People are becoming aware of their over-usage and the largely minimal or even negative benefits that come from social media altogether. Or just bored and indifferent about it. The fatigue is further strengthened when they soon learn that the alternatives are worse or at best just moving the problem.
I'd advocate for people to stop rather than cheer for any new potential winner. Just uninstall the app and walk away. It was all a lie anyway. You're not in a "community". You do not actually have followers. You did not learn anything new that you couldn't learn elsewhere.
They are lies we tell ourselves as we play the slot machine. Throw it in the trash.
If all you're doing is keeping up with a tight-nit group of friends, you could use a million other services. Group SMS, I-message, discord, Hangouts, even plain old email.
Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?
Ultimately they can all be used for the same purpose, sure. At the end of the day you're pushing the same bits around. But UX can make all the difference.
I do have some group chats and email threads but there’s a broader that extends beyond that which social media apps can be useful for.
It’s the media bit… Insta is created to share pictures and videos with your _own_ selection of followers. You couldn’t do that in WhatsApp without creating some horrific cartesian product of different groups chats for every node on your social graph. Even then the UX is designed around messaging, not as a content repository.
This has to be one of the most asinine takes I’ve ever seen.
You offer a bit of insight about using something as a content repository. That's an interesting take.
I appreciate the question and the thought process it invites. I'm also glad you added your insight in response.
Yeah you couldn't do it by whatsapp, but you could do it with discord, slack, teams, skype and a bunch of other services.
That you get so defensive is really, and I mean REALLY, telling of the real reason.
The most absurd part of this argument is that discord, WhatsApp, messenger, etc… are all also social media platforms. This is by far the silliest “well actually” I’ve ever seen on HN.
But that’s really besides the point, because as you said, they’re all social media platforms, and it’s social media when somebody posts content on them to their large public audience, and it’s social media when I post to my small audience of friends. It’s the suggestion that one of those scenarios is social media and the other isn’t that’s completely illogical.
I actually 100% agree with you here, but assuredly not in the way you meant it.
What it's NOT is that you couldn't replicate a simple media sharing experience between a tight nit group of friends. That's demonstrably false.
> This is by far the silliest “well actually” I’ve ever seen on HN.
No, it's... something else. Again, you're being extremely defensive when someone points out simple facts. Iykyk.
Having an Instagram account and messaging your friends is not social media, it's a social network using the same aforementioned platform.
In other words, a public Telegram channel can be as much social media as Instagram can be, and Instagram can be as much a social network as Telegram is. And exclusively inverse, as well.
The point they were trying to make isn’t difficult to understand. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Also before complaining about the toxicity of social media I’d suggest you take a look at the toxicity you’re choosing to contribute to this platform with how intentionally abrasive your comments appear to be.
Is there a reason you are so reactionary when people pose an alternative viewpoint to your own?
Why did you bother posting such a thing as "I don't understand why people think that social media is toxic" if you are just going to attack everyone who attempts to give a reason for it?
But I do think there’s some regret that is similar in nature to the Eternal September. Things were “fine” before the plebes and political interests found the platform.
In my case, I didn't give up social media entirely, but mostly shifted back to "web forums", which also seem to be experiencing some sort of renaissance (another data point). They have more of a local/semi-closed community feeling, as opposed to the "wide open sea" of major social media.
I consider HN to be one of those "forums", although it's more a bit of a hybrid between the two worlds, and of course it has been existing all along.
Maybe LinkedIn for the professional stuff.
And soon my army of clones will be ready!!!
Good for them. Social media is a miasma of addiction and time-wasting. ~~They~~ we should `touch grass.social`
Yeah, for the "chronically online". But twitter is also celebs and brands, and the "normals" following them. I think for those Threads will find an audience. It will be... Twitter, but for Instagram.
Twitter has always had an outside impact compared to it's actual userbase, mainly due to nailing the news media + politics segment. Threads could fail to pick up the same cultural impact, but still be a thriving business/website, especially if brands and advertisers prefer it over Twitter.
Isn't that Threads's whole thing? Everybody gets the same feed, no matter what you post?
I don't think a sizable portion of people are even willing to entertain the idea that it might still having a place in the Internet ecosystem. Maybe not in exactly the same form as pre-Elon Twitter, but still a place.
It's absolutely an example of political editorialising and narrative control.
And Musk now has a history of enabling criminal behaviour. https://gizmodo.com/twitter-dom-lucre-ban-elon-musk-child-ex...
So - yes, maybe it will continue in some form. But when progressive content is being deboosted it's not going to be the platform it used to be.
This + less moderation headaches for Meta as political discussions invite the most toxic users
I’m back in the Elon corner. Is he goes down, it’ll be doing something interesting at least.
Meta might have a head start with WhatsApp, but I don’t see them doing anything interesting or well.
Nothing has to be anything and I feel like I got down voted because people hate Elon now. I’m not asking you to like him. I’m only saying he’s going to try and create something and maybe it’s good.
How was it more shitty than what it is now or what Musk is trying to turn it into?
