There’s Something Rotten in the State of Social Media

http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/05/monetization-automation-enforcement/

by e15ctr0n • 12 years ago

52 54 12 years ago

walterbell7• 12 years ago

I hope that Twitter does not algorithmically curate Lists. The proposed changes are ostensibly for ease of use. Newbies who don't know how to follow someone would never create lists. Please leave lists alone!

Is there any alternative that could handle a mass exodus within a few quarters? Twister (http://twister.net.co/), Sublevel (http://sublevel.net/explore/), federated HN clones, ...?

radley4• 12 years ago

app.net is dying to take the reins.

ianlevesque2• 12 years ago

Actually app.net is just dying: "After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders." [1]

1. http://blog.app.net/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the-union/

tootie3• 12 years ago

I don't get why he is more emotionally connected to Twitter than Facebook. I find Facebook to be a lot more personal. I know this is a dumb thing to say in 2014, but I still have no idea what the value propostion of Twitter is. Facebook was a 100% complete social network doing everything I ever needed about 6 years ago. Everything FB and their competitors have done in the interim is iterate on the same few ideas trying to squeeze out a few more pennies of ad revenue. And some of them are successful for some reason.

walterbell7• 12 years ago

I don't get why he is more emotionally connected

s/he/she/

Interest graph vs. social graph.

tootie3• 12 years ago

Ah yes, she.

For interests I use reddit. Or HN. Facebook is for personal relationships. Showing pics of my kids to my friends and family. I think every new network is basically just a chance to reset your list of friends.

ejr• 12 years ago

  I don't get why he is more...

"Posted yesterday by Natasha Lomas"

scrollaway2• 12 years ago

I still have no idea what the value propostion of Twitter is

I despise twitter, but let me take a shot at this.

Twitter offers users an audience. The short messages and the hashtags means that in the ocean of input, there is a relatively high chance your message will be seen. The retweeting and the framework for an actual fanbase means that, with the right procedures, becoming "twitter-famous" is not horrendeously hard (compare to "realworld-famous" which is often a whole career investment).

The existing userbase and popularity of twitter guarantees that it isn't awkward or obscure to say "Follow me on twitter here", which strengthens what the platform offers.

How it became popular in the first place is a bit more obscure. Obviously it has a lot to do with how it limits the user's input and forces everyone to adopt a casual tone; this fits well with people who don't want to put a lot of thought or effort into a single message, and likewise when reading a user's message (Which is understandable. In a time where there are massive, endless amounts of information at your fingertips, you instinctively tend to wander closer to clickbait headlines than to 3 page articles. Most of us here have seen this a lot on Reddit and even HN).

My guess is that twitter will eventually die out when something more concrete will come along; these days all it takes is the right recipe and the right marketing so it's a decent bet that it could come out of Facebook or a similarly popular platform. Hell, it could come out of Twitter itself. In the mean time, what it offers is somewhere for people to rant and shout without feeling like they are not being heard.

tootie3• 12 years ago

Can you name anyone that is Twitter-famous that isn't regular famous?

radley4• 12 years ago

The secret of Twitter is useful news in a condensed format. Further, you can find out what's new with colleagues and artists that inspire you without any social obligation. Finally, unscripted major events break first on Twitter without the filters of major media.

autokad• 12 years ago

pay attention to her words, she uses facebook 'for work'. its a small set of vocal people who write about this stuff. I see lots of articles written about social media, and they always speak the same cadence - i love twitter, but facebook is just for work/outreach. I'm not saying they are wrong, but it would be nice to see points of views from normal people who aren't trying to increase their bottom line / exposure via fb.

scholia• 12 years ago

People who actually use Facebook are not paying attention to Facebook, they are paying attention to what their friends are saying. It's like watching a movie and being involved in the story, rather than the director's decision-making or the technology of digital film-making.

InclinedPlane• 12 years ago

The people I follow and who follow me on twitter are mostly my close friends. The shortness of the twitter format makes it easy for me to stay in touch with them, see what they're doing, etc. In contrast, facebook is comprised of a lot of acquaintances, and facebook's filtering makes it impossible to see all of the content there so it tends to be hit or miss whether I catch an update I actually care about on facebook.

walterbell7• 12 years ago

Could Twitter afford to buy Flipboard? They have a better user experience, better business model (premium ads), a user interface which already has "channels" and they now own the excellent curation algorithms of Zite.

