With old chat programs and forums I was talking to real people over a long span of time. On the modern platforms I’m just talking to the internet. It feels very different.
In 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years. We don’t talk as often anymore, but for many years we talked everyday. I probably talked to him more than anyone else I knew for a good 5-10 years. I don’t feel like that stuff happens when people are just blasting out memes.
That sort of connection making is happening in varying degrees of private discord servers today. You join the public discord it, you spend time with strangers, if you're likeable you eventually get told about less advertised public servers, or invite-only servers, and you go down a bit of a rabbit hole of loosely interconnected communities. Eventually you find communities that you settle into.
Good filters make for good communities. 20 years ago, being on the internet at all was pre-selecting for certain types of people. That's basically not true anymore. Today, the filters end up being invite systems.
I guess that’s sort of what happened with the forums. I was on a decently large one and eventually became a mod. Then a bunch of the mods and admins had their own smaller forums. I ended up being an admin on several of those. Over the years there were migrations and things.
However, nothing was “private”. Some of the smaller forums still had members who never found their way to the bigger hub forum.
I’ve never used Discord and the idea of starting that process and everything being like prohibition era speakeasies is more than I want to deal with at this stage of life. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always had the impression that Discord was for voice chat? I liked that forums didn’t required everyone to be online at the same time. Fun when they were, but still useful when they weren’t.
Discord is more analogous to IRC than voice chat. There's a constant set of channels/chats where people are chatting and then also voice/video channels.
This is what I quite like about Mastodon, since it's not inserting random users' posts into my feed (only people I follow, and then posts that they boost) you tend to have that experience much more like the chat and forums of old where you find a reasonably small group of active users who you mostly interact with.
Of course, 'influencer' kind of people tend to not like it because it's a lot harder to amass a huge following, but I'm fine with that!
One of the interesting things about how people socialize is that we tend to be less honest with those we're closest to, and more honest with people who have no impact on our bottom line.
Counter-intuitively this means we end up having better conversation with strangers than our closest friends and family. Which makes platforms like Facebook a lost cause for connection.
I've had the same experience. Many of my best friends have been found on forums.
In the past reputation matters. Accounts like "Endwokeness" would never work, because people would just make fun of him. "Why is he so obsessed with trans people?" "Does he have a job?". His whole persona would become an inside joke. You also can't just spam low effort opening post, because it will just be removed, so if he for example wants to hate on gay people he needs to write whole essays about it.
One thing that often gets overlooked is that 25 years ago, “the Internet” was essentially educated people from North America and Western Europe, with everyone else being a rounding error.
This made it very easy to connect on a level beyond just memes. Users had a lot in common personally, and that’s why they were able to engage on a personal level.
Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community. Beyond that lie vast cultural chasms that make any deeper interactions nearly impossible.
> Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community
I've always wondered how sure of this are we actually? Particularly now in the age of easy bot activity too. I buy that a significant % of population is online but I'd hazard at a decent guess that the majority are passively online content rather than actively engage in it so how truly online is the world in a representative sense?
It feels to me that you still have to be a bit non-average to interact online in much the same way as it used to be
I'm thinking out loud with this one, but memes tend to be a comedic way to relate to the topic in my eyes. Comedy tends to be lower friction, so it stands to reason memes would be a good shibboleth for an online community.
Now, in the modern age, you have 'creators' who make the memes and are the original posters, but you also have easy mechanisms for sharing already-created content. Sharing content is _SOMEWHAT_ akin to the original meme creation since you're putting skin in the game and standing behind the meme's sentiment. Akin to wearing liberty spikes to show you're part of a punk community. You didn't create 'liberty spikes,' you're just representing them. In using the sharing button, I think average people can interact online in a much different way than it used to be.
At some point in the 2010s, there was a definite shift towards social media and search engines started to narrow their results. The internet of twenty five years ago was a lot more fun.
It's hard to put my thoughts into words. Those who are tired of social media are those that are not addicted to the never-ending dopamine injections (i.e. doomscrolling).
I don't have kids yet but I hope "social" media will be banned until at least 18 years old before they're born.
The human brain is wired to be lazy; it's much easier to doomscroll and get your dopamine than spend 40 hours reading a book. We want to be fit but we don't take the time to exercise; we want the candy but don't tolerate any effort to get it whatsoever.
It's always been the case during history but our ancestors didn't have access to those kinds of addicting tools.
It's an anecdote but I have long hair and there's a period where you cannot get a good haircut (too long to have a "short" haircut and too short to have a "long" haircut); I know some people who couldn't put up with the few months it takes to grow into a good-looking style and cut their hair back to short. Life is not Instagram, you cannot change something instantly. Everything that is worth the "candy" takes time. A hell of a lot of time. Of which we're losing track.
Very badly worded but maybe it resonated with some of you.
Algorithmic curation is something I'm trying to avoid in all cases. I think it's not highlighted enough. The fact that youtube shows an infinite number of videos to choose from does its own sort of harm in a way that the specifics of the content cannot.
When the internet was brand new, it was very novel that I had to go out seeking the content and could look at it any time I wanted. It was different than TV. TV was enjoyed passively and you just watched what they showed you. The early internet was so much better it's hard to describe. It was a purely active experience. Algorithmic curation is a return to the TV model. Someone else decides what you should watch, and you passively observe it materialize in front of you. Try this for an experience. log out of youtube, install some filters in uBlock Origin which prevent all algorithmic results (even on the home page and in search results) and then try to think of what you'd like to watch. For some of you out there, I'll bet this feels like exercising an old, unused muscle. You used to do this kind of querying all the time. But scan your mind. What possibilities are there to view? It feels emptier than it should.
