It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore

Uranium3006@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 960 points –
businessinsider.com

Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one's posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.

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And yet, after joining Lemmy and Mastodon, I post a lot more.

Like for real!! I was a semi-lurker on reddit. Posted a couple times a year.

I just passed 500 posts on Lemmy.

I've found lemmy to be alot less hostile, don't care about downvotes, but attacking people because of opinions doesn't sound like a fun time to me

The absence of a running karma total is a surprisingly powerful difference. I do still look back at old posts, and it's nice when there's votes, but without the little number next to a name or when I mouse-over a profile, there's no motivation to be the first in a thread to repost a cliche joke or to ragebait for fake internet points.

I think the “not having to be first” is what is so powerful.

I know that if I comment on a post from a few days ago on a populated community, I’ll likely at least get a reply from OP, if not a bunch of other people finding my comment and replying as well.

It’s like Lemmy is the nice, small-town version of Reddit (which is probably more similar to Gary Indiana).

I hated most of those cliche jokes. Here I am looking for real conversation only to be met with thousands of not witty low effort jokes.

There are some starting here too, I swear to god if I see one more, "Good bot" reply to a fucking bot account I may stroke out. I don't know why, but that one really grinds my gears.

There used to be a bot rating bot on reddit that used those comments to see which bots where actually good. It was useful. I'm hoping someone will make the same on lemmy and go back retroactively to index old comments.

Why rely on people commenting to it? Why not use upvotes/downvotes?

I think that on some bots it is meant as feedback on its performance but to have 10 users give the same feedback is kinda annoying. Maybe Lemmy can have a feature were humans can approve/disapprove bot performance that doesn't involve upvote/downvote. It would only be available to bot accounts in the site's UI. Could possibly expand it's functionality to something more useful. Or just use the voting system because it's already in place.

Yeah, just use the voting system... no need to make comments to the bots.

Lemmy definitely has a more chill, human vibe than I got with Reddit, given how overrun the latter was with vast armies of shills, bots, alt right trolls, etc.

Not that it's all rainbow-pooping unicorns frolicking through flowery meadows here but at least the dick comments tend to be much rarer and often a one off for the person making them.

Opinions are fine. Being disingenuous/an asshole at the same time as having an opinion definitely provokes smackdowns, even on lemmy.

Same goes for 9gag but that site is different

Huh, when I clicked on your profile it says 0 posts...

Profiles are rarely accurate. I viewed the same profile from two different instances (yes the same profile, not the same username from two different instances) and they didn't even have the age of thr account the same. One was 2 years, one was 2 months. So I wouldn't trust that. I'd only trust it if you're logged into that very instance.

In this case it's more likely to be because that's one of my alts. This is my main.

Part of the reason is Lemmy's default sorting algorithm for comments, "Hot", addresses reddit's biggest flaw, which is that earlier comments snowballs with upvotes, so it buries late-comers to conversations, leading to the rat-race of everyone trying to get their funny one-liners in as early as possible for maximum karma (which also isn't a thing here.)

The "Active" default sort for posts also means that comments are a lot more concentrated to what people are actually talking about and posts tend to be stickier. (also, botting upvote is a lot harder on Lemmy, since it's easy to bot upvotes, it's a lot harder to fake real conversations in comments. )

In fact, it is pointless to comment at all past like 4 hours on any post on reddit since it will just sit unread for hours, but here you can comment 1 day after a post and still have people talking to you.

for me, I was motivated to make this my first post because I want to help solve the death of content issue we still have. it's gotten quite a lot of attention. I think that anywhere bigger, anything of relevance would have already been posted by the time I see it

Also, for me, it's the fact I do not feel my data and privacy are being siphoned, sold, and fingerprinted on this platform. Another factor is that I feel the people and interactions are pure and authentic, rather than astroturfed and ambiguous. That may change as the fedicerse grows, but for now it is bringing me back of the older days of the internet.

For what it's worth, that was a big reason why I moved as well, everyone here actually cares. ❤️

You bring up one advantage I see from Lemmy. Even though I've seen this article posted before (I think by L4Sbot in this technology community), the nature of de-centralized content means that cross-posting onto various servers is actually encouraged to get input from a variety of users from different communities and configs (for example, people who have disabled viewing bot-account posts).

On Reddit, people would be quick to say "boooooo repoooost", but I've not seen that too much of that, just a few complaints of "there's too much orange guy and muskrat in my feed".

Same here. For me it's because it feels smaller more often instead expecting to be buried.

I just want the communities I post in to grow. Just trying to do my part to keep people engaged and encourage others to do the same.

