I don't care who owns it, social media is a cancer. Decentralized social media is actually worse because it fragments information, which makes it harder to access, harder to collaborate on, hides subtle knowledge, and creates further in-groups and echo chambers.
What gets highlighted is almost never what is more intellectual, moral, factual, important, or curated. Instead it's whatever is entertaining, angering, scary, validating. It's a machine for capturing people's baser instincts and biases and weaponizing them to make people stupid and reactive.
And it's designed to be addictive. This isn't even just the "big" social media sites. Anything with a "feed" or "endless scroll" is designed to hook you, keep you there, keep you engaging. Cigarettes may not be your drug of choice, but TikTok may be.
Go ahead and quit social media. You know what people almost universally report? They feel calmer. Happier. Healthier. Less scared. They have more free time. It's a weight off their shoulders. Now imagine the opposite of all that, affecting nearly everyone connected to the internet. Imagine what that does over decades.
This machine is eroding society. In the future, we're going to find out that social media was worse than cigarettes. The addictive habit that slowly destroys lives - even nations - over decades.
I'm not the only person who has had friends have nervous breakdowns from social media. This is a pubic health emergency, but we're treating it like its politics. Politics is just a symptom of the greater disease: an epidemic of manipulation machines designed to ruin our health for clicks. The machine doesn't even know it's doing this to us. It's just doing what it was programmed to do. And we lap it up, like so many flies wandering into the fly trap.
I think celebrity media sites are a trap. More so if you are able to post advertising. Social, itself, isn't necessarily bad. Social that is monetized is almost certainly a race for what makes money, though. Not what makes people social.
While I agree for the most part, I have an observation and a question:
Social media, specifically microblogging networks like old Twitter, were uniquely effective at delivering near real-time breaking updates in ways that left older news delivery systems in the dust. I could do without the vapid comments, but this one aspect has real utility and I don't really know of a way to replicate that in other systems. I say this as an outsider that would only occasionally use the site to search for breaking news that hasn't hit other outlets yet.
My question is about where you draw the line on what constitutes a social network as the edges get blurry. Are comment sections social media? Are sites like Reddit and hacker News? Blogs? Blog networks with social features like Tumblr?
Old Twitter was phenomenal for news discovery. I quit news cold turkey, and got my current events from Twitter for years. Despite what you might think, the results were actually less biased and more accurate than mainstream news.
That ended with Elon’s acquisition. Not because of anything nefarious, but rather Elon just didn’t understand what he bought. He saw it as a meme and shitposting service. Which it was for a subset of users, I guess. But the changes he brought massively undermined its utility for elite and connected microblogging, and it became far less useful for that purpose. Now that he is incentivizing content creators, it has become a text version of instagram or TikTok—nothing but vapid influencers chasing engagement.
Twitter at it's peak had less monthly active users than Facebook Stories.
Outside of the journalist and media class, nobody used twitter. 300M+ people are a huge number, but barely scratches the surface in the Social Media world. What can bluesky do different to attract normies?
So soon, all the democrats will be on BlueSky and all the republicans will be on X/Twitter?
Meanwhile us foreigners will have to maintain an account on both platforms to understand what our global overlords have decided for us today ;p
As an aside, my country has banned Twitter... yet everyone in the government, from the prime minister to the junior bureaucrat, uses twitter to issue announcements. They all use VPN. The whole thing is hilarious and sad. And I have to use VPN to find out if the road I'll go out yet is blocked or if we will have electricity today.
Basically, the international market is unlikely to move to BlueSky, then again I could be wrong.
Once funny people and porn completely migrate to BlueSky, it might gain proper adoption. Gotta keep in mind $10/month will keep away a good chunk of demographics, if without it your posts/replies are basically unseen.
Maybe they found it so confusing that it wasn't even an option to bother signing up to?
Tells you all you need to know about why there wasn't any long term migration from Twitter / X to Mastodon and I already called it for Bluesky to be the real Twitter alternative years ago. [0] [1]
Seems like we know that Bluesky is going to just keep growing from here.
Government entities should post to their own Mastodon instance first, but then also syndicate to other social media sites.
That way they always maintain control of their main outlet (even if not many people actually access it there) and not have to worry about who controls other sites in the future.
