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The funny thing about Facebook is that it's got a perfectly good social network in there, I think the only one that exists. In the menu is "Feeds" which is what you want. It only shows friends and followed things. If they made that the default when you go to facebook.com I don't think I'd have any complaints feature-wise, though an ad-free option would be nice. It's a genuine social network.

Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.

Wow, I did not know about this Feeds page despite being a daily FB user for 20 years (yes, to the ridicule of most people, I know). Thanks for pointing this out. I wish this was the default homepage or at least a way to set it as default.

Each feed has a unique URL, so you can bookmark it in your browser. For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser.

> Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity

> For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser

Related (2025): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115

Thankfully, since then, Chrome and all other major browsers now ask the user for permission before letting websites send requests to localhost or any local IP addresses. Obviously some users may click through that, but it prevents the behavior from being invisible to the user at least, and gives them a way to say no.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access

PS: I still recommend never installing Meta apps on your phone.

PPS: There are legitimate uses of this functionality, so as a web dev I'm happy the functionality wasn't silently blocked. This gives an opportunity to explain to the user why the permission is needed if the use is legitimate. Would be nice if it could be further scoped though.

Chrome added that _after_ sb discovered meta abusing it.

Yep, that's why I said since then

Annoyingly I can not get it to work on mobile (iOS Safari). Loading the url cause the page to refresh and take me to the main page.

Goes to show how much my 300 friends use Facebook, I had to scroll at least 3 pages before I found a post from my grandma in law about her dog, and that was all for the next few scrolls. Everything else was followed pages that I actually don't care about and ads.

> or at least a way to set it as default

Ctrl+D?

The only thing I used Facebook, is for marketplace and groups you can buy cheap stuff on there.

facebook does have an ads-free paid option: https://www.facebook.com/help/262038446684066/

in europe

oMg thank you for pointing this out. I knew instagram had this as it’s top center. (X has to too). I didn’t know fb had it. So much better!

Wow, that Feeds page is great! Did not know.

> I think the only one that exists

Wechat moments show you the things that your contacts post. There are theoretically ads too, but ever since they forcibly converted me to a US-based account I don't get ads because no one is interested in advertising to me.

It's too bad; I liked seeing the Chinese ads.

Comments on wechat follow the Maplestory system where you can see comments (on anyone's posts) from your own contacts, but not from other people.

WhatsApp too is my only social media, you can see the updates from your contacts

I was always perturbed by the shift from calling them "social networks" to "social media". It signalled a friends-to-famous shift (plus ads) that I didn't particularly want.

Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.)

They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)

I guess social networking service is actually a more appropiate name for the thing.

That makes sense in the case where people are mindfully connecting with particular individuals or organizations, and paying for that.

Not for where algorithms select media for you. That's not a "networking service", even if that is one of its hooks. Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service".

"Attention media" is more accurate.

But that also describes traditional advertisement based "media". Which earned its keep via attention access, by including unintegrated ads as a recognizable second component.

A description specific to the new form is "surveillance/manipulation media" or "SM media".

Attention-access funded media lacked pervasive unpermissioned surveillance and seamlessly integrated individualized manipulation. Where dossier-leveraged manipulation, not simply attention access, has become the defining product.

You got me thinking. "Social media" is like a catalog you used to receive via snail mail in the mailbox. You kind of thumb through for something interesting, but there's no real substance there.

> Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service".

sb should tell those linkedin folks this.

If it's media, it should be regulated like media.

Is this code for, "I want the cops to stop people from doing things online I don't like" or "we need more regularity / predictability"?

Traditional (so-called “legacy”) media have legal rights and obligations in most countries. They are required to live up to certain standards, for example by distinguishing between opinion and fact, by disclosing political affiliations, and so on.

Journalist is more than a job title, and so is editor.

Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails.

What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.

Breaking an addiction is a personal journey not a problem to be solved at scale. I'd say it's potentially impossible to put the cat back into the bag. You can draw a corollary between obesity and social media. People will die fat because of their obesity disease, and I suspect the same might be true of their social media disease as well.

The alternative is you realizing social media is 'bad for you,' and taking steps to mitigate habitual dopamine release yourself, them smiling wryly at all the people compuslively checking their phones. It's all you can do, really.

I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time makes your life actively worse even if in the moment you feel good. Social media should be thought of through that lens -- if you think you want to preserve "the good parts," you're like an alcoholic who keeps finding a reason to continue drinking. "No, the problem was just drinking alone. Now that I'm drinking at the bar, socially, it's OK!" To an extent, but mostly it's harming you.

Alcohol is bad health wise but probably is used to reduce the harm of social imposed stress between people.

So, If I think about it "like alcohol", it would mean "what is the root cause of not being able to keep contact with people". It might be that common social mixing places are probably much fewer than hundred of years ago - be it the local bar, gathering after a day of work in the field, public bathhouse, etc. Many of activities in the modern world seem very individual - maybe that is the problem, and people being social try to replace it and get tricked into worse things.

The difference is the "algorithmic" timeline (meaning ads) you get with Facebook, Insta, and co compared to the strictly chronological timeline you get on the Fediverse equivalents (Mastodon, Pixelfed). That it's less addictive, or at least not in the doom scrolling type of way, is more a consequence. Aka the enshitification argument.

Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation.

For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.

[dead]

I think the problem is that people are lonely in ways that the medium can't address well, but does address to some lesser degree, so it elicits lopsided engagement. You're this whole person but people only ever react to this quirk or that one because those quirks come through better online, and over time those two quirks become a larger share of your personality. We end up with things like looksmaxxing--because pictures go online well, and it happens at the expense of whatever other characteristics of that person don't go online well.

I've been imagining a social medium which finds temporary peers via one of your phone's radios--so it broadcasts and gathers rotating public keys as you ride the same bus with people or share an elevator with them--and then your feed contains whatever they're posting, but only for 48 hours or something (unless you decide to make the connection permanent). That way when you see something cool in your feed, you're well positioned to go be social in meatspace.

Like I get why you don't bring your guitar on the bus, same reason I don't bring my drums on the bus, but if a few hours later I saw a video of you making some music I might be like "hey lets get together and jam" next time I see you.

The issue is the fantasy of social media doesn't convert well to reality. I've reached out numerous times "to jam" with people who have openly expressed a desire to, and... ...nothing. It's like a full conversation stopper. It's weird.

As far as I can tell the social anxiety takes hold, where someone might have their perceived fear of "being bad" exposed, so they recede back into their insular, online-only personas.

I take it you're a musician, and so I really think the only way is to take your drums (or guitar, or whatever) to the park or a local 'town square' and just get down to business. People will interact with you in whichever way they do, but at least it will be real, and possibly lead to real fruitful relationships.

> You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits

There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.

Or how in a private group someone who was invited suddenly leaves the group membership, hops off the channel. Comparative to walking out of a meeting without saying a word and provide a reason. A simple "I enjoyed it here, but I have to spend my time elsewhere" is just simply a polite thing to do, and costs only 2 seconds of time.

Social media has strong parasocial tendencies.

> you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle

The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.

But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.

> Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response.

Asking someone a question online does not obligate them to take time to answer it, or even explain why they don’t feel like doing so.

You’re not in a conversation with everyone who is online, so the comparison to in person conversations doesn’t hold.

> Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.