Agree. I also use Unhook/Brave to remove all recommendations plus my DeCasino to grayscale social media and put a clock over. I only watch subscriptions - clicking from subscriptions bar, not the feed. My phone is fully grayscale, no notifications and only has Brave with custom content filter that removes the main feed as well. It's almost impossible to watch anything on my phone but a video from a direct link. Sounds kind of crazy, but it's finally sustainable.
As a result, I have zero curated feeds, and I only follow people that I chose and started taking more word-of-mouth suggestions. I've noticed that I got much more interested in politics and my internet time is now all meaningful. Algorithms do steer us, they aren't neutral.
I also tried setting my phone to grayscale, but it takes me significantly longer to do useful things, as some UIs are harder to distinguish without color. Have you found a workaround for this?
I did this, and yeah google maps is all but unusable without color, that and the camera takes some getting used to.
I'm on an iPhone, but what ended up doing was creating a shortcut that toggles the phone to grayscale and back, and then having two automations, one for when I open any of the apps I actually want color in (maps, camera, photos, etc) that toggles grayscale off and then another automation to toggle grayscale back on when I close any of those same apps.
The option is located in Settings > Accessibility >Display & Text Size > Color Filters
It isn't perfect, but it works most of the time (I also added the shortcut to the back of the home screen so if it is off or I need one-off color I can just toggle it manually).
Wow, that’s really insightful. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but avoiding algorithmic feeds is exactly what I’ve been doing for the last few years. I mostly use RSS to read news, and I avoid browsing Reddit as much as I can, other than reading posts on specific things that I find through a search engine.
For a time last year I kind of fell off the wagon, and found myself wanting to browse Reddit constantly, even though I know it’s mostly repetitive junk, rage bait, and memes. It took me a concerted effort over a couple of weeks to break free again.
My spider sense goes off in the same way when I find myself looking at Apple News, TikTok, Youtube, etc.
I think you’re absolutely right that the common thread there is the algorithmic curation.
I recently had a baby. My wife and I are not on socials but wanted to share pics with close friends and family, so we created an iCloud shared album. We only realized that these shared albums had likes and comments once someone asked us if we had seen that my grandmother had left a comment.
I think the shared album is almost the perfect form of social media. We invited about 20 people who we all know well. This “community” has a singular and shared purpose of being interested in our baby. Content is presented in chronological order. There are no ads, no other content, not even suggested posts or “you may also like…”. If you want to see more you just swipe to the next picture and perhaps read what other people you know have to say about the funny face our child is making.
The author observes that social media creates bubbles and that people are tired of socializing. In some ways the shared album
is the ultimate bubble and provides only a very limited way for our community to socialize. Nonetheless many of our friends, also twenty-somethings, have told us how lovely it is to interact with us and each other on such a limited platform.
I think—well, maybe I hope—that the future of social media is “hyperlocal” like this. It will not be as easy to meet people and find new perspectives, sure, but it will let the internet serve its purpose of connecting people who are physically far away but still very much in each others thoughts.
Social media has long stopped being an actual social outlet and is filled with either bots or influencer types trying to be the loudest voice shouting into the void. I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting. That no longer exists anywhere on the major sites and trying for any kind of conversation is a dead end.
Eternal September combined with profit focused engineering has created a wasteland.
Facebook is next to useless. I'm on it for work. It continually boosts one person's posts on my feed — not someone I dislike but am not close friends with — and then tells me about people's birthdays and bereavements weeks after they happened.
Like YouTube, the promoted content seems to be designed to pull me in particular political directions I am not interested in.
AI has only made it worse. I stopped using instagram for a while but went back on it last week. The number of AI videos was just incredible. What happened to the place where I could see the photos from my friends? Why does Meta think I want to see AI slop instead?
There is no “social” media anymore, there’s just algorithmic feeds of dubious news, memes, ads, AI generated content (and AI generated ads), promoted content, and short form videos by people you don’t know. You have to really dig to keep up with your friends and people who have interesting things to contribute unless they have the numbers to break through. Or you click and filter a lot.
I find it interesting that the same process that played out in the forums to feed transition also took place in video games with dedicated servers to matchmaking. I joined a random Counter Strike server in 2005 and ended up becoming close friends with regulars on the server and I'm still in touch with some of them this day.
as a long time FPS gamer on PC, the change to the matchmaking style feels like it coincided with the rise of consoles and crossplay. it feels odd playing Battlefield with console players who can’t use the game chat cause they don’t have a keyboard.
An extent presentation (IMHO) by Sam Vaknin on how the very way modern social networks operate even down to their form are deeply destructive. The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created by anti social deeply narssistic nerds.
i am tired of ads, algorithmic curation, public-ness, anonymity, and scale
i still crave social interaction but have moved to smaller private group chats with real people i either see in real life or have an ongoing connection with
The difference for me is that 20+ years ago if you went to an online community there was no filter to protect you. You’d have to choose wisely what to say and avoid being confrontational because there was the very possible chance of someone more knowledgeable than you putting you in place. With social media that exposure diminished because everyone can build a bubble of like-minded people. I like been corrected, while it hurts on a personal level it also helps you evolve as a human being because you become more knowledgeable. An Internet where everyone agrees with you is boring. And because everything is a bubble we went full circle and now there are culture wars everywhere. You can’t have a decent conversation where people just present their arguments without throwing punches and accusations all around. I feel like Hacker News is the last bastion of civilized conversations at scale.
