on the site. It's text links and text comments and discussions. In the minimal sense of the word, even printed text is media, so it's technically true that HN is social media, but I think it's more like a news aggregator and discussion forum.

armchairhacker6• 1 month ago

How does being text only make it not social media?

Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343

dust-jacket3• 1 month ago

see IMO it isn't. HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were. I don't think they were social media really - they're online spaces that form around a shared interest, where Facebook etc were originally online spaces that augmented a real world community.

But we're a long way from that now.

liotier• 1 month ago

HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were.

That is the very definition of social media.

"Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't valid categorization.

kiicia• 1 month ago

HN is public forum (one of the last), it's a bit different thing

armchairhacker6• 1 month ago

Reddit is a forum, is it not social media?

wussboy• 1 month ago

Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a forum in the early 2000s.

trollbridge3• 1 month ago

I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't social media. HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".

Many other Internet forums are similar--they might technically have the capability, but the prevailing culture might be that people rarely do it.

Adding to this is that HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention. That makes it fundamentally different from other social media platforms today.

armchairhacker6• 1 month ago

HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care, because social media isn’t intrinsically bad; I always say “mainstream social media” or “toxic social media” to clarify what I’m referring to.

HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".

What’s the difference? Submissions usually include at least one picture, sometimes videos or interactive content.

HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention.

I’m sorry, but this isn’t true. HN has less AI than say Reddit, and many users try to combat, but I still frequently see top-voted (obvious) AI-generated articles and less frequently comments.

When something has lots of em-dashes and other https://tropes.fyi, I recommend checking on Pangram.

crystal_revenge• 1 month ago

I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't remember when HN first appeared?

For anyone that was an adult in the "web 2.0" days it's hard not to see HN as "social media". The first wave of social media sites where defined by community news aggregators that allowed commenting and, most important, up voting of comments and submissions. Digg, Reddit, HN, del.icio.us (though it lacked formal 'up voting') were all part of this first wave of social media.

The absolute key differentiator between HN and an old school internet forums, that absolutely makes it "social media", is that the community votes on your opinion and users have some way to score against each other. This is precisely the mechanism that is at the root of all problems in social media: you get a measurable reward for your content that pressures you towards saying things and sharing content that increases that reward.

Perhaps one of the best decisions HN ever made, which fights this somewhat, is removing the upvote count from being visible to other members of the community (this was not the case in the early days of HN). But for anyone that saw the rise of "social media" it's hard to imagine HN not fitting that description.

trumpdong17• 1 month ago

The "media" part of "social media" doesn't refer to what computer techies call "media files" (music, pictures and video) but to a mechanism of communication.

stronglikedan• 1 month ago

HN is social media

I haven't posted any personal pics, or stories about things that I've done in my life or am currently doing, so how can it be social in the same way that social media is? To me, there's a clear distinction between a news aggregator and discussion forum like HN, and a social media site. Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social interaction.

boomlinde• 1 month ago

Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social interaction.

Discussion is of course a kind of social interaction. You've posted this, which discusses a topic that is only tangentially related to the news item if at all. You can talk about framing all you want, but it ultimately is what it is: spontaneous social interaction between users on the kind of winding paths "unsupervised" discussions naturally take.

I'd be surprised if half of people supposedly discussing the "news to be discussed" have RTFA. That doesn't stop interesting discussion on a wide range of topics from happening here.

It's not "social in the same way", but Twitter and Facebook aren't "social in the same way" either.

whateveracct3• 1 month ago

Forums came before social media. It's a forum.

haunter3• 1 month ago

Forums don’t have algorithmic front page and upvote/downvote system

You can’t bump a thread to the top of HN so everyone sees it

fl4regun• 1 month ago

by this standard, isn't a public bulletin board even included in the term "social media"?

sethammons• 1 month ago

Social media started in the early 1500s if we squint with this logic.

Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were the OG forum post that went viral, and required a printing press.

talon8635• 1 month ago

The HN comments section certainly feels increasingly hostile, manipulative, manipulated, and jokey. It use to be a reprieve, but it’s feeling more and more like every other comment section online. To me anyways.

anon-3988• 1 month ago

Tell me something that involves other people that isn't a social media then.

GJim• 1 month ago

HN is social media.

No!

Social media is where one shares ones social life. It's in the name!

andix4• 1 month ago

I used to browse through my instagram feed a few times per month. Just to keep updated about those friends who often posted there. Now it's mostly crappy shorts and I can't even find the "friend feed" anymore. No idea if it's just well hidden or completely gone. Now I don't use it anymore at all.

zbikowski• 1 month ago

It is so well-hidden, in fact, that there is no visual indicator that it exists at all, so you cannot be blamed for thinking it is gone. On the homepage (house icon) tap the Instagram logo and select "Following." It will present you with a chronological feed of posts from only those you follow.

Again, there is NO ARROW or any UI to indicate this is possible. You used to be able to set it as the default view, but that has been eradicated it seems.

mattbruv• 1 month ago

Wow, I've been using instagram for 5 years and I just learned that there's a following-only feed. I had always just assumed that Instagram was designed in bad faith to always interleave posts from people you didn't follow to try to capture your attention. It's incredibly annoying that I can't set this as my default.

andix4• 1 month ago

I've found it. I'm quite sure the drop down wasn't there a few months ago.

But the sad reality: nobody is posting anything anymore. I follow around 500 real people I know in person, and in the last 30 days they published only a few posts. Very short feed.

So instagram became something completely different over time, and I still opened it occasionally, because I associate it with old memories. To feel closer to people I lost touch with, or didn't see for a while. But instead I get bombarded with BS and ads (and the occasional "real" social media post), without me consciously noticing the change for years.

al_borland4• 1 month ago

This is why I don’t understand why my family/friends keep wanting me on Facebook or Instagram. It’s not about keeping up with each other. They just want it to be slightly easier to send me memes. But if I wanted to browse memes, I could just go do that. I don’t need them sending me their feed with a bunch of jokes that are funny to them, but not me.

andix4• 1 month ago

I have a lot of unread messages on those platforms. And I'm not going to check if it's just stupid memes, or if some more personal messages hide there. Googling my name puts my contact details and phone number on the first page. So anyone who wants to get in touch should be able to.

projektfu2• 1 month ago

I was on it for the comic strips, but the rest of it is so noxious to me that I don't want to go there just to get a feed of comics.