I comment about as much as I did on reddit, but I feel like I see less negative replies. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’d post on there, somebody somewhere would have something shitty to say. It’s not my fault society can’t accept my seal clubbing hobby.

If you want to go clubbing with 90s phenom and signer of the hit song “Kiss from a Rose”, then you go for it! You are accepted here ❤️

See? This is what people in reddit can’t seem to understand. I say, “I want to go the Arctic and club the shit out some Seal,” and they immediately assume the worst. Just because I like dancing the night away in cold, barren wastelands doesn’t make me a monster.

Absolutely, I post much more here because I know actual people will actually read it and may actually respond like they would to an actual human. It's like the old days of the internet.

Hey me too! Just the Lemmy side (was never into twitters whole thing) but I actually post stuff here, even if it’s just cross posting.

I always used an alt to post on Reddit and did so very infrequently. I think I posted maybe 3 things on the 4 years on Reddit?

I comment a lot more, and have posted a ton more (even without removing the posts! And yea, 5 is a ton more since it’s in the last 2 months rather than 4years!)

I don’t even clear my comment history as a compulsive thing (I changed me behavior somewhat, to allow for this) because I don’t want to remove activity from the platform. I know it needs me to contribute so I do!

I do, too, but it's out of duty and I'll stop when other people pick up the slack.

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The concept of "influencer" as a career needs to die a quick death.

it's fancy speak for "salesman"

Ooo it's the equivalent of "side hustle" just being a 2nd job.

Fancy speak for “cheap salesman who has a large network” /0.5s

Wha..What?! So you're saying I'm not a BOSS BABE?!

I'm glad I don't really get these references. Tells me I've avoiding some of the right bullshit.

I mean I think it's a fine career, it's the name that's dumb.

For the most part they're just entertainers. The "influencer" name suggests way more than should be.

Entertainers are supposed to be entertaining though.

These people have all the "entertainment" value of a late-night infomercial at best. "Oooh, watch me get excited about unboxing this item. Whatever could have Disney sent me this week?"

The worst problem is that these influencers do gain huge amounts of followers, but rarely fact-check or do hard sciences needed to ya know, give information to viewers? See Linus Tech Tips and the whole crap they're into right now.

You are watching the wrong persons on youtube.
Aaaand: The thing you think is unfunny might be the funbiest thing since forver for another.

Exactly. And the fact that people have large amounts of followers mean that plenty of people find them entertaining.

I mean, they're mostly indie and could probably easily be compared to stand-up comedians.

Which if we look at it's history is a very crash-and-burn career itself. I think a lot of them are entertaining. But it's certainly a saturated market where it can feel like a needle in a haystack at times.

And really, the issue with LTT, is an issue. But keep in mind on the internet we largely mock news sites in general for being uninformative and many being glorified blogs. It's not as uncommon as we unfortunately may think.

But basically a lot of what is souring you on influencers, either has already happened in other careers or is currently happening to others as well, just we don't think about it as much.

Well “entertaining” is subjective. If these people weren’t entertaining, they wouldn’t have so many followers.

There are absolutely a ton of people out there taking advantage of certain people and manipulating them as opposed to actually being entertaining, but that’s not an “influencer” problem, that’s just a people problem. That happens in every industry with human interaction.

Plenty of influencers just post content they think their followers will like and use that following to make money as well. And a lot of the time, their followers actually enjoy the things they advertise.

And the great thing is if you don’t like the concept, you can just not follow them.

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Like they could be a video journalist or a nature photographer or a lifestyle model. All those would be more descriptive than just influencer.

I prefer "content creators. " Sametimes they can be very educational or entertaining. (I watch a lot of comedy, travel, and home workout content.)

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Talking to real friends more interesting than arguing with strangers? Shareholders flummoxed! News at 11.

Hey, I take offense to that! I'm going to write a vitriolic response to your seemingly-normal-but-different-viewpoint-than-mine opinion where I'll use non-applicable slurs and misinformation and then call you dumb if you post a sensible reply!

tfw you just stand on the sides and then meme on what’s happening with a lame joke instead of contributing your two cents on the socioeconomic practices that are happening in the US that are currently choking its working class to death

lmaooooooo gottem

Hey, I take offence to your office! I’m going to write a nonsensical response that parallels your comment where I’ll use no sources and not really make any point whatsoever!

... real friends ...

I don't understand.

Like text but with noises and fleshy.

Edit: sometimes they congratulate you on the anniversary of exiting your mother's birth canal.