I hate to say it (not a doom and gloom kind of dude) but to the general population, social media either is, or at the very least appears to be, one of the only ways up and out of the deep, terrifying economic chasm that our societies have been carving to separate the haves from the have-nots.
Statistically, of course, the overwhelming majority of people who try to secure the bag from social media either fail, succeed and burn out quickly, or succeed BIG and lose their souls. And given that it's just a new form of old entertainment, I'd wager that the percentage of those that break through versus those that don't is probably in line with what it always was (slim, or short-lived)
Meanwhile in the real world, wages are stagnant, institutions have crumbled, safety nets blown away like a fart in the wind; we've legalized and lionized gambling on every single aspect of life, geopolitics are in upheaval, businesses are tightening up more than they have in years, information went from a daily newspaper to a debilitating firehose, prices are through the roof, and we're all left to fend for ourselves.
What do we do?
Shuck and jive on socials. Place leveraged bets on ephemeral concepts and world events on Polymarket. Plow into memecoins, tokenize all physical assets. Play the lottery, hit the casino. On and on, while cost of living goes L-shaped.
I think for the vast majority of people, social media is both dead yet completely inescapable... but I have a nascent, vague feeling that while people are sick and tired of being algorithmically manipulated and want to bail, if pushed far enough, become hungry enough, they'll come right back and spin the wheel from the side of a creator out of desperation, feeding the machine that we all hate LOL
Anyways. More optimism, less doomerism! It ain't gotta be like this long-term!
I never been to Las Vegas, but social media makes me feel like entering a casino in John O’Briens Leaving Las Vegas (the book, not the film). Despite of all the glitz and glamour, just a desolate desert for those who have lost all the hope… And the way all these applications make you hooked works exactly like the coin machines in a Casino. Jean Pormanove was just a one poor soul, there’s literally thousands of them, somebody (or themselves) live-streaming the destruction of their bodies and soul. This is suppose to be fun?
I left long time ago. I kicked many things back then and are a lot happier now. I hope the culture is changing and SoMe ban for kids (I believe Australia is only the beginning) will cause a shift in global culture and in future IG, TikTok and rest of them are seen in similar light to tobacco today.
Yep, I have heard social media etc compared to one armed bandits. Not far off. The trouble like gambling is that I'm not interested in the game unless I win.
However, I don't consider Australia's social media ban a good thing as it is government trying to gatekeep the internet.
I'm fine with social media, but not with the illusion of it from Facebook, Instagram, etc. Those are ad delivery systems. I'm on Discord, Github, Substack, and Reddit.
In a word, yes. I have many fond memories of forums and chats that have been abandoned in favor of platforms like Reddit and Discord (which I find to be bloated and grating).
I do participate in small iMessage and Signal chats. Email remains nice as well.
Large social platforms hold no appeal given the algorithmic curation that favors the platform owners and the pervasive advertising. I’ve never seen the appeal of TikTok short form video either, though I’ll willingly acknowledge I’m in the minority there.
I’ve never abandoned RSS and love the slow pace and small scale of Mastodon.
I used to use Instagram this way, but now my feed is 90% videos, memes and trash. I don't post there anymore either, because in the process of responding to comments and checking likes, I get sucked right back into those videos.
Of course I checked just now and the first post was photos by someone I actually follow. But not posts 2-.
No matter how many of us on Hacker News are absolutely exhausted with social media… no, “we” as a society are as addicted as ever.
It is interesting to note, though, that over the years the “social” in social media exists almost exclusively in the comments. We used to have feeds heavily populated by people we actually know. Now algorithmic feeds pump influencers in many people’s faces 24/7. In some ways it’s not that different to old school media, it’s just finely optimized to addict us.
A statistic I heard on the radio a couple of days ago said that global use had declined by 8% last year. It did vary by country and the US seemed stable which implies it had fallen more in other countries.
Social media has been on the decline for a while. The trouble is that many people have put their web pages onto it. There were several groups I used to be involved in which closed their websites and just have a Facebook page now.
I'm not tired of social media as a concept, but I'm certainly tired of rage bait and engagement bait. But my tiredness of those pales in comparison to people's utter inability to recognize it and react accordingly by not responding to it.
How many times do I have to see the question about whether an airplane takes off if it's on a reverse treadmill? How many times do I have to see simple math questions that test your knowledge about order-of-operations? How many videos do I need to see of downright stupid recipes (I'm looking at you, Chef Club!)? How many deliberately misleading questions (ie, "Divide by half"), pointless questions ("Can you name a US state that doesn't contain the letter 'A'?"), and always with the claim of "Only a genius can figure this out!"
Not to mention how many people can't grasp even the most obvious satire. Some people still don't know the Onion is satire.
And ever time, the comments are filled with the dumbest takes.
I miss the days when people knew not to feed the trolls.
Surely things like the airplane on a treadmill were debated back on classic Usenet? I mean, think of the recurrent Monty Hall Problem debates! But the other examples you give do seem to be elaborately engineered (or evolved) sorts of clickbait.
I'm totally not tired of Facebook circa 2008 - a bunch of my friends, people I actually know, posting about our lives and having conversations. A fantastic way of reconnecting with old friends and staying in touch with people.
Wasn't a fan of it back then. Saw people fighting on it the first day I was on there. Deleted my account. Now back on for work and limit my usage a lot.
