from Hacker News

First-gen social media users have nowhere to go

by fariszr on 2/4/24, 11:24 AM with 92 comments

  • by NoPicklez on 2/6/24, 6:16 AM

    I think being any age demographic that grew up before these apps came to rise you can remind yourself that you don't need to have them. I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family, not articles, not random videos from across the world, not influencers, but people that were actually close to you.

    I didn't need to send a text message any longer, I could send an instant message or a post to a group of friends and family. Social media really hasn't got much better for my quality of life than that. It's now filled with crap, random videos, random influencers, eat this, don't eat that, you're not motivated because of x, read this/read that.

    Having said that, for me it's more about attention span, these social media apps have grabbed way too much of my attention and continue to find ways to keep me opening my phone.

    I can clearly see that these apps are trying to keep me looking at content and that's it, they aren't really adding value to my life, they're trying to make it my life.

  • by OldGuyInTheClub on 2/6/24, 6:45 AM

    I still long for the days of Zeroth-gen tech: Usenet, listservs, and bulletin boards. I miss the focused discussions, some of which turned into face-to-face contacts that have lasted for 25+ years. Reddit never scratched the itch. The Stack Overflow network did not either especially when my questions, carefully worded to comply with the guidelines, got the blockhammer anyway.

    My best alternative so far is searching the HN archives at least for certain kinds of technical questions. Lots of firepower here despite it not being a Q&A site.

    (Never used Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter)

  • by est on 2/6/24, 6:08 AM

    I feel abandoned after Google Reader shutdown. I never got engaged with daily long text reading again.

  • by mo_42 on 2/6/24, 6:58 AM

    New social networks are exciting until the business needs to make money. The first phase of a social network is funded by investors. So the developers make it super-interesting and easy to join. Then, it reaches a stage where the investors want to see a profit. So developers need to convert an interesting and exciting social network into a money-making machine. Feeds won't be ordered by time anymore, ads lurk around in every corner, and algorithms will be tuned to push profitable content over interesting content. Before that, social media was a bargain for the user. Now, it's a bargain for the investor.

  • by LeoPanthera on 2/6/24, 7:46 AM

    No mention of Threads or Mastodon until right at the end, with the throwaway line "none of them have seized mass culture".

    Well sorry, you can't just completely ignore the biggest up-and-coming social networks like that. I left Twitter for the obvious reasons, and the combination of Mastodon and Threads has been a pleasant replacement for me.

  • by Animats on 2/6/24, 6:47 AM

    Time to bring back USENET.

    Really. It was a successful federated system in its day.

  • by andsoitis on 2/6/24, 7:14 AM

    For someone who hates X, they sure like to post on it: https://twitter.com/nonlinearnotes

  • by vcg3rd on 2/6/24, 3:38 PM

    I still have a deactivated FB, which I would long ago have closed except Messanger became the default family chat app, and I have over 15 years of family messages.

    FB failed for me in the early years. Even though I only ever added friends I knew in the flesh,I didn't really care which coffee they picked at Starbucks or what cute thing their pets did.

    When FB moved into the next phase as global forum I found that, just like with email, most of USENET, and pretty much any digital communication tool/platform, no one had the attention and/or capacity for reasoned, balanced, nuanced, irenic discussion of any length.

    It's one reason why Twitter was "successful" at political/cultural/philosophical "discussion. Despite the complaints about character limit it's what people actually wanted. It's also why I couldn't use it.

    For years I used to write family and friends email like I would a postal letter. I replied in-line instead of at the top (thanks MS for destroying that sane practice), but even if when printed the email would be a page, page and a half at 12 pt font, I got constant compliments about length.

    I never used Instagram, quit Mastadon after it had its "Eternal September" as people fled Twitter to talk about nothing but Twitter. I never was able to find active IRC channels even in the late 90s. It felt like rooms with statues even when I asked a specific on-topic question.

    Mid-90s USENET and Prodigy forums were the best social experience I ever had. Now I mostly use internal forums in the tilde/rawtext public *nix space, a little gopher and gemini.

  • by jakobnissen on 2/6/24, 7:47 AM

    We can go outside. It's certainly nicer there than on Twitter. If people did that it would be the happy ending for social media, really.

  • by philip1209 on 2/6/24, 6:46 AM

    I think the next trend will be low-attention apps. People shouldn't be tied to their phones nonstop. Engagement, measured by active users, will increase if we make communications more async.

  • by ensocode on 2/6/24, 8:30 AM

    I am not able to use Instagram or Twitter for my own use cases. Either I want to gather information about some topic or I want to gather the news. But the search function is completely useless. What I dislike about the "new" social media is that it is missing the focus more and more and I am not able to make any use of it. YouTube if awesome to learn some new skills. TikTok or YT Shorts are pretty much useless for this.

    Question: How do you feel about this, and how do you make use of the next-gen social media apps?