At least it had a quite decent logo instead of as generic as it get X character.
> interesting
Also what so 'interesting' (in a non crazy/entertaining way) about what Musk is doing?
>At least it had a quite decent logo instead of as generic as it get X character.
It's just a logo. Companies come and go. Everyone needs to get over it.
Trying to duplicate WeChat is an objectively interesting strategy. At the very least, by integrating payments your social media platform doesn't have have to sell ads. You could buy items directly off a merchants Twitter/X page and Twitter/X can just take a merchant fee. You could have a market place with integrated payment methods rather than posting on Facebook and working out an intermediate payment method on the side.
oh.. I never personally liked Twitter. I was just thinking about the company itself rather than their products.
> It's just a logo
It also objectively sucks. I don't think we just handwave poor design instead of making fun of it and mocking it. The world is as already as ugly as it is..
> At the very least, by integrating payments your social media platform doesn't have have to sell ads
How much do they think they could get from these payments? 1-3%? Shopify's net revenue is lower than Twitter's was before they buyout and they are not even profitable. The interest payments alone on the debt Musk offloaded to Twitter as part of the acquisition are about equal to Shopify's quarterly revenue.
It's a very competitive field with basically no margins, I'm not quite sure what Twitters edge would be? They'd need to charge way more than their competitors if they wanted to use the revenue to fund the rest of the company after getting rid of ads...
> integrated payment methods rather than posting on Facebook
The lack of an integrated payment processor is not the reason Facebook Marketplace doesen't support direct payment payments. That's an insignificant problem compared to all the other stuff they would need to handle with huge costs due to significant overhead (just like at what Ebay does, also they charge 10%+ and they are not that profitable either).
In the US, if you met someone via online dating and said “here’s my whatsapp” 99% of people would think you are a scammer or something.
It could take a while, but look at all the social media messaging apps from the past: ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, My Space, GChat, Orkut, Tumblr, Snapchat, FB messages etc
They come and go. I sure don’t know what the ultimate chat/social media app looks like.
WhatsApp is used by teenagers, great-grandparents, businesses, everyone. When you give someone your number in Europe, they won't ask how to contact you, they will just send you a message on WhatsApp 100% of the time. Only tech nerds and small groups use Signal etc.
To be clear, I don't think this is a good thing. But it is simply the reality of the world. It's been like this for 10 years with no signs of changing. WhatsApp could of course die one day, but only if Meta does something categorically stupid or unpopular that forces people off the platform (eg, what Twitter is doing).
WhatsApp is not a social media platform and that's precisely why it is so universally used.
We prefer the verb “lurk”.
Lurking is when you frequent a forum but never post.
I remember a local sysop in the 80s who ran an Apple II ASCII Express download site with two 5.25” floppy drives. You’d write him a text message and save it as a file. He was a cab driver and he’d come back home once in awhile and check the messages. If you were lucky he’d put your requested software in the second drive and maybe you’d check back in time before he fulfilled someone else’s request.
My uncle told me a story of when he was at his first programming job carrying a box of at least 500 punch cards across a factory floor on his 2nd or 3rd day. Someone opened a garage door somewhere and a gust of wind came and blew every single punch card across the factory. They were everywhere he said. My uncle was terrified of losing his first job meanwhile these factory guys are pissing themselves laughing and almost literally rofl.
Turns out it's a prank they pull on everyone. There's only been a few that held onto the box and the cards are complete trash.
It sounds fun.
The former has negative connotations, the latter is neutral.
I also don't have the time or the energy to put out quality content. It is draining to put out good content and have a handful of moaners criticise it in a toxic manner.
It is even worse if they criticise your content, because 3 years ago you said something about Musk/Tesla that wasn't 100% positive.
It's an amazing way to reach very interesting people doing very interesting things and to be amazed almost every day (if you like to learn, or just like human ingenuity). It needs curating, and liberal use of blocking, muting... but having (or watching) a short conversation with a security expert, programming language warrior, database benchmarker, or HPC researcher is something I feel I couldn't do elsewhere.
Nebulous anecdotes such as this always made him curious: opinion regarding what, precisely? “David Lane’s 14 words and 88 precepts, perhaps?” — he wondered to himself, unable to divert his eyes from their username.
Not at all. "Journalists" are as biased as they come. They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them. That hand is most often advertisers but may also be governments. Chances are the articles they produce are actually hidden advertisements or propaganda. How could anyone with such massive conflicts of interest bring credibility to literally anything? I want access to real information posted by real people, not agenda-pushing "credible authorities".
> Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.
What makes you think these "journalists" aren't just randoms themselves? They're not really any better than any person on this site. Their particular brand of hot take is not automatically more valid than anyone else's. As far as I'm concerned their only purpose is to generate material for us to comment on.
There is exactly one site in the entire internet I have enough respect for to call them true journalists: LWN. It's just excellent in every way and they don't need to posture as authorities for everyone else to believe it. Everything else ranks lower than HN's comment sections to me.