I've seen the birth of it in my lifetime, I'll see the death of it in my lifetime. Way to go, evolution!

It had the potential to be good. But as with everything, once capitalisms tendrils flowed through it the benefit to anyone except those wishing to reap a profit is gone. I’m hoping the fediverse gets the support it needs because infrastructure is expensive and we have something good here

There used to be a time when corporations were taxed so hard they did everything they could to reinvest their money into the company/employees/communities just to avoid it going to taxes. Unfettered capitalism destroys the humanity in everything it touches.

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The worst part is the Cambridge Analitica kinda shit that they figured out eventually, the orange cunt, brexit and other modern calamities were fueled by the social networks reach into private activities or otherwise. It sucks cause it exposes how easy normal people will go down the rabbit hole.

Yup, and it wasn’t even just them, using social media to fuel insurrection in the US has been Russia’s playbook for a long time, and while their failures in Ukraine show how unprepared they were for outright warfare, they had no trouble using US social media platforms to stir the pot and promote right wing tendencies

Imo society needs to be restructured in a way that encourages people to log the fuck off and talk to real people in their town, not some astroturfing bot on the other side of the world. Have councils pay randomly selected people to join meetings on solutions to local issues or something. Real people will call crazy people out on their shit and are (probably) not paid to undermine democracies.

You underestimate capitalism if you think the fediverse is safe. It's going to be a constant fight against an immortal enemy. It's only a matter of time. I just hope it's after mine.

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Yeah it truly is a bummer. The early days of myspace and Facebook were great

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I was in high school when facebook went live, just out of curiosity how old were you?

I was in college and I still do not understand it. My friends were like dude there's girls on it and you can poke them. But there's girls out in the real world. Now it's the reverse where meeting people on the internet is more normal than meeting IRL.

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Social media in general is in the following stage of Enshitification:

  • Launch
  • Growth at all costs, user focus
  • Use size to bring advertisers
  • Gradually shift focus to advertisers and money bringers
  • Ensure users are way too invested to quit
  • >> Sell out <<

It's no surprise that people only end up seeing "carefully curated" content, it's what "sells", or rather, ensures people stay in the stupid app. From TFA: "While sharing has tailed off, consuming content hasn't slowed"

I have an Insta account for some of the part time 3D printing I do, but since I'm not a "content creator", my stuff has almost zero reach. Whenever I open the app, it's roughly 1:1:1 posts of "recommended", someone I actually follow, advert. 2/3 of everything shown to me is stuff I didn't ask for, not to mention when the advertises are actual scams or fucking pyramids

I redownload insta like a month ago because I thought fuck it. Other than reels from old friends from highschool, it's all adds and the same regurgitated memes and stand up comics.

It was creepy that after nearly 4 years of being inactive it knew that I liked golf, and drink too much.

I still visit Reddit but I no longer engage in any way, other than reading comments. No up/down voting, not commenting, no reporting spam. Nothing but reading with multiple layers of ad-blocking.

PS: the overall quality/value has dropped precipitously

I deleted all 6 of my accounts. I can’t upvote or comment and I like it that way. Reddit no longer values me as a content producer by eliminating my fav apps, so I no longer value Reddit.

I have used it just a handful of times where adding "Reddit" to the end of a search would get me what I was looking for - usually "peer reviewed" options on some topic.

1 time I went for commentary on a niche reality tv show to feel validated in my hate for the designated villain.

I am not logged in and don't interact any further

I deleted my main Reddit account but still find myself going back there occasionally for specific topics. For example, I haven't found a good place on Lemmy to ask travel questions.

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Those platforms are business media now, not social media anymore.

This is really interesting to think about. On my photography IG the one users who are still having good reach are the ones who are promoting their patreon/presets/editing services, are constantly trying to earn money in some way and are posting a million reels every day.

More casual photographers like me are getting zilch. I used to get 1000 likes on 95% of my stuff with some going viral. Now I get 200 if I'm lucky, my reach in general is in the hole and I refuse to spend hours editing reels and begging for the algorithms attention. I'm close to shutting it down but I help mod a page right now so I'm hanging on for a bit yet.

The fediverse, while still social media, has a level of authenticity unrivaled by most major social medias in my opinion. Hopefully it stays that way!

Has any communication system managed to do that? Once certain types of people catch the scent of profit, they tear the medium apart searching for every penny of it.

Letters became junk mail. Email became spam. Newspapers and magazines became mostly ads and shilled content. Television became for-profit news and reality content.

