> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world.

I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!

But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.

What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.

Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community.

Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.

Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem?

Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.

Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.

Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.

Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.

Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.

We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.

When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.

This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.

The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.

The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.

Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.

Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.

I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.

Social Media emerged in 2012 or so. The ability to connect already existed in the older forums and image boards for a decade prior to that, and their promise was fulfilled. The whole shtick of Social Media was it did NOT do that, Facebook, Instagram, etc was more about reinforcing preexisting connections with your real world identity than meeting others as strangers.

>connect like-minded people around the world

Traditional forums still exist.

And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers

Of course it is, but it's intended to divide and control and it's proving to be pretty powerful. FB stopped connecting people sometime around 2012.

An AI chatbot is just the next stage on "like-minded people" continuum. It's a machine that bends over backwards to match what the user wants from it. (Maybe unhealthy but it's just the next step after interacting with anon posters over a shared niche interest)

Social-mediated capitalism is what they built. Puting AI in there just makes it easier.

Mastodon literally has a trending feed. Is that not an "algorithm"? It has algorithmic popular hashtags, news feed, and user recommendations. Just a bog standard handful of algorithmic surfaces, so why are they still pretending like it's "algorithm free" is beyond me. "Absolute lack", right.

Exactly. My three internal rules for a good social media experience (ymmv) are:

1. No algorithm beyond most-recent-first

2. Stick to a maximum of ~250 following

3. Pay for the service instead of ad-supported

I can easily do all of those on Mastodon.

Mastodon and fediverse despite not running on algorithms sadly aren't free of spam and bots - probably nothing nowadays is. Last year in February there was a flood of messages attacking less populated instances, with... Spam can image in message body.

What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.

Unfortunately, we discovered that people would rather be told what to watch, rather that self-discover their interests, because that’s a lot of “work”.

"The point where social media failed" was rather when most agreed to pretend that the services are for free and our attention may be hijacked by advertisement companies who have the goal of maximizing your engagement, meaning making you addicted.

> The problem is that people are addicted to tension

And some.

We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.

I would argue that financialization of the social media is what made it fail. Once there’s direct dollar cost to your posts, ideas and etc., the incentives change from “fun” to “commercial”. That started heavily around 2017ish, where every social media switched to algorithm-first, and heavily started tracking engagement/attention per post.

You are literally topping that comment on a peer to peer social media website right now. It's hardly dead, it just happens away from meta and X. Discord is absolutely popping off, for example. HN and other forums are still very lively.

There is a neurotic personality type that doomscrolls out of a compulsion. A lot of it is hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Where will the next shoe drop? We feel threatened, then some feel like they need to take some kind of drastic action.

Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.

Exhaustion is absolutely the first word that comes to mind for me. Even when I'm not using it myself, I'm exhausted of all the oxygen it takes up in the room

Is Tumblr doing fine financially?

I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.

I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.

I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff.

I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.

In a way I see these algorithms as segregstionist, their goal is ultimately to isolate certain groups and perniciously expose them only to the rage inducing bad aspects of the other group(s) to generate more posts/likes/comment.

Segregation applied to public spaces should indeed be banned, when these platforms become so huge, they become a defacto public square that you can hardly avoid effectively without missing a good share of the conversations that need to happen in public for a healthy flow of information, so I would not see an issue with law makers to regulate this... obviously as long as it's applied fairly.

The issue is that currently even platforms that are getting regulate, for even more concerning aspect (national security, undue foreign influence on fair elections) like Tiktok seem to be exempt of the law itself and the US Congress seem unable to get the laws they voted in a bipartisan manner enforced... the only reason I see is that a certain tangerine tinted individual sees it as a tool to control the American discourse in his favor, and thus refuses to enforce the law. So these concerns about healthy public spaces are taking the backseat for now.

While I agree, forums are also easily derailed and destroyed by trolls. I'm in a few political threads and they're totally ruined by a few people that the mods do nothing about.

So long as the same incentives stay in place, we're going to get the same results. Change the names yet it's all the same.

Just like drugs, but most people understand you should have respect for them.