People are doing other things while using their computers and you should not expect to be able to commandeer their attention on demand by tagging them. Again the comparison to in-person social norms doesn’t hold because you can’t see if this person is busy with something else.

I find this sense of entitlement to other people’s instant time and attention to be very negative for any digital dynamic. Whenever someone with this attitude joins a group chat it leads to people turning their statuses to Do Not Disturb all of the time or even leaving the group because they don’t want to feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond to that one person every time that person drops a tag in chat.

It depends on the context and situation. You are right for some random public channel. I am talking about for instance chatrooms where a small remote team joins for the express purpose to collaborate closely, and I often find these weird deviations from how you would behave offline in similar setting to be very detrimental for communication and productivity killers. Part of it is about setting expectations and fostering the 'room culture', and that can help improve things. But there is an overall behavior change to the online world. Comparable perhaps (but different in the details) to "road rage", a general behavior shift people have once they step into a car and are insulated from others by their hotrods window screens. And 'commandeering' never works well, btw.

> I am talking about for instance chatrooms where a small remote team joins for the express purpose to collaborate closely

I am too.

A chat room is not equivalent to a face to face conversation. You’re not in an always-on social engagement with those people.

If you need to switch to having face to face conversational norms, you need to request a time for that.

It’s not reasonable to expect that someone’s online indicator means you are entitled to request that they drop what they’re doing and respond to you. Online does not mean not busy.

Nah, you generalize things too much. A chatroom is whatever you make of it. Generally speaking all the social communication patterns we have in the offline world, have equivalents in online communication. A chatroom is but a channel to convey these patterns. A chatroom doesn't have behavioral norms attached to it. The assumption that this is the case, may be a large contributor to many social media problem areas.

Another example. A project chatroom, and the agreement is that comms are async. But there are moments where multiple members are real-time in the chat. It may well happen that you say "Since we chatting now @JohnDoe, we have a decision to make on this and that". John Doe answers "For sure, let's do that", so you give a follow-up with elaboration. Only to suddenly find John unresponsive for 5 days.

That is a ridiculous situation if you depicted that to happen to you offline in a face to face setting.

> Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it.

Don't start drinking or smoking, because with this logic you'll have a really hard time quitting

I would like to see social networks that facilitates real life, face-to-face encounters to a much larger extent that the current state of affairs. The Fediverse has the pieces to this puzzle, but I do not know of one project that combines them in the right way yet. We do have Mobilizon for events, we have Mastodon and all the other similar projects for sharing and commenting, but we need something that puts the pieces together in a new configuration.

I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.

But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!

Social media is full of in-person events. The only reason I use Facebook lately is to keep up with groups that organize in-person events.

I was thinking about social networks that is not Facebook. The challenge is to make something that can compete in this respect. It would be so nice to have the in-person part, but without the ads, scams, data theft and blackbox algorithms!

The closer you emulate real world interactions, the more of those things you will have.

What sets Bonfire apart from other federated social media networks?

It is modular and built to be adapted to the different needs of online communities. They also have a more fine-grained boundaries system that allows to post only to pre-defined groups (or Circles in Diaspora / Google+ lingo) etc. I don't think they have an Events module yet, but technically speaking, this could be implemented.

VR/Group voice chat/Group messaging is fine too. For centuries, people have created and maintained meaningful relationships while physically and geographically separated. The circumstances of life do not always allow people to meet face-to-face. One of the worst sins of the post-pandemic "return to normalcy" was the wholesale firebombing of remote options for connecting with people.

The problem isn't whether the meeting is digital or not, it's whether the platform (a physical space or an app) facilitates high-fidelity person-to-person and small group communication consistently over time (the norm for healthy human community), or if it's set up to encourage unnatural para-social relationships and dysfunctional, anti-social communication styles.

> facilitates high-fidelity person-to-person and small group communication consistently over time

how have we done that while separated for centuries?

Yeah the first three paragraphs of the article really resonated strongly and then the fourth was an ad for mastodon, which is only slightly less bad IMHO.

When you say leave behind...do you mean you lose something by not interacting with them, or do you mean that you have some kind of duty to help get them un-addicted? I don't think you are obligated to go hangout at your local bar once a week just because alcoholics exist.

We have a duty to help them..and I don't think society gets this right in other places. We're not proactive about it. In religion and islam there's something called dawah, effectively preaching, but the idea is you're calling people to something with higher purpose and to eliminate all these bad habits. And I think it's the same whether online or offline. We need to help people. First you have to help yourself but then you have to go back and get everyone else. It speaks to a moral imperative we should all have to help our fellow man.

I don't know that you can broadly say "religion" I'm not a Buddhist but from my surface level understanding of Buddhism it might be the case that that person needs to save themselves when they have had some negative experiences with social media. (This is overly simplistic I'm not saying its all on the individual but it's hard to summarize this point in only a couple sentences).

I do think there's some people who have fallen into social media bad habits and can fairly easily be helped to correct bad habits, other people seem to go to social media because it actually aligns with who they are. I've met several people (strangers) who seemed like they brought social media behavior into real life in a way that made me think social media gave them a platform for their personality, not the other way around. They were pretty jarring experiences that really stuck with me.

It’s not a small group of people that we can afford to “lose”. It’s widespread in an entire generation (at least), a fact that threatens our society as a whole.

> What's the alternative? I don't know.

Real world connection and a strong foundation of core friends, perhaps?

My first step for this was joining a makerspace. Now I can complain about everything with my fellow nerds.

We still need a way to meet people with similar niche interests. This isn't served well IRL.

How? If you like playing Warhammer, go to Games Workshop. If you like climbing, go to a bouldering gym. I appreciate that there are probably some counter examples. But part of this, in my mind, needless demand for tech spaces to meet other hobbyists is catering to an over-reliance on technology. Yes, there are reasons you might want to screen people or groups - for instance, women looking for safety. But surely the existing tools for such a problem are good enough? Instagram and Facebook groups? Or Reddit or Hacker News? The problem is people become chronically attached to these services and convince themselves they need them to function socially. Which is complete myth.

Not everyone lives close to a major city hub.

Also, depending on your interests, you may not want to meet people IRL right away. Talking to anonymous strangers is often a good way to learn more about sensitive subjects without taking too much risk.

But yeah, I'm with you, we rely too much on these services at the moment.

I've known many people who met through games. They offer something similar, in the sense that you can meet new people and learn about them.

The synchronous nature of multiplayer games leaves most of this expression implicit rather than explicit, though, so for some people it doesn't fit the same need. It's a kind of role-play.

I think most people are, for lack of a better metaphor, blood-sucking vampires for honest, explicit, and carefully-crafted communication. People are pleased when I offer it, but they struggle to offer it back, so I learn to not bother. Most relationships degenerate into expressing things better left unsaid, or being entirely superficial.

The problem is social, not technical. But we've created a subsection of the populace who can only see things through the technical. They go out with their hammers looking for nails.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and started to poke around with implementing something, I have more ideas but a bit of a chicken and egg problem, if people use it I'll keep working on it and trying to improve it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672734 - the end goal is very very very little/specific discoverability on the platform, even narrower than I have implemented today.

I think the challenge is that the addictive formats will naturally outcompete the healthy ones because they’re, well, addicting. They exert a force pulling people into their orbit and starving anything designed for healthier (less frequent) engagement.

I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.

id say maybe marketing? make a "healthy" social network and frame the other one as really bad for you?

