Not just America. It’s a trend worldwide thanks to the abundance of AI slop taking over any ‘social network’.
See also the privacy-invading aggressiveness of most platforms, and the political ads and propaganda inundating people’s feeds. If social media had just remained a way to keep in touch with friends and post pictures, it would probably have remained popular.
But unprofitable
No, just not as profitable.
They could have had guaranteed medium long term return, if they played nice. But now there’s backlash against both the brands and even the very concept of that form of social media.
So they’ve had high short term gain that could all come collapsing down relatively soon.
I thought all of the social medias were bleeding money until they had the customer base locked down enough to exploit with all of the aforementioned shit?
Bleeding money expanding as fast as they could so nobody else got there first.
Huge capital investment to capture the market, and as you rightly put it, exploit with all of the aforementioned shit.
But that doesn’t mean they had to go down that route. Income via vaguely targeted advertising has been a standard practice for decades by newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels. They could have improved upon that old model without turning to the evil manipulators and spyware companies they are now.
Take, for example, DuckDuckGo, this is their model:
It is a myth that search engines need to track you to make money. The majority of our revenue is from private ads on our search engine. On most other search engines, ads are based on profiles compiled from your personal information, such as search, browsing, and purchase history. Since we don’t have that information per our Privacy Policy, search ads on DuckDuckGo are based on the search results page you’re viewing instead of being based on who other companies and their tracking algorithms assume you are as a person. For example, if you search for cars, we’ll show you ads about cars. We’ve even created a way to show localized ads while still keeping you completely anonymous.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/how-duckduckgo-makes-money
Reminds me of royal road
Think about people asking for a feature to view ad history (what ads they have been served)
And at least some being willing to pay for such a feature
How long can you be profitable if users are leaving though?
It pretty exists ai. While it was novel and actually social, it was fun and a good way to keep up with friends that you see less often.
Then they started pushing influencers and people starting posting an idealised version of their life. Then the feeds all devolved into junk, even before AI slop.
Its because they took the joy and monetised it while making people trust them less and less. Post about an engagement, get wedding ads. Post holiday photos, then find out they were data mined. Wish someone happy birthday and find it’s just a stream of 100s of cookie cutter messages on their page.
So people moved on or became lurkers that don’t post. A lot of engagement moved from social onteractuin with people you know to Facebook community groups which became effectively ragebait and clickbait.
Essentially they pushed so much crap into your feed that your friends got pushed out.
So then what was the point of posting your current status when your circle might only see it two or three days later?
The immediacy was lost, and thus so was the usefulness.
I agree fully with the crap in the feed. The inmediacy though, not so much. I recall when they started that and people were still posting they tried to use it for engagement. A new post from a friend that had engagement would be repeatedly resurfaced in your feed.
It did mean less consequential posts from days earlier did feel stale and pointless when they were pushed through again, though, if that’s what you meant.
The problem is that an algorithm defines “less consequential posts” and it doesn’t have your best interests at heart, at all.
I did wonder if posts from friends were deliberately delayed so that you would be guilted into responding to their Big Thing that you didn’t see on your feed. Eventually, you’d be trained to keep scrolling to find posts from your friends, and they’d be trained to keep checking for replies days after their Big Thing, thus maximising user engagement and profit.
More like “no thanks”. It’s so bad that Greasemonkey scripts are needed to fix.
No one gives a shit what I ate for lunch.
If I ate something new or interesting, my friends actually cared. Unfortunately Facebook decided no one wants to interact with the people they know and started pushing news posts down everyone’s throat. It’s not a social network if you actively work against me interacting with my social network.
You are so right - early social media was kind of magical. Your friends posted when they went to a cool new restaurant or did cook something awesome. I discovered so many new restaurants and food styles because of that. Your friends are all going to that new syrian restaurant near the lake and like it? Let’s try it ourselves! They are also your friends, so you can talk about that. They are posting pictures of some cool thing they cooked? You can ask for the receipe! You might even be invited for dinner the next time they are cooking that!
And then Facebook killed it. They started to hide the posts of your friends. They showed you some shit from some “page” or shoveled rage-baiting news in your face. They pushed Farmville everywhere. But that short little moment in time? That was awesome
You have an @lemmy.world account We already know what you ate.
Beans.
What about your shit after lunch?
You think I’m just gonna give that away for free?