  • by prmoustache on 2/6/24, 7:31 AM

    Also social media are now invaded by beggars and prostitutes (so called influencers or content creators). While I don't mind the occasional homeless or juggler asking for money and would stop to listen and donate to a good musician in the sidewalk or in a park, I would totally avoid a street where I would have to navigate around thousands of people begging for my attention and money.

  • by otterley on 2/6/24, 6:37 AM

    I think they meant third-gen, with Usenet/BBS, IRC, and LiveJournal communities all preceding them by years.

  • by mitchbob on 2/6/24, 1:03 PM

  • by leeeeeepw on 2/6/24, 8:58 AM

    I'm running an alternative social net : netwrck.com

    Interested what people think but early days, hopefully will be a place with more interesting and useful AIs that can help us instead of trying to scam us like Facebook lol

  • by yungporko on 2/6/24, 8:21 AM

    we don't need anywhere to go, i'm quite happy having a life outside of the internet.

  • by hit8run on 2/6/24, 6:43 AM

    I’m a little surprised the author didn’t mention Reddit.

  • by rustcleaner on 2/6/24, 6:30 AM

    There is still one good class of apps to socialize over: distributed/mesh peer-to-peer messaging to replace your surveiled lines of communication. Four excellent examples in order of favoritism for me:

    1) Briar. What can I say? Briar is well built and hardly hiccups. It's annoying that the desktop client is in forced upgrade beta still, no single-profile on multi-device, and there will likely never be an iOS version (iOS' fault), but aside from that for Android users it is bar none number 1. Where it lacks voice/video, it has groups, forums, blogs, and is modular with its transports (Tor, LAN, Bluetooth, Sneaker Net). It will absolutely work in a zero internet situation; for emergencies at minimum android-owning families really ought to install it and add each other. It will work with no internet!

    2) Session. Session started as a fork/clone of Signal which did not require an associated phone number to use. It has since evolved to use Oxen (Lokinet, an onion network like Tor/I2P) for messaging. Session has multi-device profiles. Unlike Briar, Session has voice and video (and it is stable most of the time, over mullvad vpn). Voice and video rely on a clearnet Oxen introduction server still (this will eventually change) and the two participants stream p2p; if anonymity is desired then a trustworthy obfuscator is a must for voice/video. Session can be used metadata free if voice/video are avoided for the time being and Slow Mode is selected (no push notification services used). Session is my second because it is more feature rich for normies, works on iphone (that abomination*), and is quite stable.

    3) Tox. Tox makes the list as #3 for being around a while and having a lot of client choices. Tox seems a little less stable, but that's more the fault of the various clients being buggy sometimes. It has voice and group voice (I think). Tox is not anonymous, so an obfuscator will be needed if anonymity is desired.

    4) Jami. Jami is a GNU project application (formerly Ring) which I think could substitute for Zoom potentially. It can be a bit buggy sometimes dropping calls or video not working right sometimes [though I haven't used it enough to say it's not PEBKAC here at this point]. I make mention of this because it underwent heavy improvement during COVID to try to offer some competition to the dismal (proprietary, China) video conference landscape. It too can do multi-device profiles.

    All of the above are short listed because they are easy to install, really quick to generate a locally stored and used set of identity tokens, and then trade strings with friends to link with them. Honorable mention because it's not a messenger but it is in the same vein as the rest spiritually: SyncThing. Ditch the cloud, sync headache-free! (MS should have used this to replicate their windows domain controller file stores IMO, no joke!)

    We are soon entering the age of The Basilisk... except The Basilisk will be leashed, tethered to men who dictate upon whom The Basilisk gazes. Stop being an NPC when it comes to your data and privacy habits, and start acting like a strategic player... always practice all of the Safe SECs!

    (* Disclosure: I daily drive Qubes OS and GrapheneOS.)

  • by magic_hamster on 2/6/24, 6:35 AM

    This was a disappointing read. There's no data in there. No research. Just a couple of opinions. I can relate, but what I'd really like to see is some usage data for social apps with more insight.

  • by latency-guy2 on 2/6/24, 6:11 AM

    In other news, social media apps continue to hit new highest MAU counts for all generations every year.

    Disaffected social media addicts are way too loud of a minority. The world goes on.

  • by hiAndrewQuinn on 2/6/24, 6:43 AM

    Social media is pretty cool. I met my wife, a ton of business contacts, and most of my best friends through social media, so I'm probably an outlier case in just how positive an impact it had on my life. But it was a very very strong positive indeed, and contributed greatly to my agreeing with patio11 about the internet being the caps-G caps-dub Great Work of humanity.

    I don't feel particularly bad that my children likely won't have the same social media experience that I have. They'll probably have a much better one, refined by a few extra decades of free market practices figuring out better ways of getting people what they really want it out of it. It's entirely possible that in a decade or so meeting people first online, then irl will be much more common than it is today. I don't think that's a bad thing in the slightest.