Oh well, there's always GoComics :) It is missing a lot of the new ones that are on Instagram, though.

keybored2• 1 month ago

I deleted my FB when they gave us the Your Data Or Your Subscription ultimatum. I don’t scroll TikTok, Instagram, or any other video “content”. I do watch some YouTube shorts but only while sitting at a personal computer type laptop or the ones which are connected to external monitors.

I read this site. But lately it’s been more difficult since the AI “content” stresses me out. Maybe social media always did that. But it’s come to the point where I cannot kid myself. Many times it just makes me more wound-up than it winds me down. So then what’s the point? Then I intentionally search for specific topics. When I’m out of those I can stare out the window. Which is a nice change.

Towaway692• 1 month ago

I've started visiting quiet rooms[1], just to hear myself think again. The world and the internet has become so loud that some quietness is refreshing. Luckily for me there are several where I live so I've even got a choice.

Strangely these rooms are quite different to being silent at home or somewhere else private. For me it seems to be that these spaces are public, you are being silent in public spaces - a different setting and experience than in places that are private. Being silent together can be disconcerting!

It's also different to using noise cancellation or listening to music or other forms of "silence", truly unique in many aspects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_room

PcChip• 1 month ago

I think I'm on an A/B test on the Facebook app, now whenever I open the app it goes straight to reels and starts playing videos with sound enabled. I looked through all settings to try to disable this but couldn't, so I finally just gave up and uninstalled it

I open the app to keep up with what my friends are doing, and also check the dating portion of the app for new matches. I purposely always avoid reels on any app, because I hate them and what they do to people. So when I open the app and it immediately starts playing reels with sound on and no way to disable it, it feels like a slap in the face

exabrial• 1 month ago

A new game: determine when you meet someone if they use tik-tok or not without asking them.

People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.

hdhdhsjsbdh• 1 month ago

What are the tells? Since COVID I’ve noticed that every new person I meet seems to harbor at least 1 or 2 oddball opinions. Conversation tends to veer into weirder places than it used to, creating a surreal sort of feeling of being in the world. I’ve felt that this is just a result of everyone being tuned by whatever personalized feed is amplifying or directing their base instincts.

boelboel• 1 month ago

I think what's more interesting is that the odd opinions don't mean anything anymore. Before someone with odd opinions tended to be either really crazy or they were intelligent and thought a long time about something. Nowadays they seem shallow, they saw something on tiktok but don't really know what they're talking about, just totally rehashing whatever they heard.

It might partially come from the fact that writing essays isn't deemed important anymore, when you hear people talk about how X or Y is good/bad they can hardly write down why. I've seen articles how we're going from a written culture to an oral culture and the sort of cranks you get with social media certainly fit with the latter.

coffeefirst• 1 month ago

The tell is they don't know it.

People who read a lot or get deep into history podcasts and have a hot take on the French Revolution know that this is some whacky shit and if they bring it up explain it first.

TikTok people say the crazy thing and they're surprised when everyone gives them the look. Also the thing they bring up is usually provocative, factually ridiculous, and a little unhinged.

AlfredBarnes• 1 month ago

I could very quickly sus out what was on FOX news last night by the conversations my coworkers have.

baggachipz5• 1 month ago

sus out

Intentional typo as a good pun?

supertroop2• 1 month ago

You’re just learning how small minded people are? In the US there was an attempted insurrection filmed live. We elected the guy who led it who then pardoned 1600 jailed criminals. Now he is trying to creat a slush fund to give them millions as reparations. 33% of the country is delighted by this. These are Plank sized brains.

hedora5• 1 month ago

billions; 30%. (His approval rating is finally starting to drop below the historic floor).

saadn922• 1 month ago

yep, even people I thought educated voted for this fool. seriously, they have college degrees, but apparently get their news from random social media accounts

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm2• 1 month ago

Anti-social take. People are being exploited by some of the smartest people in the world who use natural human desires against people but somehow they are at fault for being small minded?

xerox13ster• 1 month ago

Noting the existence of the small minded state does not imply blame or lay blame with those who exude that state.

The opposite is stated in the comment: “People are groomed and programmed”.

You’re revealing yourself. No one said they were at fault but you.

snowwrestler• 1 month ago

Nah, this is the same self-congratulatory dismissive mindset humans have been having about each other for years. “Wake up, sheeple,” “NPC,” etc.

We’re not lacking for opportunities to believe the worst of each other. It’s not something TikTok invented.

trumpdong17• 1 month ago

The scale is different.

abhaynayar• 1 month ago

I've been able to quit short-form content, but does anyone have any tips on how to quit long-form content like YouTube or Netflix?

baggachipz5• 1 month ago

Books are a thing.

hedora5• 1 month ago

Or, buy a bluray player, then find a library.

captainclam2• 1 month ago

I use the firefox extension "Unhook" to completely hide suggested content on Youtube. Really effective, I kindof can't believe how much time I spent getting suckered into watching video essays that absolutely did not deliver.

jbd0• 1 month ago

Time box it. I play video games for 1 hour on Fridays. More than that and it makes me depressed.

spking• 1 month ago

If this subject interests you, and you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

randusername• 1 month ago

40 years old now and as relevant as ever.

IMO even better than Chomsky's Necessary Illusions (1989) or Bernay's Propaganda (1928) at giving you that backstage at Disney world feeling.

ex-aws-dude• 1 month ago

There is also a book called Infinite Jest that touches on this subject

Its a breezy novella you can finish over a lunch break

BLKNSLVR5• 1 month ago

I use it to weigh down my transportable home in tornado alley. Hasn't failed yet. Density, more-so than size, is important in such an application.

lou1306• 1 month ago

Well the size of IJ is itself a statement: 1. there's an awful lot to unpack once you start exploring the intersection of capitalism, addiction, and entertainment; 2. can you even _manage_ to go through it all without switching to mindless consumption every 5 minutes?

red-iron-pine4• 1 month ago

parent poster must be referring to one of the footnotes in IJ, as those are only a few hours to get through.

defmetrix• 1 month ago

The only social media I really use is linkedin and X. I find linkedin useful for following companies and colleagues, and im pretty picky about who I accept or request as a friend. I also find X to be insightful, but I only use it to follow people for stock research.

