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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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A first generation, in which people primarily followed real-life friends or acquaintances of those friends (and so on). Those real-life friends shared their thoughts, pictures, ideas, inane ramblings and so on. This was Facebook and its predecessors like MySpace and Friendster.

I am, to be honest, a little sad that the Facebook of 10-15 years ago isn't really around anymore. To some extent, the friend network is still there and it's interesting to me to follow what my classmates and friends at the time are now up to. I think there's till a market for a good service like that for mainly keeping in touch and tracking major life events ("births, deaths, and marriages"), but modern Facebook seems to aggressively recommend Instagram-like creators rather than creating an environment where I can see "oh, this friend from college just moved to the same town as me" and stimulate real communities. But maybe I'm just getting old and reaching the "old man yells at someone else's computer cloud" stage.

For me at least, this is just a change within the last few months. Up until then my Facebook feed was exclusively activity of my friends, groups I had joined, and pages I had liked (even if it was stuff like "Bob liked a post in Nature Pics") and ads. Now it's probably 60% meme posts from random pages that I've never interacted with.

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Now it's probably 60% meme posts from random pages that I've never interacted with.

Sounds like a failure of Facebook's business model. They've cast the bait and hook and you didn't bite. That's a win in my eyes, but it's bad for business.

The issue is that there isn't enough content to fill facebook with quality content. People are spending several hours a day scrolling on their phone. There aren't enough childhood friends getting married and second cousins graduating to fill such a massive feed. People are opening their phone 50 times a day. The world isn't eventful enough to provide content.

I think that's because social media follows a Brave New World business model. Everything is geared toward pumping out content to trigger that short-term dopamine rush. There's a great book I read awhile back that took an interesting look at the problem. I think in a way, maybe human beings have strayed too far from their evolutionary niche, and it's making people miserable. Whether it's sex to someone that's never seen porn, or being an urban explorer in your own city as a teenager, or reading about other cultures through books instead of YouTube videos; the world is much more enchanting and fun with the shadow of ignorance cast over our lives.

I sometimes think that a not-for-(huge)-profit social network could work. Something like how Craigslist still has a comparatively austere website but manages to stick around modestly. I'm not sure what I'd want it to be, really: Facebook (driven by a web of social connections) is a very different platform from Reddit (pseudonymous shitposting) in ways that in strongly want to keep both, as long as the streams never cross.

It does seem like the hyper-capitalist market-maximizing nature of social media drives a lot of the dark patterns like introducing unrelated scissor statements and Instagram models into a feed I'd otherwise want to be strictly topical because they're not wrong that it probably increases median visit time.

It makes me glad that places like this one exist (thanks, Zorba!). I wonder if we'll see a resurgence of old-school sites at some point like how retro-style video games (pixel art!) have become popular.

I'm also glad places like this exist. Twitter has never been my thing. Reddit is far too politically one-sided. Other platforms have a hard time generating engagement. And one problem common to all platforms that attempt to have an informative, interested and competitive userbase is that eventually they all end up catering to the lowest common denominator. You used to be able to have interesting discussions on Reddit, years and years ago; hard as that is to believe. It's also why I 'hate' YouTube "Shorts." Adblockers should equate that to spam, ideally. Because it's low information, low content, dopamine driven nonsense. Hacker News is probably the last/only other refuge I can think of where you get good/decent engagement and informative posts.

I went the route of Shoutwire -> Digg -> Reddit. That was the genesis of my early adult engagement with relevant topics of the day.

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