Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one’s posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.
I’ve seen the birth of it in my lifetime, I’ll see the death of it in my lifetime. Way to go, evolution!
It had the potential to be good. But as with everything, once capitalisms tendrils flowed through it the benefit to anyone except those wishing to reap a profit is gone. I’m hoping the fediverse gets the support it needs because infrastructure is expensive and we have something good here
And yet, after joining Lemmy and Mastodon, I post a lot more.
Like for real!! I was a semi-lurker on reddit. Posted a couple times a year.
I just passed 500 posts on Lemmy.
I’ve found lemmy to be alot less hostile, don’t care about downvotes, but attacking people because of opinions doesn’t sound like a fun time to me
The absence of a running karma total is a surprisingly powerful difference. I do still look back at old posts, and it’s nice when there’s votes, but without the little number next to a name or when I mouse-over a profile, there’s no motivation to be the first in a thread to repost a cliche joke or to ragebait for fake internet points.
I think the “not having to be first” is what is so powerful.
I know that if I comment on a post from a few days ago on a populated community, I’ll likely at least get a reply from OP, if not a bunch of other people finding my comment and replying as well.
It’s like Lemmy is the nice, small-town version of Reddit (which is probably more similar to Gary Indiana).
That’s a bit cruel to Gary, Indiana, don’t you think?
Opinions are fine. Being disingenuous/an asshole at the same time as having an opinion definitely provokes smackdowns, even on lemmy.
I’ve been enjoying using Signal for “social media”. I can share things with my friends without being subjected to ads or having my data mined.
There’s also a promising Alpha app called Circles from Futo that uses Matrix to do something similar.
Every popular social media wants to maintain complete control and just shove content down your throat, rather than allow you to curate your feed at all. Even subscription-based ones like Strava give you absolutely no control over what’s in your feed.
Speaking of Circles, remember Google+ Circles?
Ah, Google+! The fast follow up to Google Buzz. Guaranteed to turn the Social Media space on its head.
Yep, one of Google’s many graveyard projects
tiktok copied be real with tiktok now
I’ve been trying to cut down social media use ever since 2020. I don’t blame people for not posting most social media platforms are either boring or a toxic shit holes.
George Floyd showed me that the hope I had for this nation is lost. People are just argumentative assholes and have zero perspective. Hearing people defend the police and everything that followed made me dump it.
Granted I know there are those trying to do their job. It wasn’t them. It’s the keyboard warriors that have never been close to a cop, trying to defend a dude killing another over a written check just got to me.
I almost never use Facebook anymore because whenever I’m on it, all I see are posts from groups I’m not even in, ads, videos, and interspersed in all that algorithmically chosen content, the occasional post from people I actually follow and know. Social media isn’t social any more.
Even fricking tumblr now has videos on it, and you can only shut “tumblr live” off for a week at most before they come back.
There was a bizarre transition to “other page” content on Facebook. It realised nobody posts there anymore, and tried to transition to a quasi Reddit. But the content it displays is pure garbage.
Facebook now fills half my page with the worst boomer memes. Then something updated and it scrolls the page right while I’m reading something. I don’t know why I even bother anymore.
I deleted all my big tech accounts, and lots of people are posting on the fediverse.
Big shock considering everything we post online is being weaponized in various ways.
I dont even want to talk to half the people I know anymore lol. I stopped using FB but keep it running because there are many years of pics and what not for family. And when I bring it down people freak out and think something is wrong with me. Other than that, it has been stripped of any identifying information, only has people I know and I never use it anymore. That was the only real ‘personal’ place I had on the internet. Everything else is fake names and whatnot, always has been.
download all your facebook data to get all memories locally, then you can delete
They let you transfer it to other services now, too. That’s what I did for my photos and videos before deleting them from Facebook.
Could I ask why you don’t want to talk to half the people you know? I have the opposite issue where I try to talk to people I know but they don’t reciprocate, I’m finding it hard to imagine the inverse.
There are people I liked a lot in earlier stages of my life, that I no longer have the desire to talk to not due to anything they did, but just them being from a period in my life I’d rather forget or move on from. In some cases it might be people whose main shared interested with me was what we did for work, which I no longer do.
I hear you. I always found it to be very unfortunate :/
To add an additional perspective, it’s not that I dislike these people, some of them I love, but my time has so many asks as it is, and I just cannot maintain active relationships with that many people who have no other impact on my daily life. There are a few I would make time for when the opportunity comes around, but I can’t keep sustained things going with more than a few people. I say can’t, but what I mean is that I prefer to spend the vast majority of my time with my wife and kids, and I will use just about any amount of time that I can spare for parents, siblings, and their kids. I have a few friends who fit into the same group as the family. After that, it’s occasional messages, Christmas cards, and the rare visit/meet up. If you are there for the good, you should be prepared to be there for the bad, in my opinion. I cannot offer that to too many people beyond immediate family. Also, I certainly don’t have the money to support some of those folks through their rough patches, and saying “no” to people you care about sucks.
