Businesses find a talking point, an angle, something that seems plausible to its potential users, as politics does to its potential voters.
Once hooked, it tries to keep the illusion with whatever means, as long as the org is profitable.
One company I worked for had this preposterous add on its career page. I joined and soon realized it was fake, half of the tech listed wasn't used on the project. But the add was still up, new people were still joining. If you bite, of you didn't ask the right questions, that's your problem.
mattikl · 45m ago
When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.
dr_dshiv · 4m ago
Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.
We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
UmGuys · 3m ago
Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.
mantas · 39m ago
And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers
TheOtherHobbes · 31m ago
It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends.
There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
8f2ab37a-ed6c · 2m ago
It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.
m_fayer · 25m ago
Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
closewith · 21m ago
HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
3form · 18m ago
It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.
anal_reactor · 10m ago
Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
awesome_dude · 21m ago
When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.
That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)
I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
neiman · 9m ago
I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great.
It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.
atoav · 14m ago
When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.
This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.
The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.
The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.
Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.
Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.
I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
weinzierl · 6m ago
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
Popeyes · 28m ago
The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
lukan · 22m ago
"The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.
awesome_dude · 25m ago
> The problem is that people are addicted to tension
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
3form · 37m ago
It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
riffraff · 28m ago
Is Tumblr doing fine financially?
I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.
I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
sprkwd · 10m ago
Now owned by Automattic.
acd · 28m ago
Social media is actually anti social. Meeting real people and making real connections is social.
marginalia_nu · 10s ago
I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.
Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
MrDresden · 41m ago
I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm.
Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
panstromek · 7m ago
I love the term "semantic sludge"
3form · 24m ago
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. ...
I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.
Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.
What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
lurk2 · 22m ago
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care.
No one goes to the beach anymore—there are too many people there.
benrutter · 27m ago
Like most of the other commenters here, I agree that modern social media is often an echo chamber, and frequently surface level.
I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?
yoz-y · 7m ago
IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the “true” subreddits)
panstromek · 8m ago
I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested:
I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.
chmod775 · 1h ago
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's going away.
erxam · 1h ago
So long as the same incentives stay in place, we're going to get the same results. Change the names yet it's all the same.
pineaux · 45m ago
Just like drugs, but most people understand you should have respect for them.
matesz · 44m ago
I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response.
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
devoutsalsa · 41m ago
I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.
matesz · 31m ago
Unfortunately it's an incredible tool, especially for industries which pray on people's insecurities like beauty - botox, fillers etc. This person I know puts instagram story and gets instantly booked for all free slots she has for the entire week.
She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".
t0lo · 15m ago
If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.
roomey · 1h ago
Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this.
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
close04 · 17m ago
Doesn’t this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your “editor” only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see.
And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
atleastoptimal · 1h ago
The same problems people
cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.
CommenterPerson · 49m ago
I went to NYC the other day. There was lots of diverse interesting stuff. Not full of people who looked just like me.
No comments yet
egeozcan · 1h ago
Nitpick: Around 60% of the world population live in urban areas, and if a lot of people decide to live in a particular rural area, then it quickly faces urbanization.
jajko · 40m ago
Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute.
Triple that for families with small kids.
Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).
ookblah · 1h ago
unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.
SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.
anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
jbm · 45m ago
Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.)
What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.
It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.
(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)
matesz · 25m ago
> FB is a ghost town
I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.
Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.
It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.
Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.
yusyusyus · 34m ago
reddit has a lot of sick puppies of all sorts and kinds. that is not a place of wellness in any sense ime.
ookblah · 36m ago
reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).
everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.
Juliate · 33m ago
Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
kingkawn · 21m ago
The problem is that ultimately it connects people around ideas because it isn’t taking place in the world, and everyone’s ideas are tired strange remixes of things we happened to grow up around
austin-cheney · 1h ago
> Social media was built on the romance of authenticity.
It never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.
sedgjh23 · 1h ago
I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.
pndy · 13m ago
The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming.
We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies.
People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.
Subscribe and hit that bell notification button for more content.
gausswho · 40m ago
Facebook died with the like button. Twitter died with retweets.
riffraff · 18m ago
There was no algorithm in the original Facebook and Twitter.
The echo chamber you got was the same you get in real life: your friends and family may share your pov and bias.
ahartmetz · 39m ago
You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start.
There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.
IshKebab · 32m ago
It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash.
Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...
By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).
The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.
avereveard · 45m ago
eh, I'd say monetization/gamification was the issue.
bet a social media without likes, organized in circles, would be way less toxic.
j_crick · 16m ago
More regulation and mandatory cool-downs to whatever is called “social media” because AI slop and bot-girls? Sounds reasonable /s
ValveFan6969 · 29m ago
These "internet is dead" articles are coming across as more robotic than actual robot content these days.
Businesses find a talking point, an angle, something that seems plausible to its potential users, as politics does to its potential voters.
Once hooked, it tries to keep the illusion with whatever means, as long as the org is profitable.
One company I worked for had this preposterous add on its career page. I joined and soon realized it was fake, half of the tech listed wasn't used on the project. But the add was still up, new people were still joining. If you bite, of you didn't ask the right questions, that's your problem.
We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)
There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars
I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.
This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.
The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.
The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.
Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.
Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.
I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.
I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.
Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.
What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
No one goes to the beach anymore—there are too many people there.
I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?
https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/
I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?
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Triple that for families with small kids.
Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).
SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.
anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.
It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.
(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)
I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.
Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.
It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.
Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.
everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.
Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
It never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming. We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies. People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.
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The echo chamber you got was the same you get in real life: your friends and family may share your pov and bias.
There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.
Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...
By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).
The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.
bet a social media without likes, organized in circles, would be way less toxic.