It's pretty ridiculous to compare someone who has a university degree, years of training and experience, professional qualifications, and maybe a strong reputation, with a "random" posting on an internet forum.
A random university degree is a much lower barrier, and just FYI it isn't required to be a journalist.
Big deal. I have all of those things. Lots of people here do too.
There used to be a time where as a rule journalists were below that threshold unless they were specifically working for The National Enquirer writing stories about Elvis still being alive, but whatever the threshold is, we damn well got closer to it.
It's a fair question to ask, what's the threshold and where we stand regarding it. You cannot say they're all like that, but you can say TOO MANY journalists are like that. I'd even agree with the latter statement. Would the remaining journalists be more or less likely to be out there on Twitter, mostly unheard? How about after Elon Musk's takeover? My sense is that Elon is more likely to get rid of the good ones when they correctly call him out on his nonsense.
So, you got any other account posting behind a pseudonym, being more unbiased than a journalist posting to Twitter/X using their professional name and attached to their organization? At least with the journalist, you gain some insight into what their biases might be.
> They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them.
You say that as though every dev working professionally on HN is 100% of the time working on projects they want to work on, writing the features they want to add, and releasing on a schedule that ensures the code is at a quality that fully reflects their talent.
This is my only HN account. I post pseudonymously and anonymously elsewhere on the internet but not here.
> You say that as though every dev
Devs on HN usually don't make it their business to present their biased version of the truth to vast amounts of people.
I remember when the Beirut explosion happened so quickly you had footage of what had happened.
This kind of latency is unachievable by traditional news
Random footage of some explosion is not useful news without accurate explanations of what you are seeing. It often takes time to sort out the facts of a story. Moving breathlessly ahead without facts is usually called gossip.
Just this week there was an article on HN front page about journalism school requiring twitter accounts, and pushing journalists to build "their own brand" by getting lots of followers.
These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and font want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related.
Most people of course are not on twitter at all (and could care less). Some use it as a group-chat service. Some use it as joke-of-the-day. But the biggest user base by far is journalists who have invested in it big time.
The only people who would even know are other Twitter users, most real people in real life don't use it and they are not interested or affected at all.
Every single time they say "Let's see what people on the internet are saying.", the scene always changes over to tweets and tweets and tweets.
Journalism is beyond redemption.
A prominent case: A few years ago, J.K. Rowling wrote an article on gender bathroom policy. I'm pretty sure most random people, when given the piece to read, would have judged it to be some rather moderate opinion. But on Twitter the author encounterd a massive wave of accusations and hostility. The journalists were probably sympathetic with those people, and moreover thought them to be in the majority among the general population (because the JKR criticisms were in the majority on Twitter).
So the journalists went out and wrote news pieces casually describing Rowling as being a transphobic, as if this was an uncontroversial description of fact, like the sky being blue, when it was really a serious accusation by the journalist. Their Twitter filter bubble confuses them about which views are common and which are fringe.
This is one of the reasons I left that field.
No, journalists hate that Musk took away the digital caste system that they took advantage of, where they (blue checks) were an elite ruling class. Now they are on equal footing as, and are forced to engage with, whom they perceive as the "Dalit scum" of the platform, who bought their way in for a measly $8.
Twitter was one of the most segregated societies on the planet, and Musk upturned its power structure nearly overnight and made it a more democratic society (albeit one with a benevolent dictator). Yet we all sat and watched while celebrities and journalists threw public temper tantrums, reminiscing about a time when life was better in their online universe, during the digital apartheid days, and their followers who sympathized. Talk about disruptive.
X
People keep saying this, but I've been a daily Twitter user since long before the Musk timeline and if anything the platform's never felt more engaged. Perhaps particularly vocal complainers like Taylor Lorenz leaving the platform makes the exodus seem greater than it is, but in general it seems high-follower users are just as engaged as they were before.
The only exception seem to be characters like Lorenz whose conduct has been so poorly received by the community that they seemed to be looking for any good reason to leave while still saving face.
Threads is text-based Instagram. But not even that as you can very well include photos. It has exactly the same shallow culture as Instagram: commercial, flat, vain.
Meta has openly expressed that it's disinterested or even hostile to news/journalism making their way to the platform (which comes with a lot of political flame-wars), instead to focus on making it a "fun" platform. Quite obviously because advertisers prefer networks without controversy.
Users may self-censor as on Threads the link to your real name is not very far away. Many users may have a real name Insta account linked up which in turn is linked to your Facebook account. Even if not visibility linked to your real name, internally you should assume it's there. So who knows what happens to all those accounts when you step over the line in Threads?
Hence, it's not Twitter which is defined by the culture war taking the main stage. Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. It also produces quite a lot of original content, whether they be memes or otherwise. You'll find none of that originating on Meta networks.
As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost. There is no longer a "cultural network" where you push a message and get reach. None of the alternatives work for this purpose either.
I have no idea what will become of Twitter, but I do know to keep an open mind as we live in wild times. Just because Musk is a chaos monkey does not mean that it will not eventually rebound or even surpass old Twitter.