Reddit, TikTok, Youtube, and 4chan are all flourishing. Ian's a known pessimist. We're seeing economic effects on corporations here, not disinterest in social networking.
Dunbar's number of 150 meaningful relationships has built into it a definition of "meaning" which was not anticipated back in 1992. The meaning of meaning changes.
Furthermore, the constraint that meaning has on communication is not fleshed out. Sure I only have 150 meaningful relationships... but I still subscribe to 1000s of youtube channels to learn to fix my toilet, compose music, meditate, etc. These are meaningful to me, but don't require a traditional relationship. The meaning is, now, "I improve my life, and suffer the first 5 seconds of an advertisement for it.
> I still subscribe to 1000s of youtube channels to learn to fix my toilet, compose music, meditate, etc.
I've always found it strange that YT is considered social media to be honest. Most people just go on there to consume content, not engage on an eye-to-eye level. You can comment, sure, but then any news site that has a comment section would also count. I suppose Youtubers do have a community among themselves, but still that's a tiny minority of the platform's users.
I think the jury is out on YouTube being social media. Like yourself I'd agree it's not social media based on the way I use it.
For people who just watch the videos it's purely a video streaming site. For other users it's social media because they use comments/messages (if it has this feature).
It ponders the question that if a website can be used in 2 ways (as a social network, or as an information/entertainment source, like when lurking anonymously), whether you should really call it by it's full-feature name.
For the most part, I rarely write on HN and I browse Reddit but don't have an account, so am I using them as social networks?
And if on a site like HN I can't add somebody as a friend, and always reply once or twice to a fresh user I've never met before, does that still count? Is it socialising or just taking part in a one-off conversation?
> At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.
I think smaller, focused social networks will emerge/survive and will be much better for society. The concept of a “town square” online is a fallacy and really doesn’t help people, it sure helps these companies make money, well some of them.
The current climate of public, global social media promotes and fosters content that is controversial and draws in heated oppositional arguing, aka “engagement”. The people that engage in this content think first, likely subconsciously, to poke holes in peoples comments, ridicule, troll, and be controversial because they know it gets comments which might get them whatever “score” that social media network uses. Localized content, from people you know directly, is much more normal - pics of things you do, events you’re going to and old school sharing of your life.
Can we just go back to using forums again? I know they never died but can they actually get indexed in search engines more frequently?
Forums are awesome.
Yeah everyone is going to sit around at restaurants and stand in lines reading NPR and the Atlantic on their mobile phone,maybe a little HN to spice it up. Netcraft confirms.
TikTok is a behemoth and it really kicked off during the COVID lockdown when people had nothing better to do. It's the latest, and best optimized, social media algo dopamine hit. (I sometimes regret downloading it but it's too late now :P )
Unless it's straight up banned, it'll take over for the other platforms.
Someone put some street art up at intersections locally of a silhouetted pedestrian with their neck craned at their phone, incidentally right where your eyes would be when you are looking at your phone just like the silhouette and crossing the street. I'd like to think that this artist has saved more pedestrian lives than the local department of transportation at this point.
Not unless someone has found a way to make crossing the street as stimulating as watching cute kitten videos. I really think it's almost a neurological type of issue-- phones are just so stimulating there isn't much in the real world that can compete. Even when driving a car people will glance at their phones for dangerously long. They know it's dangerous, but they're not necessarily making the conscious decision to take the risk-- they just take a quick impulsive glance to see what that person is texting them
Yes, one day, people are not going to talk to each other anymore, at least not using computers, they're just going to use those to consume content created by their betters.
Still waiting for Elon to reveal the killer feature that he wants to upgrade Twitter with. He did have a plan right? The checkmark thing is just a temporary screw up right? Elon acting like he is having public meltdowns is just a gimmick to get more engagement on Twitter right?
I'm running out of copium here
I'm only semi-serious. But this is a thread about how social media needs to die in a fire. And Twitter collapsing would be a big step in the right direction. Now if the brainworms that have infected Elon could just get into Zuckerberg's noggin...
I think his plan was to buy Twitter so Trump's twitter account would be reinstated. Guess Elon is now going to have to buy truth social and make it part of twitter to get his way.
> From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality.
This actually reminds me of a larger issue than social media. I personally don't have accounts on any of these services. Hacker News is the closest, and it's a pure pull model where very little of the content is user-generated and you can't follow individual users.
But I also live in a major US metro downtown and I walk all over the place, frequently. Often several hours a day. And even there, people are screaming for my attention. Mostly, these are homeless pandhandlers, but also sometimes religious nuts, political signature campaigns, people with storefronts trying to get you to come in, and fundraisers for charities.
At one point when I first moved here, I'd actually respond to some of these people, but I just can't do it any more. At a certain level, there are so many people asking for money that, no matter how much each might individually deserve it and I can afford to help them, I'd go broke helping everyone, and have no way to triage when I have no idea who is going to come next and what their story will be. Even more than that, though, the sheer amount of time it takes just to stop and listen to each pitch becomes overwhelming when you add it all up. An hour long walk turns into three hours, with two of them spent not walking at all.
Social media seems like people who don't leave the comfort of the nice walls of the house and car still managing to experience this same thing anyway by subjecting themselves to the interjections and interruptions of everyone else in the world, somehow convinced that whatever tiny nuggets of value they find every once in a while are worth it.
Dunbar's number of 150 meaningful relationships has built into it a definition of "meaning" which was not anticipated back in 1992. The meaning of meaning changes.
Furthermore, the constraint that meaning has on communication is not fleshed out. Sure I only have 150 meaningful relationships... but I still subscribe to 1000s of youtube channels to learn to fix my toilet, compose music, meditate, etc. These are meaningful to me, but don't require a traditional relationship. The meaning is, now, "I improve my life, and suffer the first 5 seconds of an advertisement for it.