Worth checking out, for me at least. But honestly enough people seem to have moved on from this type of platform that the combination of fragmentation and just less overall participation means there probably isn't enough critical mass and excitement any more.
Pretty tired of this rhetoric. Mastodon functions basically identical to email and damn near every normies has figured it out. Pick a server, sign up, share your handle(email address) with your friends. Type in box zoom zoom.
Content wise it's a timeline so you, by default, only get who/what you follow. Sure local server timeline and global is an option but then it's no better or worse than the random crap X's algo throws, uncontrollably, in your face.
What gets highlighted is almost never what is more intellectual, moral, factual, important, or curated. Instead it's whatever is entertaining, angering, scary, validating. It's a machine for capturing people's baser instincts and biases and weaponizing them to make people stupid and reactive.
And it's designed to be addictive. This isn't even just the "big" social media sites. Anything with a "feed" or "endless scroll" is designed to hook you, keep you there, keep you engaging. Cigarettes may not be your drug of choice, but TikTok may be.
Go ahead and quit social media. You know what people almost universally report? They feel calmer. Happier. Healthier. Less scared. They have more free time. It's a weight off their shoulders. Now imagine the opposite of all that, affecting nearly everyone connected to the internet. Imagine what that does over decades.
This machine is eroding society. In the future, we're going to find out that social media was worse than cigarettes. The addictive habit that slowly destroys lives - even nations - over decades.
I'm not the only person who has had friends have nervous breakdowns from social media. This is a pubic health emergency, but we're treating it like its politics. Politics is just a symptom of the greater disease: an epidemic of manipulation machines designed to ruin our health for clicks. The machine doesn't even know it's doing this to us. It's just doing what it was programmed to do. And we lap it up, like so many flies wandering into the fly trap.
I think celebrity media sites are a trap. More so if you are able to post advertising. Social, itself, isn't necessarily bad. Social that is monetized is almost certainly a race for what makes money, though. Not what makes people social.
Social media, specifically microblogging networks like old Twitter, were uniquely effective at delivering near real-time breaking updates in ways that left older news delivery systems in the dust. I could do without the vapid comments, but this one aspect has real utility and I don't really know of a way to replicate that in other systems. I say this as an outsider that would only occasionally use the site to search for breaking news that hasn't hit other outlets yet.
My question is about where you draw the line on what constitutes a social network as the edges get blurry. Are comment sections social media? Are sites like Reddit and hacker News? Blogs? Blog networks with social features like Tumblr?
That ended with Elon’s acquisition. Not because of anything nefarious, but rather Elon just didn’t understand what he bought. He saw it as a meme and shitposting service. Which it was for a subset of users, I guess. But the changes he brought massively undermined its utility for elite and connected microblogging, and it became far less useful for that purpose. Now that he is incentivizing content creators, it has become a text version of instagram or TikTok—nothing but vapid influencers chasing engagement.
Outside of the journalist and media class, nobody used twitter. 300M+ people are a huge number, but barely scratches the surface in the Social Media world. What can bluesky do different to attract normies?
Meanwhile us foreigners will have to maintain an account on both platforms to understand what our global overlords have decided for us today ;p
As an aside, my country has banned Twitter... yet everyone in the government, from the prime minister to the junior bureaucrat, uses twitter to issue announcements. They all use VPN. The whole thing is hilarious and sad. And I have to use VPN to find out if the road I'll go out yet is blocked or if we will have electricity today.
Basically, the international market is unlikely to move to BlueSky, then again I could be wrong.
Maybe they found it so confusing that it wasn't even an option to bother signing up to?
Tells you all you need to know about why there wasn't any long term migration from Twitter / X to Mastodon and I already called it for Bluesky to be the real Twitter alternative years ago. [0] [1]
Seems like we know that Bluesky is going to just keep growing from here.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35831893
That way they always maintain control of their main outlet (even if not many people actually access it there) and not have to worry about who controls other sites in the future.
Which one?
Not simple enough for normies. Not enough people. Who wants to be on the 10th largest social media? Full of sketchy content.
Content wise it's a timeline so you, by default, only get who/what you follow. Sure local server timeline and global is an option but then it's no better or worse than the random crap X's algo throws, uncontrollably, in your face.
Jack.