I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?

I think we're talking fast food rather than nicotine.

We know that fast food is bad for us. But fast food companies keep putting the things that we like into it. So a lot of people, when tasting actual, real, good-for-you, food decide that they prefer fast food. Other people are aware that fast food is bad for them and prefer real food. It's a choice that we leave up to the individual. Unfortunately we then allow the fast food companies to advertise so they can affect the choice.

We don't really have an answer for this as a culture. We should make the fast food companies responsible for the harms they're causing, but we don't have a mechanism for that. We could stop them advertising, as some countries have done, but that starts a whole process of questions about what the government can and can't do that ends up in bad places.

I think you are right, it's more fast food, or maybe to extend the metaphor its like processed or ultra-processed food. Systematically prepared with lots of ingredients to give you something that is "food" but has been modified to amp up the sugar and salt to levels that make it basically impossible to stop eating. It also loses almost all of its nutritional value and is often cheaper than real food. Just like social media is cheap because its been infused with ads and data tracking sales. A "free range organic" social network would have to cost more.

We do have gov. mechanisms for controlling what can be sold as food so it seems plausible, but those only happened after we went through a period of time where companies would literally put poison into bread as a filler, and the whole rotten meat packing industry thing. Maybe we are in that phase now but even so i dont expect there to be enough of a social movement to control these things (and as you say... how is tricky)

still "real food" might not have the reach of mcdonalds, but it does exit and thrive. maybe there is market for a healthy network? based on the comments here and a lot of anecdotes, I suspect there is some latent demand.

I'm a Mastodon user, so yes, there is demand for "real food". But I am in no way a representative member of the mass market.

And the social media companies, who have essentially unlimited resources, would fight it tooth and nail

What we take for granted is it was always addicting, as far back in the 90s when we didn't call it social media. There was just a smaller privileged demographic frequenting it. That said, as much as it was the wild-west, it was probably "better" for us then than it is now.

I will admit, one thing the crowd attention model does exceptionally well is surface the best comments on content. Whether it's HN, Instagram, YouTube, etc... the top comments are usually the "best", depending on how best is defined in the given context. On the silly Instagram meme videos my algo serves up, the top comments are invariably hilarious, often funnier than the actual content, and as you scroll it's impressive how the ordering by like count matches hilarity quite well.

This works on platforms like HN, Less Wrong or niche subreddits, which

i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them) ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations)

Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree.

In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.

Right, hn is 50% collaborative filtering and 50% dang

HN and other social media sites are closer to 99% free labor, 1% paid labor, like dang. Free labor writing comments, blog posts, voting/moderating, posting videos and so on. Imagine if HN or Youtube had to pay people to generate all that content[1].

I think the only pay most get, is that you get to enjoy the site content. But in the case of Youtube, they slap so many ads in front of it that you often end up paying for this free labor content just to get rid of the ads. HN doesn't do Ad walls, but is more of a sales funnel for YCombinator and harvesting whatever value they can from the data, so not so intrusive.

[1] Youtube does pay some of the more popular content creators

> the top comments are invariably hilarious,

Sadly that is all that reddit is, now. Have a serious question? Expect multiple top replies to be some sort of [un]funny joke answer.

It's a wasteland and devalues the platform when everyone competes for Internet Points.

/r/aviation is just one example of being full of this crap.

Oddly enough, I don't see it as much in gaming subreddits, even the more generic ones.

reddit lacks consistent moderation and the worst is location based subreddits, where all dissenting takes are effectively hidden.

Yet one can imagine a limited set of filters that could in theory fix this:

    - eliminate obvious bots
    - eliminate low content / metoo / naysaying
    - eliminate memes
    - detect and promote high quality controversial posts equally to unilaterally upvoted ones

still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.

> still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.

This is why it's a good idea to make the switch to federated alternatives like Lemmy/Piefed. The more people who do this the more people will see it as a viable alternative, making it easier to get away from the ad-driven model of social media.

Retvrn to oldschool forums with chronological posting.

Excepting small communities: if you're looking for anything but humor, sort by best typically ruins the comments.

Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.

PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.

Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.

This is a way to tell if something is social media or attention media.

"Surfacing the best comments" is only a problem at scale. And attention media demands scale whereas your social circles break down at scale. Commerce sites (like Yelp or Amazon) also demand scale, so they also have a "surfacing the best" mechanism.

> depending on how best is defined in the given context

That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).

"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.

Slashdot let you rate content across multiple dimensions.

I see no specifics about the scoring in the wikipedia article, but a search revealed that it was a simple, single five star rating scale. The same as on Amazon, and formerly Netflix?

Speaking of instagram - i have found the ads sometimes incredibly helpful - sometimes exactly the thing i am looking for.

Facebook on the other hand has become too very bad.

I regularly see pretty bad/misinformed takes upvoted to the top though.

You have simply redefined “best” as “hilarious” “often funnier” or “hilarity”

Is it your intention to suggest that the highest possible form of commenting is humorous?

"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. "

It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.

Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me. For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years.

Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.

It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.

> Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form

Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.

If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.

However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.

> Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.

I think unfortunately for IG in particular, it evolved for a segment of people into a status flexing game more than genuinely keeping in touch.

> it evolved for a segment of people

Every social media platform has a lot of different segments of people using it for different reasons.

If one of your follows is posting content you don’t like, it’s so easy to unfollow them. If you feel obligated to follow for social reasons, Instagram even has convenient features to hide their posts so you can maintain the follow without seeing their content.

I’m not a heavy Instagram user but I’ve found it trivially easy to tailor my feed to the content I want to see (friends and family). That’s why I don’t find much interest in the pearl clutching about how some people post on the platform. I’m not there to judge and moralize about others.

>If one of your follows is posting content you don’t like, it’s so easy to unfollow them. If you feel obligated to follow for social reasons, Instagram even has convenient features to hide their posts so you can maintain the follow without seeing their content.

Let's ignore the things that upset us even more easily, while maintaining the required social appearances even harder!

Ah, such progress!

Speechless, except obscenely.

You can say porn. It's an adult website

10 years ago Instagram was great. I would see 10 posts from friends, 1 ad, and 0 posts from people I didn't know.

I gave up about 4 years ago as I was seeing 1 post from a friend, 3 ads, and then lots of random stranger posts.

My friends gave up too.

I have tons of private groups chats and share stuff with people I care about there.

You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/

Foto is good, provided you want a community exclusively made up of other photographers. If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option.

The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.

> If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option.

Wasn't people wanting reach what supposedly ruined Instagram in the first place? Seems like wanting it both ways if you want reach for yourself, but not for "influencers"

There was a time on Instagram when artists could grow their reach organically, on the merit of their work alone, but I don’t think that’s possible today without engaging in reels and positioning yourself as an influencer, which most artists I would imagine find abhorrent.

That feature has been monetized, you now have to pay to spam other users with sponsored content or something like that.

I mean I want to enjoy some wine, doesn’t mean I’m a hypocrite for disliking alcoholics and drunk driving.

It’s OK to believe both 1) social media can be a useful service for connecting with friends and interesting people, and 2) social media has feedback mechanisms that reward unpleasant and abusive behavior.

+1 for Foto. I was also using Instagram through a photography lens and fell off when it got totally unsuitable for that. Foto is pretty good so far.

Or Pixelfed, for a decentralized fediverse option.