Flipboard UX would enable users to have the best of both algorithmic and human/social curation.

radley4• 12 years ago

Ack! As a Twitter user, I don't seek such a conversion. I find the need to turn a fake page for each 2-5 posts to be pedantic and antiquated.

I use Twitter as an news/interest stream and leave it open 24/7 on my desktop. In contrast, Flipboard is literally shovelware for me (I can't remove it from my Galaxy S4).

walterbell7• 12 years ago

Other ideas welcome. Twitter's new PM (ex-Google Maps) may be about to start hiding items in your feed, and adding items you didn't request, http://gigaom.com/2014/09/04/twitter-cfo-says-a-facebook-sty...

"Twitter’s timeline is organized in reverse chronological order… but this “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Noto said. Timely tweets can get buried at the bottom of the feed if the user doesn’t have the app open, for example. “Putting that content in front of the person at that moment in time is a way to organize that content better.”

igravious3• 12 years ago

I quit Facebook years ago. I stay on Twitter because paradoxically it feels like less of a commitment than Facebook. I stay on LinkedIn because... actually I don't know why. I keep joining and leaving Google+. I keep joining, sometimes by accident. I always leave deliberately.

I was at a conference recently and someone asked why Second Life didn't go global. And I answered that it was because it wasn't open and federated. They was a bit of bluster but that is the why.

Postal (snail mailing), PSTN (phone-calling), SMS (texting), email (uh, emailing), IRC (chatting?) ... These are all open and federated and have lasted and lasted. No corporation, no matter how massive is ever ever ever going to become 'the social medium' which is what they all want.

Eventually we are going to have open federated online social communication. I thought identi.ca had a chance then I thought Diaspora* was going to do it. Maybe I need to invest in setting up some of these services, maybe all us techies do. Maybe what we need is a movement, we probably already have the tech stacks.

Also, we need single-sign-on, like yesterday :(

Every time these articles come up it's the same ol' same ol'. Actually you know, I'd pay for a Twitter account at this point if only to say, "I trust you, you can keep having my € while I trust you, but as soon as I don't goodbye!"

GuiA• 12 years ago

Eventually we are going to have open federated online social communication

Is there a true need for it? Everyday people use Facebook and Twitter because it's free, but I highly doubt they'd pay for it. The real "social networks" are text messaging and email as far as most of my non techie friends are concerned.

igravious3• 12 years ago

Ah. Thank you. You made me realise something.

The difference is, text messaging and email allow you to communicate linguistically with people within your social network in a peer-to-peer (one-to-one) fashion -- whereas a social network platform allows you to define contacts and their relation to you and use a befriend/unfriend, follow/unfollow model where once befriended or followed you automatically get delivered (in theory, unless muted or an algo decides otherwise) broadcast (one-to-many) messages

Did I get it right? I think so? Devil's in the details...

AhLondon• 12 years ago

Twitter is a cocktail party. Facebook is a dinner party. You can flit in and out of a cocktail party easily. LinkedIn is just a map of professional contacts, only useful for figuring out who you need to actually call for something. Google +, beats me. I know people on it, but none who use it.

w1ntermute2• 12 years ago

There's absolutely nothing rotten with social media, at least as far as social media's primary userbase is concerned. The small minority of people complaining on TC or HN about the "decline" of social media don't understand that the average Joe doesn't give two shits about FB requiring a separate app for IMing, or Twitter adding advertising to your feed. They just accept it as a fact of life.

walterbell7• 12 years ago

Twitter's user growth (or lack thereof), stock price and turnover in product managers says otherwise.

w1ntermute2• 12 years ago

Twitter's problem isn't advertising, it's that the site/service is and has always been hard to use and doesn't make sense to the average person. The most common way the vast majority of people "access" Twitter is probably when they see tweets shown on TV news, which means no advertising revenue for Twitter. The learning curve for Twitter is extremely steep, and there's a lot of jargon you have to learn.