ThunderBee• 1 month ago

X is excellent for following niche research interests but they’ve been pushing quite hard to force political news/opinions into the feeds which is really annoying.

baggachipz5• 1 month ago

It's run by a guy who literally did a nazi salute. One of their most prolific users is named "catturd". I'm astonished that anybody in research or science still remains there.

Edit to add: The owner of the platform contributed millions of dollars, endorsements, and manipulation of the platform to elect a regime which actively works to dismantle scientific and research funding and institutions. By continuing to use the platform, these people are contributing to the destruction of their work and careers.

close046• 1 month ago

Why is nobody here defining social media, put down the clear criteria? "I say this, I am tired of people saying that" isn't productive if everyone has their own interpretation of what's being discussed.

everdrive4• 1 month ago

In my case, I don't think most people who claim HN is social media are making a serious argument. They are taking two different things which have a few points of inter-comparison and using that as a basis to claim those two things are actually equivalent. This is done as a retort (eg, "you say you hate social media, but you're on social media _right now_") rather than in service of a larger argument.

close046• 1 month ago

You wrote a paragraph to say you don't "think" the others are right. What is the definition that made you think this?

stickfigure7• 1 month ago

I'm making it as a very serious argument.

HN is social, it has an algorithmic feed, people upvote and downvote your content, hell it has a social credit score. The idea that HN somehow isn't "social media" is hard to take serious. This is Reddit for a niche audience.

The main difference is that HN has a small and relatively high quality community, plus the traffic is low enough that it gets a fair amount of manual moderation. It's still social media and if there were enough people here, we'd eventually read stories of kids who offed themselves over downvotes. But we're thousands, not billions, so the law of large numbers doesn't apply.

If your FB feed or Youtube feed is garbage, spend some time curating it. HN is mostly curated for you, which appears to be creating unrealistic expectations of the broader world.

stickfigure7• 1 month ago

Because the people who say this like HN and dislike Facebook and their post-hoc rationalizations are transparent.

airstrike3• 1 month ago

HN and Facebook are entirely different beasts. I have no idea who you are, stickfigure. I can't remember usernames from HN, I can't follow people, I can't curate my feed

not every user submitted feed with upvotes is the same

austin-cheney4• 1 month ago

My personal criteria to specifically identify social media apart from other online interaction:

* The platform is a closed garden with a goal to own the content, user submissions, and any personally identifiable data or relationships thereof.

* User interaction is primarily limited by a terms and conditions policy as opposed to a code of conduct. The goal is to impose constraints upon user rights as opposed to user behavior.

* There exists a profit incentive directly tied to engagement frequency. The goal is to quantify content visibility and sell those numbers to third parties.

* Exchange and reselling of user profile data, user submissions, and any analysis or relationship there upon is beyond user control, awareness, or agreement.

robgibbons• 1 month ago

What about Mastodon or other federated platforms? If someone created a new Facebook, but it didn't have these corporate terms, it would still be social media.

armchairhacker6• 1 month ago

Social media is any website whose purpose is socialization i.e. “small-talk” style discussion, with many (50+) members.

If it’s a larger site that contains socialization, like blog comments, the blog itself may not be social media but the comments can be. I define TikTok, Twitch, and part of YouTube as social media because the videos themselves are casual and therefore quality as small-talk (if you only visit YouTube for large videos or videos without commentary, you’re not visiting the social media part).

A 1-on-1 or small group chat isn’t social media, but a large group chat, Discord, or other invite-only platform is. Because when these get large enough, they have the parasocialization, shock, and constant activity of open social medias (even some self-promotion, but it’s more authentic and IMO not an issue).

Some people argue text doesn’t count because it’s not “media”, but I don’t think it matters, because in practice people share media on text forums and I don’t think there’s much difference anyways (e.g. name dropping a movie, is that sharing media?).

I define Stack Exchange as not social media, because it actively strongly discourages socialization. Video game lobbies are social media iff users heavily socialize in the chat (the clans in Warcraft, Eve, and Clash of Clans may qualify; large Minecraft server chats may quality).

Ultimately, I define social media based on parasocialization, with tendency to promote and consistently provide high-dopamine text and other media. Someone else can define it as “a parasocial dopamine sink with notifications and ‘friends’” like Twitter, or “a parasocial dopamine sink that encourages your real name” like Facebook”. I include sites like HN because I think, while they’re significantly better, they’re still “social” in a way regular communication isn’t, and can still have most of the negative effects (you can engage positively with HN, but you can engage positively even with TikTok and Facebook, if you use it selectively productively).

cryptopian• 1 month ago

Given all the arguments above this post, I don't think there's a lot of value in trying to categorise any particular website as a yes/no to "is this social media". All that achieves is people trying to litigate whether a site fits a definition nobody can agree on.

Much more effective is trying to identify the mechanisms by which a communication platform breaks social interactions. Is the feed sorted by engagement or chronologically? Does the platform encourage you to chase metrics? Does the default feed include content you didn't subscribe to? Are comment threads difficult to trace through?

bee_rider• 1 month ago

Social media grew out of social networking sites, as far as I remember. The distinct feature of social networking sites is that they are focused on… well, social networks, comprised of nodes of users and links of friendships. Your content feed is naturally “personalized” in the sense that you see the posts of your friends.

Social media is the development that they can also use that personalized feed to show media, and actually, your real friends don’t generate enough content to keep you hooked 24/7. So the site is quickly overwhelmed with professional content creators and other entities that are looking for engagement. The site might pander to them intentionally, or it might just fail to prevent them, but in any case they take over. This turns it from a sharing network to a passive consumption broadcasting one.

Hackernews was never a social networking site really, and so it never had the infrastructure to develop into a social media site. It is more like an evolution of a phpBB board, or something like 4chan (but, thankfully, with just enough moderation to keep out all the unpleasantness).

The important distinction is that the feed isn’t personalized, content is ranked based on what the community finds interesting. This seems to surface better stuff. It could just be the moderation and the type of content (tech stuff has always been easier to find on the internet than, say, politics). But there’s probably something to the fact that content has to be “better” in the sense that it can’t just appeal to a specific quirk (weakness?) of an individual viewer.

pseudalopex• 1 month ago

People called social graph platforms social media before social graph platforms became engagement platforms.

pessimizer4• 1 month ago

Why is nobody here defining social media, put down the clear criteria?

