?ou misspelled "monitized". I tried to play TribalWars. I remember playing this game a decade ago. It was fun. Stil it. There are so many things that could be done with 2 clicks, instead of 10. But, hey, they can be! As long as you buy/spend "premium points". I deleted my account after two weeks playing 30mins per day. To grow further I would either have to spend 1h per day (then 2h, 3h, and so on) or buy the click-reducers. I will go back to my AoE2-AOK)!!
The internet/websites/services have vastly improved. AND the pricing model has too. There are plenty of discussions in HN about "setting the correct price". That sweet spot that will yield YOU (the maker) the most profit. You don't want 1bn customers giving you $1. You want 1k customers that will give you $1.5m instead. This way you got less costs and more revenue. And you got better marketing ("everyone has an android but who can afford a cool $1k rose gold (puke) iphone???)
You don't pay? It's ok, someone else will and will get ahead in line, and you then will suffer from FOMO (ok not exactly but you still reduce your opportunities)(gotta make it rain to the company!).
> I wonder if a large part of what makes social media unhealthy is exposing human nature to mass communication.
Bingo. I do not believe for a moment that social media company A or B is worsening society. Heck, Facebook links your presumably real identity to your content and people are still disgusting online.
No company will win by not rewarding “interesting content”. We tried that, it was called forums, and they lost out to more “rewarding” communities.
> I really think social media companies are deliberately promoting stupid and blatantly wrong beliefs. It's good for engagement.
I don't think it even has to be deliberate; the algorithms social media uses, by their very nature, are going to promote stupid and blatantly wrong beliefs, since so many people will enjoy mocking them and there will always be some believers willing to argue back and keep the discussion going indefinitely.
Only corporate ad surveillance social media! I grew up on the internet and it is my hometown. I'm on IRC and the fediverse, and still anonymously browse reddit via the api, and run a bbs (link in profile).
Much of the best shit in my life came from weird strangers on the internet.
I love social media; I just hate advertising and surveillance.
> You've got a lot of recent comments on HN for this to be true. I think you use social media a lot more than you think you do, and it could be impacting you in ways that you don't notice.
Ah so you're that kind of user.
Semantics. I don't consider HN social media, when I say social media I mean instagram, facebook, etc. I consider HN a forum like reddit or other places. My usage of forums is a way to kill time when I'm at work.
> How do you know that? This isn't something you can typically know for your self with any degree of confidence.
Speak for yourself. Maybe you can't typically know this for yourself, but I can. And more importantly, if you're not coming into this exchange in good faith and willing to trust my claims, then any chance of reasonable conversation is gone. I'll be wrapping up my end of our conversation here, thanks.
> Most people in our circles recognize the social media is marketing for your personal brand
Marketing for your personal brand? What on earth does that even mean? I can’t even imagine what “my personal brand” would be let alone how/why I would market it. Get me out of this narcissism dystopia!
Is it any surprise that companies with little to no social media intuition would just jump onto the bandwagon of what was, at the time, the Next Big Thing™ in social media? Social media is (or at least it used to be) an inherently organic, grassroots thing. It's been shoehorned into an advertising platform but the grating experience of reading the latest spam from Coca Cola or whoever is absolutely due to the friction caused when people try to use a conversation platform to simply blast out their latest announcements. They treat it like an RSS feed that they can post to, not like an opportunity to actually interact with their market.
Your idea has merit, but would be better off being posted on a twitter suggestions page than HN, I think.
> I use social media for information, not to be turned into a money-making asset for those I follow.
I mean it's social media... literally the entire purpose of it is to monetize you, any information you manage to extract from it is just a tertiary side effect. Not only that, but typically the quality of information exchanged on social media is of the lowest quality, so you're really getting a bad deal on the whole if this is your expectation.
None (As in no social media.). The solution to a pure social media / network is having none. Or just go outside.
It is not replacing one social network with another. It just prolongs the outrage and addiction regardless of the platform.
Just delete your accounts on all of them. You will feel much better rather than participate in the $current_outrage of the day. They deleted their accounts and never looked back: [0] [1] [2] [3]
> It seems to me social media is ripe for disruption.
I think what we see is that every social media site goes down pretty much the same way at some point.
FB was great until they started that whole recommended post stuff which fucked up the feed.
Instagram was great until they were bought by Facebook and had to get some metrics straight, too.
TikTok will be the next one to go down as influencers and other parasitic users tear it down, flood it with low quality content etc.
There will be something after TikTok. And TikTok will copy their features and FB will (try to) buy them and ruin them that way, too. It all goes down eventually.
> I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental health.
The social media business is definitely a toxic, failed replacement for social discourse.
Perhaps young citizens are driven to despair by this and their distress is an early indicator that we are failing as a society to provide adequate education and humanity.
As an adult citizen, I am almost driven to despair.
>I also want to add this is a good example of why marketing should probably just be using tools like Insta, Twitter, FB etc to get their message out. Now if you actually have a good company blog w/ good resources than that's different but I think that's more the exception than the norm.
Would you be willing to elaborate this position? I disagree that only being on social media is sufficient for marketing a service/product/organization.
Social media channels can be used to link content to a website, where there is far more control over how the information is presented (e.g. with embedded documents, testimonials, contact forms, and more pictures that can't be added as easily to sical media). You also have more control over the content on your website, on the low but real chance that you lose control of your company's social media accounts due to an unexpected reason.
>I think the whole thing is bogus from the start, the 'social media' idea I mean. These are companies.. they're not here to make culture or societies..
Nonetheless, they do. Medium is the message and all that.
> Almost all social networks are garbage and make the world awful and are very bad at their stated goal while being very good at their actual goal, which is creepy, invasive marketing.
I don't think that's much of a contrarian view though.
I was going to point out that this makes the assumption that they're consuming corporate social media, but we're on HN so I suppose that's implied.
I should probably delete this account too.
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