That authenticity is just going to make it more appealing to astro-turf.

we need to shitpost more. a neighborhood that is high in crime does not appeal to advertisers. like north korea, they live in paradise whilst convincing the rest of the world that it's a shithole.

Weirdest NK take I've seen

Weirdest NK take I’ve seen

I think it's kinda true for like...a couple very specific people there.

ah i guess that's in the process of changing. you can see this happening right now. more right-wing memes, more "look at this cool movie/toy/outfit... i found. it's really me, a normal human being just like you!"

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I also noticed how my social media usage (even on Lemmy and Mastodon) is consistently declining, I haven't opened the clients I use for either platform in days (or possibly more than a week). It's bad because I was pretty invested in the fediverse, but it's good because now I can actually do something productive, or even go outside.

It's not bad... it's actually healthy. I think that feeling that you must post on social media isn't really good for the head.

Go on social media when you feel like it, but it's best if the default is to not use social media.

Agreed, this experiment should be able to last by itself without feeling obligated to post something. If that's the case then it's failed.

No app better defines the changing nature of social media than Instagram. The app started as a digital scrapbook — a place to keep up with real-world connections, close friends, and family. While other networks had more users (Facebook) or generated more news (Twitter), Instagram seemed to define the ideal form of this era of social media. Instagram became a verb, an aesthetic, and a generational signifier.

huUURP! BLAAaahhriifgghhh. . .

Garbage marketing platform dies horribly. Thousands of clueless "journalists" bereft.

Insta-gram

I thought it originated as a marketplace for single servings of drugs.

Discord is better than IRC imo. I used IRC for a VERY long time and Discord was the one that finally killed it for me. We'll see if it lasts. I guess if they kill themselves (and they keep trying to), IRC will still be there waiting. Used to be on Rizon!

Discord is sooo awful imo. Every server has annoying “rule bots” or people constantly changing the look/feel of the channels or trying to engage you with @all or @channel (which you can ignore but it’s still annoying)… even the more technical ones have the same vibe. IRC is so much easier to communicate in IMO.

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No one's posting on BeReal

Nobody has heard of BeReal

BeReal is pretty popular with a lot of the people I know- you might not be in the right social circles who know about it

What is BeReal?

I believe it's an app, where you randomly get a notification and mist poat within then and 2 minutes. It takes a pic of both the front and back cameras on your phone. The idea is that you can't make yourself look good, like with Snapchat filters, or even Instagram where you can find a nice angle or whatever.

I'm having trouble imagining a worse social media experience and I've used both Facebook and the new Reddit site.

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Also, if no one is posting on social media, then what the hell are we all doing right now then?

My Facebook is only memes, only from the large meme pages, not the ones I like that I have to check manually since they'll never end up in my feed. And news articles.

It started with Facebook just hiding what your friends are posting. It still happens that someone shares a photo once a year or so, but I will never get shown it. I just browse my friend's profiles manually.

That was extremely dissatisfying about Facebook. I’d see an endless stream of crap from people that I barely knew and didn’t care about at all, and then when I’d look at a profile of someone I actually knew and did want to keep up with, I’d see posts about significant and interesting things that happened in their lives which Facebook never showed me. I tried to get them to stop showing me irritating posts about politics - unfollow people, block people, mark “show less posts like this”, then it would come up with more political posts from people I didn’t even recognize. Meanwhile, oh, colleague got married…. sure, just never show me that post and show me 15 idiotic political memes instead.

and we'd voice our opinion AS THESE CHANGES WERE HAPPENING and people would cry "things change you just don't like change hur durr i'm so progressive"

I don't consider this or reddit social media. I don't know anyone, nor do I care to.

Instead it is like a collection of forums since forever like in the bbs days.

I pick and choose what rooms to go in and learn something. But it isn't about me, or staying connected. You know, the social part.

This and Reddit are 100% social media. Right now, writing this, we are socializing on this media.

Maybe I'm wrong, but this is how I've viewed it for years

No, I don't think so. Not in the sense that social media became defined. Web forum, and bbs rooms, existed long before the term. The key difference and turning point was removal of anonymity, and the concept of self promotion. I know they are similar and overlap, but the evolution from one to the other did occur. Reddit and Lemmy still have more in common with news aggregation and forums than say a Titter, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. Most of the content here is in reference to something else, end then discussion are on that.

nah. Social Media has a sort of implied entertainment attached to it, which is not a good description of, e.g., this very discussion. This -can- be social media if you're just lurking, but for us conversing here this is now a forum. We're sharing thoughts and discussing.