A preference for unfalsifiable babbling. As worthless as arguing what exact colors the word "pink" refers to. Just define a range.

It's worse than bikeshedding because then at least you get a bikeshed. At the end of this discussion, at best you get a synonym.

duderific2• 1 month ago

For me, the central entity of "social media" is a person or personality.

The central entity of forums, such as HN or Reddit, is topics.

Sometimes there is crossover between the two types of entities, and of course there are exceptions to the rule, but I find it to be a useful way to discern what is social media and what isn't.

j45• 1 month ago

As soon as devices inserted themselves as a barrier between people and called it social, when it was really the media in waiting, they could hide and direct the nature of interactions, and ultimately, attention.

torben-friis• 1 month ago

If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-friends (and ads).

It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.

Ajedi322• 1 month ago

Interesting, I thought Revanced was just for YouTube, I didn't realize it worked with other social media sites too.

al_borland4• 1 month ago

As people’s default shifts to consumption, they stop posting content themselves. They also stop living a life worth posting about… especially when they start comparing themselves with “influencers”, who have made a full time job out of pretending to live an interesting life.

The problem with filtering out all the junk as a solution is that it doesn’t fix the actual problem of those sites with perverse incentives having control. It seems like the real goal should be to get people off these platforms. That’s the only way to really stop it.

I wonder how long companies would keep paying for ads when a site is 100% bot traffic? They could keep the ruse up for a while, but likely not forever.

testudovictoria• 1 month ago

The problem with some of (all of?) these is that it's becoming increasingly moot to bother posting. I posted back in the early days of social media to share with my friends. In response, my friends and acquaintances kept me up to date with their lives. Now the apps only bother to show me friend/following posts if they deem it matches my interests.

I understand that this sort of algorithmic feed likely matches the metrics to keep people scrolling. This would also track with every app moving away from "friend" verbiage to something like followers, subscribers, or members. Users are encouraged to post _to_ their audience rather than sharing _with_ their friends.

marcod• 1 month ago

Look into Morphe as a revanced alternative, it's by the peeps who make the Youtube patches and I find it better to use and it can draw on the same patches.

rich_sasha• 1 month ago

The article made me reminisce. I was a young adult when Facebook crept in. I felt the constant pressure to do cool stuff so I could put it on Facebook and get likes. I used to browse through friends walls, look at their carefully manicured photo albums, no doubt driven by similar anxieties.

Sad as it was, at least the incentives were somewhat aligned with a healthy social life. Seek out cool things in life, preferably with friends, share.

This has its own downsides of course too, but is a world away from going on Facebook today, full of people definitely shutting down thekr life businesses, turning wood into MacBook cases and incoherent AI generated videos of 300m waves. I seriously can't remember the last time I put something on Facebook, certainly not in this decade. Never mind any of the other ones...

trumpdong17• 1 month ago

I wish I felt that pressure. lcamtuf has an awesome blog with cool projects like homemade resin-cast gears and demos of AFL. I wanted a cool blog like that but I never felt motivated enough to do anything like it. I guess I was already stuck in consumption-mode by that time.

m463• 1 month ago

It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this.

what if your friends used it too?

would there be more content (as they seek to connect to real peopl), or less (as they leave)?

matheusmoreira• 1 month ago

what if your friends used it too?

Let's not kid ourselves. They won't.

Nursie2• 1 month ago

Most of my friends have already gone from fb, and I don't post there any more really either. Still check it most days in case I have messages.

If the "you might like" "why not follow" "reels" and other crap was gone, I guess there could be some sort of revival. But it might be too late.

Because instead we've splintered into various discords, and those sorta-aquaintanceships that old fb was quite good at keeping alive have basically fallen away.

Exoristos• 1 month ago

A deathly calm.

jonaustin• 1 month ago

Probably use Morphe now: https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedextended/comments/1q20ga5/w...

api• 1 month ago

Social media hasn't been "social" in more than a decade. It stopped being that when algorithmic feeds and infinite scroll were introduced.

spike021• 1 month ago

While I partly agree, I also disagree. I still use Instagram a lot to keep in touch with friends I've made in different places. Generally as long as they are making posts then my feeds have those posts. It's only when they do not and supposedly IG "runs out" that I don't.

Personally what I hate more is that there are some content creators I've been happy to support over the years and now instead of doing regular content posts they now do the "collab post" thing as an ad that looks like a regular post. Some of them may do but many do not.

jrflo• 1 month ago

I built a safari extension called Scrolless [1] to try and solve this issue (Disclaimer: it's a $4.99 one time unlock). If you use social media in the web instead of the native apps, and use Scrolless, you'll only see posts from your friends, no recommendation algorithms anywhere.

It's absolutely insane how much influence we have given over to social media algorithms as a society. I know so many people who I'd consider to be intelligent just completely believe whatever they see on tiktok/reels. These recommendation algorithms can create such intense polarization, I really hope we can find a way to scale back their use and encourage people to think more for themselves.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrolless-feed-blocker/id67588...

nailer• 1 month ago

Yes, Tiktok staff made this point when they emerged in 2020 - "Tiktok isn't a social media platform, they're an entertainment platform". Meta's catching up.

mrweasel• 1 month ago

That makes talking about the issues a lot simpler. Calling HN a social media makes much more sense if we talk about Instagram, or Facebook as entertainment or advertising platforms.

jdw64• 1 month ago

i have cut off social media related to my actual career, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Because people laughed at me for becoming a programmer. So I created my own homepage, and for communication, I mainly read posts on large Chinese tech communities, Hacker News, or dev.to.

However, when I try to communicate through GitHub or something, I wonder if I'm just using another form of social media. My main daily routine is to gradually add posts to my own homepage that no one will see, and start from there.

hedora5• 1 month ago

My bar for "is it social media?" is "is the sole benefit network effects?"

Now that GitHub's availability has hit one 9, I consider it just a social network. Any code I put there is just for marketing. Real work stays far away.

IAmBroom5• 1 month ago

This thread is doomed by a common HN* affliction: People are bandying around key terms without defining them, assuming and pretending that the definitions are universally accepted.

Here, the term is "social media", which can also be pronounced "boogeye man". We all seem to agree it is bad, but very few are willing to lay down a solid definition.

