We need whatsapp/telegram/signal to display a feed based on user's status and nothing more. It's almost free, frictionless and free from ads (for now). But sharing without the widest audience (just to the social graph of your contacts).
It could bring back Google+'s circles so you don't share the same stuff with colleagues and friends and family, but your feed page would display it all the same.
Decentralized micro blogging without the huge tech cost and barrier of entry of mastodon.
People could choose how people are allowed to react to their status: limited in time, to the latest status update, limited to emoji/thumbs up reactions, allows starting new chat with that status as a topic, etc.
It also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce which I thought had some great ideas at the time.
There's no money in it though, so maybe bring back the old whatsapp model ? 1€ for 6 months or something ?
Or maybe just tell people to start a group chat in which they post updates ? Facebook/Twitter/Instagram got that easy to post/single tunnel thing simplified to the max, I don't think you can do better without being centralized.
I don’t care what my friends are doing outside of our interactions. Maybe if they started to murder puppies in their spare time.
It seems to me that the direction of the thinking goes the other way: in one, you think of a friend and contact him, in the other, you think of yourself, show yourself to the world and people send you likes.
When I thought of this, it seemed to me that social media is often some sort of "narcissistic exposure of oneself" and encourages this type of behaviour from me and I didn't like it. This plus the fact that I didn't like Facebook's behaviour with it's user's data made me delete my account, and I didn't miss it since. If I think of friends, I have other means of contacting them that have a more personal feel.
I forget where I read it, but it's similar to the idea that if someone you love makes a meal for you, at the end of it, you don't ask "how much do I owe you?" and break out your wallet. It's distasteful. Likewise, you don't do someone for a loved one or friend and afterwards say, "well that will be $X".
Posting on social media has a reward of sharing and liking, and as a result, to me, it turns human interaction into an exchange. (And I will admit that there is an element to that already, in terms of owing people favors etc., but the "bookkeeping" that we do is generally in our heads and is hard to quantify, which makes it a bit fuzzier and less commodified.)
You don't get the warm fuzzies when someone tries to harvest intimacy across hundreds of their relationships simultaneously with a post? Weird.
I love seeing a post about something that made a friend happy, but so much of the content on facebook is so obviously not an honest post about something that made somebody happy, but rather something they felt should have made them happy, or something that somebody else would be jealous of, or worst of all a brand trying to co-opt the "something that made me happy" style of posting, that it's ruined the few honest moments of joy.
But seeing people who are your peers, who have mostly followed the same paths as you being far happier and living much full and rich lives (by appearance), and _only_ seeing that, I think, becomes a subtle reminder of your own failings.
We just need to see some of that sheen taken down. If, somehow, we saw _all_ of the shit people go through in their lives, and not just the good, maybe social media would be way different.
Personally, I find it incredibly shallow to post about food you're eating or places you're visiting. That's just money, and you might as well just take a picture of the money you're spending. I prefer to see things people make in my feed (art, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, etc.). It impresses and inspires me to see people out there making the world better with their minds and bodies, not just consuming.
There's also the asynchronous nature. If you're out with friends and hear about their engagement after the fact (among other catching up), that's one thing. But when you're sitting on the couch lonely and see photos from moments after the engagement (and nothing else), it's just that much more of a gap.
Then throw in everyone's highlights with their outrage and some random shared clickbait (fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:You won't believe what this evil politician did!), and it's just toxic.
Most people will probably acknowledge that it's more complicated than that. I think it might have to do with how easily comparable the other person's life is to our own.
I can't explain it well, but here's an example:
I saw a video of a child surprising their step-dad with paperwork for the official name change (kid accepting the Dad's last name). The Dad cried out of joy.
The video made me feel good.
On the other hand, seeing someone that I graduated highschool with getting promoted and being more successful than me makes me jealous.
Why? Because he has something and I don't, but would be within the realm of possibility to achieve. This behavior can also be observed in monkeys, so I don't question it too much.
I'm not a super active user, but as an observer, I do wonder if much of it is pushing those same buttons but in a perhaps more subtle way— like a lot of "wellness" creators who cultivate an apparently authentic persona from which to deliver a never ending stream of motivational you're-worth-it type content meant to encourage and uplift, but that ultimately rings a bit hollow.
As these sites/services gain more popularity communities tend to splinter and it's up to the service to keep things going in whatever direction they want to via things like the fyp algorithm.
presumably there are some personality types that social media works well for, as opposed to personality types that work well for social media, of which there are clearly a lot.
