Millennials: It's ok to mourn the death of social media

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 449 points – Millennials: It's ok to mourn the death of social media
businessinsider.com

Millennials: It's ok to mourn the death of social media::Wired writes how "first-gen social media users have nowhere to go." Ouch.

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I'm just excited the internet is in part going back to its non corporate backed roots with Lemmy mastodon and the like. The internet started that way, and thanks to the enshitification it will hopefully slowly revert back to it

The idea that corporations were involved in social media was insane looking back. The results were exactly what one would have anticipated

I remember when I first started using Reddit and there was so much weird and crazy shit that it really did feel like there was a sub for everything. Now it's so sanitised that it's nowhere near as diverse in its content and subs, hopefully Lemmy/fediverse can have as many different instances as old Reddit and the active community too.

What I don't understand is who is moderating the big subs and why? When r/funny, r/holup, r/publicfreakout, r/damnthatsinsteresting (and I'm sure many others) are all basically the same memes and short videos, what kind of "community" is that? What kind of person signs up to clear the spam out of what is essentially 9gag 2.0 for free?

There are many smaller communities that would probably be happy to move to the Fedi if it were easier and bigger, and I hope Lemmy evolves to the point where those can be absorbed. Reddit can keep the endless meme scrolls.

It's only the smaller ones that I really miss in the fedi. Like, my pipeline for memes is doing fine, I doubt i'm missing any cultural touchstone moments, but on the corpo-net if you needed info specific info about your window box AC unit, not only was there probably a sub, but there was a larger sub just for general AC that would probably ban your post and say something like "hey post this in windowAC."

this is why r/Android moved to !android@lemdro.id. We even made our own instance dedicated to technical content. The reason most people I've been around mod is because they want to either fix a perceived quality problem or maintain a community that they enjoy frequenting.

In many cases I believe SOMEONE is paying these supermods.

It's more about controlling public discourse than it is any sense of moral compass IMO.

It's a fairly cheap way to control the narrative on just about whatever you like if you can steer acceptable speech around hot button issues on such a large platform.

idk, I was in a Discord with many of them during the vaxxhappened protest and I didn't get the impression any had particularly strong backbones. Not saying it doesn't happen but I really have a hard time picturing most of the "powermods" as having the will to control anything. They (largely) seemed pretty afraid to rock the boat or upset Spez.

Power hungry douches that have nothing better to do with their lives. Some of these people actually consider it a job, even though they don't get paid.

This is why our society is so fucked, someone with community spirit wants to help maintain a fun community which is free to access for everyone in the world and what do they get? Nothing but hate and abuse.

People who don't appreciate moderators but also don't like unmoderated places like 8chan are like the "No take only throw" dog.

BreadStapledToTrees had me so confused the first time I found it. It still confuses me. Even though I have only been active on Reddit for the past 5 years, even I saw a massive change in it.

When I first found GoneWild and the like I was like "Mother of God, this is amazing..." and now 85% of the porn subs are just OF advertisements.

I remember that sub. I’m pretty sure there’s a sub with a similar name that is used for furry porn, for some reason.

This, every time I see a post in the frontpage here where someone has taken a picture of a pear stuffed up their ass (etc etc), I breathe a sigh of relief knowing no advertisers or asshole CEOs are ruining this place. Feels like the old days of the internet, roughly. Sure it's small, but it feels real, not sterile and clean for advertisers and shareholders.

I use old reddit from time to time to check specific subs and it's wild seeing how boring they've gotten.

Because they ban people for "harassment" now for using the word fuck (or anything similar) in any context that might hurt some twit's feefees.

That's not it. Swearing doesn't create content.

Reddit is boring and dumb because they insert a million sponsored posts. Plus the karma farmers are going overboard. It's just karma farmers and advertisers now.

Example:

*"If you really want to improve yourself, stop concerning yourself with what pronouns others use for anyone or anything.

Failing that, just shut the fuck up about it regardless of your concerns and you'll have improved yourself tremendously."*

Someone I know recently got a ban for that verbatim as a reply to someone who said they wanted to accept criticism and "improve" themselves after saying stupid shit about how important it was to refer to unknown animals as it instead of they.