You can see the difference by looking at Facebook. They are also instituting lots of supposedly "user-unfriendly" policies, and yet their stock price keeps going up, as do their user numbers and revenue.

mschuster913• 12 years ago

What drove lots of people in my friend circle away from Facebook was the lack of being able to entirely disable all those stupid game invites.

Every day there's a new fad for the kids and they flood their entire friendlist with invites - and you can't unfriend them e.g. because they're family or work colleagues.

dawson2• 12 years ago

This has now been resolved in v2.0 of the Graph API, whereby calling /me/friends only returns the person's friends who are using the same app, i.e. you can no longer access a list of non-app-using friends.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/upgrading#upgradin...

mschuster913• 12 years ago

Looks like the inviting crap has its dedicated API now (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2....).

Also, removing the ability for apps to see friend data basically makes 3rd-party FB clients all but impossible.

ivraatiems2• 12 years ago

I've said it a lot on HN, but in my opinion, there's nothing rotten in the state of social media. Social media itself is inherently rotten.

Twitter, Facebook, et al taking away users' rights, pushing crappy updates and changes, while at the same time using creepy advertising tactics to make money and addictive functionality to keep you involved is Twitter, Facebook et al doing exactly what they were designed to do. Their job is to make their shareholders money by exploiting the people who use their service, and they're doing, I'd say, pretty well.

I think Facebook knows full well that nobody likes Facebook Messenger, the newsfeed, the fact their data is never deleted, the obnoxious Zyngames, and so on. They don't care. People will use their service anyway and they'll make money. Twitter knows people probably wouldn't like curated lists, and they'll still do it if they think it'll make them money (just like they know that developers have no choice but to accept their draconian API terms).

I have a lot of objections to social media - on a philosophical basis and a business one - but I don't feel it's reasonable to say it's "dying" or "getting worse." From the perspective of the people running the companies (the only perspective said companies care about), it's doing just fine.

vmarsy2• 12 years ago

I think Facebook knows full well that nobody likes Facebook Messenger, the newsfeed ...

That may be true for you and your social circle, but I think this doesn't represent all people's opinion.

Facebook messenger is the replacement of MSN Messenger and the like for a lot of people, and the fact that it's a seperate app made it so much better: Since everybody is on Facebook, I can easily discuss with all my friends without the burden of opening the classic Facebook app. The FB messenger app is much more fluid than the full sized app.

The newsfeed app is giving more accurate content than ever in my opinion, especially when I mark people I don't care so much about as "Acquaintance" instead of "Friend"

And the primary reason I use facebook is for planning/joining events, and follow news/annoucements from the associations I'm involved in using the facebook Groups.

As for the Zynga games invite, most people who don't play just disable them, last time I saw a stupid game invite was maybe in 2013

I can't speak for Twitter, I don't see how it is useful. To stay in touch with my close friends I use FB messenger and snapchat.

ivraatiems2• 12 years ago

I'm not talking about my specific social circle, I'm talking about general trends.

With regards to Facebook Messenger, take a look at its one-star rating on the Apple Store, or the dozens and dozens of blog posts and tech articles complaining about it, or the comments on any of those articles. It's not hard data, but it's pretty clear there's significant negative buzz.

With the newsfeed, I'm just talking about Facebook's general behavior of only showing you a small percentage of what people actually post, not the separate app.

As for the Zynga thing, like you say, "most people just disable them" - what do you think that says about people's preferences for Zynga? To be fair, those games may largely be a fad that has passed, but that doesn't change the fact that for a while they were massively popular and fully exploited by numerous companies.

As for Twitter and how it's useful: You got it in one. :P*

*unless you're a celebrity, a CEO, or a PR person

TheSpiceIsLife• 12 years ago

Uncoupling messaging functionality from Facebook is the best thing that's happened to Facebook for me. I can now use Adium or Pidgin on the laptop / desktop to connect to Facebook chat and Facebook Messenger on the smartphone / tablet and not have to actually login to Facebook proper.