If you have a Dutch shelf toilet, it’s there in all splendor.
Ah the famous lay and admire toilet.
Wait, have I been sitting on it the wrong way around?
Do the Dutch sit facing the other way or something?
What do you mean? They sit the correct way, where they have a little shelf for their chocolate milk.
Its to allow inspection of faeces prior to flush, I believe. For health purposes.
I can examine my turds equally well in a regular toilet.
What if you didn’t have solid turds, generally?
Germans call them “Flachspüler” (flat washer). I appreciate that the falling dookie doesn’t splash water onto your ass. A fine feat of engineering and VERY off-topic. 🤣
Now that’s an odd design. Is there some reason they made it wrong?
There are toilets with AI that will make measurements and will check the health of your shit etc. Etc. Where do you think that data goes ;)
Yeah! You could even make like a business model out of… nevermind.
Now we are talking, go on…
What did you eat for breakfast?
My man spiting facta! Preach!
I mean, I still post to social media every day, but it’s pixelfed. It’s not toxic, it’s just me throwing in my art on the pile with everyone else’s art that I also get to flip through and enjoy, in chronological posting order, with no advertisements or other subject matter present.
No ads and no “algorithm”. That’s all I ask for
Mine is at https://pixelfed.social/tanisnikana, if you want to get an idea of what gets posted. There’s much better artists than me on that site too!
It’s a really interesting thing that happens, Pixelfed put me in touch with some amazing industry photographers like NatGeo dudes and such, and it’s actually got my photography career properly started.
It’s a really interesting thing that happens, Pixelfed put me in touch with some amazing industry photographers like NatGeo dudes and such, and it’s actually got my photography career properly started.
that sounds amazing!
Ah, OK! So it’s basically de-enshittified Flicker.
Your work is beautiful. I’d heard of Pixelfed of course but never actually seen it before, and it’s blowing me away. I’m looking at the explore page right now:
https://pixelfed.social/web/explore
I’m a fan of landscape and nature photography anyway, and I absolutely love this. I crave beauty in these times, and there is plenty of it there. Many thanks.
I remember when Facebook used to just show your friends posts in reverse chronological order. You could react to stuff in real time and it felt great. People would do stuff like watch sporting events and TV shows live and then react with all your friends online.
Then it changed to just pure alogrithm garbage filled with ads.
I use vernissage rather than pixelfed, but yeah, it’s the only one I deliberately try and post to every day!
Dude they filled my timeline with a bunch of ads and AI generated nonsense. We stopped posting because no one ever saw it thanks to all of the filler.
For me, it’s the death of the chronological view. That’s when I stopped using social media. I’d see random, irrelevant stuff from weeks ago instead of what my friends were up to today.
It was all over when Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline. It’s just taken a while for people to notice how awful it’s made everything.
That was what got me off - I kept feeling like I had to scroll much farther back to see the updates from friends I missed past what FB decided I should see, until I decided Facebook had made it no longer worth the effort
Back in the day, I posted on Instagram to share things with my friends and scrolled to see their updates. The chronological feed with no suggested posts was the only way it worked, and now that’s impossible. There are no “people” on Instagram anymore.
What happened to Facebook is happening to Instagram. What used to be just a feed of my friends is now a bunch of suggested posts from accounts I don’t follow. It gives me a feeling of having my own friends used as bait for them to churn more content, souring the whole experience.
Makes sense. It’s the same company now, and they’re going to “reuse” patterns and stuff that they feel worked for Facebook and bring it over to instagram.
Just another way for zuck to push his incel fascist agenda
You can still get chronological posts on there if you tape the “Instagram” button at the top and tap followers instead of recommended. Not well labeled but still possible
Because no one fing cares about your hourly updates and you’re just advertising your insecurities.
Social media is 75% ads, 15% shared content (more ads), and 10% people you know creating actual posts. You’re a gluten for punishment if you hang out there.
“gluten for punishment”, thanks autocorrect for another genius coinage
Darn it! I’m not changing it. I shall live with my shame of not proof reading
For some, gluten could indeed be punishment.
looks with novautocrrect look of superiority
That’s how I felt when I tried bluesky. I missed the boat on Twitter and it’d already gone down the shitter so I never tried it. Figured bsky would be an opportunity to try the whole tweeting thing for myself.