If you don't think that's overzealous I'm not sure what to say.

Disagree

Editing to add: banning people for stupid shit reduces the pool of people creating content... Also, I still use it on occasion with a revanced app so I don't see any of their ads... What I do see there is overly zealous and sensitive moderation dampening discussion (which is content)

Do we have a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook yet..?

yes, Friendica has been around for longer than Mastodon has.

Mastodon has rich media features and such that it could be considered a replacement for modern Facebook.

Now for the legacy Facebook that was more focused on the Facebook wall, homepages, and etc. There really isn’t a replacement but nobody can use Facebook for that now.

As for a replacement for Facebook groups, kbin or Lemmy can do it. Kbin does both the microblogging/status updates and communities.

Someone else mentioned frendica. But I don’t have any experience with that.

Facebook does a lot of things. Depends on what exactly you're looking for. Facebook allows you to follow friends and organizations (= Mastodon), it also allows you to participate in groups (= Lemmy), and then it has a few other features too.

Bluesky now has a federated server and moving people over. I'm curious how that's going to play out.

Bluesky is not really decentralized like Mastodon. It's more like crypto where the bigger you are the more influence you have over the network. There is zero incentive for someone to host a server off of .social since they will control it. Having a BS server does nothing besides provide Jack Dorsey and co with a little free hosting.

I use both and mainly curious because it doesn't take as much as Mastodon to show you what you want to see. Or maybe I think that because I came from Mastodon to Bluesky, but I understand what both are. People know what Bluesky is but when I bring up Mastodon people are not really interested. Jack Dorsey is also no longer involved.

I’m hopeful that long term, AtProto and ActivityPub end up merged into one future standard. But even if they end up separate, it’s not the end of the world since they’re both open and bridges already exist.

It’s kind of like Atom and RSS. Soon, users won’t have to care or know the difference and eventually, code libraries will make it so even developers don’t have to know the details.

the internet is in part going back to its non corporate backed roots with Lemmy mastodon and the like.

I'm very small part.

and thanks to the enshitification it will hopefully slowly revert back to it

Twitter has proven that they won't. Reddit has proven that they won't. They've both proven that you can shit all over your own users, give them nothing in return, and they'll complain for a few days but never leave in any significant numbers. Meta has proven that these shitty corporations can start up wholly new operation (Threads) and the masses will flock to it by the tens of millions.

People have demonstrated over and over that, by and large, they will let these corporations piss on their heads and tell them it's raining and that they will do absolutely nothing about it.

If by "mourn" you mean "tap-dance on its fucking grave," then sure!

I just moved to Miami and don't know where to meet groups of like-minded people. There is nothing on MeetUp, but there are groups on Facebook. I hate that I had to sign into that garbage fire for the first time in years. My whole feed is filled with "suggested posts" of people I don't know nor things I give a shit about.

Yeah, the other day I had to wade past fucking stacks of junk that doesn't apply to or interest me, there was a whole wall of stuff that makes no sense at all for me, adverts for services I'll never use and even study areas that I'm not ever going to need because I'm not at school! Fuck libraries we should burn them all down, how dare they don't serve and cater to me and me alone!

I mean, I've been rooting for the demise of social media for nearly 20 years. I don't know why I'd be mourning.

FTFY: ~mourn~ celebrate

I only mourne reddit, that website was a lifestyle back in the day. Thats why i'm here lol. God I miss the good oll' days.

Yeah, it is a bit strange. That was a central hub of where I got news, jokes, stayed connected with internet culture. That's mostly gone now. So many things feel splintered anymore. I'm old so I don't keep up with the latest games, but that feels all over the place---too many games, too many communities. Streaming/TV stuff---very few people I know watch the same things I do, and I miss the joy of watching something new and then talking about it the next day moments. Worse now is that most people can't even access the same content since there are too many services. Music is strange now too. Partly, I'm just not connected to pop culture, but also everyone is listening to VERY different stuff (referring to college-age folks---most other millennials I know just listen to NPR, podcasts and 90s mixes). There doesn't seem to be any monolithic music culture at all anymore. Everyone has super customized spotify playlists. I know a big part is just millennial aging, but also reddit kept me connected to broader things, and now its just like everything else and enshittified and disappearing. sigh ... get off my lawn I guess :(

That was a central hub of where I got news, jokes, stayed connected with internet culture. That’s mostly gone now. So many things feel splintered anymore.