I've been using online chat / messaging (FidoNet then IRC / forums / etc) for 20 years. I don't _want_ online 'Social Networking', it is, in my opinion, toxic in every way.

edit: clarity

PaulHoule2• 12 years ago

I dunno, I think media of all kinds can get rotten.

Take CNN.

The other day I was watching CNN after the events that went down in Fergurson. For once they sent somebody out of the studio to go look around, but they can't talk to the cops because the cops have PR people that won't let them to talk to the media. They can't talk to ordinary black and white people because they'll say nasty things.

Instead they end up having some geek argue with the dead guy's lawyer about how hard his case is going to be for hours. And then they interrupt to say that they have important news that the third and fourth cousins of somebody famous just died in a car crash.

A week before that there was some woman who looked like Oprah Winfrey who was aghast that a child that was kept in a basement was forced to EXERCISE. She looked like she could do some sit up and push ups herself.

Then before that there was a bounce house accident out in wind gust country in Colorado so they have to go on Youtube and find all the Youtube videos about bounce houses blowing away.

Then they wonder why nobody watches CNN.

angersock• 12 years ago

"They can't talk to ordinary black and white people because they'll say nasty things."

Yeah, that'd be too much like actual journalism. :(

PaulHoule2• 12 years ago

Exactly

tim3332• 12 years ago

Yeah and CNN used to be good when it started. Dunno where it went wrong.

0x434D53• 12 years ago

It's the users fault! App.net was a alternative to twitter, but a paid one. Failed. So users are in no position that they are the product sold to advertisers. They actively decided to be the product.

shurcooL• 12 years ago

I was really excited about the idea of App.net being a developer-friendly replacement for Twitter, but when I finally got to try it, I was appalled by its complex and awful UI. One thing Twitter does relatively well is be simple. You can write tweets and you can read them. App.net had poor focus and failed to do a simple thing by trying to do a complex thing instead.

xnull• 12 years ago

The article doesn't mention it but the latest trends in advertising has moved beyond 'behavioral' targeted advertising, where a user is served specific content because they may have browsed something similar in the past (ironically I once searched over hundreds of shelving products to find one that met some very strict weight/size/height/load requirements and was rewarded with months of completely irrelevant shelving ads).

The new trend is to use social networking models to discover 'influencers' in social groups and use those people's reputations to recommend products to other people. Take for example object (a) versus (b) on page nine of the following paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.4327v1.pdf

Lindex 'Enterprise SEO Software' has this to say: "Our latest innovation Linkdex Networks enables you to visualise and analyse these groups of relevant influencers. The objective is to enable digital marketers to gradually identify the right personalities and build relationships with them, spreading along those networks for maximum exposure.

If someone within your network has lots of relationships pointing to them you know that they are perceived as trustworthy sources. The aim is to find influencers who are passionate on a niche topic, have strong relationships with the group and are receptive to new ideas with plenty of reach." [1]

It's on fire everywhere in marketing and advertising and there are lots of variations being tried and tested at the moment, and also publicly funded research at universities [2]. Marketers will drop prices online when they detect influencers, in an attempt to encourage them to speak highly of their product to their friends and family (who will need to buy at full price). The Marketing Science Institute has a whole section dedicated to social networks and influencing them [3][4].

Just searching for the term "social contagion advertising" or "advertising influencers" reveals media research arms with nifty tables that map out ways of influencing social groups by targeting information strategically at certain members. For example you can get people to change their view of the "legitimacy of an item" by "encourag[ing] influential targets to adopt the item" or create the idea of a "status disadvantage of not adopting" by "Emphasiz[ing] activities of close connections in a social network to influence behavior". [5]

Perhaps a side note, but the DoD "MINERVA initiative" [6] studies social contagion strategies to track, create or lessen political instability in other countries (although the initiative studies a lot of other things too). The USAID Cuban Twitter project sought to (and nearly succeeded in) creating mass unrest by appearing to be a grassroots movement in Cuba to overthrow the government. You can bet that other countries have these capabilities, or analogues to them, as well (Snowden documents and leaked HB Gary memos show that both the NSA and GCHQ engage in astroturfing and social media manipulation) [7][8][9]. The giant meta-data graph created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for 'influencer' and 'social contagion' analysis.

