I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends, college friends, and distant family without having to see irrelevant posts, like some stupid remark from a politician halfway around the world or influencers doing something outrageous just for attention.
This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back.
Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.
Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.
Any way you cut it, "feeds" are more addictive. Your family and friends only post a couple times a day, but you have all day at work to look for some quick stimulation.
I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed about it. But it's fake. It's all fake.
In real life, it took me a whole year to figure out that the people at one particular local pub actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. I only figured out why they were so hostile because the people at my other pub told me. (It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family. Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese. We get along a lot better than I do with my old antifa "friends") This was a hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people can be for no reason. It's not something you can understand properly, ever, on any kind of social media. The media format just gets in the way of understanding other people as people; of understanding truth and factual reality; of differentiating between opinion and fact.
>Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese.
Why is it ironic that an Arab would be nice to you? Ignoring the racial/national assumption here, political views from diasporic Arabs, especially older ones who immigrated many years ago, are incredibly diverse and often more contingent on their local issues than world politics. People make the same mistake when assuming political views towards Mexico from Latinos (both Tejano and Mexican) in Texas, for example.
>my old antifa "friends"
Most antifa folks are gonna have a very clear cut moral stance on the state of Israel, even before Hamas' military began the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. Be honest now, have they distanced themselves from you because of your identity, or is it because of your opinions on the actions of the state of Israel? Because even the most hardline "antifa" types I know are more than happy to organize with the likes of SJP and similar organizations of Jewish and Israeli people.
> actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around.
This happens virtually everywhere. It is extremely rampant. I have yet to find a place where there are humans and it does not happen, excl. friend circles.
Yeh, I know. It's a kinda sad fact about humans. You can handle it a few ways. The most tempting and easiest is to compete on the same level, sniping at other people. More difficult but similar is to take it a step further and be the biggest guy at the pub, deal some drugs, fuck more girls, act like a friend and then talk shit. Every bar has one... it's just a method. They learned it from the internet, or possibly from being abused as a child. My method in all cases, everywhere, is to be extremely honest and see what comes out of people. What I find respectable is someone who tells you honestly what they think, even if they're not your friend. The people who tell you the unfiltered truth as they see it. Those are the good humans. Making other people reveal themselves, so you know what you're dealing with. That's actually understanding the world.
I am mostly just a listener, and at times a mediator. It worked well for me in cases where I was liked by most. Sadly it does not work well even when it comes to family, they talk shit about me behind my back to people and so forth.
> What I find respectable is someone who tells you honestly what they think
I think. Hear me out. To be a good mediator is also to be brutally honest with everyone. And your takeaway isn't them liking you. If either side liked you, you'd be a shit mediator. lol
The good news is they'll respect you for something they can't get anywhere else.
Had a long-time friend group explode last year over this. Years of behind-their-backs shit-stirring lies by a couple members of the group finally got figured out and called out, publicly, which lit the fuse. Exact same behavior that was called out was immediately employed to try to spin that and get these people's "enemies" pushed out of the group, which was the bomb going off. About half the group survived with some scarring, the rest just shattered.
Toxic people gonna toxic.
> There’s always going to be a shot caller or instigator behind it and everyone else who is weak willed will get on board with it.
Yeah, a major factor was lots of people putting up with some real bullshit for years to try to keep the peace. That, and the ones who did try to do something about it approached the problem-people one-on-one, which just led to them being lied to ("oh no, there's no problem between us") and then smeared even harder to others, and marginalized, having no idea why any of it was happening.
I've gotten in the habit of straight out calling out these people, including throwing them out of my house when they start down this road.
They tend to have some form of serious mental illness and/or a major substance problem they're not interested in addressing, which leads to emotional dysregulation. So not exactly great people to have around anyway.
Have I lost friends over it? Yes. But that's fine, having no friends is better than having fake friends who undermine you.
I would not punish them for having a mental illness, I am understanding of it as I have, too, but it is completely fine if you, yourself, do not want to handle or deal with it.
I tend to call people out, too. I keep the ones that take it gracefully.
Yeah, I try to give people some grace but if their behavior is repeatedly disruptive over a period of months to years, eventually something has to give. Everyone needs to have some boundaries.
It’s not necessarily punishment, e.g. leaving an abusive partner is in most cases about self-preservation, and if intended as a punishment, very ineffective at that. That said, I think a lot of people who end up at the receiving end of it do tend to try to spin it as a punishment due to self-centered thinking and in order to frame themselves as the victim.
If the people in the pub don't show they hate you, they don't hate you. It might as well be the people in the other pub that are making stuff up about the others.
> It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family... This was a hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people can be for no reason.
Don't be too discouraged. IMHO it's as simple as there being a significant portion of the population who tend to talk shit about other people in their circle when those people aren't around. If asked, they'll often attribute this oddly unmotivated malice to some conveniently proximate reason but, in most cases, if that reason didn't exist they'd still talk some slightly different shit about that same person.
