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.

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.

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.

> These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

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 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.

What extensions do you recommend?

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

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.

"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 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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.