These sorts of forces are abound on social media websites, as can be seen in the recent Wired article "I liked everything I saw on Facebook for two days" [10]. What's more, the role that social media has begun to play in political races is incredible. If you have the time and interest, look up the capabilities of incumbent Obama's "The Cave" for social media evangelism and tracking. Real time social estimates of support across dozens of major social media platforms with the ability to influence and target any of them at will. Interns scrambling to be "first to post" on online discussions in news media articles.

To be a member of online social media is to be surveilled by both governments and by corporations, to have your content curated for financial purposes, and to have your information sold to the highest bidder. It is also to be influenced not just by direct advertisement, but also indirectly through information that gets carried word of mouth. On the internet nobody knows that you are a dog. This is often an inconvenience and it allows trolls and other unsavory social behavior. Unfortunately it is now also true that on social media, those with the right perspective - those that can see social media at the thousand foot view - not only know that you are a dog, but also know how to make you drool when they ring a bell.

[1] http://www.linkdex.com/blog/social-contagion-why-ideas-and-p...

[2] http://icos.umich.edu/sites/icos6.cms.si.umich.edu/files/lec...

[3] http://www.msi.org/reports/distinguishing-among-mechanisms-o...

[4] http://www.msi.org/articles/what-drives-social-contagion-in-...

[5] http://socialmediaandmobileresearch.com/2014/03/10/social-co...

[6] http://minerva.dtic.mil/

[7] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

[8] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun...

[9] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The...

[10] http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-fac...

igravious3• 12 years ago

Yes. All that makes sense. And we should have predicted it many years ago as the logical outcome of social forces.

The fact that we did not predict this or see this coming is because we are blind to the hidden forces at play in society and furthermore lack the imagination to see how each of us will be used as a means to an end rather than an end in ourselves.

From what you're saying Social Media has very little upside and a whole raft of bad juju.

If rhetoric is the art of influencing people with language and communication then in the 21st century our cyber-rhetoric would cause the Greeks and Romans of old to bow down before us.

This will only get a hell of a lot worse before it gets better. Yes, that's my own personal subjective viewpoint and a highly normative claim but, you know what, that's not the world I want to be living in.

walterbell7• 12 years ago

Media is like any other virus - it can kill you or train your immune system. It's no coincidence that social media contagion research & social network analysis draw upon epidemiology.

In software security, we see the publication of both defensive and offensive research. Where are the defensive researchers for brain security? Currently, social media companies own the proprietary datasets of their customers' behavior. If this was available to each customer, they could voluntarily provide their data to researchers who represented their social values. This would enable diverse research into defensive filters. The originating company can still have an aggregate copy, but it would be non-exclusive.

Algorithmic disarmament is unlikely. We need open-source, defensive algorithms for media consumption. A baby step would be to post social media on your own site, then syndicate to social media companies, see http://indiewebcamp.com/Bridgy

samsolomon• 12 years ago

I'd love to see a non-profit replace Twitter.

It's a long shot, but Wikipedia replaced Britannica. Perhaps, there's hope.

tim3332• 12 years ago

Some programming courses use Twitter clones as their 101 CRUD app lesson so the tech can't be too hard. I guess it's getting users that would be tricky?

afro88• 12 years ago

This trend of social networks turning to shit when investors run out of patience for their returns really sucks. It was bound to happen with Facebook and Twitter, and seeing it with Soundcloud (when they already had a revenue stream as well) just depresses me.

I guess all "free" services that have investment from purely profit orientated VC's/Angels are bound to turn to shit eventually. But maybe now the service exists and is part of everyone's day to day world, a useful paid for social network could pop up that reaches critical mass. I'd gladly pay a small monthly fee for a non-creepy, no advertising, no privacy invasion Facebook... If all my friends got on board too of course ;)

Houshalter• 12 years ago

This is taking the "website made a minor change that I dislike, they are evil" to the absurd extreme. Algorithmic filtering is amazing and necessary and A/B type testing isn't "evil AI controlling your life for profit".

There’s Something Rotten in the State of Social Media

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