For anyone who doesnt know: unlike in Facebook you can switch off/pause random strangers posts in your feed by going to "content preferences" in your settings. Of course being Meta this reenables every 30 days, but makes for a way cleaner feed in between.

I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.

It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.

> I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.

I agree with this 100%, on top of what you said remember that Instagram launched in 2010 as an iOS exclusive during a time where Apple was not particularly focused on camera quality, ignoring Android where there were numerous devices with substantially better cameras. IIRC someone was even selling one with an optical system in the ballpark of a low-end mirrorless. They also limited image resolution to 640 pixels square until 2015.

While number of active users still grows, one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.

“Who is left on Facebook besides dopamine junkies and bots?”

“I only use it in this limited circumstance”

You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.

> It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/20110...

> Take a 2002 Times/CNN poll on the eating habits of 10,000 Americans. Six percent of the individuals surveyed said they considered themselves vegetarian. But when asked by the pollsters what they had eaten in the last 24 hours, 60% of the self-described "vegetarians" admitted that [they] had consumed red meat, poultry, or fish the previous day.

> Six percent of the individuals surveyed said they considered themselves vegetarian

In any casual poll like this, every number has a large margin of error. When 6% of respondents select an answer, some of those were mis-clicks, people who misread the answers, or people who were just clicking through randomly. The latter happens a lot when bad UX means the only way to see the results is to take the poll.

So the more likely explanation is not that people were calling themselves vegetarian but also eating meat recently, it’s that around half of those reporting vegetarians were either mis-clicks or people blindly clicking things. It happens a lot in online polls.

> So the more likely explanation is not that people were calling themselves vegetarian but also eating meat recently, it’s that around half of those reporting vegetarians were either mis-clicks or people blindly clicking things. It happens a lot in online polls.

No, you're just making things up. For one thing, these are telephone polls, not online polls.

You say that, the the psychology today deliberately does not link to the study. It links to several studies but not the one they're writing about. The most they identify it as is a 2002 Times/CNN survey.

If you have the actual study please share it. Right now, I doubt the veracity of psychology today's claims.

In fact I've done more digging since posting this and the only other people talking about this survey is citing psychology today as their source. I can find no primary sources.

That poll is not published. But if you doubt the veracity of Psychology Today, it's easy enough to verify that Time/CNN sponsored it and published on the results: https://time.com/archive/6666859/should-we-all-be-vegetarian...

You can find other Time articles that cover their methodology, which involves paying a polling (or consulting) firm to run the poll.

> It links to several studies but not the one they're writing about.

Which one do you think is "the one they're writing about"? The Psychology Today piece opens with a description of the current state of affairs.

You might or might not have noticed that immediately after the mention of the Time poll, Psychology Today links to a survey published by the USDA finding that, among self-described vegetarians, 64% reported eating meat within the last 24 hours. Why do you doubt the Time poll?

So its a real survey but we're not allowed to see it? Can't see methodology can't see the actual numbers, can't see their margin of error or the questions.

I'm sorry, but science doesn't happen in the dark. "Trust me" isn't the path to data

I wonder what the breakdown between meat/poultry and fish was. I know it isn't the dictionary definition, but I think the common definition of "vegetarian" in the US includes people who only eat fish. I don't know anyone that uses "pescatarian" in conversation or identifies as that, even if it's accurate.

I get it, I hear that too, but it’s wrong.

Vegetarian = no meat, no chicken, no fish, no crustaceans, no dead animals, no meat/fish broth, no lard. Nothing derived from a dead animal. Or as my little sister used to ask: “did this have a face?”

But that’s what “vegetarian” means to me. I guess that’s a “strict vegetarian”?

Like humanity in general, there is a lot of variety. My dad has been a pescetarian for 30+ years, so I'm aware of the term and use it at least two or three times a year. Personally, I'm a flexitarian and eat a reduced animal flesh diet. I know quite a few vegetarians, and they don't all eat the same diet (one does eat eggs on a weekly basis and still calls himself a vegetarian, which is somewhat controversial according to the other vegetarians that I talk to). Most vegetarians I know don't consume fish or dairy.

Time didn't break down their results between meat/poultry and fish, but they did break them down between "red meat" and poultry/fish; 37% of vegetarians had eaten red meat within the last day.

I'm happy they've been able to build a $1,660,000,000,000 company on the back of me logging in once every two months, scrolling 3 posts, getting disgusted with slop, and closing the tab. Gives me hope that my harebrained ventures may also succeed!

I love the unabbreviated $1,660,000,000,000 lol It reminded me of Waxahatchee's

> You let me take my own damn car

> To Brooklyn, New York, USA

I don't buy it. You use it more than that - otherwise you'd just delete your account.

I've used my Facebook account once in the last decade, still keep it open as I have no reason to delete it and give up my parked identity (I share a name with a nationally recognizeable politician).

That is about right for me. I scoll a little longer but as soon as it changes from people I care to follow to slop I'm gone for a couple more months. there is value in following distant friends but it isn't worth hours per day of sorting through slop to find it. When it is only every month or two the non-slop still seems to rise to the top. (But God only knows what non slop they choose not to show me) I wish there was a way to block all 'so-and-so shared' as that is where most of the slop comes from. (Ads at least I can say is how they pay the bills and so I accept a few as non-slop)

So if someone doesn't use something they must delete instead of letting it rot?

I’m down to 3 hours a week of social media woot!

Does that include HN?

Absolutely lol - as a human in tech; I like to try and live like it is 1999 - and the 1999 where I wasn’t inside writing Perl but 1999 like when I was outside roller blading, skateboarding, bmxing, before I had a cell phone.

A very aggressive noprocrast could certainly get you there!

How long until Claude has noprocrast?

I keep mine alive a) to squat on the account for my identity, b) just because I know there are family members that will do posts/messages once in awhile instead of sending me a direct SMS, so I log in every few months

You overestimate the amount of a crap I give about cleaning up accounts I don't use! It also helps prevent someone from credibly impersonating me, which is something that has happened to a few people I know.

It's for messaging with old people. It's like having a telephone doesn't mean you're talking all day. It's for people to be able to contact you and vice versa.

> who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

Political activists, like a former partner of mine.

… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …

… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …

… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).

> I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery

There is some percentage of the world-wide population that would find interest in both ads simultaneously.

While true (you're not the first to suggest it, even), in the context of the other things they show, I think it is more likely to be an example of them not knowing which advertiser to pitch my eyeballs at, and less likely to be them identifying me as a member of this set.

I take poorly directed targeting advertisements as a performance indicator for how well my data privacy efforts are working. When the ad targeting has you dead to rights is when you need to worry.

To an extent, sure, but I think also a sign their analytics were never as good as they claimed.

For example, so far as I know my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?

> my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?

Probably so you can suggest it to your partner.

This. My wife and I can hardly buy each other surprise gifts because the targeted advertising gives us away every time.

Plot twist: all old folks were also on Facebook only to chat with other old folks. Once this fact was spotted, they all just moved to Discord.

The cognitive dissonance in some of these posts is strange.

> one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

> The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.

How are you confused about who still uses Facebook in one sentence and then immediately in the next sentence you describe yourself as a user and explain why it’s useful to you and the people you know.

Around me I see this usage:

- Older folks.

- People using marketplace

- People exchanging inter-personal tips and info: best stroller, contractor, etc.