Interesting, thanks for the response. Robin Dunbar is a psychologist and anthropologist who studies friendship. His claim to fame is ‘Dunbar’s Number’ which is a general statement of how many friends a person can have. It varies from person to person and is influenced by one’s environment, age, beliefs, etc.
He has a way of expressing how relationships manifest themselves based in closeness, I have an
here.This seems to map to what you’re saying. Another thing he said was that the more close friends you have, the less acquaintances you’ll have, and vice versa. There are limits to the number of people you interact with and it can be seen as a sort of hierarchy.
I wanted to ask to get a better understanding: Why do you prefer more time with your kids and wife? Is the idea that your time is better spent to positively affect them and yourself (i.e. enjoying your time with family) and it’s better to ‘put your eggs in one basket’ so to speak? That there is an investment required to have some kind of benefit to make it worthwhile to spend time with others and with family there is a predictable outcome? Do you ever actively engage in criteria to evaluate the methods, reasons, or heuristics you use to determine who to spend time with or who to allocate resources to?
My notion is more investment is given to those who we are closer to due to some perceived positive effect but those heuristics are only ever rules of thumb and wholly influenced by reasons outside of our control. The conclusion is made and then we work backwards to find justification.
I have a friend who spends every weekend with their family, in the infrequent times we do see one another they complain about their parent’s misunderstanding and causing them distress. Rightfully so, as their parents are a bit old-fashioned to say the least. What confused me was, this is a bit machiavellian, they have already seemingly reaped many of the benefits from engaging with their parents and they may be better suited to distributing their time intentionally so as to have a better outcome for themselves and even their parents who are a bit reliant on them and whose ways are set-in further as the friend plays their part in the pattern. They are acclimatized to their environment (with their parents) and the extent that they can predictably or intentionally cause meaningful improvements or positive outcomes is set.
I always thought it would make sense to continually test alternative strategies because at any point one can become ‘comfortable’ at a given local minima or maxima more or less arresting any further development or change. The violent refusal when the topic is broached, and the absolute certainty to which they claimed their current method was superior caught me off-guard and made me confused.
Very interesting! Thanks for that Robin Dunbar info!
Of course! Here’s is a link I have more resources as well if you’d like.
A quote from another article I have saved:
According to John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist who specialized in the study of loneliness (he died in 2018), humans would have evolved a built-in bias against easily making friends because avoiding an enemy would have been more important than making a friend. “If I make an error and detect a person as a foe who turns out to be a friend, that’s O.K., I don’t make the friend as fast, but I survive,” Dr. Capiocco said in a 2017 interview in The Atlantic. “But if I mistakenly detect someone as a friend when they’re a foe, that can cost me my life. Over evolution, we’ve been shaped to have this bias.”
A link for the second article here
Getting older. Lots of drama. Lots of political bullshit I can’t stand anymore and don’t want to hear about. Not saying my situation is the healthiest in the world but that is how I am feeling these days.
Ah, ok makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the response.
No one’s posting on BeReal
Nobody has heard of BeReal
What is BeReal?
I believe it’s an app, where you randomly get a notification and mist poat within then and 2 minutes. It takes a pic of both the front and back cameras on your phone. The idea is that you can’t make yourself look good, like with Snapchat filters, or even Instagram where you can find a nice angle or whatever.
I’m having trouble imagining a worse social media experience and I’ve used both Facebook and the new Reddit site.
It feels like it has a similar stance to what BeMe had but is somewhat successful. Less about you attempting to look perfect and more about every day life. The BeMe idea was to set your camera to record, hold it to your chest to record what ever you were looking at, and before you knew it the video was uploaded to the servers.
What if I’m taking a shit???
Rapper in Cypress Hill. Oh, no, that’s B-Real.
BeReal is pretty popular with a lot of the people I know- you might not be in the right social circles who know about it
No app better defines the changing nature of social media than Instagram. The app started as a digital scrapbook — a place to keep up with real-world connections, close friends, and family. While other networks had more users (Facebook) or generated more news (Twitter), Instagram seemed to define the ideal form of this era of social media. Instagram became a verb, an aesthetic, and a generational signifier.
huUURP! BLAAaahhriifgghhh. . .
Garbage marketing platform dies horribly. Thousands of clueless “journalists” bereft.
Group chats were for sharing before social media. It just out lasted them.
I’m pretty big into the mechanical watch community. Insta used to be popular in that community, but the best content and discussion has long since moved off “social media” and into various private Slack and WhatsApp groups.
I’ve heard of a similar movement in other hobbyist/enthusiast communities.
For people I actually know IRL, it’s virtually all WhatsApp.
Too bad whatapp spies on you just as much. For whole communities to be in private chats seems rather counter productive for new people to find it.
Agreed on spying, though I don’t think it’s any worse than posting on public sites.
The new people concern cuts both ways. Yes, it’s moderately harder for brand new folks to learn about them and gain access. But it’s far from impossible, and the additional hurdle or effort tends to substantially cut down on trolls, spammers, etc.
Take me back to MSN Messenger.
nudge
nudge
nudge
hey u there
Hopefully interest in forums starts to pick up again. Not be the main thing, but at least an alternative.
Social media was fun until my family joined and scrutinized my posts, and then I lost all my friends