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That's basically how most of Instagram works and is what the article is about. No one knows folks on those platforms either. They aren't "social" anymore. No one shares anything personal, it's all "content" created for millions of followers by influencers and the like. This is probably more like social media than current platforms are. It's closer to what social media was when it started.

This is literally social media lmao

No, I don’t think so. Not in the sense that social media became defined. Web forum, and bbs rooms, existed long before the term. The key difference and turning point was self promotion, and the removal of anonymity. I know they are similar and overlap, but the evolution from one to the other did occur. Reddit and Lemmy still have more in common with news aggregation and forums than say a Titter, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. Most of the content here is in reference to something else, end then discussion are on that.

If you look up the history of the term the turning point is definitely the change to having real personas and real people connect. That is where the "social" part comes from. The term "social networking". But we are not social networking here. Do you actually know anyone here? Do you want to?

preach. If anyone wants an example of what is meant by "forum" if you're too accustomed to modern takes on it, visit places like news.ycombinator.com or just browse reddit using old.reddit.com and go in some less "popular" subs that aren't just people posting random pics and videos.

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I'm assuming you're just here studying nerds for your next blockbuster where you're playing Ada Lovelace or something.

... I don't know what you're talking about.

On a purely coincidentally note, how likely would you be in watching an Ada Lovelace biopic? No reason, just asking.

I see your point, but I only used Reddit for a long time and the difference was the anonymity, so it's social media but minus the personal brand.

This is why I hate when "journalists" write titles like these because they're just stupid bullshit. Why not just say "social media use is in severe decline". Oh, because it's not clickbait, that's why.

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if someone posts on social media and nobody reads it ... does the poster even exist?

Trees in forests breathe quantum sighs of relief

…or do they?

I almost never use Facebook anymore because whenever I’m on it, all I see are posts from groups I’m not even in, ads, videos, and interspersed in all that algorithmically chosen content, the occasional post from people I actually follow and know. Social media isn’t social any more.

Even fricking tumblr now has videos on it, and you can only shut “tumblr live” off for a week at most before they come back.

I didn't think anyone used Tumblr any more since they got rid of porn.

A solid amount of new memes I see are from Tumblr posts. A lot of people went back prior to Twitter changing ownership, and then many more after that too.

Yea. My whole Facebook feed is full of ads and posts from people I don't even have on my friend list. I got fed up and barely go on there anymore.

There was a bizarre transition to "other page" content on Facebook. It realised nobody posts there anymore, and tried to transition to a quasi Reddit. But the content it displays is pure garbage.

Facebook now fills half my page with the worst boomer memes. Then something updated and it scrolls the page right while I'm reading something. I don't know why I even bother anymore.

God yeah Tumblr is so frustrating now. Like I get that a site needs to make money and I'm not even opposed to the gimmicks they have. But changing the look of it (which has been changed before but at least it made sense a lot of the time) to what is essentially a clone of Twitter. It's frustrating to see a site I love so much, decide to kill itself and for what?

That and also the fact that they allow racism, transphobia, homophobia to fester. You'd think that a site that is pretty popular with the LGBTQIA+ crowd, they sure like to keep people around who would harm us.

it's interesting how many comments show that people like to read the headline and are content with that to form an opinion. literally the first paragraph says that it's not "THERE ARE NO POSTS" but it says that the "feed is swamped by a combination of perfectly curated photos and professionally created content." - the problem is that the paid content creators have become GOOD. so many of them really look like they are just opinions and casual mentions of movies/clothes/...things. viral marketing is really at a point where so many fronts that have been established have been broken down in the guise of "irony" or "sarcasm". "I'm only buying the Barbie merch ironically" etc.

it’s interesting how many comments show that people like to read the headline

I read articles about India landing on the moon, ancestors of humans nearly dying out, tech employees being dissatisfied in Austin, etc. I don't care about social media enough to read an article. That's probably a lot of people here.

Are those articles shown to you by Google News (the thing built into Android) by any chance? I've had those exact ones recommended to me in the past few days and it's a little unnerving seeing someone else mention reading them all lmao.

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It's not just about content creators becoming good though, the article also explains how the algorithm pushes that content over others.

Granted, the quality of the content is still a big part of it, another point it makes is that people refrain from posting things because it's not "good enough" compared to others.

Isn't that what the summary above pretty much says with even less words?

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My following on insta is dominated by meme pages, influencers, and that one person in your social group who practically shares their life on social media.

The only followers I’ve been getting on tumblr lately are porn bots. I don’t even follow porn bots or look at their pages, I’m only there to shitpost.

Same. I hate how often I have to block them.