I guess the one boundary is that I don't generally mine my interactions with my kids for internet kudos— I don't want my camera in their faces when we're at the park or reading a book, making them feel like I'm only there spending time with them to score internet kudos later.
I'd like to share the most coherent conversation regarding the harms of Facebook (to a certain extent big tech algorithms/ML/AI). This is with Tristan Harris, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Frank Luntz. I didn't find any dull moment so please watch the whole thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPAOzlqcGIQ
To say nothing of edited photos.
But yeah - being vulnerable and open like that is hard and not for everyone. And it can also be faked for attention. Ultimately I don't know what a platform is supposed to do if everyone starts optimizing for the algorithm or is constantly consuming the very content that is bad for them but doesn't want censorship. There's no win - social media would be amazing if everyone was kind, honest and authentic. But I realize that's asking the impossible on a global scale.
I've noticed this increasingly. It's sorta bizarre?
People who stream usually don't dump an entire 8 hour stream in one video on YouTube. How many people would sit through the entire 8 hour video? But do clips and more people will watch more content. From what I've seen at least. (I'm not a streamer FYI)
The "pretending to be on vacation" thing is super wired. Haven't been on Facebook in years. Is it a new trend.
Instant messages are more personal and you're not broadcasting your life to 5000 randos, who could potentially weaponize that data if they wanted (potential employer saw your meme about binge drinking & alcohol consumption? Too bad).
Would you please clarify this? I know that messages flagged by the recipient can be read by moderators [1], but I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here.
I'm not defending WhatsApp (I've advocated for Signal since the days of TextSecure), but AFAIK the messages are encrypted using the Signal protocol, so I'm not sure how the "WhatsApp police" would be able to determine if you said something specific without the recipient reporting it.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-...
So in this case we have Whatsapp users essentially snitching on each other and getting posts flagged for the purposes of law enforcement, and having those message unencrypted. Whilst this is largely helpful, there is the potential for false positives (e.g a meme about ISIS getting flagged as 'extremist' and 'violent')
It's a tricky one, because although the feature may help save lives and such, I am just uncomfortable with it, since the E2E encryption is slightly broken because of this mechanism in place.
So, over the course of a year I made a hundred different cocktails and blogged my experiences on my blog, twitter, and Facebook. Most of the cocktails were simple 3-ingredient things based on what I had available, but a few were elaborate messes like eggnog or a Ramos gin fizz.
I had my neighbors coming over to me when I was outside thanking me for the cocktail blogging and saying it was one of their favourite things to see on Facebook, and asked me to keep posting them.
Social media doesn't have to be terrible.
The thing is, Facebook actively pushes the trash at you, because trash content monetizes the best.
The only effective avoidance mechanism is to not use it (unless there's some facebook-specific browser plugin that strips it all out).
Most people don't outright block offtopic material, they just gloss over it, and it still ends up with influence because that's what Facebook optimizes for. Plus people will still take the occasional click of curiosity to see what some posts are all about, even if they're not really into that content.
Yes, if you do have the discipline to take a zero-tolerance personal policy and immediately block even inoffensive things that just touch into the realm of polarizing, you can probably keep your feeds clean. But most people (eg, non-HN types) don't understand what Facebook is doing and don't think to actively defend against it, and just absent-mindedly consume the feed with no click discipline.
I never really understood shitting on people posting food pics. How exactly is it hurting anyone?
That is to say, some people want real, individual, original and ultimately personal content. But the overwhelming activity and reactions to content has driven that out, and left us only with "mass appeal" - the things that get reactions and shares.
1) To get updates on friends or family I don't talk to regularly, including their garden food pictures.
2) To use facebook marketplace, because in my region its basically taken over the online classifieds and if I want to buy or sell something facebook is the way to go currently.
I had a friend post a picture of food made from ingredients they had made in their own garden, and it made them feel so good to eat it because they had had a rough year and it was a good personal win, so they apologetically posted a photo of it.
Forget the rest of the trash on Facebook - seeing a friend I haven't seen in a while experience something good and being able to share that with them is something we need more of in the world. I'd trade away all the "only geniuses can remember the order of operations for this future scam page" or "you won't believe how this person misrepresents their opponents views and tears that misrepresentation apart!" and keep stuff like this.