In my experience, these kind of people will, at various times and in various contexts, talk shit about around half the people in their relevant circle. And who's in the half varies over time and each shit-talker can have different individuals in their half. So how does one end up in a given talker's shit-talked half? It can seem almost random but definite contributing factors include the talker perceiving you as better than them in any way (even if you never imply that - and even if it's not remotely correct). It's enough that their insecurity gets triggered even if it's over something 100% imaginary. Heaven help you if you actually are slightly more attractive in some way, have a slightly better job, spouse, education, hobby, hairdo, car - it can be anything or nothing. It's them - not you. And if it wasn't that one thing, it would be about something else.
The truly strange thing is, in my experience, when many of these people shit-talk about their friend group it's unconsciously triggered behavior that relieves some internal psychological stressor. It's almost like some kind of bizarre Tourette syndrome. On another day, in another context, that same shit-talker would tell someone you're their friend, that you're a great person - and, strangely, in that moment they would sincerely mean it. In some ways, I'd almost prefer it if these people were two-faced liars who spend every moment secretly hating me but act nice to my face. While unpleasant, that's at least easy to understand. The reality that they're just socially schizophrenic and almost randomly acting out triggered emotional stress but without harboring any deep rooted animosity toward me is much harder to mentally model.
Once I gained an understanding of this. I learned to avoid not only the shit-talkers, but the people close to them who don't shit talk but listen to their shit talk passively. While the shit-talkers are flawed, insecure people, the regular shit-listeners are just weak and unprincipled. I decided I don't have time to waste on either type. It's also a good reminder to myself to avoid ever slipping into passive shit-listening. Whenever I'd hear shit-talk about someone else, I'd usually politely question the shit-talker on their inconsistent behavior. This pretty quickly ensures no one shit-talks about anyone when I'm around - and it often leads to being excluded from the group entirely. Which I consider an excellent outcome.
Note: Based on the broad circumstances you related, I'll also add a general reminder to always consider the motivations of whoever told you about the shit-talking. Obviously, that's an all-to-common way to stir up drama and/or deepen their relationship with you. Always remember, if they weren't considered a 'safe' shit-listener by the shit-talker, they wouldn't have heard the shit-talk about you. And, of course, exaggerating (or entirely fabricating) the supposed shit-talk they reported to you is another level of shit-stirring.
I do have a similar experience and it's almost impossible to find groups of people that value honesty above everything else. That's because truth hurts and is hard to accept (it can also cause all kinds of emotional reactions that may not be desirable).
I think you are attributing too much psychology nonsense on the matter; it's a pretty bad tendency of our times to try to make every behavior some sort of mental illness.
While part of the behavior might look schizophrenic, the reality is that it is that way for plenty of reasons, you being unable to understand/sense them doesn't mean they doesn't exist.
Before even going too deep, you can always assume it's some kind of power play or a cheap way to grab attention and support. The people doing this are always working "from behind", because the whole point of it is to gain power without risking a direct confrontation (that could in theory lead into physical altercation or have them loose much more than what they want to bargain for).
I don't like this behavior for many reasons but you can't go around and pretend its mental illness or some nonsense like that; summarizing it as shit talking is a mistake.
It's actually the whole point of politics and while you may have an autistic view of the world (no offense intended, I am one) it's how regular people work things out. Not everything can be a perfect competition or a science project with pure facts...
"Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares."
This is spot on. Facebook proper has supplanted private email chains for a lot of older people. This is ironic because they are moving in the opposite direction as everyone else. Everyone else is moving into private communities, older people are leaving the safety of email chains and, often unknowingly, posting publicly. Facebook (probably intentionally) upholds the illusion that they are posting for their friends. I've seen Facebook actually provide a compelling service to my older dad who keeps in touch with a lot of his old friends on there. It's a much more active community of seniors than you'd guess.
Of course, they are subject to all the ills of Facebook at the same time. Overall I'd rate it as a net loss for society because of that.
100%. I got pulled into Old School Revival TTRPGs there. It was smaller and quieter, and in the sections I read mostly free of politics and other noise. I miss the "anti-social network".
The closest thing that I remember within a Google product was actually Google Reader's optional friend-of-a-friend visibility on shared items/comments. A lot of little circles-like communities that sprung up around individual people.
People love LinkedIn cringe on instagram and twitter - but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious
A comedy act called 'Wankernomics' just showed up in my YouTube recommendations. I thought about booking a ticket to their show but its too close to reality.
> but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious
I doubt many are being serious.
Business culture (at least in the US) is so steeped in lying and general fake-ness that in-group signaling as "real business person" involves public performances of bullshit.
It's what you're supposed to do in interviews: bullshit just the right way, to show you understand the game and are willing to debase yourself to play it. Otherwise you're "risky", either due to excessive commitment to ethical principles or to being too clueless or inept to play the game right. That's what's going on, on LinkedIn. "Humility" and "realness" even have to be faked just the right way.
That's probably one reason that business degrades over time. With that type of "requirement" you can't get anyone worth a dam to work for you, past a certain point.
"The baby's gotta eat" is a very strong motivator for people to do somewhat cringe things in the name of their livelihoods and future. Including $50/year subscriptions for PDF reader apps (dead serious).
I have made one post ever to LinkedIn and it was something I said as a joke in a 1-1 that I realised was perfect LinkedIn fodder. It did some pretty good numbers, and made me respect that site even less than I already did.