It isn't limited to bad terms. It happens anytime we argue over whether X displays consciousness, or X has a mind, or X can think.

* And other forums, obviously.

captainclam2• 1 month ago

I don't think the quality of discussion about social media suffers from lack of specification. Whether or not you consider HN to be social media, or wherever your decision boundary is, doesn't change that most of the conversation does apply to the general class of apps/websites that have become de-facto short form video platforms. Which lots of people use, so the effects of use are consequential and worth discussing.

The conversations on consciousness though...oh man. I have to steel myself before diving into that mess.

IAmBroom5• 1 month ago

I see commenters ITT vehemently disagreeing on the point. Maybe you collapsed those conversations?

groan• 1 month ago

This is usually why I collapse the 2-3 top-most ranked comment threads. They’re very often gamed and calibrated for engagement. Every so often anecdotes/stories that completely ignore the subject matter (sometimes dangerous if medical). I wish there were other ways to organize comments (rip slashdot) but this usually helps to make HN less social media-y.

twodave2• 1 month ago

Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.

saadn922• 1 month ago

We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 1 month ago

Not all problems have technical solutions.

We need a national conversation (which we seem to be having) about the corrosive nature of these algos.

I personally think they should be liable for much more than they are under section 230.

zerobees2• 1 month ago

The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.

We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.

And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.

sph• 1 month ago

I’d rather ask the Amish how can we fix the internet than a bunch of Bay Area VCs and FAANG employees.

vitally3643• 1 month ago

Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes.

But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion dollars. Shrug.

intended4• 1 month ago

Far too much money in tech traces its roots to ad tech.

You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.

There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.

Incentives make the world go round.

swed4202• 1 month ago

We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.

This is a good start for brainstorming:

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

keybored2• 1 month ago

Don’t listen to the defeatists. This is like post-modernism. Post-modernism as a phenonemena is a very real thing, studied and documented extensively, critiqued extensively. And when you read about it it seems hopeless. Like everything is destined to be a pastiche. But once you stop reading about it you realize that there is no Matrix that you’re trapped in. The biggest Matrix is your own mind. People had problems disciplining their minds a millenium ago. They do today as well. It’s marginally more difficult today, yes. But smart phones are just addictive like bad food. Not like a ahrd drug.

We also, thankfully, don’t need a clique of very smart people to save us. We’re all in this together. (Except the psychopaths wanting to enslave us.)

dijksterhuis• 1 month ago

this made me think of humdog’s pandora’s vox https://gist.github.com/kolber/2131643

wuliwong2• 1 month ago

I am going to push back without entirely disagreeing. Most of the people online are definitely caught in this social media as cable tv thing. But the number of people using the internet back in the early days is probably similar or even smaller than the number of people today that use niche areas of the internet, niches that still have that 'playground' experience and much less corporate overwatch control. Maybe?

twodave2• 1 month ago

There's a perspective by which you aren't wrong, and yet everything about how we interact with the Internet has changed in the last decade or so. Because (to quote School of Rock) the world is run by the man.

squidsoup• 1 month ago

Capitalism subsumes all culture, even counter culture, destroys its essence and commodifies it.

BLKNSLVR5• 1 month ago

Well said.

I think the only reason I remain staunchly independent is because I've never found anything that has had enough common ground with enough people to allow me to profit (to any degree whatsoever) in such a way as to corrupt the core of "me". Oddly I find that the less my venn diagram overlaps with others, the more I like my venn diagram and the more committed I am to it. If other people start agreeing with me, I tend to question where I might be wrong.

Isaackoz• 1 month ago

I've deleted all my social media and haven't looked back. It's safe to assume Meta tracks every little detail about you: what kind of content you like, how long you look at each post, your political stance, etc. Every single metric you can possibly think of... they're collecting.

Humans are predictable (more than we'd like to admit). Now they have AI to crunch all that data and find patterns to predict your next move and find out what content will give you the most dopamine. Escape while you can.

ChrisArchitect• 1 month ago

hot take maybe: but alot of these shifts have come with the sheer explosion in number of people on these platforms and online in general - the arrival of many/most of the mainstream/normies as it were. Perhaps the reality is that alot of these people's lives on and offline actually are dominated by 'fads' and so this is just naturally following that.

Think 'keeping up with the jones', 'the latest fahsion, food, entertainment, music, x, trends' etc. People live by what I dunno, magazines, Oprah, local morning show hosts, entertainment news shows, etc, tell them. They've brought that view of things with them online.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm2• 1 month ago

What I find unsettling is the monoculture that is being created by platforms like Instagram. You will see a 30 year old man from Alabama engaging in the same trends as a 19 year old girl from Japan. Suddenly everyone likes matcha and is posting photos of themselves in photo booths. On dating apps, tons of women from all ethnicities suddenly love sushi or have a photo at the exact same location with the exact same pose.

Same people who run these platforms will preach about diversity while destroying it.

seydor• 1 month ago

The pendulum has finally swung the other way. There is no longer the need for people to shamelessly air their life on live feeds, and when something serious happens, people prefer to share it in a messaging group.

The extreme gossipy porn of the past two decades has finally worn off.

I think it has little to do with privacy concerns as they are hypothesizing.

cbold• 1 month ago

Social media does not only spread bad ideas, but degrades the symbolic machinery people use to form ideas in the first place. It trains reflexes where thought should be. There is no symbolic lattice for things to land and it turns people into reactive zombies.

Neil44• 1 month ago

Facebook stopped being good when they took away the order by most recent option IMO.

hinata082• 1 month ago

I'm bored when I see how inactive platforms like Discord and forums have become

snobs used to be thought on users who liked popular culture or "jejemons", "kikoolols", "eternal september,... posters who used to be actually active, experimental and creative, but at least newcommers were still posting

nowadays the creative part is gone. Forums are dead. You're encouraged to use your actual identity everywhere on social media and to sign apps. You're indeed not guided to post and be creative. The internet became just passive :/

yannis7• 1 month ago

"we were promised social networks, what we got was social media" -- Elad Gil

phendrenad2• 1 month ago

A publicly-traded company which must increase shareholder value each year is incompatible with Social Networks. You cannot build an infinite growth machine on photos of people's dogs. So they stopped being social networks, and became a generic entertainment channel. Neither Facebook nor Instagram nor X nor Bluesky nor <fill in the blank> are Social Networks in 2026. The only true Social Network platforms are obscure things like SpaceHey.

bradlys• 1 month ago

It’s always been this way - people just don’t realize it.