Its returned closer to what the internet was BEFORE reddit. People cultivated lists of bookmarks for sites they'd visit for their daily special interests. Lemmy is still a larger audience than what we had before. For jokes you might go to fark.com or somethingawful.com. These were the user driven humor aggregators of the day.

I would love to see someone born into today's internet landscape try to entertain themselves with lowtax's poorly written essays about hentai and his beginner knowledge of ww2 tanks.

There doesn’t seem to be any monolithic music culture at all anymore. Everyone has super customized spotify playlists.

I've noticed this too. In some ways it makes it harder to find new music.

Makes it harder to find popular music, but way easier to find music that appeals to you personally

Yes, when I come across something I am not familiar with I have a preset playlist of enough things to really get a feel for the style and know if I like any of it.

Honestly I'm probably just going to keep mining the 60s-00s for music like I always have. Now that I have a job and less time to find music I'll probably never run out lol

It really is a bit weird when people ask me what kind of music I like and I have to think of a way to describe my 1.3k video YouTube playlist of random genre and time period music that I have found in the most random places

I just say shitty indie metal and folk. Folks usually losee interest, or they become curious and find out about Hulkoff and holy locust.

Can you link both of those bands?

(https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCT_NhVY2IYvjTsn0HUsd9Jg) [Hulkoff] (https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCzkRX3sC7hV7O1MKWpM5Aiw) [Holy Locust]

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It looks like none of the apps for handle the syntax of lemmy correctly, that hurts communication.

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Idk. I feel mentally healthier off social media. But its been around since I was in high school and I have no idea how to socialize with people outside my immediate circle now. My social muscles have atrophied.

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I don't mourn "social media." I mourn what we had before they started using that phrase.

Facebook was actually awesome back in the late 2000s. I had an account when it was just 4 year universities, that was it's hey day.

You mean traditional media owned and controlled by people like Murdoch? Or rumors and innuendo spread by word of mouth in pubs?

I know you were le born in le wrong generation like every other hipster complainer on the planet but you'd have hated wherever was popular at any time in history because it's not about finding a balanced and sensible view it's about hating whatever is popular.

Also no. I meant the forums, chat rooms and instant messengers we had right before Facebook and Twitter ruined it all.

I grew up on those and they were all awful, take off the rose tinted glasses and you'll see those chat rooms were basically twitch chat with more sexual predators.

And forums still exist and they're still awfull, having to read fifty stupid comments of people saying totally off topic 'yes Bob, we got our cat six years ago' but it fills the entire screen because he's quoted the entire script of life of Brian in his signature. Finally you find someone replying to the question you were interested in but it's only to ask another question do you got fifty more comments from poorly replying to questions in the OP which have been answered hours ago but they didn't bother reading the thread before posting.

And there's a million great messenger apps out there, of course none of them are as good as they used to be because they don't have my childhood friends on, or if they do they're all to busy with kids and carers to come ride bikes.

Hey, I'm fully on board with your defense of social media, but I think in this case the commenter is just saying "i miss the social media we had before they started calling it 'social media'". Even 2004 facebook fits this description, and I'm inclined to agree. I miss social media when it felt more like IRC and craigslist, when facebook was a glorified personal guestbook, etc.

As someone who was on the internet before social media existed, please let it die in a fire.

Everything now is curated and cultivated by corporations and political entities to weed out any "unacceptable" discourse and content that doesn't support a particular agenda or narrative.