Well, serious in the same way cult members have to be serious.
If you crack and admit it’s fake, everything falls apart and it’s your fault. Expulsion out onto the street follows.
Even worse, now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.
I mean.. if you go into with the right frame of mind, it is harmless. It is starts being an issue when you take it seriously and someone ends up with back broken in someone's backyard.
Honestly, I'm really nice to the LDS when they drop by.
My experience has been that Mormons are generally self-aware, polite, and willing the engage in interesting conversation.
In contrast, LinkedIn influencers' eyes glaze over whenever you try to dig into the details of what they're purporting to talk about. Because, ugh, nerd stuff that's beneath them.
It's not because "nerd stuff that's beneath them" but because to a significant portion of the middle management class, the bullshit IS reality. The bullshit is how they get their job, how they function day to day, how they explain themselves to others, how they THINK about themselves etc.
It's much the same as the people who get books ghostwritten and say "I wrote a book". It doesn't matter if you understand someone else wrote it, if you say that in your head or out loud enough, your brain will treat it as reality and you will think it to be reality, and that will effect future thinking and feeling.
It doesn't matter if you are playing a character. Play it convincingly enough and it WILL bleed into your reality.
That's great if you are the kind of person wo is added into fun social group chats. But my group chats are mostly functional, like for hobbies, or parents groups for the kids' classes, and so on. There is one family group which sees annoying memes every now and then, and one group with friends from university which is also rarely used.
Old school social networks used to be this noncommital, low-threshold way to connect with others around you. It was really great if you were a socially awkward teen or twenty-something. It's no big deal to friend somebody on facebook (or MySpace, or your universities gamified campus management system or whatever) and see what they are doing, or strike up a conversation. I really miss that kind of network.
The best social networks i have are imessage group chats. One with my old college friends, one with my immediate family, and another with extended family. My kids have their own group chats with their classmates. They're much better than the social platforms.
The problem with Insta as a “hip LinkedIn” is I can’t even browse it properly without an account. Say I find an interesting business elsewhere and Ggogle them; their primary web presence is Insta; I find their page, but cannot browse their photos/posts.
So, it’s a pretty shit tool for a business to share what it’s about.
If there's a link to an Insta page that I'm actually interested in, I turn on the devtools and hide their modal pop up about logging in. That allows me to continue to scroll the page. Then instead of clicking on the item of interest directly, I use the browser's copy link which I then paste into a new tab. This avoids their attempt at getting you to login again. They'll let you land on any post without throttling the number of direct loads. It's a total pain in the ass, so I only do it for the rare account that actually looks interesting. After a couple of posts, I quickly realize that the account isn't actually worth all of that, and just close and move on.
Oh yeah, Insta wants me to join. But I quit Meta last year because the algorithms suck donkey bollocks and drive me crazy. I'm much happier for it, but it is annoying to find a restaurant or craftsman who only uses Insta (or FB or whatever else).
For some reason Meta destroyed Insta as a monetisation tool. The algo used to be good for self-promo for artists and writers, and they tweaked it to kill that. Now it's useless.
There was a mass exodus to Threads, which is now a weird toxic liminal space apparently tuned for woke-adjacent rage bait blended with LinkedIn-for-creatives. "I have an opinion, now buy my fan art."
My take on all of these is that huge corporations are all polluters. We think of pollution as chemical and environmental, but Meta and X are the world's biggest sources of mental and emotional pollution - outside of the MSM.
> A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.
But sometimes I do, because saying something to one person feels like I'm demanding a response from them, but saying it to a broad circle of friends allows those interested to reply, and others to leave it. Back when I used Facebook, I was more likely to gripe (or brag) on the Facebook wall than in a personal text conversation with a friend.
(Friends in person are the best option, of course.)
While I never have used "social media" I recently changed my online viewing(news/reading) habit, to after work only, limiting myself to one or two forum comments before first coffee. And as a self employed person this has changed my whole day and work flow..,,.snappier.
Eh, I'd disagree on the Instagram front. If you look at the reels section, where most spend their time, it's just a more deplorable Tiktok. 80% of the content on there is soft core porn advertising one OnlyFans girl or another. The other 20% seems to be brain rot memes. I reinstalled it recently after 8 years of not having it, and immediately deleted it.
Here's the thing, Instagram figured it quickly that I might spend another second or two looking at an attractive lady, but that isn't my preference for what I would see in the feed. Merely because I have libido Instagram became absolutely unusable no matter how many times I tell it I'm not interested in insta-bitches showing skin, it knows I'll look, so Instagram is gone out of my life.
Too bad because other topics like woodworking and mountain biking we're interesting and less... provocative, but that's not good for Instagram.
That's hilarious, I got a bit of the same "problem" but with Facebook (I don't use Instagram), but it's generally pretty actress or (for some reason) ballerinas.
I'm not gonna lie, I kinda like it.
I have found out that the algorithm will adjust itself relatively quickly if you don't click on stuff (at some point it decided I was into foot fetish and it disappeared quickly).
With that I get stuff about philosophy, math (memes), science and technology stuff with a lot of animals videos.