Before, people were reposting memes, articles, chain letters, etc. Most of the content you’d see wasn’t created by the person you are friends with.

This isn’t really new. And as someone who makes original content and posts it regularly - people do enjoy original stuff from their friends. It’s just that it’s hard for people to do. Most people are very insecure, have little original thought, and/or the interest in sharing anything they think to a broader audience than 2-3 close friends. I buck the trend here.

Willingham• 1 month ago

I actually used hacker news to get off of social media 2 years ago. I consider it ‘medically assisted treatment’ like suboxone for heroin addicts.

hunglee2• 1 month ago

Does anyone remember Path?

Limit circle social network, I think capped at 50 people. Beautiful app, and I remember it was a great place to spend time when you really just wanted to be with true friends.

Time for someone to reboot this

floren• 1 month ago

I honestly liked the Google+ circles thing too, felt like a similar idea.

Aurornis3• 1 month ago

This article has struck a nerve in the comment section. It's describing how traditional social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are not used for social features anymore, but for content discovery. The descriptions of how people are using Facebook to find new content anonymously are not that different from how we use Hacker News, which has reignited the debate about whether Hacker News is social media.

I had to use the Wayback Machine to dig this up:

7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...

Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site and that social news sites could be "dangerously addictive". The goalposts for defining social media keep moving as people try to avoid any definition that captures their own internet usage, but I think it's important to be honest about what we're all doing here.

Also the noprocrast feature is still there right in your profile, though I don't know if it's documented anywhere.

rvshchwl• 1 month ago

Hacker News is certainly addictive. As I've started to limit my interactions on other sites like Instagram and X by removing the apps from my phone, I've seen I spend more time on this site than I did before. The content is a lot more interesting and relevant to me, so I don't see it as a problem (Yet) but I don't think that'll always be the case.

I feel that this is one of the consequences of spending so much time on Social Media sites, that my brain hast just started to look forward to "distractions" when I don't have anything else to do. If I don't have Instagram, I'll open X. If I don't have X, I'll open Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Hacker News. It's hard to get away from this constant need for distractions all the time, and I've found myself to procrastinate on simple things whereas I wouldn't have done that a few years ago.

I'm glad that features like Noprocrast exist. It's unfortunate that other media sites would never implement these features because their business model is entirely driven on people spending more and more time on their sites.

Aurornis3• 1 month ago

It's unfortunate that other media sites would never implement these features because their business model is entirely driven on people spending more and more time on their sites.

I don't know every social media site, but many of them do have built-in time limit functionality. It's even better documented than what's on Hacker News.

First two random ones I searched for (Instagram and TikTok)

https://help.instagram.com/2049425491975359/?cms_platform=ip...

https://www.tiktok.com/support/faq_detail?id=754359745915568...

overgard3• 1 month ago

I'm old enough to remember life before internet/social media (40ish). One thing that's weird now, to me, is that it's very rare that I'm outright bored, but it's like that boredom just became diffuse into everything, almost everything in life is sort of boredom-tinted (probably just because I'm so flooded with too many dopamine-reward-signaling low-value things)

A couple weeks ago, I had a power outage, and instead of being upset I felt RELIEVED. Like, everything in life just felt calmer for a moment. It was kind of nice to just grab a book because it was the only option. (well, I mean, there was still the cell phone but at least it was the only distraction)

apt-apt-apt-apt• 1 month ago

I've read thousands of HN posts and comments, "just in case" it'll be useful someday, but I'm not sure if my life would have been meaningfully worse had I lived under a rock instead.

xg15• 1 month ago

Addictive yes, but I also realized another dynamic on that site, or at least for the first time, fully caught the weirdness of it:

In old-style forums, BBSes and chats, there was at least a premise that you were talking to specific other persons: Yes, you started a new thread by shouting into the void, but if you got replies, the "from who" was sometimes just as interesting as the "what". If you stuck around long enough, you could recognize regulars and understand the structure of the community - maybe even get to know some people.

This kind of social network still exists, but has been joined by a different kind, where you still can hold conversations - but it's been completely deemphasized with whom your holding that conversation. Instead, the platform provides technical helpers such as tree or DAG views and up/downvotes to let you follow the structure of the discussion and get feedback without needing to track who you are talking to.

HN and Reddit do this, with *chan sites having driven it to an extreme where usernames have become completely optional.

It's basically online discussion completely abstracted to "content".

It still feels surprisingly rewarding (otherwise I wouldn't do it) but is also weird if you think about it.

Timpanzee• 1 month ago

Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site

As with all discussions of whether something does or does not fall into a specific category, the devil is in the demarcation. How you define a social site, or how I define it, or how the vague general consensus vaguely defines it, or how Hacker News defined it 15 years ago, or how Hacker News defines it now; changes the answer to whether it belongs in the category or not.

The same applies to whether AIs are conscious/sentient, whether a certain governing body is fascist/totalitarian, or even something as simple as whether something is good or bad, comes entirely from how those categories are defined in the context of the conversation. Without the same, agreed upon definitions, we're all just talking past each other.

overgard3• 1 month ago

Maybe the useful distinction isn't "is it a social site?" but rather "is the content curated or user created?". Anything that's user created is going to have the issues described I think, whether you consider it a social network or not.

trumpdong17• 1 month ago

HN has curated content, since dang has a heavy thumb on the scale.

jezzamon2• 1 month ago

We used to call them social networking sites, now they're social media sites.

But I think the problem is that people don't contribute very much too them, so if none of your friends are sharing things that interest you then the media part has to come in as a fallback

duxup2• 1 month ago

I remember trying bluesky and realizing it isn't just the services I don't like. I don't like ... what all the social media users like. The heavy memeification / gamification for attention. Trite posts, posts that seem like the middle of a conversation ... really all negative bits about internet discourse.

But most everyone there likes it that way...

trumpdong17• 1 month ago

When I joined Bluesky (late 2024) it felt like Fox News from the opposite side. Every second post was saying how we have to hang in there through Trump, or Trump is #NotMyPresident, or a cartoon of Trump doing something stupid, or saying the Democrats should just do XYZ. I got bored quickly.

duxup2• 1 month ago

Somehow my typical filtering avoided the politics.

