> Add to that the fact that social media is highly game-able and scalable, and you have small groups of people working against the majority of the country.
I started in this industry in the '90s, I like to think of my cohort as the generation who "built the Internet" (or the commercial version of it).
We've created a monster. Or at least the means to unleash it.
> What social media has done is ensure you hear more from groups that previously didn’t get a voice.
And that's the important thing. They have a huge voice now, given the loudest and most repetitive people get way more presence, and how social networks are malleable to bots. Saying this existed decades ago is like comparing nuclear weapons to arrows and bows and saying lethal weapons existed since time immemorial.
> This didn’t happen to Facebook and Twitter. Both attained a scale and durability that exceeded the networks that preceded them. For many people, it seemed like the operators of these services had cracked the nut of making eternal social media.
There is a qualitative aspect to it that is not reflected by numbers yet. In the late 2000s to early 2010s Twitter used to be this cool new thing everyone wanted to try out. Now a significant part of society sees it as a cesspool.
> Social media wasn’t always like this. I think back to the
> ways I used Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the early
> days and they were completely different than they way they
> are used today. They were personal, real time, and no one
> cared about “likes”.
Yup, also when considering how this all evolved. Before that there were Newsgroups (mega techy) and various online forums/chats. They were a little trashy but people were very engaged. On the other hand pseudonymity was omnipresent, Facebook was the first big one to change that. Now there are far more users and far less online communities.
>> With all its problems, social media has proven over and over to be a far more useful tool for communities.
I just LOVE how you proclaim this, without first seeing (a) the cosequences of social media (good or bad) 30+ years from now, and (b) whatever disrupts current social media next.
> My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True?
I don't think that's really true. I'm about your age, and you were ~20 when the iPhone came out, right? Facebook was just settling in as the tool of choice for every college student, but even then it was mainly just photo-sharing and event-planning. The fact that we missed out on social networking in our entire teenage and preteen years means that we narrowly escaped this.
If you spend any time around people a bit younger than us, the contrast is particularly stark. My cousins are about a decade younger than me (just started college), and throughout high school, Snapchat/Twitter/etc were simply a must-have. The amount of time they spent sharing content and scrolling through others is insane, and if you talk to them about it, they're very aware that it's somewhere between a chore, an addiction, and good ol' fun.
That's the kind of "hardwired into your formative social years" thing that we never really had to deal with.
> If, like me, you believe the solution to the stranglehold that the current social cartel has had for the past decade is to build new, competing platforms, and encourage their growth
I think that's half of it. The other is a lot of time. It seems pretty clear to me that different age groups use social media in different ways, and I'm not sure it's a behavior that stays with the cohort as it ages, or is associated with that age itself.
My teenage children use whatever social network they feel like and don't really care for Facebook or Twitter. Does that change as they get older, or does it mean that in 10-20 years those companies will be less relevant (unless they buy the up-and-comers, like Facebook did with Instagram)?
I think Trump definitely has the ability to put that to the test though, and that you're right in that he's got a lot of pull to cause at least a short term shift based on the narrative he expresses.
I think most of us would agree that they've changed society for the worse. It pains me as a starry-eyed techie kid from the 90s that this is what we've done. Life was so much better before social media.
> I know that newer generations are all experiencing their own forms of social-media-ingrouping that they will feel just as nostalgic for, but it truly was a unique time.
BBSes, MUDs/MOOs, Usenet, things like this, and even EFNet had things that don't really exist in the same way very often anymore (not every one had each of these things, but..):
- A broad optimism about technology and communication using technology
- Reasonably small communities. Even during EFNet's simultaneous 100k peak (of which many were bots), there were probably 30k truly active users and a few thousand people feeling deep ownership of the network and community. It was more like a medium sized town. (And now it's like that town after most people have moved away).
- A shared culture (coming from the smallness of the communities).
- A broad focus. Subreddits are small; discords are small; etc. But in these other places you'd run into and talk to the same people about many different kinds of things. You might have a discord group of a few dozen friends, but it's not likely to be a semi-exclusive social channel for you for many topics.
- Local ties. Especially with the BBS.
- Blurry lines on anonymity. Purely anonymous, distant connections morphed to real life ones far more often than today.