The algorithm isn't designed to give everyone exactly what THEY want.
The algorithim is optimized for "engagement", and therefore optimized specifically to trigger addiction as quickly and effectively as possible. The lower level softcore porn and rage bait and brainrot memes are what triggers addiction in people prone to it.
It's exactly the same situation as slot machines. They are made by the same companies in many cases that made some of the best and most fun arcade and video games. But if you aren't prone to gambling addiction, they aren't fun, because they aren't optimized for fun, they are optimized for addiction. The same triggers and stimuli that are most effective at triggering addiction behaviors are LESS effective at being "fun" to non-addictive people.
"The algorithm" is literally not meant to feed people what they want. "The algorithm" serves only the interests of the company, which is to efficiently keep eyeballs looking at a feed in order to sell ads. Giving most people what they want is genuinely counter to that.
This definitely works. I have two profiles on IG: one for musical instrument related things and one for painting miniatures. I’ve been able to keep both profiles strictly on topic by aggressively using the “not interested” button whenever something not related pops up.
That's basically what I do on youtube, except not logged in, using browser profiles to keep the cookies separate. If you exercise strict discipline then you can make the youtube algorithm work for you. Slip ups ruin it quick though.
The problem is, I haven't used it in 8 years, so there's no way to know my preference. The email is also not tied to any other accounts than perhaps a few browser video game accounts from my youth (miniclips, runescape and the like). My guess is that it fills the feed with sexualised content because it's the most popular kind, and eventually repopulates it depending on subsequent follows. The problem is I only follow friends and family, not celebrities, so that would prove difficult to do.
WhatsApp has really taken on this role for me, now that mention it.
I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
There are also the loners whos complete social and emotional life is the feed who send that feed onwards into group chats as input, isolating them further.
iOS added more social network-like functionality to the group chats—like being able to name them, set a photo, etc. To me, this helped cement their popularity since you can create a bespoke “named thing” that makes it easier to return to. You don’t accidentally leave someone off when returning to the convo.
I have never used any of these features, I just see the names on the group chat - same as groups texts 15 years ago. I don’t want to hide that with a group name that might make me forget who I’m messaging.
>solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life.
This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase profits abusing the user base.
I think this is what your conscious mind thinks but your actual desires don’t.
Facebook was refocusing on friend and family content before TikTok came along. But they had to adjust to the TikTok trend otherwise they would have lost market share or potentially lost the entire market.
You might think you want friend and family content, but actually you don’t. Not as much as you want engaging content.
You are equating action and desire which is a false equivalence. You wouldn't claim that somebody who died in a car accident wanted that to happen, would you?
VC is just a lazy boogieman. Facebook IPO'ed 13 years ago. I dont think it would be different if was owned by the other boogie man private equity, owned entirely by Zuckerberg, or publicly traded.
This is a response that lacks imagination and depth of understanding of capital markets.
No, VC money is what enables the entire multi-billion-dollar loss-leading front end effort that creates the network that is sold in an IPO.
No one else will take that level of risk, and the first eight years of its existence wouldn’t occur without VC money.
You’ll also notice how I didn’t say VC money was the problem. That was a long list of very specific qualifiers I wrote that you strawmanned very efficiently.
I just dont think it is accurate to put recent behavior at the feet of VC debt funding. FB would have been slower in growth, but had significant revenue long before IPO. The most objected behaviors of FB occurred post IPO.
Again this response seems to miss the point. Without VC funding, there is no Facebook. The company is a variant of companies that lose money by pretending to not need profit for many years and can only exist because they are/were VC funded.
I think that's just rephrasing the same argument. If social media weren't free, then you would be the customer and those VC-backed corps would be serving you. Social media being free means they're not serving you because you are not the customer. The "free" part and the "VC-backed" part aren't the problem, it's the incentive structure created by combining the two.
I read Facebook with the special URL[1] that gives a traditional reverse chronological feed (plus ads, of course), but it's all my friends and family.
Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views, usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of the USA and the elimination of due process are good things doesn't help my mental health.
While there will always be unhinged relatives, maybe the problem would be less pronounced without the polarization that comes with the networks pushing polarizing posts into their faces in their never ending quest for more "engagement" by users.
It's important to note that this is not a new or unique feature of social media. At least in our lifetimes, conservative moguls have always had a habit of buying up as many media outlets as possible and polarizing the constituency with unhinged stories. Before social media (everything I don't like is woke), it was cable news (Obamacare means death panels for your grandmother, stay tuned), before that it was talk radio (Rush Limbaugh calling Bill Clinton an extreme leftist), before that, it was the papers (get a load of this nerd Dukakis in a tank, in this op ed...). Today, it's all of the above.
If anything is different today, it's not that social media makes things easier or faster, because we've always had 24/7 talking heads on TV or the radio, we had dailies with evening editions, etc. It's that consolidation is even more prevalent today.
Also socializing becomes impossible. I once went to a birthday party only to have it ruined by a friend of the host. Said friend only wanted to talk partisan politics non-stop.
The issue they've been told is important, right? For example it was vital in the minds of some in USA to put import taxes (tariffs) >100% on all Chinese goods.