So presumably the people fighting were actual friends (since back then there was nothing else in the feed but posts by people you'd friended)? Do those people fight a lot in real life? How do you cope with that?
Text-based social media is cancer, the best example being X but also its derivatives, Facebook, Reddit etc. They are too susceptible to astroturfing, manipulation, political slop and outrage, bullying etc.
I get a lot of value out of Instagram despite its ongoing enslopification. It lets me keep up with old friends, share memes with my friends, and the reel algorithm never fails to put me in a good mood.
I'm 50/50 on HN, because even though it's a text-based platform it's not so bad compared to X for example.
I do think people will be drastically reevaluating their internet usage over the next decade tho, especially as the dead internet theory becomes more than just a theory and people return to the real world.
As soon as non-text gets integrated in any meaningful way, it all goes down hill.
Text is fine. Text with some images that aren’t always integrated so well like forums are fine. Full on image/video media is just reptile brain fodder.
A lot of it is reptile brain fodder but I'd rather spend my time watching brainrot that makes me happy then read ragebait, political takes, etc which genuinely ruin my mental state.
X/Twitter is awful, but the difference is that I used to be able to follow channels I enjoyed, and there was often humour. Now I find I am seeing content that Twitter has selected for me rather than subscribed to.
1. The size of a healthy, general social network is limited by Dunbar's number, because this is the number of people an individual can get to know individually. For a social network to grow beyond this and remain healthy, it must become specific (e.g., an online forum with a specific focus), so that the effort required to interact with any given individual is minimised, because there are fewer points of difference.
2. People who pine for the good old days of the internet are university-educated elites who enjoyed those good old days because the only other internet users were other university educated elites. Social media didn't destroy online culture; it gave the Great Unwashed a reason to be online, and they changed online culture into something that resembled their offline culture.
3. We like to think of the good old days as a time without bubbles online, but in reality, it was just one big bubble.
4. Conventional social media platforms have just become media platforms because only a small proportion of their users - influencers - regularly produce anything interesting.
Absolutely. The worst part about this by far is the fact that you are virtually required to participate in at least one of these platforms if you want to exist in the professional world.
Is this actually true? Maybe in sales and marketing. Maybe for “leadership” roles. But outside of that? Idk. I wouldn’t rule out a candidate for not having a LinkedIn. Maybe I’m underestimating how many recruiters do use that as a pass/fail - but it doesn’t feel like they do.
I actually tried to get back on Facebook in order to get a Meta business account because I wanted to use the WhatsApp API. They wouldn't let me back on. Instaban every time. I left by my own accord as well.
> However after a while I realized that people just post into the void. Everyone has something to say or promote, yet no one wants to listen. It's like we're all having our booth on a crowded public space, but there are no actual receivers...
> Thus I concluded that people overall are tired of socializing.
I don't think people are tired of socialising. People are tired of the self-centered, propagandized publication that social media companies have addicted us to, both as consumers and providers. This makes people want to socialise less because:
a) They get more immediate satisfaction from consuming or providing content than actually socialising
b) Satisfying this (any) addiction takes a lot of time and emotional effort that might otherwise be used for socialising
Ironically, I think the author discovered exactly what social media ACTUALLY looks like without the addictive algorithms: lots of people yelling and nobody listening.
No, we are tired of "social media" demanding all of our free time and utmost attention - and for what, our eyeballs on ads. We've seen that it brings no intelligent discussion but rather maximalist thinking in bubbles and hatred towards others. We're divided into so many categories that we figured we might as well just spend time by ourselves. That's where the new LLM chatbots come in.
Lots of people talk about being tired of it but few do anything about it. The entrenched social media has become a sort of flypaper for the Eternal September keeping them off the newer, smaller, better options. Anyone discerning has left Twitter/Reddit/etc. But rather than try to replace those it's better to think of the newer places as off-ramps from social media rather than forming new dependence on them.
I used to hear about MTV all the time, but didn't know anyone that watched it. The only time I spent watching it was at a hotel. Didn't have it at home.
yo why do I need javascript to layout your web page when all the contents are right there and u could just turn that pre into a p and add a monospace font and make that gigantic photo of your face a little smaller
Social media is designed to polarise people. However, the problem is that we do live in a world where most things go unreported and we get celebrity gossip on the news instead.
With old chat programs and forums I was talking to real people over a long span of time. On the modern platforms I’m just talking to the internet. It feels very different.
In 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years. We don’t talk as often anymore, but for many years we talked everyday. I probably talked to him more than anyone else I knew for a good 5-10 years. I don’t feel like that stuff happens when people are just blasting out memes.
That sort of connection making is happening in varying degrees of private discord servers today. You join the public discord it, you spend time with strangers, if you're likeable you eventually get told about less advertised public servers, or invite-only servers, and you go down a bit of a rabbit hole of loosely interconnected communities. Eventually you find communities that you settle into.
Good filters make for good communities. 20 years ago, being on the internet at all was pre-selecting for certain types of people. That's basically not true anymore. Today, the filters end up being invite systems.
I guess that’s sort of what happened with the forums. I was on a decently large one and eventually became a mod. Then a bunch of the mods and admins had their own smaller forums. I ended up being an admin on several of those. Over the years there were migrations and things.
However, nothing was “private”. Some of the smaller forums still had members who never found their way to the bigger hub forum.
I’ve never used Discord and the idea of starting that process and everything being like prohibition era speakeasies is more than I want to deal with at this stage of life. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always had the impression that Discord was for voice chat? I liked that forums didn’t required everyone to be online at the same time. Fun when they were, but still useful when they weren’t.