I even wrote into tumblr staff and they acknowledged it was an issue in the ticket but won't say anything publicly which is annoying.

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Does Lemmy count as social media?? lol

Yes but I’d classify it as a different category more akin to old school forums. It’s less a place to post photos of yourself and more one to discuss and read about stuff you enjoy (or memes). I just want a place personally to discuss movies, video games, technology etc

In broad strokes, yeah. I'd even consider older, more traditional forms like forums and IRC/BBS to be proto forms of social media. As long as the internet exists there will be social media, what form it takes is malleable depending on the desires of the userbase at hand.

At that point the operational definition is just "website where you can post stuff"

Not to me.

Just like Reddit, it's more anonymous and the people you are interacting with don't really matter, you don't know them, they don't know you.

You just interact for a few minutes and never see each other again.

I'm not sure "they don't matter" is something I could get behind. We still have every reason to remember that there's (probably) a person on the other end, one we should extend common courtesy to, and with whom we might exchange perspective-changing ideas, even if rarely.

That said I agree the "reddit" format is the one I always liked best. It just makes more sense for people who want to discuss the same things, to group up online, rather than into arbitrary parasocial masses around a select few persons, as well as the people you know IRL and may or may not have any interest in actually interacting with.

Yeah the way you describe it makes it sound like we could build an AI forum where each user is the only one in there and all the rest are ai bots whose only purpose is to generate the content and interaction we're looking for.

I think Reddit is just the beta version.

I prefer it not be this way.

I kind of hate getting replies here and I can tell the person I'm talking to isn't paying attention to who in the thread they are talking to. It's like people aren't seeing each other as people.

Wtf is bereal

Bereal is great, you get a notification and take a picture, front and rear camera, that's all you get for the day, then you can see what your friends are up to.

By far my favorite social media.

I get it but man, I'd never want to post pics of myself on the Internet for anyone to see. I also don't think anyone would wanna see me anyway. ¯⁠\⁠(⁠°⁠_⁠o⁠)⁠/⁠¯

Default is only your friends see. You opt in to make it public.

You don't actually have to take a photo of yourself. If you're quick enough you can just move the front facing camera to take a photo of the ceiling.

That's what I do on days I don't want to take a photo of myself.

This sounds so bizarre to me. "If you're quick enough"? What happens if you aren't? What kind of insane, voluntary 1984-esque nightmare is this app?

I mean like you take a photo with your rear camera and once that's taken it'll load up your front camera to take a photo but you can move it so it doesn't take a photo of you. Kind of like a countdown timer.

The principles are cool but none of my friend wants to bother with another social network

My thoughts exactly... This might be why nobody is posting there

We're just to old, my niece and nephews in their teens are all using it.

I'm 24 and a lot of people in my friend circle are definitely using it. I'd say it started off niche but it's becoming mainstream.

It's the only social network I don't hate right now

Must be an age thing. Mid 30's and I can't fathom why this is a thing based on the description in this thread. It just sounds so voluntarily invasive, like leaving your door open.

I dont even want to talk to half the people I know anymore lol. I stopped using FB but keep it running because there are many years of pics and what not for family. And when I bring it down people freak out and think something is wrong with me. Other than that, it has been stripped of any identifying information, only has people I know and I never use it anymore. That was the only real 'personal' place I had on the internet. Everything else is fake names and whatnot, always has been.

download all your facebook data to get all memories locally, then you can delete

They let you transfer it to other services now, too. That's what I did for my photos and videos before deleting them from Facebook.

Big shock considering everything we post online is being weaponized in various ways.

I know this conversation is had nearly daily here, but by fuck am I glad that the fediverse is so much less astroturfed than every other social media site.

we need to work on keeping it that way. we have the advantage with no corporations to silently manipulate us and we own the infrastructure, but we still gotta root out bot accounts and malicious instances

no corporations to silently manipulate us

…yet!

They are relentless! They will get here when it becomes meaningful enough. So yes I echo your sentiments that we need to do all we can to prepare for that day to defend this space.

I've been trying to cut down social media use ever since 2020. I don't blame people for not posting most social media platforms are either boring or a toxic shit holes.

George Floyd showed me that the hope I had for this nation is lost. People are just argumentative assholes and have zero perspective. Hearing people defend the police and everything that followed made me dump it.

Granted I know there are those trying to do their job. It wasn't them. It's the keyboard warriors that have never been close to a cop, trying to defend a dude killing another over a written check just got to me.