They would have seemed to care about that, until Trump got told that wasn't working (or, as likely, the market had been swung far enough) and did a 180 removing tariffs on what the public were told were the most vital things to tariff...
All those people didn't change their mind at the exact moment it was needed to swing the stock market back and for you mate the oligarchs money - just Musk et al. have built a brainwash machine at a national level.
It's an important distinction - when interviewed it seems barely any of those being manipulated can form a coherent thought about "the issue they care about".
That's a good definition of propaganda. The way it's usually taught in schools is that propaganda is all lies, but propaganda is any communication intended to promote a cause or agenda and opportunistically uses both truth and lies, choosing whichever align with the agenda. Unreliable captured this neatly.
We were taught in school that what they choose to cover is as important as what they don’t choose to cover. Of course I am realizing I had better critical media analysis sort of education than most.
I think the EU should flex their regulatory muscle and forbid algorithmic feeds on by default unless the networks break european society as the US is broken.
I don’t know how much of a difference it would make, as then we just become the algorithm.
I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to go “look at my shiny car/wife/house”, and I would use it to lose friends and alienate people.
These online environments do not foster any kind of human connection.
Blue sky allows you to have many different kinds of feeds and I can say the difference in adrenaline level and mood is palpable depending on the feed I use.
News items - frustration at the state the world is in.
Urban bicycle feed: annoyance at the atrocities of the inept drivers.
Feed with cycle side trip pictures: fun.
Rust projects, Electronics: the curiosity of learning.
Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.
Bluesky has felt like the healthiest experience I have ever had with social media. I don't really use any algorithmic feeds (though I have been toying with building my own), just my following feed.
I find the algorithmic topical feeds nicely solve the problem of discovery for me. There’s a lot of people who are experts in their fields, totally different to mine (e.g. astronomy, physics, photography etc) which makes it interesting for me.
Yeah, I'm sure they're useful! I have just found myself in a neat community, and I have > 700 followers and followers (mostly mutual), so I haven't really felt a need for discovery. I usually just find people through replies to people I know already at this point.
> Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.
Oh yeah I remember how this worked on Twitter. Make a post that annoys some anonymous blocklist maintainer, and suddenly you're blocked by a whole swath of accounts. Sometimes just following the wrong person or liking the wrong post is enough. No accountability for these decisions and no way to reverse them, or even figure out whom to approach to reverse them.
Sounds awfully exclusionary for a service that purports to be inclusive. It encourages the formation of authoritarian cliques, as tends to happen in any left-wing group sooner or later.
I was always polite and respectful on Twitter and still wound up on a blocklist. So did many others. There was no notification or explanation provided and no recourse, I just suddenly found myself blocked from various accounts to the extent it degraded the utility of the platform.
Lots of people on the left love to be little commissars, and this sort of thing provides a perfect opportunity.
The implication of your statement is "you probably did something to deserve it, comrade" which is very much in keeping with that mentality.
If they blocked you, evidently you didn’t clear the bar for them, and even if it was some completely lunatic reason - you have to respect their right to not talk to you, however lunatic it looks for you.
Now, if their blocklists were popular - either they weren’t lunatics or there was a crowd of lunatics. Now, why would you worry about not talking with a crowd of lunatics ?
But, regardless - again - nobody is entitled to an interaction with those that don’t want it, directly or by proxy.
Baffles me, why is it so hard to understand this ?
People can do whatever they want. I simply observed that this is a toxic practice that reinforces my decision to stay away from the platform. Entitlement has nothing to do with it, and I don’t appreciate the implication of your statement.
(You do know that blocking removes the ability to view posts, not just interact with them, right?)
* Bluesky is from the same people that launched Twitter and, optics aside, just the same ideology. There is no real deep divide on values. It is about locking up people in echo chambers, information filtering and ultimately ripping out people's ability to organize around a common good.
There is only one danger for the 0.1%. The 99,9%.
* The people that got disturbed by Twitter's boosting of extremists and nazis, now took refuge to bsky. Only to get ripe for the next iteration. But see how many people are still on X, increasingly less aware of the abnormality they are drowning in.
This playbook of cultural engineering should be super clear by now. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.
* How to sell it? Invest in narratives that bend the notion of free trade in order to instill rigid beliefs about Free Markets. Now look at the free markets. :) It only takes you a few million bucks and a dinner to set your company free.
Like parent hinted at, "social media" means the opposite for society.
I can not argue about the values of people I do not know personally. I only said that the tool they made seems to be okay in my experience, which I shared.
“Free markets” is an uneducated nonsense. An entirely unregulated market evolves into monopoly. Even without corruption.
Social media for me is just a tool (HN is also social media btw). I find it useful and it meaningfully interacts with the other aspects of my life. When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.
As for the hierarchy: it had always existed and for better or worse the humans and other animals are wired for it. Likewise, they are wired for maintaining the total perceived fairness of the system - so the system eventually autocorrects the extreme imbalance. Often brutally, though.
> I only said that the tool they made seems to be okay in my experience,
I could understand that! I wanted to make a general comment, to warn people that although things feel fine now, they should imho pay caution to what these things devolve into. There doesn't even need to be any particular evil scheming from people involved. We usually focus on tech solutions. While blindness to cultural forces is generally what leads us into problems. It is a self-feedback loop in which societal fracturing and extremism is fostered.