But it didn't really matter, the medium was just as bad.

nkotov• 1 month ago

Maybe I'm in the minority here (early 30s, married + kids), but my social media feed is primarily my friends. Though, if we go into the Reels tab, my friends and I share videos back and forth through DMs.

I have an alt account for business / lifestyle content that I like consuming. That's the only place I actually follow content creators. And even then, I check the account once or twice a day and rarely view/engage with Instagram stories.

Back to my personal account - I have 2-3 people out of the 198 that I follow that are trying to hop on trends and become influencers. Rest just do photo dumps + daily stories. But the reality is only 20-30% of my friends actually share something (post or story), rest are just silent observers.

red_admiral2• 1 month ago

Yes, we've moved from town squares to private parties - whatsapp chats, discord servers, even IRC still exists. (Bluesky is a bit of an exception but they'll need to get enough stable revenue at some point.)

Interestingly, in-person "nerd" events seem to be going just fine - LARP, D&D, board games, historical reenactment, trading card games and tournaments like M:tG, and a lot more.

time0ut• 1 month ago

I have never been interested in the “normal” social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and the like. The content never appealed to me as a consumer enough to get started. Occasionally something would go viral enough that a friend would eventually link it to me and that was the whole experience.

Recently, I made a dumb little app for my kids and decided to try marketing it on social media just to see what it is like. It is fascinating in a sense and disheartening as well. I have been very unsuccessful, but the most signal tends to come from the dumbest content I have tried.

In doing this, I have come into contact with the social media feeds I never felt the need to look at and man… they are like a drug. I find myself mesmerized by random IG reels. It is one thing to understand what they are on an intellectual level and a totally different to feel it first hand.

I miss MySpace.

TrackerFF• 1 month ago

Social media feeds have been completely broken for many years. What social media used to be, has now moved to group chats and channels.

But, I guess, there's still room for those channels to be run through the enshittificator. Wouldn't surprise me if we in the not-so-distant future start to see random ads and paid content in group chats.

make3• 1 month ago

parasocial media

daytonix• 1 month ago

It's so frustrating when this is brought up as if this hasn't been the case for almost 10 years now.

popupeyecare• 1 month ago

I miss when social media was mostly about my friends’ lives. It actually helped us stay in touch.

So much of social media now feels built around whatever is trending that week, not the relationships you actually want to keep up with.

That’s why I’m building Dearest (https://dearest.co) : a private, email-based Sunday photo digest for families and friends. Everyone sends a photo and a short update by Saturday night, and contributors get the group’s digest on Sunday morning. Hopefully this keeps us social and in touch.

WarmWash• 1 month ago

The attention economy is real, your eyes have value that is surprisingly high, and buying out that attention so you can have a pure you-centered experience would just be too expensive for most people.

Instagram gets ~$27/mo/user from advertisers. Would you spend $27/mo for Instagram? Probably not. Hence the financial void is filled with ads.

otter-in-a-suit• 1 month ago

This all means that small businesses, that have long used social media for free promotion have to up their game.

I've recently tried to promote a product on social media (well, I still try, I'm just not successful) and, especially as someone who doesn't really use it otherwise (outside of HN and reddit), I can't even manage to be part of the problem:

- Anything I post on Twitter, personal or corpo account, gets <20 views. Every time I scroll through it (again, on either account), it seems most things barely get any views. I am forcing myself to use it, thinking it would help, but I also find it insufferable.

- Facebook has been actually reasonably useful for local things/news and had a surprisingly personalized feed until I realized half the comments (from seemingly real accounts) were clearly written with (or by) AI. When I was forced to post myself (again, for promotion), I noticed FB actively prompts you to use AI to "improve writing" or whatever it was in its own app. Lovely, so even the few islands of real human comments I found are written by robots.

- Instagram auto-bans me, despite going to their verification/selfie spiel. It is literally impossible to reach a human for support, since Meta laid them all off. Seems to be a common theme and it sounds like I'm not missing much. Also locks me out of Threads (I don't know a single person who uses that).

- BlueSky seemed nicer, until I realized interactions to my posts (personal account only) have largely been OF bots. Also lovely.

- Mastodon etc are all enormous tech bubbles that may be interesting, but not what I am looking for.

The social platforms continue to be monetised predominantly by ad revenue. That is still the core business model. And ad revenue continues to grow," ... Might there be a backlash coming? Don't many people go on to social media to see how friends are reacting to their posts or comments before settling down to scroll through professionally made content?

Now, I suspect I can solve all these issues by paying them money - actually, I'm fairly sure that would fix the Twitter thing at least - but I _also_ suspect that all that would do is show my traffic to other bots, since I more and more get the feeling that no sane human being is voluntarily putting up with this. But clearly, that's not the case.

nitwit005• 1 month ago

Facebook just isn't a social media site anymore. They pivoted, and did so multiple times.

Remember when they were going to be a games platform, where Farmville was their big hit? They eventually abandoned that and then wanted to be a video and streaming platform. Then Metaverse VR was going to replace everything. Now they're some sort of AI company.

People long ago started migrating to Whatsapp, Discord, and similar groups for actual socializing. They did seemingly panic a bit at that trend and bought Whatsapp.

Gigachad5• 1 month ago

The thing is socialising isn’t that profitable. People moved socialising to IM apps but hardly any of them are paying for it or consuming many ads.

Short form video media is massively profitable and those same people are eating it up.

255kb• 1 month ago

The algorithmic feeds are to blame. This would happen less with a chronological feed.

I think we will see in the future algorithmic feeds addiction rehab, algorithmic feeds self-exclusion lists (like for casinos) and even algorithmic feeds ban, which would probably be a net positive for humanity.

sunandsurf• 1 month ago

The solution is regulations to turn of recommendation systems by default in the apps.