If a company ever puts ads in my group chats I will jump in a volcano

Don't use a MIUI phone then.

please dont give them ideas, maybe some CEO is seeing this and decides to implement it

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Group chats were for sharing before social media. It just out lasted them.

I'm pretty big into the mechanical watch community. Insta used to be popular in that community, but the best content and discussion has long since moved off "social media" and into various private Slack and WhatsApp groups.

I've heard of a similar movement in other hobbyist/enthusiast communities.

For people I actually know IRL, it's virtually all WhatsApp.

Too bad whatapp spies on you just as much. For whole communities to be in private chats seems rather counter productive for new people to find it.

Agreed on spying, though I don't think it's any worse than posting on public sites.

The new people concern cuts both ways. Yes, it's moderately harder for brand new folks to learn about them and gain access. But it's far from impossible, and the additional hurdle or effort tends to substantially cut down on trolls, spammers, etc.

The fuck even is BeReal? LOL

It's kinda niche, but it's where you and your friends can only post once a day at a random time. But it's all at the same time, so you kinda get a slice of life of what everyone is doing. I like it, it's much worse for influencer type stuff, so everyone I know just uses it with their friends which is nice. It starts conversations that might not happen otherwise.

My students will jump up in class when they get the notification. My only rule is that I get to be in it.

You're a good teacher, working around the things they find important in their lives. Thank you

Same with ChatGPT I show them how to use it as a tutor, instead of a homework solving machine. Other teachers "ban" it. They're the same people that would have resisted color television.

Wtf? ChatGPT gets things wrong way, way too often to trust it to "know" anything you don't. Of course it depends on how niche the topic of information is, but I don't ever trust it to definitely not be confidently incorrect.

I'm not sure I understand the concept. So the app chooses a random time of day to send an alert, at which point everyone in a group gets to post whatever they want? When the window ends then there are no more posts until the next day? Are you in the groups with the kids?

You're allowed to post later, though this will be visible with your post. Tbh I like it until now. It's a good way to engage with my friends now that I only see them a few times a month. The friends I have on BeReal are generally respecting the rule that you either post at the moment BeReal asks you to or at the nearest moment where it's okay to so. I won't post at work, at the toilet, or in the shower or something. But I will do so after those moments of I'm doing something mundane like washing the dishes or cycling home. You'll generally just get a sense of what your friends' life's like like normally, as well as the fun things they do like traveling or visiting some event.

Not at the toilet???

Bro, do you even social media?

Totally kidding, but I hate having to use that slash ess.

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My guess is they misspelled BeeReel, the social media for apiary and native plant enthusiasts.

I would watch the shit out of a bunch of bee videos. I love bees and butterflies.

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I've been enjoying using Signal for "social media". I can share things with my friends without being subjected to ads or having my data mined.

There's also a promising Alpha app called Circles from Futo that uses Matrix to do something similar.

Every popular social media wants to maintain complete control and just shove content down your throat, rather than allow you to curate your feed at all. Even subscription-based ones like Strava give you absolutely no control over what's in your feed.

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I would argue that the quality of content is in decline more than numerical users. Also, the quantity of ads are much much higher, which hides what little good content there is.

Mix that in with political splits in social media sites (from left leaning Lemmy to the Facebook right), and you generally find yourself in an echo chamber with little to surprise you, and a lot of things confirming what you already know.

The three things cited in the post summary? Never been on them. I never ever heard of one of them. It seems to me that it's more that these few platforms are struggling, and other (twitter/x, reddit, facebook, and other) just keep sailing smoothly.

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I don't post because I know no one will see my posts, and I don't want to give them my data without feeding my narcism in return.

I deleted all my big tech accounts, and lots of people are posting on the fediverse.

I have Instagram installed but frozen with "Ice Box" android app.

I open once per day or 2 days to catch up with some friends status. But I don't see those neverending reels anymore.

What do you mean by frozen? What does it do?

It freezes the app preventing background usage.

It's like the "disable" option that you have in system apps. But for user apps. In fact, once you disable them if you search them in play store they appear with an "enable" button.

The advantage is that your userdata is still there. And you can quickly open it (unfreeze) from the Ice Box app.

Social media was fun until my family joined and scrutinized my posts, and then I lost all my friends

Noticed this on reddit's All/Hot in the last two years or so. Not even just the posts but the comments in particular were very Bot-like. Front page was almost all recycled reposts and thinly veiled marketing.

Before doing Lemmy full time I scrolled through Red with the official app just to see if I could compromise somewhere, but it smelt of Dead Internet to me.

Dead Internet Theory in short is a conspiracy theory that most of the Internet is just algorithms and bots posting back and forth at each other for marketing purposes and to nudge people's beliefs. It's dead because theres hardly any humans posting.