> When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.
I feel the same. But most people, not only the young, are hooked to social media. For the young, they are essential for social validation, and thus they are easily pried on by people with less morality than you likely do.
> HN is also social media btw
Sure, but it is in a different class. HN at least does it best to be the least dopamine awarding. It is hard to read, and it is difficult to see if someone replied to a question or remark you made.
Traditional fora, mailing lists, HN--they are far more benign than what we are talking about.
Absolutely true about focusing too much on tech solutions, it’s often a very tricky problem that is best solved at non-technical layer.
To your other points: I find that people who are addicted never heed the warnings, they just get annoying. Just occurred to me: wonder if the addiction is to some extent internalization of the habit; so that fighting the habit becomes fighting oneself….
About HN being less addictive than the others: that is arguable :-) though it is much less driven by pure emotions than the other forms of exchange, indeed !
I lasted a little bit longer, but it grew shocking to see how eager friends and family were to display how cruel and bigoted they can be.
I sometimes wonder if it’s the addictive, attention seeking nature of social media that encouraged such behavior, or if they simply lacked the courage to be so inhumane in person.
I wouldn’t rule out the radicalising properties of social media either. You don’t have to fly out to the Middle East and join a militia to be turned against Western ideals when Facebook can flood your feed with targeted propaganda for a price.
It does say something about one’s character that they would be targeted by this and would also buy into it, though. You’d hope people might see it for what it is and take a step back.
These people are just as inhumane in person actually. In fact they want to test their opinions on you and see if you signal that you are also in their in group. Stuff like an old creepy guy gawking at a woman and asking you “how about that” is a someone common example of this. Or telling some story about some human condition where the punch line is well they were black and this isn’t surprising behavior given the racist stereotypes they believe in. These guys come out of the woodwork too. Like a total stranger on the bus would be like this, turn over at you unsolicited.
My Instagram account is private and I only follow real life friends and family. I mute (posts or stories or both from) any that post in ways that I don’t find positive. I haven’t had to mute many, but it’s some.
If it wasn’t for the algorithmic feed showing “recommended” posts from accounts I don’t follow and the constant ads, I would have a perfectly healthy and pleasant experience with Instagram.
I really wish they’d let us pay to get rid of ads and configure the algorithm to e.g. only recommend from accounts I follow.
That wouldn't work. 95% of people ordinarily do usually stick with defaults, but not when chasing their (dopamine) addiction.
Imagine there's a toggle you can flip in the Settings of Instagram that was labeled "free oxy", and every morning and evening Meta would FedEx an oxy pill into your mailbox. Everyone would tell eachother about it, and few would be able to resist the temptation.
I'm not sure this model works as it just forbids lists of any kind. Algorithmic is an extremely poor choice of words as any method of selecting posts/messages for a list is an algorithm.
They should just say that algorithm is editorialised and needs to be subject to the same regulations as newspapers (fined for fake news, editor can lose his journalist status).
In some EU countries yes it is. You need recognised journalists that can be disbarred to report news. Exceptions exist for specialised publications, so science journals don't need journalists.
Newspapers can publish all the fake news they want. There's no special carve out for e.g. tabloids. The only constraint they have is they aren't protected by section 230, so they can be sued for things like defamation or libel.
The big one to me is paid content should be clearly labeled as paid content and should be skippable programmatically and in bulk. Things like product placement.
The result of a purely chronological feed is that you have to scroll through 10 posts from the same person and never see anything from people that post good content rarely.
Plenty of people like and enjoy "algorithmic feeds". I can enjoy occasionally scrolling through a feed. Banning it is like banning alcohol because there are alcoholics in society.
> The result of a purely chronological feed is that you have to scroll through 10 posts from the same person and never see anything from people that post good content rarely.
I follow over 700 accounts on Bluesky and strictly use the following feed, and this is not my experience.
Obviously there’s a balance to be struck here. We could legalise fentanyl and tell people to just not use it, but that probably wouldn’t have a very positive impact on society.
At the very least we should acknowledge the negative externalities. Just leaving it up to the market to figure out (especially if we allow the current tech monopolies to exist) will result in serious societal impact.
"The result of a purely chronological feed is that you have to scroll through 10 posts from the same person and never see anything from people that post good content rarely."
But who made the demand, to have everything shown from everyone?
Imagine a social network, where you make your own rules for your feed. That special person who posts rarely, but good will have special visibility. And from that bored family member that basically spams, you will see the message "X has posted 50 pictures and text today" and with a click you can go there.
I'm sure that would work out fine. Just like the GDPR regulation made the web so much better & more private, and the promise of the AI act is boosting innovation in Europe...
The GDPR regulation is great and arguably does make the web more private and better. At the very least, it's better than having no regulations.
I've even been able to successfully use it to remove something private about me from the internet. I don't think I would have even gotten a response had there been no legal precedent.
You can always argue about how some regulations are badly implemented or incomplete but I believe it would be very misguided to believe that no regulations are instead the better alternative.