And even still, it was just nothing but political bitching, navel gazing, and glorified (or actual) advertising. Like… what’s the point of it all? Deleted my account within the month.
Lemmy has its share of faults but at least people are willing to have actual discussions and conversations here. On bsky it felt like talking to a bot. People talking past each other instead of actually communicating.
Doesn’t it depend on who you follow? The only things I see on bsky are those I follow.
the article actually says the opposite - that it’s the random nature of pushing internet algorithm-chasing influencers that pushes people away instead of it being a way to keep in touch with people you know and love.
Yea, it was actually pretty great when there wasn’t an algorithm forcing-feeding us bullshit. It was just us and our friends keeping in touch with each other. It was a boon for many introverts.
Now though? Why post when we know the algorithm won’t show our posts to our friends unless they dig through mountains of grift, brain rot, and propaganda.
I stopped using sites like Facebook years ago when I noticed I was seeing posts from random meme pages I didn’t even follow that were days old yet I hadn’t seen any posts from my actual friends in days. So, went check their pages to see they had been posting daily and the algorithm just never showed them to me.
that’s the case for me and it seems like most of the people in my circle
yeah none of us care about the hourly updates. but our circle doesn’t do that, we generally would only share things other people actually want to see. but it’s been a long time since anyone did that. now the only sharing that happens is just Strava and in group chats
When social media started it focuses on friends. You add someone as a friend and you could see what they were up to.
Then Facebook came along and made it competitive, it became less about seeing what friends were doing and more about posting things that people liked.
As Facebook grew, it changed. One day you didn’t see the stuff your friends posted unless you constantly interacted with their posts or a lot of other people did.
It’s gotten worse and worse since then. They have added more and more ads and posts from people and pages you might know that you no longer see stuff from people you do know.
It’s absolutely worthless.
Facebook died to me when the timeline was no longer linear
Yeah, that was the moment it changed from a social media platform to an advertising platform.
when instagram changed the algorithm a decade ago to no longer show your friends’ recent posts, that’s when they lost me. prior to that, it was actually useful for sharing trips and events with friends.
now it and Facebook are entirely ads / sponsored posts, and random shit fb thinks I’ll hate
As soon as posts were no longer ordered by post date and time it was over for me.
SAME. Seeing posts from a week later it because a certain friend is shadow banned just ruined the whole experience.
On reddit you can sort by “new”…
Can’t do shit on reddit anymore without being signed in with an account.
Jesus, that’s a form of psychological abuse.
Yup, I fought it for a while by clicking the appropriate tab or sort button, but they kept changing where it lives until I gave up and never logged on again.
Now it’s just here for the community, and youtube for the consumption - at least they let you just look at your subscription by new without any junk mixed in (yet).
There’s a certain merit to posts with high interactions getting a higher priority to posts that were sent more recently. I didn’t enjoy the Facebook spam that started popping up as people gamed the system. 10,000 “Your friend is playing Fart Hospital! Your friend just pooped himself in Fart Hospital! Your friend has made an Epic Fart at Fart Hospital!” posts because someone didn’t realize the game they were playing was posting to their feed.
But they got the Reddit disease, where engagement was everything. And then you started losing sight of media you cared about under a pile of Shrimp Jesus clickbait.
I think, at the end of the day, the Facebook internal metrics changed from “Are our users happy?” to “Are our users meth addicts?”
Because it’s stupid, you get nothing out of it and you lose time on top
Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.
For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there’s a lot of posts that you can’t see without having an account and logging in. That’s a big ask for something that you’re not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn’t sidestep that using the old reddit interface.
Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can’t see much of anything without being logged in, but they’re trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you’re human before you can use your account.
If you’ve scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you’re actually a human, and if you don’t have an account, the content that you can see doesn’t seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.
Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.
Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that’s mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.
Reddit is even worse on mobile. They’ve moved to putting up a banner that tells you to use the app. On iOS, it kills the scroll, and swiping to go back doesn’t work. Go to the app? Fuck you, log in. Desktop mode is rough on mobile and they’re already talking about nuking old.reddit.com now.
Old reddit is the only way I interact with the site at all, and only for communities and stuff that for whatever reason haven’t moved on to greener pastures. Once old reddit’s gone I guess I’ll finally move that site into the graveyard.
It was a cool place while it lasted.