100% agree. I was learning networking and internet coding back when Javascript was new, web 2.0 was going to revolutionize our lives, and Macromedia was releasing a little animation software called Flash. As an elder Millenial I can confidently say that the death of social media would be the absolute best thing that could happen for our society as a whole. The society was not mature enough for it, still aren't. Maybe next time it is invented we will be ready and someone will remember to keep the damn corporations out of it.

TBH I'm right there with you when it comes to wishing corporate social media a fiery demise.

And yet, I'm happily using decentralized/non-profit social media that I'd very much like to see flourish. The thing I don't like about social media today is that it's billionaires selling personal info to people that want to direct advertising or propaganda to intellectually defenseless people, I really think democracy can't withstand the firehose of bullshit that now empowers bad actors to lie at scale that used to require traditional media or state resources.

Were BBSs social media?

They were decentralized. If not federated, definitely connected in many aspects.

I was thinking of standing up an instance of this

https://enigma-bbs.github.io/

Just for friends and family

In of the opinion the term social media needs to be broken into two groups. Ones where you're yourself by name and one's where you're an online handle. The "personal" social media are all garbage, but there's some alright "unpersonal" social media, like Lemmy for example. BBSs would mostly be the later, but probably would be social media if the term existed when they were popular

Mourning? More like dancing on its grave. With the fediverse being everything social media 1.0 was and more, there is no need for the legacy platforms. I just hope that the fediverse can get some more traction with folks outside tech circles and we can normalize cooperation and free social platforms as in free speech not as in free beer.

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It's also all right to laugh maniacally as it all burns down.

That was my thought.

I don't mourn it's death, I celebrate it.

Why though? Did you love it when only the rich could affect popular sentiment?

Rich people like Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg?

Once advertising got involved, it was all downhill from there.

"Social media is like a public toilet; anyone is free to use it, no one should drink from it." -Llama2 70B by Meta

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Nah, forums are more organic old school is cool.

Forums are social media as well, though. They just have different features. "Social media" are all websites and applications which allow sharing of content between users.

I think a forum was just less anonymous. I never remember any name on Lemmy, for example. On the forums ~back in the day~ I actually got to know the people. We even had forum meetings in real life.

I miss forums. Even on technical forums for a software, there was usually an off topic or random section to hang out in

I fear those sections would look very different today. I watched that unfold in an Otaku forum which was quite nice and peaceful for years. It got radicalised by hateful people until the owner shut it down. The same happened with a gamer forum and several other communities I frequented.

Yeah that's why it's a forlorn memory. Forums are way too easy for toxic people to dominate.

If you think about it, atmosphere is social media too

I feel like it should read, “Millenials, remember to drink water in between your champagne glasses while you’re toasting to the death of social media.”

The worst is the ever-shortening of content into an addictive format. It reduces mental clarity.

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The thing that threw me off Facebook was the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, even though I ran a popular meme page. I thought I found a sanctuary on Reddit, but looking back everything major on it was shilled to advertise or sow political discord. I thought Google Plus had a lot of potential, but nobody I knew would join and y’know, Google’s privacy record.

By the time Google+ rolled around, it had become clear that any social media owned by a big tech giant would suck after a while, and anything experimental released by Google would be killed after a while, so why invest in it?

Especially fuck meta and xitter.

Worst part is that they actually started out kind of great, and killed all alternatives. Then they became progressively worse because of their predatory algorithms and whatnot, and now it's borderline impossible to get friends and family to switch to an alternative like mastodon or pixelfed...

From those annoying af fb "games" to those goddamn algorithms.

How do you pronounce xitter?

Think of how the name of current CCP General Secretary Xi is pronounced.

“Shitter”. It’s “Shitter”.

Social Media is cancer. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

So you are willfully participating in spreading cancer? Because Lemmy is social media.

Such a simplistic and frankly dumb take, have you really thought about what you've said at all?

Regularl people shouldn't have a voice, all media should be run and distributed by an authority of some kind? If you're not rich enough to own a newspaper company then you don't get to express yourself? Only the likes of Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to set trends and influence people?

Or did you just mean 'some women are popular on social media for doing things that don't interest me and therefore influencers and all of social media is evil and I hate it' because that's what it always seems to boil down to with kneejerk anti haters.