> “…instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life…”
I’ve stopped using FB regularly, because I don’t like their feed algorithm. I don’t like the ads or the content, and I had curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends update.
That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I see FB’s problem and I don’t envy them. The vitality of the platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock).
I’m not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I’m an emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The only platform all of my friends and family use are group private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats we have are few and far between.
I'm inclined to agree. I remember when Facebook (and before that, MySpace) was new and was still mostly a reverse-chronological feed of your friend's updates. It caused zero stress or anxiety at all - and it was kind of nice checking in to see what was going on. Your feed was like an internet forum for your social circle.
Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. As you say, the algorithmic feed is superior for creators wanting reach, and more importantly, advertisers who want eyeballs on their ads. Due to network effects, it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative.
Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement.
The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff).
The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.
> Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day.
I’m not sure if that’s actually a “shortcut” to the reptile brain and it’s just about “I have to scroll more to get stuff I’m interested in. At least for me it feels like that and it causes me to use these social media things far less.
For me it feels more like intermittent rewards vs full rewards at once.
Obviously for the ad-industry the intermittent rewards are more useful, that’s why we can’t have nice things
> it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative.
Isn’t this just WhatsApp now though? The addition of Statuses, Following and now Communities almost confirms this. People are dropping Facebook and IG, but can’t give up WhatsApp (yet).
I've got a personal policy: No websites that have an infinite scroll. That means no new Reddit, mobile Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, or similar. This also means I can't use food delivery services, since those tend to be infinite as well.
If they're paginated that's fine, even if they're infinitely so. Infinite scrolling is just a very good touchstone as to the quality and addictiveness of a site, and I'll avoid anything that has it.
For this reason I get my news through RSS and like using Discord -- both have finite ends (even if there may be a lot of content in bursts.)
I’m reminded of how junk food was seen as a dominant and crushing force, and how today we have moved to people willingly embracing healthier lifestyles.
I rue the amount of damage caused, before people and society began resisting and arresting its deleterious effects.
But perhaps this is the same process being followed here. New shiny for the reptile brain, eventually the costs are made clear and people decide they would rather not become statistics and instead find joy in other formats and tools.
Then People make those formats or invent ways of engaging with our tools that includes self care and leads to more happiness. We grow older and we eventually get tired of all the online health fads and become crotchety older humans.
No, to my brain, reptile or not, these FB feed suggestions are a constant source of irritation.
I use FB only because I'm member of a couple of groups relevant to my hobby, and the stuff posted in those is worth following. Unfortunately there is currently no alternative for those, otherwise I would happily ditch FB.
I don't even care about posts from family and friends anymore because nowadays those are mostly about bragging about their fancy dinner/holiday/social life etc.
You're talking about something exactly like the ‘Moments’ of WeChat, China's largest social media. It doesn't have a feed, but only updates from friends and family. But still, people spend so much time on that - 900 million people spending an average of 1 hour and 42 minutes per person per day.
The single problem with social media is that they are not public, but are heavily thought of (and propagandized) as such.
Any marketplace that is privately owned, is not a free market place. And, the elephant in the room, these social media marketplaces are owned by parties with very particular interests. As long as don't recognise that, we will let ourselves be distracted by details that are always the result of this private control.
Something social must be public, or it isn't social, and it isn't what you and I really want.
There's a version of Facebook that only shows things from your friends, and not "suggested" or "reels" etc.: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr (it still shows ads but not the other random stuff)
And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page:
And any page you follow, including anything that tries to convince you to click through to their website via clickbait, anxiety-inducing headlines, etc.. It also shows FB groups you're in, which are often full of their own unnecessary drama.
The “like” button killed genuine engagement, and made Facebook an exercise in lever-pressing. The problem is that in a lot of cases (not all), those stupid remarks and outrageous influencers are being “liked” and “reposted” by your network in order to gather reflected glory and dopamine hits.
A social network is no better than the sum of its parts, and to create something really worthwhile, you have to limit what people are allowed to post (original content only, for example).
Instagram used to be closer to this when they showed posts in chronological order. Of course, Facebook got to work and ended this by showing posts in algo-sorted order, added an explore page, and even started showing non-followed people's viral content on the main feed. So unfortunately the trend has been a slow frog-boiling march towards engagement and enshittification.
In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the group chat instead...
I think the fact that "the algorithm" capitalizes on negative emotion has been known for a while. The problem is that Zuck (and Elon, etc.) is at best motivated by making money, at worst motivated by swaying public opinion, and certainly not motivating by improving the emotional state of the users of these services, or even giving them a good experience.
I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.
I cannot agree more. It's amazing that WeChat, a Chinese app, has figured this out years ago; its Moments feature had no ads, no influencers, only posts by contacts. It even suppresses comments made by people you don't know, even if the subject of a comment is a post by people you do know.
Of course there are other Chinese apps that operate entirely based on feeds. What I found interesting is that on Rednote it tried to suppress your posts from what it infers to be your friends in real life.
I think it is a great approach. There are sometimes I just want to see updates from friends and family. There are other times when I only want to see something interesting to me without necessarily telling all my friends what I'm interested in. These are two entirely different categories of social media and it is a good thing to require users to switch apps.