I don't know if it's true but supposedly some birds will eat indigestible cigarette butts thinking they are food, then starve to death because their stomach is full.

Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.

IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the “true” subreddits)

I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested:

https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/

I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.

I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience.

I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.

Search for "bridging based ranking". The X community notes algorithm does that. I think it should be applied to all content.

My fingers are not fully compatible with touch screens so I'm not a big phone guy, so I can't speak for them, but I've been trying to make my computer more task oriented, to make choices more explicit.

I've experimented with using PWAs instead of browser windows, or even having different user accounts for different activities.

It works pretty well in combating the sort of tab cycling zombie mode it's easy to fall into where you aren't really doing anything but checking feeds and notifications. It doesn't block me from doing anything, it just forces me to do one activity at a time, which needs to be chosen upfront.

My inspiration behind this was basically old desktop computers, which with their single CPU core and small screen basically only permitted you to single-task (even if you could technically have multiple windows open you only really worked in the one).

> someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.

It’s is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I don’t think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.

Not to say they're fully innocent, but it seems really strange to point to Google specifically on this issue, rather than like... Meta.

Doesn’t this just reinforce your echo chamber? Your “editor” only gives you stuff you want to see not the stuff you need or should see.

And once you empower someone to gate or filter your access to information, what’s stopping them from treating you like the product for a better paying customer, like today?

Algorithmic feeds, search result pages, and LLM responses with web citations are all different editors. It's just a computer doing the editing.

I'm a little conflicted about using social media growing a business. If I do make content, I'll probably only commit to making actually useful posts, not putting up stuff that's vapid or shallow.

If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.

I enjoy watching movie trailers on youtube and I've noticed in the last month all these ai-created fake movie trailers for upcoming movies where the actual trailer isn't out yet. It's infuriating when I watch it, realize something is off and then at the end it's like "Fan-made!"

If this ai-slop keeps up I'm going to just probably stop watching youtube altogether, it sucks getting tricked by fake content.

Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute.

Triple that for families with small kids.

Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).

Nitpick: Around 60% of the world population live in urban areas, and if a lot of people decide to live in a particular rural area, then it quickly faces urbanization.

>> people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas

If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census.

If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)

I went to NYC the other day. There was lots of diverse interesting stuff. Not full of people who looked just like me.

Oops ... "Just because something is bad, that doesn't mean that these are its last days.

Discord has "forum channels". https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

What aspects of conventional forums are you looking for?

Everyone refers to FB and IG as the representatives of social media. FB is a ghost town, and IG is a major advertising online. (I also have said nice things about using FB while in Japan, all of which stand for the time in which I said them; I don't let my children use either.)

What I really find annoying is that Reddit never comes up in these discussions. Just because people tend to agree with the bias doesn't change the fact that it has no doubt left people radicalised. I was watching an Ezra Klein interview with some pollsters after the election, and it even shocked me the level of difference between what polling showed as of importance to most Americans, and what Reddit portrayed as being the common American opinion.

It's a cancer, just like Twitter, but no one ever mentions it. Not even Trump, who you would think would want to squash this safe space.

(I am indulging a bit in conspiracies, but the Elgins Air Force Base conspiracy seems more and more likely given how this site goes unnamed in the US, despite being so busy and so weird)

I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.

You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start.

There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.

My take on this kind of view: it wasn't built on authenticity or social connection. That was what the enthusiasts were claiming it would be. It was a reference to something known, very superficial in nature, only meant to to increase the appeal.

There was no algorithm in the original Facebook and Twitter.

The echo chamber you got was the same you get in real life: your friends and family may share your pov and bias.

It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash.

Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...

By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).

The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.

[dead]

I created an open source tool to help apps stay near the Dunbar Number: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed. I think the concept of social networks is interesting, but the ultimate unbounded result is a disaster.

Edit (missing link to github repo): https://github.com/darkpicnic/ten_cubed

Without advertising you would have to pay for it. But that would not sufficiently deter bad actors. What you need is culture to repel and moderation to exclude them.

> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care.

No one goes to the beach anymore—there are too many people there.