You seem to think that social media is about giving people a voice. It isn't. Most social media is set up either to harvest users personal data to sell for profit or to sell products to and push ideas on users. In most cases, both. It has become the primary method of distributing propaganda and influencing public opinion generally.

Cancer

you're basically Alex Jones with that level of paranoid delusion, they're just a service that exists not a communist plot to turn frogs gay.

And yes of course people attempt to control narratives on social media, you think it was better when Murdoch could just print anything he liked? and if even if you could prove it's bullshit the only thing you could do was moan about it to some dunks down the pub.

Social media isn't perfect but your characterisation of it is absurd and based on nothing but kneejerk hatred of change

If propaganda comes from Fox News it's easy to identify as propaganda, but when people you know are citing seemingly well written and researched studies it's more complicated. Propaganda has become more believable and widespread because of social media.

But even if you ignore the propaganda, social media is still used to push products with targeted advertising and harvests data to sell to whoever will pay for it. It's not a conspiracy at all it's just how capitalism works.

Even if you remove money from the equation all together, you're seeing the highlights of everyone's lives which has been shown to lead to depression and feelings of inadequacy.

Not to mention that half the posts and comments on Reddit aren't even made by humans. Lemmy might be a bit better, but honestly not much.

Literally the only thing social media is good for is memes and even that distracts people from what they're supposed to be doing and have been shown to be an effective method of spreading disinformation.

Social media is cancer.

How about instead of getting pissy over a valid criticism of companies that you have no duty to defend, either explain why any of the above isn't true or come up with some positive aspects to social media.

It's not over though, it's really just beginning again.

Something tells me the editorial staff at Buisness Insider might have a harder time than most visualizing an online social landscape built around being, y'know, social, and not for profit.

Ah, now I'm tracking. I really should've paid more attention to the source.

As long as humans are social creatures, and the Internet connects us, there will be social media in some form or another.

And as long as multi billion dollar companies are allowed to engage in anti-monopolistic behaviour and erode our privacy by buying politicians, they'll ruin every form of it to make a quick buck.

Imagine mourning the death of social media.

I mourn its creation.

I grew up on forums / IRC / IMs, later transitioned to Myspace, then Twitter / Facebook / Tumblr / Instagram. I had a lot of fun over the years, it definitely saddens me that I can't get the things I liked about those experiences back.

Check out the forums again, they are still around in a lot of cases and sometimes more active than what you'll find on reddit.

I only discovered IRC a year ago, and now pretty much all my social life is there) With just a bit also existing in XMPP MUCs)

But you can, isn't that kind of what all this new internet is about?

I for one celebrate the inevitable crash/death of all this social media. It's turned normal people into unacceptable drooling trash. That is if you're able to ignore the data collection and use of it, in which case it turned the whole internet into a dumpster fire as well.

It's turned normal people into unacceptable drooling trash.

They always were. Social media just gave them a platform to you.

It also gave those trash people the feeling of "look I'm not alone" and amplified all of it. At least before people were worried about being seen as a fuckwit.

On one hand, it's a bit sad to see the average person not know about the Fediverse and claim "welp, there's nowhere else to go, it's either staying on the same ten junkyards I know or quitting cold-turkey". On the other hand, the relative obscurity kind of comes from the fact that there's no single main instance of the Fediverse. Sure there's things like Mastodon.Social, Lemmy.ML and Misskey.GG that concentrate most users of their niche, but by nature, there is not (and should not be) a centralized place where everybody is, that can be used as the poster child for the Fediverse.

Is this their first platform death? Come on, Wired!

Millennials have been losing platforms on the Internet for pretty much the whole history of the Internet. Just a handful of "social media" type services that have risen and fallen in my years of the internet: AOL Instant Message, ICQ, IRC, Usenet, LiveJournal, MySpace, on and on.

Most of these aren't even properly "dead", many I just.mentioned still have big user groups too. They just lost a critical user share when folks moved on.