Many discord servers don't even have voice channels and are just collections of text chat channels.
Even BBSes were filters for people, live chats and group gaming. Digital communications hasn't basically changed at all.
Discord is more analogous to IRC than voice chat. There's a constant set of channels/chats where people are chatting and then also voice/video channels.
now it also has threaded channels so it went full loop into a forum
This is what I quite like about Mastodon, since it's not inserting random users' posts into my feed (only people I follow, and then posts that they boost) you tend to have that experience much more like the chat and forums of old where you find a reasonably small group of active users who you mostly interact with.
Of course, 'influencer' kind of people tend to not like it because it's a lot harder to amass a huge following, but I'm fine with that!
One of the interesting things about how people socialize is that we tend to be less honest with those we're closest to, and more honest with people who have no impact on our bottom line.
Counter-intuitively this means we end up having better conversation with strangers than our closest friends and family. Which makes platforms like Facebook a lost cause for connection.
I've had the same experience. Many of my best friends have been found on forums.
In the past reputation matters. Accounts like "Endwokeness" would never work, because people would just make fun of him. "Why is he so obsessed with trans people?" "Does he have a job?". His whole persona would become an inside joke. You also can't just spam low effort opening post, because it will just be removed, so if he for example wants to hate on gay people he needs to write whole essays about it.
One thing that often gets overlooked is that 25 years ago, “the Internet” was essentially educated people from North America and Western Europe, with everyone else being a rounding error.
This made it very easy to connect on a level beyond just memes. Users had a lot in common personally, and that’s why they were able to engage on a personal level.
Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community. Beyond that lie vast cultural chasms that make any deeper interactions nearly impossible.
> Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community
I've always wondered how sure of this are we actually? Particularly now in the age of easy bot activity too. I buy that a significant % of population is online but I'd hazard at a decent guess that the majority are passively online content rather than actively engage in it so how truly online is the world in a representative sense?
It feels to me that you still have to be a bit non-average to interact online in much the same way as it used to be
I'm thinking out loud with this one, but memes tend to be a comedic way to relate to the topic in my eyes. Comedy tends to be lower friction, so it stands to reason memes would be a good shibboleth for an online community.
Now, in the modern age, you have 'creators' who make the memes and are the original posters, but you also have easy mechanisms for sharing already-created content. Sharing content is _SOMEWHAT_ akin to the original meme creation since you're putting skin in the game and standing behind the meme's sentiment. Akin to wearing liberty spikes to show you're part of a punk community. You didn't create 'liberty spikes,' you're just representing them. In using the sharing button, I think average people can interact online in a much different way than it used to be.
At some point in the 2010s, there was a definite shift towards social media and search engines started to narrow their results. The internet of twenty five years ago was a lot more fun.
Eternal September just kept happening day after day for 25 years.
To be fair, the Eternal September is also what created that huge tsunami of money, that has made so many tech people wealthy.
It's hard to put my thoughts into words. Those who are tired of social media are those that are not addicted to the never-ending dopamine injections (i.e. doomscrolling).
I don't have kids yet but I hope "social" media will be banned until at least 18 years old before they're born.
The human brain is wired to be lazy; it's much easier to doomscroll and get your dopamine than spend 40 hours reading a book. We want to be fit but we don't take the time to exercise; we want the candy but don't tolerate any effort to get it whatsoever.
It's always been the case during history but our ancestors didn't have access to those kinds of addicting tools.
It's an anecdote but I have long hair and there's a period where you cannot get a good haircut (too long to have a "short" haircut and too short to have a "long" haircut); I know some people who couldn't put up with the few months it takes to grow into a good-looking style and cut their hair back to short. Life is not Instagram, you cannot change something instantly. Everything that is worth the "candy" takes time. A hell of a lot of time. Of which we're losing track.
Very badly worded but maybe it resonated with some of you.
Algorithmic curation is something I'm trying to avoid in all cases. I think it's not highlighted enough. The fact that youtube shows an infinite number of videos to choose from does its own sort of harm in a way that the specifics of the content cannot.
When the internet was brand new, it was very novel that I had to go out seeking the content and could look at it any time I wanted. It was different than TV. TV was enjoyed passively and you just watched what they showed you. The early internet was so much better it's hard to describe. It was a purely active experience. Algorithmic curation is a return to the TV model. Someone else decides what you should watch, and you passively observe it materialize in front of you. Try this for an experience. log out of youtube, install some filters in uBlock Origin which prevent all algorithmic results (even on the home page and in search results) and then try to think of what you'd like to watch. For some of you out there, I'll bet this feels like exercising an old, unused muscle. You used to do this kind of querying all the time. But scan your mind. What possibilities are there to view? It feels emptier than it should.
Agree. I also use Unhook/Brave to remove all recommendations plus my DeCasino to grayscale social media and put a clock over. I only watch subscriptions - clicking from subscriptions bar, not the feed. My phone is fully grayscale, no notifications and only has Brave with custom content filter that removes the main feed as well. It's almost impossible to watch anything on my phone but a video from a direct link. Sounds kind of crazy, but it's finally sustainable.
As a result, I have zero curated feeds, and I only follow people that I chose and started taking more word-of-mouth suggestions. I've noticed that I got much more interested in politics and my internet time is now all meaningful. Algorithms do steer us, they aren't neutral.
I also tried setting my phone to grayscale, but it takes me significantly longer to do useful things, as some UIs are harder to distinguish without color. Have you found a workaround for this?