I came to Reddit right at the tail end of their do-gooder phase, and just got to watch it quickly collapse into a contest of who could make the same joke first, and then the pages and pages of attempts at one-upsmanship after that. You used to click on the comments to get more information, and as the years went by the lower that information sunk into a mud pit of poor puns.
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maybe we could help handing them nails to their coffin. Lets start demanding they add even more obnoxious things. Like for reddit, make even more posts no visible to those who are not logged in, have premium members be even more exclusive and away from the view. That should be a decent blow to any new people considering to join there since why would they want to do it if they cant even see what is there. And lets say they do it anyway and maybe even pay something, they will just get shit that isnt worth their money or they are kind of people that make it even worse place.
it could be sold to the crazier users as a way for them to be oh so exclusive and vip users so they would join in too. The executives would likely be extatic to see people demand same kind of shit they would want to put in anyway.
I dont know enough about facebook or shitter to have any ideas how to make them even worse, but for sure there is room there too.
Worse commercial social media becomes the better since it will push people away and eventually make it crumble.
I just signed up for my local Nextdoor; holy crap, it’s 75% commercial ads, about 10% personal ads, about 10% dogs/cats/kittens, and 5% misc. Utterly useless.
You’re lucky then. For me there was at least a double digit percentage of just plain racism.
Photo of black man walking: “ANYBODY KNOW WHO THIS IS?!”
Car broken into: “I BET IT WAS THAT MEXICAN”.
Absolutely vile place. Boomers talking to other boomers with no filter, an HOA board given a social platform.
I think Nextdoor encourages it. I’m from a very liberal state (Maryland). Around here, people started posting on there complaining about a house right beside an elementary school always flying some garbage flag. For a while it was a Confederate flag, then a FJB flag, etc. So someone posted a picture of it asking if there was some kind of ordinance it was violating for which they could submit a complaint, and then people piled on about how much they hated it and how inappropriate they thought it was. The next thing I see is that the post was taken down and the poster was given some kind of warning for endangering the owner/ doxing them, even though the street address was not posted and the owner’s name was not mentioned. Everyone in the community knows which house that is and could look up the owner from the county records if they want to!!
but nextdoor is happy to keep racism alive, it’s the bread and butter
Yeah I’m originally from a very notorious southern state for racism and the nextdoor app was like that there too.
Hated it. I’ve not been in it ever since. Also, a lot of people being very nosy about weird stuff.
I thought it was going to be like a community app, a good way to meet people. How naive I was.
Too many people tell me they prefer small towns because people are “nice”. In my experience, absolutely not. They may say hello to you, but that does not mean they are nice people. My experience aligns with yours. Selfish, ignorant, nosy. After you leave they’ll immediately start talking about you, your family, and anything else gossipy. Not much else to do in a small town.
Say what you will about big cities but no one gives a damn about you and its great. Someone rude to you? You can literally never see them again. It’s wonderful.
I grew up in the city because my parents couldn’t stand the gossip, conformism and backbiting of small-town life. I’ve been to where they came from (there are still relatives there), and getting the hell out of there was one of the best things they ever did for me.
I’m in a small city now. The neighbors are friendly but not over-curious and the crime rate is minimal. I live near the center so everything I need is within a 20-minute walking radius. And the last time there was a racist demonstration here, the counter-demo was five times larger and the fascists got back on their bus and fucked off: they weren’t even locals, they were a rent-a-mob. That matters greatly to me since we’re an ethnically diverse family. If those assholes get the upper hand, they’ll be coming for us.
It sounds like you found a very nice place to live! Congrats to you!
I grew up in a town of 2500, and after having to spend 3 months there due to my father being in hospice and then dying in the last year, I would NEVER live there again. Holy shit. The only plus for my mom now is that like 25 family members live within a 2 mile radius.
I can honestly say I lived through that exact scenario (except not father, but another family member) recently. Fully agree, horrid experience. So many people come to you and act like they care, but they just want the latest gossip. I’m sorry about your father.
Say what you will about big cities but no one gives a damn about you and its great. Someone rude to you? You can literally never see them again. It’s wonderful.
Lol what, i have lived in a big city my entire life and had plenty of nosy weird neighbors who got up in my shit because they were old and bored. and just random strangers come up to me and start trying to start a fight or whatever because they are just weird and miserable.
my life in a small town, was relatively free of any of that. i remember in my hometown nobody ever bothered us. it was glorious.
