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
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 died when it went beyond dial up and ASCII. The vibe of BBS culture in the 1980s and early '90s was so much more social than the dogshit people do now.
That explains the bots.
Dead Internet theory is real.
Let’s get it to 85%
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
For me it’s the idea that by interacting with social media I’m working to generate profit for a billionaire-led company.
Because it’s stupid, you get nothing out of it and you lose time on top
They’re already trying to track everything I do. Why would I help them?
Funny, I’m not american, but I’m working on disconnecting my self too, that’s the reason I’m quitting Reddit and I’m here.
Reddit’s just so swamped with bots anymore. And even in the small subs where you’re reasonably sure no one’s wasting bots on, the people are just weird.
And the bots are posting stories, so you literally have a lifeless machine picking fights with people
AITA, AIO, all the variations are likely just AI bots, or a person just gauging a reaction for thier own writing/novels. plus all those ask “advice” subs about thier personal or family problems.
AFAIK, these companies are making record revenue.
From what? Is my mom clicking on that many ads and buying their shit?
Spoiler: >!Yes she is.!<
My mom: I don’t want ad blocker I want to see what the ads are selling!
Also my mom: Malware ridden phone I have to clean every two months
She has a constant stream of useless, scammy shit from temu ripoffs being sent to her house constantly and I just had to get some AI face filter subscription she swears she didn’t sign up for off her bank account.
But she’ll constantly tell you how much she hates technology.
The cringe I crunge at “I want to see what the ads are selling” like that is some straight up boomer mindset, like nothing against your mom, but like it’s insane to me that there’s an entire cohort of people who kind of think this way. Like they always had so much money they needed ads to help them figure out how to spend it. Must have been cool
Yep iv have read and thought for minimum 2 hours, probably way more, for a 50 euro mouse
Ive done the same for a keyboard,i know some of the flaws in the software used for the fucking remaping of keys, i could probably reflash the firmware with minimum additional research, for a keyboard i dont actualy have
And people are out there buying the crap on ads
Im simply haveing a hard time imagening what exactly they are thinking
Nah, I agree entirely. I cringe very often when in her presence. She is the stereotypical oilfield money boomer.
Do we have the same parents?
Hello brother
Just because they buy ad space doesn’t mean those ads are effective.
Facebook shows an after every two posts in my feed.
From scams
I think this is what makes me the most angry.
My daughter wanted some toy, so I Google it, and go to one of the top results for it, thinking it’s a legitimate website. I go through the checkout process, but it’s weird and hanging. And then they text me some “verification code” I’m supposed to enter which is actually my CC code for my account. A total scam. I do some more searches and this is a common scam for this toy. So I cancel our credit card immediately.
But what pisses me off is that this totally fraudulent website was a top results from Google. They could have verified that shit! But instead they chose to serve me up to wolves.
They could have verified that shit!
There’s no “They”. There’s nobody home. Nobody’s looking at this shit, it’s all just algorithms and machine learning, there’s nobody customer-facing at Google who’s job it is to vet this crap. Your scammy website passed some set of automated metrics Google uses to determine scamminess, so it’s off to the front page of search results it goes.
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
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.
