Ma Bell tells me they may not have considered all possible angles on this matter.
Telecom is very very broken.
Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that.
On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back.
I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!
Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.
That's not communication being lost, it's media.
The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams.
Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.
But especially if you allow audio/video then your moderation costs can get very high if you're aiming for more "broadcast" and less "community."
Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill.
There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.
For instance if it is photography technique or sports talk or Arduino programming almost all problematic content is "off-topic" and easy to delete without splitting hairs or offending libertarian sentiments.
Similarly "no explicit images" is an easy line to defend, but anything past that like "no CSAM" is excruciatingly difficult.
For a general purpose platform where people can post what they want, particularly if there is a libertarian ethos where people cry about "censorship", moderation is a bitch.
My personal pet peeve is that on any platform that has DMs I get a lot of messages, particularly when starting a new account, for things that are transparently scams and if I was starting one today my feeling of responsibility leads me to the conclusion that I would not support DMs.
Every social network experiences convergent evolutionary pressure driving it to become social media instead.
That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.
At some point I realized those people were just like that.
I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc.
We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.
Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.
Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.
Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!
So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.
1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”
2. For every social media account you have: close it.
3. Profit
My suggestion was much more modest. Put down the phone and delete your socials. Disengagement is the ultimate act of rebellion.
Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
Being a precursor is not inconsistent with great filters, a great filter is why nobody else is there to be one.
Great filter is anywhere at all in the progress of life from pre-life chemistry to stable interplanetary expansion; filters behind us, for example multicellular life or having dry land so we can invent fire, are still potential great filters and they would leave no space ruins to find.
That said, my assumption is lots of little filters that add up. Eleven filters behind us each with 10% pass rates is enough to make us the peak of civilisation in this galaxy; eleven more between us and Kardashev III would make the universe seem empty.
Humans do find alien radio signals, but they keep going dark after a brief window; the narrator suspects why, because they witness fellow humans disappearing into simulations far more fun than reality could ever be.
Looking through this lens, fighting, limiting internet usage is akin to moving to the rainforest to avoid capitalism - lone rebelling acts in the wrong direction of history, a temporary, partial victory for the few who dare this hassle.
Time is better spent to make this emerging space better, for everyone.
https://rickroderick.org/300-guide-the-self-under-siege-1993...
The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising. That 100% depends on the ability of platforms to control the message, which Facebook achieved to an extent that politicians started paying them in order to game elections.
Then "influencers" came, and largely control the message on essentially all platforms.
By contrast, on Youtube and Twitter, advertisers are making deals directly with specific influencers so their advertising remains on-target. Only "old-style" generic geo-targeted advertising, what you used to see on TV, uses the platforms themselves.
AI achieves many things for these platforms:
1) get rid of influencers by creating AI influencers (done both by influencers themselves, attempting to create fake/AI influencers that are cheaper, and by the platforms that want to control the process)
2) allow advertisers to control the message (think of a guarantee not to get shown on pro-Nazi channels)
3) force advertisers to come to the platforms instead of specific influencers
4) also get the ability to influence and later even control elections
Then I can continue with my strong preference to direct my time and attention toward content generated, mostly, by my fellow humans.
Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives?
Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period.
Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.
So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?
An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
Also, even though I'm an active Fediverse user, the side of fedi that I call home is quite different from his, a stick out being that we tend to use a different set of software (Pleroma instead of Mastodon, usually). Having and using alts on several different instances running the same software is very common. I can't say I've ever interacted with a Pixelfed account from my side of Fedi, though.
Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up.
I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most heavily populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.
Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front.
For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)
But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators.
Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult.
The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.
There's nothing I can add to this.
Dansup has built a photo-sharing app on top of ActivityPub, and we humans are a lost cause because the app doesn't also do text-only messages?
Is that the gist of it?
bryanrasmussen•1h ago
and
>When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago,
I am confused.
8organicbits•1h ago
bryanrasmussen•59m ago