You must have lived in a very different small town then I grew up in because everybody in the town knew what time you took a shit
a mean, a significant chunk of the pop was too drunk or strung out on opiates to really care about anything… so that helped.
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Fortunately I live in a pretty diverse area; a fair number of the posts are in spanish. Probably 5 or 6 non English languages spoken in my court alone.
Mine was 75% commercial ads and 15% DOES ANYONE KNOW WHO THIS IS PARKED ON THE PUBLIC STREET IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE I NEED TO BE ABLE TO PART THERE ITS TOO FAR TO WALK
And let’s not forget the racist curtain-twitchers. “I saw a brown person walking down the street near my house this morning. Should I report it?”
But I hate Nextdoor even more because I don’t see any reason to put my real name and address into any social-media app.
Exactly—i used my initials and throwaway email and refused to give my phone number, so I can read but not participate. Which is fine.
I’ve heard enough about Nextdoor that I never want to have an account for their site
They’re already trying to track everything I do. Why would I help them?
And I still use social media the way many people originally imagined it: as a way to stay connected. My feeds have always been a mix of far-flung relatives, old friends, and high school band chums (because, let’s be honest, band buddies are the best buddies). Most days, I carve out a little time after work to catch up with the people who matter.
The last thing I’d want is for doing so to be…just more work. And yet, more than half of respondents agreed with the statement “Maintaining an online presence feels like work,” with about a third of those checking the “strongly agree” box. Only 16% disagreed, with the rest remaining neutral.
A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer?
I don’t really care about the following-people form of social media, the Twitter family. I’m more interested in the forum sort, the Reddit family. There, I don’t need to singlehandedly maintain a flow of content, because people aren’t coming to see @tal@lemmy.today, but because they’re coming to see what’s going on in some community that I only incidentally participate in.
This exactly. I like the thread style formatting, because then I’m following a topic, and not an individual person, because I really don’t give a shit what you had for breakfast, and don’t need your food pics lol. I’m not into that, but if you post something interesting in a technology forum, then I’m quite interested.
I haven’t had breakfast yet. I’m still working on my Americano. #espresso
I’m having coffee. Because I’m dragging ass. Because yesterday was my grandson’s first birthday. But that was just the pièce de résistance of a week that saw me working through last weekend and putting in about 100 hours this week because my team was behind in a deliverable and that would hold up multiple other teams, making delivery by end of September impossible.
So I coded and refactored on a project I’ve never touched before because I’m the technical lead, which means I spend all day every day in meetings and unblocking people and planning new projects. All this, only to find out on Friday, with 4 hours of sleep, as I was running back and forth between meetings and helping set up for the party, that some other team didn’t understand the requirements until they tried to implement the design which we provided weeks ago.
They were supposed to build a landing page to call the registration and login API and orchestrate the results. They have done none of it and now want to re-architect the whole back end to give them less work. After I nearly killed myself getting my team’s ducks in a row.
So I’m exhausted I think I’ve slept 10+hours each of the last two nights and the only fuel I have left in my take is rage and venom. And I have to process this all by tomorrow so I can figure out how to calmly and diplomatically explain to this other team that they can eat shit.
Which is where the coffee comes into play. Sorry to interrupt my gripping tale of breakfast fluids with such a lengthy rant about tech. Cheers!
Same here
Although unfortunatly multiple topics i like just arent nearly as developed on lemmy
Some are better developed on mastadon but its nowhere near the same as reddit
Others just dont exist
Some i know not to bother searching for because of how unlikely they are to exist on lemmy (rp1, for most that says shit all, maybe they think its about the fuel)
I miss webforums terribly. phpBB boards were everything back in the day. Reddit/Lemmy isn’t remotely the same.
I keep hoping some of the new old web stuff will manage to strike a spark again.
I personally prefer Markdown to BBCode and not having to have a ton of different different accounts, but if you want phpBB forums, they are out there. Search a Web search engine for a string that exists on the website that the forum software displays by default. “Powered by vBulletin”, “Powered by phpBB”, etc.
searches
It’s annoying to have different accounts but at the same time I feel like it’s a necessary component if you wanted to retain the same feel. Plus password managers making keeping it all organized dead simple.
Social media used to be mostly about keeping up with friends. Now it’s about competing with everyone for money and views.
Big change.
also the best way to disseminate propaganda.