Not saying FB is best for those things but it doesn’t seem dead at all.

The growth is across the family of products (inc Instagram and WhatsApp) not Facebook itself. Facebook itself is a zombie, and I don't believe they have a way to innovate out of it. I'm not going to predict the end of Meta, they have more than enough products, but agreed that it's actually quite difficult to understand who's really left.

There are some apparent niche communities both on Facebook and Instagram. Heavy metal and hardrock music fans is one group that hasn’t migrated anywhere else yet. I both play in a band and promote events, and both are still required in my geographic area to reach out.

it's like wondering why pubs or restaurants exists if I'm not visiting them everyday, but they do because they have other businesses (birthday parties, company events etc.). Look at Facebook for business.

Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.

It's not complicated. That random garbage increases advertising revenues. Maybe not from every user, but certainly in the aggregate.

Twitter followed the same way ad well. All political rubbish now

It’s the worse. The algo will feed anything that makes you cheer or infuriates you. No middle ground. And God forbid if you dig to some disunion and you “like” something or stop scrolling in the “wrong” tweet… you’ll be getting similar content for months.

It’s crazy how bad it has become.

I really think youtube did a good job there. No thirst trap, no outraging content. Praise to the youtube algorithm.

hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.

Too late. (And I don't do mobile anyway.)

I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.

and keep your kids away from it too before Mark’s robots get handsy

https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat...

Warning: truly disgusting

The adult engineers and adult managers responsible for such things should get the same treatment as any adult having such conversations directly. You can’t just say “wasn’t me, it’s the AI layer I built to do the abuse for me”. You’re actively choosing to abuse and groom children. Sick stuff.

The funny thing about the friends feed is that it highlights for me who is extremely active on the platform. People resharing stuff all the time. And, it's one of the few feeds you can't endlessly scroll through. It will tell you to "check back later" once you get to 3-4 days of updates. No money in showing people their friends feeds, so why let them endlessly scroll.

The amount of shady stuff Facebook has tried with their app over the years has resulted in it, and other Meta apps, being banned from my devices.

Everyone wants to be TikTok. The generated feed is much better than following "creators"/influencers.

> These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone

They clearly work for advertisers, and that's all that matters.

It's literally what got me off Facebook for good. I used it less and less over the years, but would still log in once every couple weeks or so. At least it was always 100% content posted by friends or friends of friends, or at least something that was interacted with by someone I know. Then it seems like overnight they flipped a switch and it was 10% content from people I know and 90% completely irrelevant slop. I logged in one more time after that, and then never again.

For many people, the alternative would be that their feeds are completely empty since a lot of folks don’t post any updates on Facebook really.

People seek novelty. Real social networks do not change as fast as that.

It’s funny how everyone experiences their own Eternal September. Remember that there are 1.5 billion Indians. They’re on FB too and influencing the algorithm with what they want to see.

I’m quite literally experiencing a physical reaction whenever I need to browse some algorithmic timeline. Even YouTube, what used to be a couple of related videos is now a wall full of “recommendations” - the unskippable ads on every video are more relevant than the actual videos…

Mastodon and related (for me Loops mainly) are a breath of fresh air and I wish more people can (re)learn to enjoy that.

YouTube recommendations are very well tuned for me. You need to mark videos "not interested" and downvote stuff you don't actually like, as well as stopping videos when you've decided you're not interested. This and other aspects WILL improve your recommended feed. So if your recommended feed sucks, well that's on you there bud, you can influence it completely.

Do you use youtube intending to be drawn into watching things you never intended to watch? I don't want a feed but the people operating these sites do not care that they are destroying people's time. Go to twitter, click on "following". Next time you sign in, somehow it's on "For you" (the algorithmic feed).

Thankfully on Youtube I can completely disable recommendations on the site and I use it purely as a source of information, not as a dopamine addiction funnel.

I just get the same videos recommended over and over. I liked it when the YT feed would recommend stuff new and different i might find interesting. Now its just hyperoptimized to get me to click on ads.

IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time.

To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks

> the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time

I guess you joined a crappy instance. The Explore feed on my instance is freakin' awesome and full of a constant stream of interesting and enjoyable posts by cool people. Mastodon isn't very optimal when you join the biggest instances on the network (like mastodon.social or similar). The tech is best experienced with invite-only communities of people who agree on a basic set of standards for their social experience.

This feels like the most important comment here. Do other Mastodon users feel the same? The OP Madden me want to try Mastodon.

yeah the instance timeline is basically the same trap with a smaller corpus. the only thing that consistently avoids this is RSS -- you chose the sources, there's no explore, no trending, no algorithmic sidebar. maybe the "social" part was always the problem.

What extensions do you recommend?

I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me.

Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.

> Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.

How do you discover new people? I'd say some people I followed I discovered them thanks for the feed

Suggestions from friends? The network of people even without a feed is extremely vast on its own. You'd be surprised how far "a friend of a friend" can go.

Why do I need to discover new people? If I like your podcast or your art or whatever, I will find you on the platform. Other than that, I only want to follow friends and family

This might be controversial. Please disagree with me.

When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.

So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.

"We deserve it" is the tldr I gather from you here, just like people addicted to opiates are ultimately responsible for the way those drug companies systematically set them up for that, right?

I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.

I appreciate your comment, and how you argued your disagreement. Yet I think you missed something in GPs post.

First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on.

I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted.

Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature.

Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things.

I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.

Capitalism at work…

That’s nonsense. Nobody asked for algorithmic feed pushing schizo agenda on you.

Of course we did. We all switched from early social media sites that didn't employ such algorithms to those that did, and when new social media platforms came around we progressively moved to more algorithmic ones. Hell half the reason I switched from myspace to facebook was the opportunity to do all the facebook quizzes which were just "let's see how much information I can feed the algorithm". We all want a steady stream of content we find personally interesting and engaging, why wouldn't we? Our issue with most of these sites is when the algorithm fails to give us what we want, and we complain "I didn't ask to see this" but the fact is we are asking to see something, and we receive it often enough to stay on these platforms.

> Of course we did. We all

Speak for yourself. I was quite content with the separation of social life and video platforms/engagement media. And don't make it sound like poor Facebook was forced to invent algorithm because of users.

I think your experiment was valid, even if anecdotal. This article from January 2009 was talking about the phenomena of what it actually meant to have friends on facebook. Are you a "loser" or a "social slut"? This was at least a few years before most of the algorithms that we perceive as dangerous and enshittifying became core to the platform. The specific study they referenced (new link below) argued that there is genetic components in how we perceive our social networks.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/200901/faceb... https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0806746106

Where FB and Instagram are to blame is not just being aware of the psychological impact but amplifying it make it worse, especially onto a teen audience that has no capability of distinguishing the real world from social media. To them, it's the exact same. Your online social circle may be all you have in real life, not to mention the cyber bullying, unrealistic body standards and all the other awful parts that come when you gamify and reward capturing people's attention.

I won't deny that individuals are also responsible to guard themselves and especially parents, but these platforms have been accused (and are currently in US court) over the fact that they knew about the addictive potential of their platforms and made no safeguards over improving that. As a platform owner, you are responsible for all aspects of its success and failures, its highs and lows.

> They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.

Imagine the government saw the fentanyl crisis and started making fentanyl to support the habits of its citizens.

Not every single trend humans take on should be encouraged. We can be dumb as individuals, as well as collectively. At least in bursts.