I did this, and yeah google maps is all but unusable without color, that and the camera takes some getting used to.
I'm on an iPhone, but what ended up doing was creating a shortcut that toggles the phone to grayscale and back, and then having two automations, one for when I open any of the apps I actually want color in (maps, camera, photos, etc) that toggles grayscale off and then another automation to toggle grayscale back on when I close any of those same apps.
The option is located in Settings > Accessibility >Display & Text Size > Color Filters
It isn't perfect, but it works most of the time (I also added the shortcut to the back of the home screen so if it is off or I need one-off color I can just toggle it manually).
On iOS, the grey scale filter can also be activated via triple clicking the power button:
It is the “zoom”, in which you can have 1.0 scale and add a color filter.
I like the combined grayscale and color inversion filter.
The triple click zoom is activated in Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut: https://support.apple.com/111771
The scale can be set by activating the zoom controller once, zooming out, and then hiding it.
I'd look into accessibility settings - they often have a colorblind mode (even some games do)
Wow, that’s really insightful. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but avoiding algorithmic feeds is exactly what I’ve been doing for the last few years. I mostly use RSS to read news, and I avoid browsing Reddit as much as I can, other than reading posts on specific things that I find through a search engine.
For a time last year I kind of fell off the wagon, and found myself wanting to browse Reddit constantly, even though I know it’s mostly repetitive junk, rage bait, and memes. It took me a concerted effort over a couple of weeks to break free again.
My spider sense goes off in the same way when I find myself looking at Apple News, TikTok, Youtube, etc.
I think you’re absolutely right that the common thread there is the algorithmic curation.
If you subscribe to creators you like, and use the Subscriptions tab in YouTube, you will only see their content and not anything algorithmic AFAIK
The best way to subscribe to creators on YouTube is via rss. This way one doesn’t have to deal with YT at all.
I recently had a baby. My wife and I are not on socials but wanted to share pics with close friends and family, so we created an iCloud shared album. We only realized that these shared albums had likes and comments once someone asked us if we had seen that my grandmother had left a comment.
I think the shared album is almost the perfect form of social media. We invited about 20 people who we all know well. This “community” has a singular and shared purpose of being interested in our baby. Content is presented in chronological order. There are no ads, no other content, not even suggested posts or “you may also like…”. If you want to see more you just swipe to the next picture and perhaps read what other people you know have to say about the funny face our child is making.
The author observes that social media creates bubbles and that people are tired of socializing. In some ways the shared album is the ultimate bubble and provides only a very limited way for our community to socialize. Nonetheless many of our friends, also twenty-somethings, have told us how lovely it is to interact with us and each other on such a limited platform.
I think—well, maybe I hope—that the future of social media is “hyperlocal” like this. It will not be as easy to meet people and find new perspectives, sure, but it will let the internet serve its purpose of connecting people who are physically far away but still very much in each others thoughts.
Social media has long stopped being an actual social outlet and is filled with either bots or influencer types trying to be the loudest voice shouting into the void. I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting. That no longer exists anywhere on the major sites and trying for any kind of conversation is a dead end.
Eternal September combined with profit focused engineering has created a wasteland.
> I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting.
Well, there was also narwhal bacon and Streetlamp Le Moose.
Facebook is next to useless. I'm on it for work. It continually boosts one person's posts on my feed — not someone I dislike but am not close friends with — and then tells me about people's birthdays and bereavements weeks after they happened.
Like YouTube, the promoted content seems to be designed to pull me in particular political directions I am not interested in.
AI has only made it worse. I stopped using instagram for a while but went back on it last week. The number of AI videos was just incredible. What happened to the place where I could see the photos from my friends? Why does Meta think I want to see AI slop instead?
There is no “social” media anymore, there’s just algorithmic feeds of dubious news, memes, ads, AI generated content (and AI generated ads), promoted content, and short form videos by people you don’t know. You have to really dig to keep up with your friends and people who have interesting things to contribute unless they have the numbers to break through. Or you click and filter a lot.
I find it interesting that the same process that played out in the forums to feed transition also took place in video games with dedicated servers to matchmaking. I joined a random Counter Strike server in 2005 and ended up becoming close friends with regulars on the server and I'm still in touch with some of them this day.
as a long time FPS gamer on PC, the change to the matchmaking style feels like it coincided with the rise of consoles and crossplay. it feels odd playing Battlefield with console players who can’t use the game chat cause they don’t have a keyboard.
An extent presentation (IMHO) by Sam Vaknin on how the very way modern social networks operate even down to their form are deeply destructive. The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created by anti social deeply narssistic nerds.
Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU
i am tired of ads, algorithmic curation, public-ness, anonymity, and scale
i still crave social interaction but have moved to smaller private group chats with real people i either see in real life or have an ongoing connection with
Discord is still great. Not exactly traditional social media but it has features that are similar beyond just being a chat platform.
The difference for me is that 20+ years ago if you went to an online community there was no filter to protect you. You’d have to choose wisely what to say and avoid being confrontational because there was the very possible chance of someone more knowledgeable than you putting you in place. With social media that exposure diminished because everyone can build a bubble of like-minded people. I like been corrected, while it hurts on a personal level it also helps you evolve as a human being because you become more knowledgeable. An Internet where everyone agrees with you is boring. And because everything is a bubble we went full circle and now there are culture wars everywhere. You can’t have a decent conversation where people just present their arguments without throwing punches and accusations all around. I feel like Hacker News is the last bastion of civilized conversations at scale.