Usenet is still quite active. Especially in the piracy field, as a forum for discussion, it's pretty dead though.

How about gaia? No one is on it anymore. That's where I first started to learn HTML.

Oldest Millennials were almost too old for Gaia. We were 18-22 at it's launch in 2003.

I got my start on Alamak Chat in late 1995 but I had friends who had already been on IRC or Usenet for years prior to that.

Hopefully it's just the death of surveillance and fake news infested social media with censors ensuring you don't deviate from the Overton window.

Actually, I think I'm kinda okay with the "death" of social media. I mean, I'm already on this platform a lot, so...I guess I'm not missing much?

Bots and spam have ruined social media for me. I wish there was a private social media.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In Wired, Jason Parham writes about how first-gen social media users have nowhere to go.

Indeed, millennials have soured on the big social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram feel dead.

There's a lot of ways to feel about this: maybe relief, maybe anger at the companies who messed things up.

But Parham made me feel something different: sad.

He points out that "first-gen" users (like me) were part of a "golden age of connectivity," and for those years, it really was exciting.

I'm sad that golden age is over, and I'm not sure we'll ever experience anything like it again.

The original article contains 103 words, the summary contains 101 words. Saved 2%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

The original article contains 103 words, the summary contains 101 words.

wow thanks so much

Um, FIDOnet and USEnet were pretty awesome, thank you.

I was on some network that rose after MySpace but before Facebook and realized that wasn't for me.

Censorship and Centralized manner killed all the goodness.

If traditional social media platforms die, then most of their users will move to federated ones and end up turning those into dumpster fires. I'm a Reddit migrant and I've already noticed Reddit behavior just a couple weeks in, also known as "not good". I'm getting the vibe that Mastodon could suffer from this a few months or years from now due to Elon Musk's questionable decisions regarding Twitt- I mean X, and the fact that nobody uses Threads anymore (it's basically a giant Israel-Palestine debate right now). I'm not sure about PixelFed or PeerTube or any of the other ActivityPub alternatives to traditional platforms.

Is it worth adding the "van Lemmy" suffix to my username? Yeah, it sounds more Flemish (I am not from Flanders), and it reveals to the world that I'm some random loser from the fediverse, even though I've only ever spent a few months here. Also, there's probably a few other folks who refer to themselves as "Resol", so it kinda makes me stand out.

'life isn't as fun as it was when I was younger, it must be the internet's fault'

The world in general is far shittier than it was a decade ago, internet included.

I too preferred being young, things were exciting and fresh back then not jaded and worn down by decades of grind as my dreams one by one crumble to dust while my own mortality starts to loom on the horizon...

Almost everything is better than it was when we were kids and it's a tough pill but it's reality.

We used to watch television at specific times because there would be a documentary about something interesting and it wouldn't be exactly what you want but if you like nature or science or something it's your only choice - if you're super lucky the people who made it would have briefly talked with someone who kinda understands the subject.

YouTube and other VOD services have completely ended that tyranny, you'd be very hard pressed to find a subject I couldn't find you free to watch videos from knowledgeable and passionate people deeply involved in the field. YouTube even has far less adverts than TV, adverts you can skip after five seconds - we used to have to go make a cup of tea every fifteen minutes because the breaks were so long, that was our idea of an addblocker.

Have you ever been to a library to do your homework and found that someone else has the volume of brittanica you need so you just have to wait two hours while they lean on it and chat with their friends? If you're only looking back ten years to your youth then proubably you haven't, kids today certainly haven't - I have though and so have most people my age. That's what progress is, incredibly easy not to notice things getting better beside we only tend to think about problems when we encounter them. All today's problems are fresh and we forgot what problems we had back then.

More people have better access to improved medical care, more access to education, more access to basic necessities AND luxuries, it's easier than ever to travel, to learn new skills, make friends based on a shared interest, there's an unprecedented amount of free entertainment in pretty much every form.

But we're tired and busy and struggling to make ends meet - just like adults were when we young and didn't have to worry about anything but b3ta's Photoshop Friday and which custom doom wad to try next.