Between the history of crack cocaine in inner cities, safe injection sites and the current trajectory of American governance, I’m flummoxed by your incredulous posture here.

I imagine this is not the first time you've been flummoxed given the take you've just presented.

I myself started making the same distinction when I talk about these things in English, except it's "social media" vs "social networks". Though I have no idea how to make that distinction in Russian, social "media" never caught on as a term there.

An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.

Sure you can. You can not post political things on social networks. They're not doing any good anyway. They're not changing anyone's mind. They're not providing depth or width to the discussion. I don't say this to be insulting, but rather a realist.

My point is that I just want to be able to discuss any topic with my followers without self-policing lest a bunch of anonymous accounts butts into the conversation and completely derails it.

What you're probably looking for is closer to a closed discussion group or mailing list than "social media", which is presently universally-readable, algorithmically-targeted, feed-based, advertising-supported, and increasingly, saturated with AI slop (which itself has replace clickbait and ragebait).

Which reminds me of Kitman's Law: Pure drivel tend to drive off the TV screen ordinary drivel.

From Marvin Kitman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Kitman#Television_criti...>

Cited in Arthur Bloch, *Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Things Go Wrong!" (1977) p. 30.

<https://www.scribd.com/document/672553711/Arthur-Bloch-Murph...>

I want my posts universally-readable and universally-interactable (that's why I don't like the idea of locking my accounts). I also want to be able to explore the social graph — looking at who follows who, what that friend of a friend posts, etc. It all forms an integral part of what social networks are.

What I absolutely do not want is the platform having any of its own agency. I want a social network that ideally works as a dumb pipe. I especially don't want my content surfaced in front of the kinds of people who would've never found it through their own exploration.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I have a lot of faith in the fediverse.

My evolved view is that there's a time and place for various types of interactions. That's after being a long-time fan of universal readability.

Truth though is that today's Internet is vastly different from that experienced in the 1980s (when I first came online), '90s, aughts, or even the teens. Scale is a huge piece of this, though broadband, mobile devices, advertising, attention merchants, clickbait, and AI have all had their impacts. The Internet (or proto-Internet) of the 1990s and earlier was very limited in access, with soft-but-imposing barriers to entry (selective research universities, some government agencies, some tech firms), which made the experience both "open" and closed. Yes, there was exposure to a large audience, particularly as contrasted to immediate physical space or mass media of the time (print, including early small-scale copiers, amplified audio, radio, television, and telephones). But the total online population would be considered a minuscule social network by current standards --- a few thousands to a few millions of souls in the 1980s and 1990s.

I continue to use some smaller networks today (HN, Mastodon, Diaspora*), and find that they tend to retain at least some of the feel of the forums I was familiar with in the 1980s and 1990s: small, intentional, generally motivated. Ironically, their limited size and the fact that those who are there want to be there is something of a feature. A significant problem isn't so much people leaving as dying, which seems to happen with regularity. (An older population amplifies this, though I've noted previously that mortality at FB/Google scale is likely on the order of tens of thousands of accounts daily.)

The platforms I mention also largely lack agency, which as you note is quite refreshing. I'll note that HN is somewhat an exception, but it's mediated mostly by humans (member flags, moderator actions), as well as some automated rules, though those are largely guided by HN's mission of "intellectual curiosity" rather than attention-mongering.

Factors other than scale alone include broadband (enabling graphics, audio, video, and interactive content, all of which have considerable downsides), mobile devices (making for more distracted and far less nuanced discussion, as well as quite brief responses contrasted with physical keyboards), and the pernicious first and higher-order effects of advertising, manipulation, algorithms, AI, and the like.

I've toyed with the notion of a set of interrelated scopes, some limited and personal, some more widely open, though arranging that formally and as part of a designed system has yet to emerge. I have hopes for that though.

There's also the distinction between a pure social graph and a highly-curated specific discussion or forum. I've tried the latter from time to time with stunningly good results, especially at modest size (< 50 participants generally).

(This comment, as most of mine, was composed at a keyboard, and edited several times.)

Twitter has settings for who can reply to tweets, which are configurable per post. You can make it so that only people you follow can reply.

Why do you assume that there needs to be a purpose other than discussing a topic that you're interested in?

Politics is a complex topic. If you want to learn more, social media is not the way to do it. Well reasoned books and essays are. If you want to convince others of your positions, social media is not the way to do it. Personal relationships in real life are.

What's left?

Again, you seem to insist on an ulterior motive, completely discounting the value or pleasure of conversation. In contrast, reading is a solitary activity. Have you heard of book clubs? People read books, and then they get together to discuss the books.

Hacker News itself is all about reading articles, and then discussing the articles with others. "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I still think it's worth reflecting which of the toxic patterns we want to, or don't want to reproduce on non-commercial networks like mastodon. Infinite scroll, quote reply, the like button... all these aren't neutral, and discussions were rightly heated about introducing them.

You're so right... Some of these patterns are, to their very core, parts of what make these social media bad.

https://www.deceptive.design/

I'm surprised there's not more discussion here and in general about symmetric- vs. asymmetric-relationship networks. Facebook worked in the beginning because relationships were symmetric and there was no concept of getting "follows" -- friendships are modeled after real life ones, where the friendship is between two people.

I can see why the big networks moved away from that: pushing "content" has a lot more friction when relationships are symmetrical. What I don't understand is why there is no upstart trying to bring that back.

The problem is obvious: People spend much more attention on cat videos from strangers than on their own friends' posts. Ads turn this attention into money.

What does that mean exactly, how do you see that manifesting itself? Would we even be aware of these networks, sounds like email

Not email; social networking. Symmetrical just means the relationship is the same from both sides. Imagine a two-way "friendship" relationship (old-school Facebook) vs. a one-way "following" relationship (more recent Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc.).

A followers graph is much more stable. You can have 1m followers but you can't have 1m friends

The friendship link on the site would need to go both ways. Request and accept. There is no concept of “Follow”.

In addition, I’d say limit the number of “friends” a person can have. Maybe cap it at 200 (Dunbar's number plus a little extra). This eliminates celebrity, news, and meme accounts. It also eliminates people playing the silly game of seeing who can get the most followers or bragging about follower counts.

These are your actual friends, who also consider you a friend. Even if a celebrity were to join, the site would be useful for sharing with actual friends, not their fans or casual acquaintances.

Facebook started out similarly, but I don’t think it ever had a friend cap. I remember some sorority girls try to get me to make a Facebook account around 2004/5, because they had a contest to see who could get the most friends. I thought this was stupid and said no. Since this happened almost instantly after launch, I think those friend limits are important to make people use it for actual friends and not a popularity contest. Facebook went the opposite way, leaned into it, and created the Follow option. It was all downhill from there.

Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see.

As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me.

Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.

Facebook’s best feature, at its peak, was that everyone was there. My friends and family aren’t on Mastodon, and likely never will be. If the goal of a social network is to connect with people I know in real life, rather than follow various Internet personalities, it fails at this for me.

This isn’t Mastodon’s fault, but it’s the reality of the situation.

I’m not on Facebook anymore due to what the site has become, but I found the same emptiness on Mastodon, as my friends aren’t there. I’m not influential enough to get everyone to move to a new platform just for me.

