Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

Each feed has a unique URL, so you can bookmark it in your browser. For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser.

Is this code for, "I want the cops to stop people from doing things online I don't like" or "we need more regularity / predictability"?

That makes sense in the case where people are mindfully connecting with particular individuals or organizations, and paying for that.

Not for where algorithms select media for you. That's not a "networking service", even if that is one of its hooks. Unless you consider SPAM or junk mail, riding on email and postal "networking" to be a "service".

"Attention media" is more accurate.

But that also describes traditional advertisement based "media". Which earned its keep via attention access, by including unintegrated ads as a recognizable second component.

A description specific to the new form is "surveillance/manipulation media" or "SM media".

Attention-access funded media lacked pervasive unpermissioned surveillance and seamlessly integrated individualized manipulation. Where dossier-leveraged manipulation, not simply attention access, has become the defining product.

I think alcohol is a good working model to start with. It's a complicated issue bound up with culture, religion, and addiction. How do we deal with it? Well we haven't fixed the problem perfectly and it can still cause a lot of problems, but the main thing we have settled on (in America) is some regulation + formal social pressure and beliefs + informal social pressure.

The first step is to make it more socially acceptable for people to publicly express their belief that social media is bad and that it is ok to do something about it. Libertarians hate this, but legal+social influence over behavior has been something humans have been doing since the dawn of society (for good and ill, unfortunately).

Alcohol is bad health wise but probably is used to reduce the harm of social imposed stress between people.

So, If I think about it "like alcohol", it would mean "what is the root cause of not being able to keep contact with people". It might be that common social mixing places are probably much fewer than hundred of years ago - be it the local bar, gathering after a day of work in the field, public bathhouse, etc. Many of activities in the modern world seem very individual - maybe that is the problem, and people being social try to replace it and get tricked into worse things.

The difference is the "algorithmic" timeline (meaning ads) you get with Facebook, Insta, and co compared to the strictly chronological timeline you get on the Fediverse equivalents (Mastodon, Pixelfed). That it's less addictive, or at least not in the doom scrolling type of way, is more a consequence. Aka the enshitification argument.

Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation.

For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.

> Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response.

Asking someone a question online does not obligate them to take time to answer it, or even explain why they don’t feel like doing so.

You’re not in a conversation with everyone who is online, so the comparison to in person conversations doesn’t hold.

> Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.

People are doing other things while using their computers and you should not expect to be able to commandeer their attention on demand by tagging them. Again the comparison to in-person social norms doesn’t hold because you can’t see if this person is busy with something else.

I find this sense of entitlement to other people’s instant time and attention to be very negative for any digital dynamic. Whenever someone with this attitude joins a group chat it leads to people turning their statuses to Do Not Disturb all of the time or even leaving the group because they don’t want to feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond to that one person every time that person drops a tag in chat.

> you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle

The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.

But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.

Social media is full of in-person events. The only reason I use Facebook lately is to keep up with groups that organize in-person events.

VR/Group voice chat/Group messaging is fine too. For centuries, people have created and maintained meaningful relationships while physically and geographically separated. The circumstances of life do not always allow people to meet face-to-face. One of the worst sins of the post-pandemic "return to normalcy" was the wholesale firebombing of remote options for connecting with people.

The problem isn't whether the meeting is digital or not, it's whether the platform (a physical space or an app) facilitates high-fidelity person-to-person and small group communication consistently over time (the norm for healthy human community), or if it's set up to encourage unnatural para-social relationships and dysfunctional, anti-social communication styles.

We have a duty to help them..and I don't think society gets this right in other places. We're not proactive about it. In religion and islam there's something called dawah, effectively preaching, but the idea is you're calling people to something with higher purpose and to eliminate all these bad habits. And I think it's the same whether online or offline. We need to help people. First you have to help yourself but then you have to go back and get everyone else. It speaks to a moral imperative we should all have to help our fellow man.

It’s not a small group of people that we can afford to “lose”. It’s widespread in an entire generation (at least), a fact that threatens our society as a whole.

We still need a way to meet people with similar niche interests. This isn't served well IRL.

My first step for this was joining a makerspace. Now I can complain about everything with my fellow nerds.

And the social media companies, who have essentially unlimited resources, would fight it tooth and nail

Do you use youtube intending to be drawn into watching things you never intended to watch? I don't want a feed but the people operating these sites do not care that they are destroying people's time. Go to twitter, click on "following". Next time you sign in, somehow it's on "For you" (the algorithmic feed).

Thankfully on Youtube I can completely disable recommendations on the site and I use it purely as a source of information, not as a dopamine addiction funnel.

Right, hn is 50% collaborative filtering and 50% dang

reddit lacks consistent moderation and the worst is location based subreddits, where all dissenting takes are effectively hidden.

Yet one can imagine a limited set of filters that could in theory fix this:

    - eliminate obvious bots
    - eliminate low content / metoo / naysaying
    - eliminate memes
    - detect and promote high quality controversial posts equally to unilaterally upvoted ones

still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.

Retvrn to oldschool forums with chronological posting.

> Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form

Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.

If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.

However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.

You can say porn. It's an adult website

10 years ago Instagram was great. I would see 10 posts from friends, 1 ad, and 0 posts from people I didn't know.

I gave up about 4 years ago as I was seeing 1 post from a friend, 3 ads, and then lots of random stranger posts.

My friends gave up too.

I have tons of private groups chats and share stuff with people I care about there.

You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/

For anyone who doesnt know: unlike in Facebook you can switch off/pause random strangers posts in your feed by going to "content preferences" in your settings. Of course being Meta this reenables every 30 days, but makes for a way cleaner feed in between.

I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.

It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.

“Who is left on Facebook besides dopamine junkies and bots?”

“I only use it in this limited circumstance”

You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.

> who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

Political activists, like a former partner of mine.

… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …

… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …

… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).

Plot twist: all old folks were also on Facebook only to chat with other old folks. Once this fact was spotted, they all just moved to Discord.

The cognitive dissonance in some of these posts is strange.

> one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.

> The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.

How are you confused about who still uses Facebook in one sentence and then immediately in the next sentence you describe yourself as a user and explain why it’s useful to you and the people you know.

There are some apparent niche communities both on Facebook and Instagram. Heavy metal and hardrock music fans is one group that hasn’t migrated anywhere else yet. I both play in a band and promote events, and both are still required in my geographic area to reach out.

Around me I see this usage:

- Older folks.

- People using marketplace

- People exchanging inter-personal tips and info: best stroller, contractor, etc.

Not saying FB is best for those things but it doesn’t seem dead at all.

The growth is across the family of products (inc Instagram and WhatsApp) not Facebook itself. Facebook itself is a zombie, and I don't believe they have a way to innovate out of it. I'm not going to predict the end of Meta, they have more than enough products, but agreed that it's actually quite difficult to understand who's really left.

it's like wondering why pubs or restaurants exists if I'm not visiting them everyday, but they do because they have other businesses (birthday parties, company events etc.). Look at Facebook for business.

It’s the worse. The algo will feed anything that makes you cheer or infuriates you. No middle ground. And God forbid if you dig to some disunion and you “like” something or stop scrolling in the “wrong” tweet… you’ll be getting similar content for months.

It’s crazy how bad it has become.

Too late. (And I don't do mobile anyway.)

I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.

The funny thing about the friends feed is that it highlights for me who is extremely active on the platform. People resharing stuff all the time. And, it's one of the few feeds you can't endlessly scroll through. It will tell you to "check back later" once you get to 3-4 days of updates. No money in showing people their friends feeds, so why let them endlessly scroll.

The amount of shady stuff Facebook has tried with their app over the years has resulted in it, and other Meta apps, being banned from my devices.

I appreciate your comment, and how you argued your disagreement. Yet I think you missed something in GPs post.

First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on.

I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted.

Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature.

Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things.

I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.

Capitalism at work…

Of course we did. We all switched from early social media sites that didn't employ such algorithms to those that did, and when new social media platforms came around we progressively moved to more algorithmic ones. Hell half the reason I switched from myspace to facebook was the opportunity to do all the facebook quizzes which were just "let's see how much information I can feed the algorithm". We all want a steady stream of content we find personally interesting and engaging, why wouldn't we? Our issue with most of these sites is when the algorithm fails to give us what we want, and we complain "I didn't ask to see this" but the fact is we are asking to see something, and we receive it often enough to stay on these platforms.

Between the history of crack cocaine in inner cities, safe injection sites and the current trajectory of American governance, I’m flummoxed by your incredulous posture here.

> Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.

How do you discover new people? I'd say some people I followed I discovered them thanks for the feed

My point is that I just want to be able to discuss any topic with my followers without self-policing lest a bunch of anonymous accounts butts into the conversation and completely derails it.

Why do you assume that there needs to be a purpose other than discussing a topic that you're interested in?

Not email; social networking. Symmetrical just means the relationship is the same from both sides. Imagine a two-way "friendship" relationship (old-school Facebook) vs. a one-way "following" relationship (more recent Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc.).

The friendship link on the site would need to go both ways. Request and accept. There is no concept of “Follow”.

In addition, I’d say limit the number of “friends” a person can have. Maybe cap it at 200 (Dunbar's number plus a little extra). This eliminates celebrity, news, and meme accounts. It also eliminates people playing the silly game of seeing who can get the most followers or bragging about follower counts.

These are your actual friends, who also consider you a friend. Even if a celebrity were to join, the site would be useful for sharing with actual friends, not their fans or casual acquaintances.

Facebook started out similarly, but I don’t think it ever had a friend cap. I remember some sorority girls try to get me to make a Facebook account around 2004/5, because they had a contest to see who could get the most friends. I thought this was stupid and said no. Since this happened almost instantly after launch, I think those friend limits are important to make people use it for actual friends and not a popularity contest. Facebook went the opposite way, leaned into it, and created the Follow option. It was all downhill from there.

Yup, feeling the same way. Mastodon needs to leverage a friends graph somehow

What were the main issues of reddit according to you?