from Hacker News

Social media platforms: what's wrong, and what's next

by eggbrain on 5/22/25, 3:01 PM with 58 comments

• by burningChrome on 5/22/25, 5:11 PM

  I feel like social media has changed human behavior for the worse and we're too far gone in trying to get it back.

  I was just getting into development when social media was coming on the scene. It was so cool to be engaged in communities with people who I loved to see what they were doing, finding emerging technologies and development frameworks and techniques. People were willing to tell you about stuff they were working on. It really felt like a community. Every new platform someone at work would find it and send out invites or get us to sign up and run it through its paces. It was such a great time and I really felt like my growth as a developer was accelerated by being apart of these early communities.

  Now? Its not about bringing people together with common interests. Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes.

  It would seem the entire purpose of social media these days is just about getting people to react negatively to what you're posting in order to generate MORE negative content. It turns into a self fulfilling cycle that is now in a space where I have no idea how it will be broken.

  As a footnote to this, there are still very good people, still posting very good content that does not have that purpose. One account I found a few months ago was trailerparksports on instagram. Its a black guy who got interested in Hockey after the Four Nations Cup and how crazy that tournament started out with the Canada/USA game. His interest was 100% genuine. In the last four months, he's detailed how much he's learned and the outpouring from hockey fans AND the teams themselves has been unreal. The LA Kings flew him out for a few of their games, he's been going to games in other cities. He's 100% into the sport now and its been really cool to see him go through the process of picking a team to support, learning the rules and the strategies.

  So yes, there are still very honorable and decent content creators who are sharing ceratain aspects of their life with the internet and getting a lot of positivity in return. But man oh man, it takes a LOT of digging to find them these days.

• by standardUser on 5/22/25, 4:17 PM

  I think a lot of us want the same thing - a minimally commercialized social network with content exclusively from people we actually know or like. But much like with group chats (or real life) the people we know are not going to be consistently engaged, let alone entertaining, and we'll get bored fast.

• by _ink_ on 5/22/25, 5:32 PM

  I think the EU is on the right track. The network effect prevents progress. If big corporations need to provide APIs that might change. We might even get an app, where you can chose to only see what you want to see (e.g. only content from your friends) and still be able to talk to people that use Fb, Insta, whatever exclusively.

• by kdamica on 5/22/25, 4:58 PM

  The biggest issue is that most people don't want social media. They want TV

• by pizzadog on 5/22/25, 10:59 PM

  This might sound like a strange position to take, but in my experience at least one social media platform has managed to retain its original direction (just being a place for people to come socialize) and that platform is 4chan. I've seen people there theorize that it hasn't gone belly-up because it literally cannot be sold to advertisers due to its reputation. This is not to say that 4chan doesn't have its own problems, but it did somehow manage to stay on mission for nearly 20 years now when we watch other social media platforms struggling; being allergic to advertisers may have been a blessing in disguise. It might not be the most enlightening conclusion to reach but, maybe the issue is (and always has been) trying to monetize a space that doesn't actually create a product?

• by incomingpain on 5/22/25, 3:21 PM

  >I think we need a new social media platform to emerge from the web.

  There are a very large number of major platforms? None of them fit your needs?

  Many of the examples throughout are reddit. Though many of the memes are more facebook.

  The big question to me; can you be social and interact with people on many subjects. Say what I want, when I want. I want to see what I want. Just because a small group of people dont like what I said, they dont get to unilaterally hide what I said.

  When you go on reddit and you say something that many people agree with, but many dont. Suddenly my message is disappeared. Why bother being on reddit? You now have a small group of people curating content.

  If you go on X and say something many people agree with and many dont. I top comment. The people wont dont like what I said can leave a comment but they cant hide my message.

  This is the fundamental flaw in many social media.

• by nick007 on 5/22/25, 3:11 PM

  Very thoughtful analysis. I particularly like the insight around the industry metrics and Goodhart's Law. “DAU” and the like align with social media companies’ interests of increasing attention and time on site, which lead to more ad revenue. But, they are at odds with their users’ interests, or at least don’t consider user costs (ie time). I wonder if a social product could thrive based on the principle of “efficient” usage, a la the platform works on my behalf to keep me efficiently informed on what’s going on in my network and considers the cost tradeoffs of my time and attention. I suspect I could feel very “up to date” on the things I care about most by checking into a social product ~weekly with a thoughtfully curated digest of content.

• by zyx_db on 5/22/25, 4:09 PM

  somewhat unrelated, but i really wish platforms like youtube and instagram had the ability to "opt-out" of certain features. i find that the short form content in youtube shorts / instagram reels can be really easy to waste a few minutes on.

  if anyone knows any solutions (ex. browser extensions) that solve this, id be really interested

• by webdoodle on 5/22/25, 5:32 PM

  Social media platforms cost money. Until we solve that, without monetizing it and giving rich parasites an advantage, we'll continue to be pitted against each other to there benefit. Fediverse, mastadon, other open source systems are likely the way, but until everyone abandons the fake monetized social media, they'll continue to reign.

• by amelius on 5/22/25, 4:04 PM

  Just give me a way to see what events my friends are attending. That's all I need from a social media platform.

• by bananabreakfast on 5/22/25, 3:17 PM

  Couldn't agree more. We need to put the "social" back into social media.

• by sigmaisaletter on 5/22/25, 5:00 PM

  After reading all the posts, I feel this is far too strongly centered on Reddit. What about the other services? They seem to be mentioned in an aside, if at all.

• by Zak on 5/22/25, 10:56 PM

  I read through the whole series, and there's definitely some thoughtful analysis in there. I'm pretty skeptical of the proposal at the end though.

  What's proposed is a centralized platform with some sort of identity verification and no community moderators. It presumably aims to avoid many of the issues the series describes as being wrong with other platforms but doesn't say how it's going to handle the enshittification problem. Many of the issues mentioned are related to the only business model we've seen work for large social platforms; good intentions at the start won't keep them from popping up later when the incentives are aligned in their favor.

  Decentralization is my favorite solution to that problem, but it's not compatible with the ideas of one account per person for life and no community moderators. I'm interested to see what comes next in this series.

• by lapcat on 5/22/25, 3:53 PM

  > All existing large social media platforms of today use one or more (if not all) of the above methods to incentivize users to consume, engage, and create content on the app — and that’s been the state of the social web for the past ~30 years.

  I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition.

  All existing large social media platforms of today are for-profit. Moreover, being large, they require large amounts of capital. Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification, which is why all large social media platforms have followed this pattern for the past ~30 years, even if they started with good intentions and user friendliness. What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?

  Unfortunately, it appears that social media platforms are not the type of product that many users are willing to spend money for, thereby maintaining some level of respect for the users. If the product is not free, it won't become "large". Several platforms, including Twitter/X (and remember ADN?), have tried and mostly failed to promote subscription funding. As the old saying goes, if you're not the customer, you're the product.