When I joined Mastodon, I ended up following a bunch of developers, but ultimately felt like a fly on the wall to a friend group I wasn’t part of, as a lot of these people had been real-life friends or co-workers. I guess if your friend group is all geeky enough to join Mastodon, it can work. I have very few real-life connections that fall into that bucket, which I think is the case for most people.

The people I know who still use social media seem more than happy with Meta’s products. The others just stopped using these things all together and don’t seem to care about finding an alternative.

I actually find people who are not already my friends to be way more interesting and to say something truly novel for me.

Yup, feeling the same way. Mastodon needs to leverage a friends graph somehow

Unrelated to the topic described in the blog itself, I overall like the theme of `susam.net`. The name itself reminded me of a sesame seed in Turkish for a while. (I think author had recently mentioned one of the recent posts that they wanted to get susam.com but that was already taken by a Turkish company selling some spices...)

The content (that shows up in HN) is also good. Since I am on mobile device, I cannot tell the exact font used, but seems like Georgia to me. While https://github.com/susam/susam.net hosts the actual source code of the website.

Another remark: Would be really nice to have a same theme adaptation for BearBlog and similar places.

Agreed! I thought this site was generated in Hugo for some reason. Never knew Lisp was used until I saw that GitHub you linked.

The real social network is the group chat / friend group you already have. Everything else is algorithmic brainrot with some kind of "friends list" for "legitimacy".

The problem isn't the feed, it's that people actually use "social" networks instead of just talking to actual friends. Just close the apps, lol

FB is still a social network, but seemingly only when you use groups. And you actively need to moderate those. Public pages, and things like that? AI/bots and ads wasteland.

Any other platforms like Mastodon which are doing things well - are you guys on lemmy?

Lemmy is mostly a clone of reddit with a lot less people on it. That is to say it works fairly well and doesn't yet seem filled with bots, but its got the same issues as Reddit since its based on the same design.

What were the main issues of reddit according to you?

I think one of the main flaws of Reddit is that upvotes that happen on a user's front page and upvotes that come from 'within' the subreddit are treated equal (at least as far as I know).

It degrades the "does this post fit the subreddit's theme/topic?"-signal and makes the average user work against the moderation team rather than supporting them.

This was exacerbated when they started showing posts from subreddits that the user is not even subscribed to on the front page rather than just ranking posts of subscribed subreddits.

I've never heard this raised before but its an interesting idea. Lemmy/Piefed are pretty open to features and changes. At the moment this wouldnt be a good idea because a lot of communities are to small to be browsing specifically but as the platform grows I can see this being a really good change to the algorithm .

The idea that community votes will result in the best content floating to the top is flawed, because what happens is the most popular content gets upvoted and not necessarily the most insightful or pertinent. This effect is magnified as the network or communities grow and welcome more a more general audience. The most prominent commentary is often useless jokes, memes, reactions etc. Slashdot, HN, lobsters have similar flaws with different strategies to overcome them.

Yep - true I do see things being easily gamed but then also lemmyverse does seem to be a personal favourite now - i hope things don't change down the line.

StumbleUpon sent you to content that was thumbed up by people with a profile (of thumbing up) similar to yours.

It was a good idea, but it seems to have withered.

I'll answer - too many bots and most communities don't demand high quality comments. I still use it though - it's my only social network (although I don't think it's really a social network since I have no durable social connections with anybody there and I presume most other people don't either).

Reddit does give a lot of value - despite the shortcomings.

This reminded me of this video from a more optimistic time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Thank you for posting this. Despite being an old video, I had never come across it, and it almost made me tear up. It showed me the hope that I wished the web would be, despite it never realizing that ambition, with businesses that only pursued engagement metrics, and governments who saw value in vassalizing tech companies to pursue their political goals.

The final transition happened with the death of online forums. I still miss those dearly. I've met extremely interesting and competent people with a true desire to interact with passionate peers. They thought me how to ask for and give advice, how to express opinions in public, the value of growing a community around common interest, and the joy of laughing and getting angry on the OT section.

My family has moved to group chats. It's great.

Same here. My father is 1 of 8 children and my mom is 1 of 12 children. I have tons of aunts, uncles, 30 first cousins, and they have lots of kids that I know as well. It's lots of birthday pics, graduations, weddings, vacations, and especially when some of us get together.

I assume you mean SMS?

"Attention Media" is the perfect definition of what those platforms are, the term "social network" is deceiving

When our first child was born, we wanted to share photos with family. So I set up a Google photos album and shared it with parents, aunts, grandparents, etc.

It supports general chat plus comments and reactions linked to posted media. It's exactly what I wish social networks became... Something like the "circles" idea that Google abandoned years ago.

Now with several thousand images and videos and comments we're hitting the limits of what Google seems to have designed for with however shared albums sync.

This community feature though is the only reason I haven't self hosted all this stuff...

My only "social network" I'd say is WhatsApp, only people I have added I can see their posts(updates) and since you need their phone I only give it to people that are close to me.

>It feels closer to how social networks used to work originally. I hope it stays that way.

Is there something about it (it's architecture or the company behind it) that is fundamentally different than other social networks? If not, it is doomed to follow them all eventually.

I think the fact that there is no one company behind it helps a great deal. Monetising user attention is simply incompatible with the architecture of the fediverse - even Meta couldn’t twist it into that and eventually decided to give up.

i find this sorta thing very interesting because not only have i never experienced the 'early' social networks as described (too young), i've never even considered using one of these sites as described - why would i voluntarily forgo pseudonymity on the public internet? I don't think this was fully a generational thing, i remember being genuinely baffled when i discovered my peers/classmates were using their real names, posting pictures/videos of themselves, and interacting with each other on these public platforms; wasn't internet safety 101 "Don't Do That?"

I have never used mastodon, but why is it so much better than X (twitter)? I also follow a small group of people on X that I find interesting and I get a chronological feed of their posts in the “following” tab. I know that the “For You” tab abyss is right there. I opened it once, was shocked by all the crap the system assumed I would like, and never went back. The good thing is that nobody forces me to use it. I am perfectly fine in the “following” feed and not exposed at all to recommender systems trying to grab my attention. Only the ads in the feed annoy me - and they are so bad that I wonder how X makes any money.

> I get a chronological feed of their posts in the “following” tab

Which is broken for 2 weeks now. The small drop down to change it to "most recent" have been disappeared for a lot of people both on web and iOS/Android so you see ALL tweets from accounts you follow, even replies you don't care about.

Everything evolved into a marketing platform right now. It is innately driven by the human desire for power, control and greed. There are very humans that recognize it and act in beneficial ways when power is given to them. With the rest, we get what we have right now. That’s normal thing with humans. We want to market to others, show our power, and we want to be marketed by powerful hoping we will become like them.

I was active on FB, Insta, Goggle +, and Orkut during their early days. My brother and I were the first few people from our circle to have these social media account.

Looking back, the incentives have changed. Back then, there was some openness, rawness, and genuine curiosity about people and things. And of course, the signal-noise ratio was much higher.

Influencer culture ruined everything, consciously or subconsciously. I still use Insta for photography. But, it's a sinking ship. Insta could have made a different app for reels.

My mental model for all of this is that my attention is valuable. I can choose where to spend my attention and it should cost something to these platforms and their advertisers to command that attention. Unfortunately, these platforms have figured how to lower their cost by triggering lizard brain reflexes. The best solution is to simply remove any pathways they have to command that attention: uninstall apps and turn off all notifications. My attention is more under my control in this way.