Try posting something that majority of HN disagrees with and see the barrage of downvotes.
"At this point, I don't even know if I would want to connect with others that much."
Seeing this recent comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469403) gave me the idea:
Check out the searches "We could" | "what if we could" | "people should" from HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Going forward, isn't there the potential right now to connect the right people together for the right reasons?
I hate to say it (not a doom and gloom kind of dude) but to the general population, social media either is, or at the very least appears to be, one of the only ways up and out of the deep, terrifying economic chasm that our societies have been carving to separate the haves from the have-nots.
Statistically, of course, the overwhelming majority of people who try to secure the bag from social media either fail, succeed and burn out quickly, or succeed BIG and lose their souls. And given that it's just a new form of old entertainment, I'd wager that the percentage of those that break through versus those that don't is probably in line with what it always was (slim, or short-lived)
Meanwhile in the real world, wages are stagnant, institutions have crumbled, safety nets blown away like a fart in the wind; we've legalized and lionized gambling on every single aspect of life, geopolitics are in upheaval, businesses are tightening up more than they have in years, information went from a daily newspaper to a debilitating firehose, prices are through the roof, and we're all left to fend for ourselves.
What do we do?
Shuck and jive on socials. Place leveraged bets on ephemeral concepts and world events on Polymarket. Plow into memecoins, tokenize all physical assets. Play the lottery, hit the casino. On and on, while cost of living goes L-shaped.
I think for the vast majority of people, social media is both dead yet completely inescapable... but I have a nascent, vague feeling that while people are sick and tired of being algorithmically manipulated and want to bail, if pushed far enough, become hungry enough, they'll come right back and spin the wheel from the side of a creator out of desperation, feeding the machine that we all hate LOL
Anyways. More optimism, less doomerism! It ain't gotta be like this long-term!
I never been to Las Vegas, but social media makes me feel like entering a casino in John O’Briens Leaving Las Vegas (the book, not the film). Despite of all the glitz and glamour, just a desolate desert for those who have lost all the hope… And the way all these applications make you hooked works exactly like the coin machines in a Casino. Jean Pormanove was just a one poor soul, there’s literally thousands of them, somebody (or themselves) live-streaming the destruction of their bodies and soul. This is suppose to be fun?
I left long time ago. I kicked many things back then and are a lot happier now. I hope the culture is changing and SoMe ban for kids (I believe Australia is only the beginning) will cause a shift in global culture and in future IG, TikTok and rest of them are seen in similar light to tobacco today.
E: typos
Yep, I have heard social media etc compared to one armed bandits. Not far off. The trouble like gambling is that I'm not interested in the game unless I win.
However, I don't consider Australia's social media ban a good thing as it is government trying to gatekeep the internet.
Facebook is the opiate of the masses.
I'm fine with social media, but not with the illusion of it from Facebook, Instagram, etc. Those are ad delivery systems. I'm on Discord, Github, Substack, and Reddit.
We're going to miss social media when it's gone.
I would like to find a way out and often thought about starting a community / movement around this. Maybe this step feels easier collectively.
In a word, yes. I have many fond memories of forums and chats that have been abandoned in favor of platforms like Reddit and Discord (which I find to be bloated and grating).
I do participate in small iMessage and Signal chats. Email remains nice as well.
Large social platforms hold no appeal given the algorithmic curation that favors the platform owners and the pervasive advertising. I’ve never seen the appeal of TikTok short form video either, though I’ll willingly acknowledge I’m in the minority there.
I’ve never abandoned RSS and love the slow pace and small scale of Mastodon.
Nobody goes on Instagram anymore, it's too crowded!
As a photography enthusiasts, I still regularly post photos to it. It's also one of my source of inspiration.
Fair enough, unlike the others, (almost) no photos of my daily life.
I used to use Instagram this way, but now my feed is 90% videos, memes and trash. I don't post there anymore either, because in the process of responding to comments and checking likes, I get sucked right back into those videos.
Of course I checked just now and the first post was photos by someone I actually follow. But not posts 2-.
I understand this reference! Nice call back to dang.
A famous Yogi-ism [1]; On why he no longer went to Ruggeri's, a St. Louis restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogiisms
... I did not know that dang used to play for the Yankees! :)
No matter how many of us on Hacker News are absolutely exhausted with social media… no, “we” as a society are as addicted as ever.
It is interesting to note, though, that over the years the “social” in social media exists almost exclusively in the comments. We used to have feeds heavily populated by people we actually know. Now algorithmic feeds pump influencers in many people’s faces 24/7. In some ways it’s not that different to old school media, it’s just finely optimized to addict us.
A statistic I heard on the radio a couple of days ago said that global use had declined by 8% last year. It did vary by country and the US seemed stable which implies it had fallen more in other countries.
Social media has been on the decline for a while. The trouble is that many people have put their web pages onto it. There were several groups I used to be involved in which closed their websites and just have a Facebook page now.
I'm not tired of social media as a concept, but I'm certainly tired of rage bait and engagement bait. But my tiredness of those pales in comparison to people's utter inability to recognize it and react accordingly by not responding to it.
How many times do I have to see the question about whether an airplane takes off if it's on a reverse treadmill? How many times do I have to see simple math questions that test your knowledge about order-of-operations? How many videos do I need to see of downright stupid recipes (I'm looking at you, Chef Club!)? How many deliberately misleading questions (ie, "Divide by half"), pointless questions ("Can you name a US state that doesn't contain the letter 'A'?"), and always with the claim of "Only a genius can figure this out!"