Try turning off history in youtube and see how much your time spent on it changes when you cant just mindlessly click on the next video.

jonesai• 1 month ago

Social media down, real connection up. Unsurprising that people are buying 'dumb phones' more and more

zem• 1 month ago

I think nothing has contributed to the depersonalization of social media more than the (facebook led, afaik) push to aggressively show as many people as possible everything you post. after the first few jarring reminders that random friends were being served up my comments on other random friends' posts, and that their friends were likewise being served their interactions with my posts, I drew back very sharply from the social aspect.

kayo_20211030• 1 month ago

Right. Anything that matters a blind bit to me is on WhatsApp (don't judge!), I don't consume too much from other sources, and when I do I don't expect anything more than a sensible person would expect. It is what it is. Choose your channel and you'll get what you expect. That's pretty much it.

mannanj• 1 month ago

Early in COVID I was lucky to have lots of time and a disposable budget. I was seeking experiences and practices to make me be more present, and have more time and productivity back. I ran into this guy named Tommy who led a phone-free movement called Brick.

With his insight I came up with my own system around apps and the computer that I still use today.

Here's how I'd encapsulate it in a nutshell, and the blocks ontop work fantastically to combat all forms of social media addiction. Notification Zero.

Notification Zero is when no apps can ever give you notifications, ever. Not the phone call, not the text, or sms, not slack, etc. Even for work. Now, with that as the default, you have to manually set and think through which apps in which cases do give you notifications, and this philosophy would built itself into a fine AI notifications management system some day. So what notifies me? When my phone is not on DND (rarely, when I'm expecting a call) only starred contacts calls. Texts never notify me. People know to call if it's serious. With this path I use my technology more intentionally, and when I open my phone there's nothing nagging me for my attention because it's a blank screen with no apps with no alarms set by other people ("notifications are like alarms other people set for you" - Naval R.)

I don't miss it. and it feels great, minimalist and clean, and allows my attention to stay focused on what I opened my phone or computer int he first place. (My computer is the same: blank screen, matching black, no apps or notifications. On Mac, I set the mission bar at the bottom to only show apps if they are open, and as we speak, only 7 open windows appear at the bottom though the bar is hidden unless mouse overed). The screen becomes a canvas for what I'm actively working on, tactically laid out for my particular use & focus.

Happy to share more if its of help to anyone.

firebot• 1 month ago

You're just a cost of acquisition.

bamboozled2• 1 month ago

The two single reasons I I have instagram installed are:

* Keeping in touch with people / contacts.

* Knowing when random cafes and restaurants I like are open.

Outside of that I just hate it and want it out of my life. I’ve spoke to others and the loss of contacts is a major reason they don’t leave also.

kachurovskiy• 1 month ago

I've stopped using YouTube and Reddit since early April and it's been a mixed bag.

On one side my interest level has adjusted so that normal activities make sense again - like sitting in the garden or playing a game with my kid. I've also completed dozens of projects like replacing old silicon in the entire kitchen or updating the garden playground.

On the other side I'm feeling more isolated and lacking information / stimulation for creative output because I no longer have any idea what other people are doing. However given that massive amounts of time have been freed I'm more productive both at work and at home, more effort on health too.

It's definitely something to try but it's not all roses.

rnewme• 1 month ago

Create rss feed of few curated favorite creators.

anitil2• 1 month ago

I've effectively dropped reddit because they've made the mobile web version near-unusable (and I find old.reddit.com difficult on mobile). Honestly, it's an improvement in my life. I don't know how I found myself spending so much time on it for so little benefit

red-iron-pine4• 1 month ago

yeah same. old.reddit still works okay sometimes but it is annoying for regular use

the mobile options are terrible.

happy to be done w/ it tbh.

switchbak4• 1 month ago

You must have one high-tech kitchen!

switchbak4• 1 month ago

I'm a big YouTube addict, but I dropped social media well before that was cool.

I've felt quite disconnected from folks I knew, and I presume they feel like I've pulled away. Sounds like this is kind of similar, you end up feeling a bit disconnected? Doesn't sound all that bad, but I get what you mean - you feel isolated.

I've learned incredible amounts of things with YouTube - I curate it like a madman, but overall I'm still not sure it's a good thing. Corporations just tend to end up eating their customers eventually.

Gigachad5• 1 month ago

I’ve kept YouTube on the tv but avoid it on mobile. Theres a lot of great stuff on the site that inspires projects and ideas for myself.

I do have to resist watching all the product review videos which are essentially just ads.

mcmoor4• 1 month ago

I've been forced to do it once for reddit, with the API fiasco, and I don't really notice improvement but I do notice reduced quality of life. Almost no other websites have easily accessible niche memes.

YouTube recommendation is never that good to me. I frequently just scroll desperately and ended up not watching anything, and when I'm peak bored I resort to rewatching my list of liked videos. That's why I feel weird whenever I see projects that want to make YouTube less engaging, it's already not engaging enough for me.

trumpdong17• 1 month ago

My recommendations on YouTube are currently a mix between science projects - NightHawkInLight just did something on electrolysis that I haven't watched yet - and political hopefully-not-slop-but-still-mass-produced-content like how AI data centers are failing.

erikerikson• 1 month ago

Oops, they hit the 'f' key when typing the headline.

mystraline• 1 month ago

Its capitalist 'social media' thats the problem. Doctorow's enshittification case study was exactly about Facebook and Instagram.

However, you go to Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Lemmy and things are dramatically better. Well, no, not just better, but completely refreshing. You friend people and what you get is a cronological feed. No algorithm bullshit, no gamification, no adverts snuck in.

amatecha• 1 month ago

Stop using corporate-owned walled gardens and manipulation factories.

syngrog66• 1 month ago

topics & individuals

whether something fad or not does not matter to me

tap-snap-or-nap• 1 month ago

Never has it been more lonely in my lifetime than when I am browsing social media feeds alone.

I believe in a way I hold myself to be partially responsible for allowing myself to consume cheap risk free passive interactions online.

I can only do my best in person to person interaction to make it as good individually for others and myself but it is always a hit and miss to have similar risk free or positive interactions in real life.

iovrthoughtthis• 1 month ago

Is this some sort of paid for PR to divide the category of social media in the face of governments gearing up to regulate social media apps?

kevinmiller452• 1 month ago

The shift to private messaging groups makes sense though. No ads, no influencers, just talking to people you actually know. That's where the real social interaction went.

markcollins05• 1 month ago

I get why young people prefer polished content over their friends' posts. Friends' stuff is boring compared to pro creators. But it's kind of sad and lonely at the same time.

Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

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