Substack has been a welcome alternative in this space as well. It reminds me of my experience on web blogs back in the 2000s. A real sense of community and substance.

I struggle to see anything "social" about social media. Looking at short videos of others and ads is anything but social activity.

The problem is that people who don't know the history of the internet just call everything with user posts "social media". Web 2.0 has some overlap with social networks. But it is still a different concept. And social media is a meaningless term at this point.

It’s handheld, portrait television

Yea since the old FB the dial of human/friends posts vs human attention harvesting posts & ads has been slowly changing so that users wouldn't notice it immediately.

Modern large platforms are no longer social networks in the original sense, but media platforms optimized for attention. Real social networks are characterized by the fact that users themselves determine whose content they see.

> Attention Media

I like this and will use it from now on, reserving "social network" only for Usenet, Mastodon and IRC and such.

But which social networks aren’t attention media these days, and will they remain thus after a few more investment rounds?

friction is underrated as an attention design pattern. blocking feels punitive, friction just makes you notice the reach instead of being on autopilot. not saying it solves algorithmic feeds, but the pause before opening apps changes the math for most people

Though that's where a lot of people get their news, ironically.

as someone who makes video content, the attention media framing is spot on. the platforms don't care about your craft or your audience relationship, they care about watch time metrics.

what's wild is how this distorts the creation process itself. you end up optimizing for the algorithm instead of for quality. every creative decision becomes "will this get recommended" instead of "is this good." i've found that the best content comes from having strong human creative oversight and not just chasing whatever the algo rewards this week.

the no-code tools that promise to automate content creation for these platforms are even worse -- they just produce generic slop that feeds the attention machine. you need to actually care about what you're making, and that means stitching together your own pipeline where you control the decisions.

The title of the article is arguing semantics. Like it or not, the term “social media” is what we use to describe scroll apps like TikTok.

The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else.

I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.

Social Networks ⊆ Attention Media.

The problem is that a functional social network is a bad business model.

A chronological feed has a "stop" point. You catch up, you feel satisfied, and you close the app. Meta’s revenue depends on you never feeling caught up. That’s why the "Feeds" tab is buried three menus deep—it’s there so they can say it exists, but hidden so you stay stuck in the algorithmic slop.

Even if they made it the default, you’re still left with the trust issue. You aren’t the customer; you’re the data being mined. At this point, the brand is probably too far gone for a simple UI tweak to fix the underlying rot.

Recently I realized something. Back in the day in the early 2000s people were talking about this thing called social media that didn't really exist but would be the future. (That and micro transactions) I never got what was so hot about it.

Looking back I am realizing that the techno elite did not coopt something that used to be nice. This whole narrative control and private information funnel was designed from the beginning with what it became today already on their crosshairs. We just went through the phases and ate all of it up.

Good news! Microtransactions really were the future.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/05/30/noony-nokuni

They used to be hung up on the fact that the transaction cost of a microtransaction (5 cents to read the new york times for a day) was the show stopper. Boy did they solve that issue. :)

Why won’t their stock crash and burn already???

I wonder why the author did not mention bluesky as his critisism is on the timeline algo and bluesky allows to create custom timelie algos

> I stumbled upon Mastodon and it reminded me of the early days of Twitter. Back in 2006, I followed a small number of folks of the nerd variety on Twitter and received genuinely interesting updates from them.

Personally, I never got into Twitter. I'm on the Fediverse now, and check in on it occasionally, but it never draws me in. I don't connect with people on that kind of platform.

Some forums work for me, mostly because there's a small enough number of participants, or, importantly, there's a place I can go to read content from specific people. Even if we don't become friends (or IRL friends), I still feel like I know them to some degree. The people matter.

Twitter / Fediverse / Bluesky seem to be about topics, and as such, I lose interest quickly. Because no matter how much I like photography, birding, cars, board games, computers, software, etc... I don't really care what the masses have to say on those topics. I want to know about Alice, Bob, and Carol have to say on things that interest me.

Early Facebook was, as described in the article, people you knew, who held some sway in your life, sharing their life events (however inane), or their opinions. I care more about that than I care about a celebrity or complete stranger declaring some thing as good or bad or interesting.

But the network effect was always going to matter. LiveJournal/Xanga/MySpace all had some network effect where some of your friends were there, and you wanted to be there, too. But Facebook figured out monetization, and they still seem to hold the greatest network effect despite how terrible the experience has become. I can post photos there, and dozens will respond, all people I know. If I post in literally any other place, I will get less than dozens of responses, and almost none of them will be from people I know.

There is no new place like early Facebook, or even current Facebook. But of course what I want is a place where I can share with the people I know, and no one has to pay for it, but the monetization doesn't drive the service towards enshittification. This isn't a very realistic desire. Discord has been the closest for me, where I have dozens of contacts in a shared space, and very frequently get interaction with people I know about things I care about. But it also feels like enshittification of Discord is also inevitable even though there's a paid subscription option.

Let’s not forgot the emerging deity-esque “content creator” and “influencer”. A far stretch from the humble “vlogger” or “YouTuber”. The latter two sound like a jolly guy with a camcorder and a backpack.

I remember when social networks were at the very least portrayed in the interest of “connecting people from around the world”.

I’ll often hear something along the lines of these services being engineered to pin us all against each other. Jaron Lanier’s “ Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” likes to claim this, but I never see any actual evidence.

Either way, when I visit social media site these days, people are definitely nastier. There’s more snark, a need to ridicule others for not knowing niche little factoids. “You still use tea bags?” something something cast iron pans and dish soap.

There’s a lot more capitalizing through hoarding trivial information. They know something you don’t, and they love it.

It’s like joining an MMORPG and realizing you have to put more time in to reach the same level as everyone else.

Luckily, the EU is tackling the most impactful feature — the infinite scroll "slot machine".

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagr...

The failure of Mastodon to thrive even when Twitter itself became very vulnerable unfortunately tells me that people actually want this pathologically bad behaviour. Lots of friends who slagged Twitter and Facebook etc for its anti-social aspects turned around and tried Mastodon for a few days and then came back to me with a "there's nothing happening there" and it's "boring" etc because they were fundamentally expecting to be force fed entertainment just like Twitter. Lots of comments on hackernews to that effect, too.

That's fine. I never liked Twitter anyways, but I do think it's interesting how two faced we can be about this.

The engagement hackers found a market and met it. Not good, but true.

I would tend to agree with this, I vibidly remember when facebook had a feed on the top right that told you what your friends were doing, playing games, listening to music on soundcloud, etc.

That was social media, not whatever the hell we have today... it's antisocial and attention grabbing.

This post has convinced me to give Mastodon another try.

Eh, watch as HN comments slowly become exactly the thing you don’t want to participate in.

they try hard to obfuscate this

That's why I am so glad to only be on Mastodon these days, the true social network, without any rich sociopath billionare or some vulture crapitalist behind it. That keeps Mastodon form becoming the attention/propaganda platforms that all these for profit platforms really are.

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Sure, the modern Twitter/X feed is not like the original reverse chronological timeline but the latter is still available right next to it. Maybe it's the power of the default but I find the algorithmic feed much better.

The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok.

The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.

I find the algorithmic feeds literally horrible on twitter. Algorithmic feeds only work with video content/short form I feel like