> Social media is about me feeling that what I say matters.
I agree with where you are coming from, but I'm not sure social media is actually about that. Making you feel like your content is important is only a goal in-so-much as it incentivizes you to create hype-able content. Social media is a hype engine designed to take randos on the internet and make them famous in front of other randos on the internet. If caring for the needy generates hype, that's what gets hyped. If pranks generate hype, that's what gets hyped. If twerking generates hype, thats what gets hyped.
It's about maximizing engagement to maximize monetization. And that monetization ends up getting balanced with social pressures, PR nightmares, political pressure, and legal pressure. We have a hype machine willing to promote anything that doesn't get moderated away.
I'd say social networking actually captured what you are talking about here. It's goal was to connect friends, families, communities, peers, etc. I've seen that level of connection, that level of community building, manifest in real-world love/kindness.
I don't see that happen on social media outside of people going against the grain and forcing social networking through social media. I have first-hand experience of how surprisingly difficult social networking on social media is; primarily because of the recommendation algorithms drowning out social networking content.
> The problem isn't in the technology
But the issue is the technology. Centralized social networking failed because of the technology. Centralized social networking is expensive. Being a "free proxy server" and archivist for the entire world's communication is a hard technical and financial problem to solve. It's also legally expensive to host a bunch of other people's content for free. And it's socially expensive, people get very upset about what other people say, and get mad at you for proxying that content.
Offering to let the entire world communicate through a single central "town square" for free just doesn't appear to be viable.
The result was that it stopped being about social networking. That entire class of product silently died.
Social networking is dead. What we have now is social media.
>I suspect that those who grow up as social media “natives” will have some social norms that protect them somewhat, whereas many of those who came of age pre-social media will not have learned the social norms that can protect them.
Agreed. A lot of older generations fall for a lot of satire and comment on things as if they're 1 on 1 with you instead of realizing that it's a public forum. However, a lot of younger generations are incredibly aware that everything they do and say could potentially be public or go viral. That brings a whole host of other problems and challenges with it.
The ultimate problem is every incentive goes against a "healthy" social media. Companies don't want a "healthy" social media as they're focused on engagement, screen time, content, and advertisers. Most of the primitive portions of our brains don't want "healthy" social media either, as it craves the rush of more likes and followers. I don't think that the logical, self-aware portions of our psyche are going to change the direction of how things are going.
Maybe that was true years ago but I really don't know that it is today. Social media is the primary means of communication for a lot of people and in a very real sense it is real life. I'd argue the Capitol riot in January is an example of social media becoming very real. Even the topic at hand - /r/wallstreetbets and $GME - shows the same.
No, our brains evolved for millions of years to operate in groups of less than 100. Social media is basically high fructose corn syrup for our dopamine system. Within a span of roughly 20 years the way we live our lives and communicate with other humans changed massively
All the MSM hate for Facebook though is simply because they are butthurt that they've lost their spot in society in terms of controlling influence and information
They absolutely did. Twitter et al. just change the shape of who you socialize with, humans weren't in solitary confinement before the Internet. The platform was more local more community based for example there were often awful people at church.
I've always used sugar and high fructose corn syrup as my analogy.
In the early days of the internet we didn't have what we now call social media, but we had things like blogs and message boards that allowed for some connection with other people. Those things had some of the elements that make modern social media toxic, but they were mixed in with other good things and we consumed them much slower.
Over the past few decades, we've slowly refined social media to what it is today. In an attempt to retain customers we've boiled it down to its most addictive and unhealthy parts and pushed customers to consume more of that quicker than ever before.
> The scale of content being posted on social media is such that this liability makes running a social media platform effectively impossible.
I won’t miss social media, will you?
And I say this as someone who uses Facebook, YouTube and Instagram quite a lot for Blood Bowl hobby purposes, so it’s not that I dislike their platforms as such, but it’s hard to deny that they aren’t healthy for society. At least not if we want to continue valuing experts and science and not popularity and populism.
I started in this industry in the '90s, I like to think of my cohort as the generation who "built the Internet" (or the commercial version of it).
We've created a monster. Or at least the means to unleash it.
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