The "Friends" tab (sometimes "Feed" instead; the A/B testing on this one seems strong) only shows the posts of people you know. Events is still there as well. But in both cases the rate of creation has dropped dramatically since the time you remember, making these nearly useless. That's why the social media services have had to focus on content created by professional content creators instead.
The outcome was inevitable. People had fun posting posts and photos when it was a novelty, but once the novelty wore off they were back to not wanting to put in the effort. You can only post so many photos of your cat before you grow tired of it.
Why would nobody see it? "Friends"/"Feed" is a chronological view of all your friend posts. Unless their friends are posting so much that they can't keep up, which is completely unrealistic these days, your posts are going to pretty hard to miss.
But, in practice, nowadays people who have something to share with those they care about will do so through some sort of messaging application, including Facebook Messenger, so posting really only ends up being for the sake of the casual acquaintances you've accumulated as Facebook friends over the years. What, exactly, do you want to let them know?
Also the way it works, for some reason it decides 2-3 people are my besties (they are not) and just shows me what they post, ignoring what everyone else is posting, so it's still useless.
Who doesn't know it exists? You know it exists. More likely nobody cares to use it because they don't really get much from their acquaintances' cat photos, in much the same way we were unable to come up with anything you want to share with your acquaintances. It turns out that people soon realize that the hundreds of random people they accumulated as "friends" over the years don't actually matter in their life. Those that do matter are already engaged using messaging services (SMS, iMessage, Messenger, etc.). Social media is alive and well, but it moved to places where you can actually be social, away from the "say and spray" venues like Facebook.
Also, you can choose to filter that feed by "Favorites". Did you mistakenly end up in that mode?
I wrote my own client for Twitter, which was later adapted to also support Bluesky. The idea behind the project was to scrape porn easily, but it's also an amazing tool where it shows me the feed I personally want to see. This is pretty much the only way I interact with these services.
It's tough, because even within real friend circles there can be a lot of junk. I have a friend who constantly posts "What does your favorite color say about your personality?" type of stuff. I don't want to hide her posts because I don't want to miss anything actually important that happens in her life. But there's no clear line between that and the cruft that you can solve with a rule.
So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.
On the Instagram home page, on the top left there's an option to switch to only following feed which shows posts only from the people I follow. I found this somewhat useful but wish it was the default.
Social media started as a way to stay connected with people you actually know, but it's morphed into this performative attention economy where the loudest, most extreme content wins.
> ..and could go against what most people have become accustomed to.
I think that’s the tough reality—over time, people gradually become accustomed to consuming random content from random accounts or pages, to the point where the original idea of interacting with friends and family on social media starts to fade away. That said, messaging apps might still bridge that gap through groups.
The issue for social media companies is that its dead. No one posts like they did in 2010 anymore. Go ahead and follow only your friends actual posts on fb and it is going to be pretty dead. Likewise for instagram and other platforms. They don’t want you to be able to scan an entire chronological feed in 10 mins and be updated.
You mean, what it was to begin with? Right now WhatsApp is basically my family Facebook. Images, videos, chat. Separate groups of people so you can remain friends with two former friends who are now mortal enemies. Facebook is just another toxic, addictive social media.
There's a spectrum; when it comes to short videos on YT and IG merely ditching the slide-down-for-next video for a thumbnail grid gives some agency - and liberally using "don't recommend" (which I think most normies never notice is there) cleans it up further.
I've been using BeReal this way with a bunch of friends and family for the last couple of years. It definitely fills its purpose of seeing what my friends are up to without occupying too much of my headspace. Can't be happier about it
> and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life.
Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when others have their personal information/drunk party photos. Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside content creators so that the services could give you... something.
Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family" feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect asymptotically nobody.
I logged into classmates a couple of years ago. I had a message waiting from 2005 from one of my sister's insane ex-friends. That was a blast from the past and hilarious. 18 years without bothering to log in.
Then I realized their business model is so low-rent, they had web 1.0 style protections on scraping all their scanned yearbooks. So I liberated all the ones with anyone I was likely to know and posted them to Archive.org.
> This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media... Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends
This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating with you because of the additional friction caused, especially when a free alternative exists.
Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if you had users pay for the product.
Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain their initial spread.
I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing is generally useful or entertaining, respectively.
This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social circles would also follow through with the same choice. This ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages. Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1].
(Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people disagree with.)
> However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company
I’m reading this as: The corporate internet is unable to fulfill the actual social needs of its users.
>Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped.
And this translates to: Our economic system drains us of so much of our energy that living a fulfilling life is no longer possible, and so we fill our valuable time with the slop that same system serves us.
I think you’re being downvoted because your comment speaks to an uncomfortable truth, namely that none of this is working to advance quality of life but rather to advance the contents of a few wallets.
On Twitter, don't follow anyone, put everyone in a list, only read that list - you get a feed of chronological posts from only the people on the list, no algorithmic bullshit.
Or use Nostr. Definitely zero algorithm nonsense over there.
> many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life
You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^
The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It craves monetisation — at the expense of all else, including factual information.
What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to see.