Twitter's so annoying, they constantly show me the same ads. Was it different before Musk?

The ads went out of control in like 2019 when the post 2015 social media boom started to cool. One of the knockoff effects of 2020 pandemic is it artificially extended the life of social media companies for like 2 years.

The funniest part of the musk buyout of twitter is the company would probably be doing very similar bullshit if he didnt buy them out, probably in a slightly more savvy way, but they'd still be dripping money.

Dunno, quit after Musk took over so no idea what it's like now or why you'd stay on it.

I heard it used to have very solid ad management options. It was good for business too, as direct feedback/curation = more appropriate ads = more valuable ads. But i guess as algorithm shit and data harvesting "automated" the process it went downhill, and advertisers fleeing twitter post $8 checkmark was the coup de grace

Well, it sucks. A certain South African Dutch chump with a Napoleon complex is 90% of the reason why.

And I can't be alone in finding Instagram's UI to be terrible. They have to share some blame.

I keep telling myself that I'll spend time on Instagram, but I can never force myself to actually do it. Yeah, that interface is a confusing mess.

I don't get group chats. It seems like the worst parts of IRC had a baby with the worst part of internet forums and created a thing destined to make you always late to the party.

And woe betide those who get into a group chat with a bunch of chatty people who never stop texting. Then you turn off notifications for it and you miss all kinds of things.

OMG this. Every chat app needs a way to rate-limit notifications, but I've yet to encounter a single one that does.

what did it take from internet forums that IRC couldn't have realistically already done?

Most group chats to me are pretty much the same as IRC was back in the day, unless you examined the protocols themselves. Upload limits are also much larger (except for that brief period skype was popular and you could upload gigabytes)

Honestly the only thing group chats are bad at is archiving, and it's mainly because it's designed for real-time conversation (so people are spamming more) and sites can't search the stored text at all.

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I really like that Signal let's you do group stories, it works really well for this.

Some of my groups have great participation and it's a great place to send all the random links we send.

I have been wanting to get back to making stuff on social media but due to work and no longer being the IDGAF teenager I get nervous on what to talk about.

Like I was hoping to do a podcast for my Facebook friends but I only uploaded one episode cause I want to do a few about how work sucks. But then I worry it'll be depressing.

We've run a private chat server for friends 10+ years now with channels and that's where most sharing goes on, whatsapp chats with some, and I've basically moved to Discord for other interests and still use forums for some. Public social media is more for profile curation, displaying a highly curated identity.

Hopefully interest in forums starts to pick up again. Not be the main thing, but at least an alternative.

Are these social media or scam media?
I consider kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon (or better, the Fediverse) so much healthier.

More people need to know about pixelfed. It is basically very much the old IG.

Why does this seem to only be about Instagram?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Other apps like Dispo, Poparazzi, and Locket have all used various gimmicks to try and recapture social media's halcyon days — each had a moment in the sun at the top of the US Apple app-store charts — but none have truly broken through.

For instance, the content creator Nina Haines launched a group called SapphLit, a self-described "sapphic book club born out of the queer BookTok community."

Victoria Johnston, a 22-year-old software engineer, imagines the ideal social-media platform as a "safe space where people can just connect and you don't feel pressured to have a big following or a presence or be really well known."

And as more users and creator communities migrate toward closed spaces, the behemoths like Instagram are also trying to capitalize on this reality by introducing features like paid-subscription services that offer exclusive group chats.

Lia Haberman, an adjunct professor at UCLA Extension and an advisor for the American Influencer Council, said that Gen Alpha, the age cohort of 13 and younger, are "not embracing traditional social-media platforms and customs."

It's hard to know how the change will affect the online atmosphere over the long term — some evidence suggests the shift will create a healthier digital experience, but it also risks further dividing people into like-minded echo chambers.

The original article contains 2,197 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Is it? Don't like to play devil's advocate but I'm pretty sure my Instagram is pretty much alive and my BeReal feed is an at all all-time high, with several new joins lately too.

I agree that it's much worse, that on anything that isn't BeReal it's harder to find your friends posts, that the ads got way too many - but at least here people are absolutely not stopping to create content for them.

if you red even the first sentences, you will see that the author doesn't claim that there are NO posts. they say that most of the posts are not social media anymore but corporate designs

Mostly repost of things they didn't make in an attempt to grab some ad revenue...

Like why do I need to see 2 or 3 arborist reposts from ~3 accounts not owned or affiliated by such arborists?