Not to mention how many people can't grasp even the most obvious satire. Some people still don't know the Onion is satire.
And ever time, the comments are filled with the dumbest takes.
I miss the days when people knew not to feed the trolls.
Surely things like the airplane on a treadmill were debated back on classic Usenet? I mean, think of the recurrent Monty Hall Problem debates! But the other examples you give do seem to be elaborately engineered (or evolved) sorts of clickbait.
I'm totally not tired of Facebook circa 2008 - a bunch of my friends, people I actually know, posting about our lives and having conversations. A fantastic way of reconnecting with old friends and staying in touch with people.
I'm utterly tired of what it is now.
Wasn't a fan of it back then. Saw people fighting on it the first day I was on there. Deleted my account. Now back on for work and limit my usage a lot.
Interesting.
So presumably the people fighting were actual friends (since back then there was nothing else in the feed but posts by people you'd friended)? Do those people fight a lot in real life? How do you cope with that?
Text-based social media is cancer, the best example being X but also its derivatives, Facebook, Reddit etc. They are too susceptible to astroturfing, manipulation, political slop and outrage, bullying etc.
I get a lot of value out of Instagram despite its ongoing enslopification. It lets me keep up with old friends, share memes with my friends, and the reel algorithm never fails to put me in a good mood.
I'm 50/50 on HN, because even though it's a text-based platform it's not so bad compared to X for example.
I do think people will be drastically reevaluating their internet usage over the next decade tho, especially as the dead internet theory becomes more than just a theory and people return to the real world.
As soon as non-text gets integrated in any meaningful way, it all goes down hill.
Text is fine. Text with some images that aren’t always integrated so well like forums are fine. Full on image/video media is just reptile brain fodder.
A lot of it is reptile brain fodder but I'd rather spend my time watching brainrot that makes me happy then read ragebait, political takes, etc which genuinely ruin my mental state.
X/Twitter is awful, but the difference is that I used to be able to follow channels I enjoyed, and there was often humour. Now I find I am seeing content that Twitter has selected for me rather than subscribed to.
1. The size of a healthy, general social network is limited by Dunbar's number, because this is the number of people an individual can get to know individually. For a social network to grow beyond this and remain healthy, it must become specific (e.g., an online forum with a specific focus), so that the effort required to interact with any given individual is minimised, because there are fewer points of difference.
2. People who pine for the good old days of the internet are university-educated elites who enjoyed those good old days because the only other internet users were other university educated elites. Social media didn't destroy online culture; it gave the Great Unwashed a reason to be online, and they changed online culture into something that resembled their offline culture.
3. We like to think of the good old days as a time without bubbles online, but in reality, it was just one big bubble.
4. Conventional social media platforms have just become media platforms because only a small proportion of their users - influencers - regularly produce anything interesting.
Absolutely. The worst part about this by far is the fact that you are virtually required to participate in at least one of these platforms if you want to exist in the professional world.
Is this actually true? Maybe in sales and marketing. Maybe for “leadership” roles. But outside of that? Idk. I wouldn’t rule out a candidate for not having a LinkedIn. Maybe I’m underestimating how many recruiters do use that as a pass/fail - but it doesn’t feel like they do.
I'm only on FB for work. It's dire.
I actually tried to get back on Facebook in order to get a Meta business account because I wanted to use the WhatsApp API. They wouldn't let me back on. Instaban every time. I left by my own accord as well.
> However after a while I realized that people just post into the void. Everyone has something to say or promote, yet no one wants to listen. It's like we're all having our booth on a crowded public space, but there are no actual receivers...
> Thus I concluded that people overall are tired of socializing.
I don't think people are tired of socialising. People are tired of the self-centered, propagandized publication that social media companies have addicted us to, both as consumers and providers. This makes people want to socialise less because:
a) They get more immediate satisfaction from consuming or providing content than actually socialising
b) Satisfying this (any) addiction takes a lot of time and emotional effort that might otherwise be used for socialising
Ironically, I think the author discovered exactly what social media ACTUALLY looks like without the addictive algorithms: lots of people yelling and nobody listening.
No, we are tired of "social media" demanding all of our free time and utmost attention - and for what, our eyeballs on ads. We've seen that it brings no intelligent discussion but rather maximalist thinking in bubbles and hatred towards others. We're divided into so many categories that we figured we might as well just spend time by ourselves. That's where the new LLM chatbots come in.
Lots of people talk about being tired of it but few do anything about it. The entrenched social media has become a sort of flypaper for the Eternal September keeping them off the newer, smaller, better options. Anyone discerning has left Twitter/Reddit/etc. But rather than try to replace those it's better to think of the newer places as off-ramps from social media rather than forming new dependence on them.
This all reminds me of back in the 90s with MTV. Everyone hated it - or, at least they said they hated it, but everyone still watched it.
I used to hear about MTV all the time, but didn't know anyone that watched it. The only time I spent watching it was at a hotel. Didn't have it at home.
yo why do I need javascript to layout your web page when all the contents are right there and u could just turn that pre into a p and add a monospace font and make that gigantic photo of your face a little smaller
It's all ignorant bigots. Everywhere. Painfully stupid angry ignorant people yelling about conspiracies they read in a meme.
We should all dedicate 0 seconds of our life to this.
Social media is designed to polarise people. However, the problem is that we do live in a world where most things go unreported and we get celebrity gossip on the news instead.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines is undefeated
social media needs to evolve
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