It’s crazy to think the social media era may finally be ending. There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing. Everything is about feeding you content you didn’t ask for but may be targeted enough to catch your attention.
And for what? To show you some ads here and there? To collect data that can be used to… sell more ads and products?
Instagram was once my favorite app. There was a golden age before stories came a long where people just posted random pictures of what they were up to or what they were seeing. Things weren’t too memefied or political, unlike Facebook. Then photos got more and more glamorized and more about flexing and showing how much cooler and more awesome your life was. People started following themes and niches for their profile content rather than just posting random unorganized series of photos. Businesses and brands started getting built on the platform.
Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularity is practically impossible these days with such entrenched incumbents and no niches left to start a user base with.
…unless perhaps… we build a social network on the blockchain
Why don't you see, we'll solve the social dysfunction created by a commercialized monetized internet by hypercommercialization and monetizing it even more!
There is no alternative! It'll be the end of history!
To respond to the dead comment below, the last two disjointed sentences are from Margaret Thatcher and an allusion to Francis Fukayama's "End of History".
I've given that guy a fair shake, I think he's a well spoken idiot. I wish I could come to some other conclusion.
There's an adage that (properly defined) economic liberalism warps the imaginary and closes off possibilities, he may be a victim of it. The guy is clearly sincere and passionate and I really like that, I just think he's really mistaken
There's healthier futures possible based on we and not on me, one that pulls from more human emotions than greed and fear and there's something that precludes the man from considering it possible or palatable.
I think something like mastodon could be like that with a group of friends, but most people don't seem to want to keep up with that kind of decentralized platform. Lol we certainly don't need blockchain though. That literally brings nothing to the table and unnecessarily complicates it. I think people just keep adding and adding anything and everything to Instagram and Facebook, and it just turns into an amorphous fatberg. I pared both down a lot to more or less my top 50 friends/family/groups and it's a lot more useful, sorting by "most recent" doesn't turn up bunch of junk and defeats the facebook algorithm.
It really is weird, isn't it? To have what was essentially a solved problem 10 years ago become... what you described.
On Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/LinkedIn, I still have tons of people I'd be interesting in passively keeping up with. Maybe even actively, sometimes. But all that latent sociality is increasingly just dead out of the gate, seeing as I no longer use any of those platforms regularly.
My closest friends, the ones I will actually put in effort to talk to? Group chat. The polar opposite of the public social media ecosystem that we used to have. A closed, private space that admits no outsiders, marketers, or clout chasers, but strongly discourages developing relationships with new people or expanding one's horizons.
> A closed, private space that admits no outsiders, marketers, or clout chasers, but strongly discourages developing relationships with new people or expanding one's horizons.
Sounds wonderful. This is how the vast majority of humans have experienced socialising for the vast majority of human history. And they were happier for it.
No, it was definitely possible to meet new people. The propagation of these closed spaces worsens the loneliness epidemic, which is way worse than at any point in history.
The closed space of a group chat with friends worsens the loneliness epidemic? And arguing with random strangers on Reddit alleviates it? It's very much the opposite. Big, open and often anonymous social spaces are terrible at making you feel part of a group. Spaces with few people who you actually know and like and can depend on are key to not feeling lonely, and yes they tend to be closed.
Closed doesn't mean undiscoverable. The biggest closed group chat I'm in is the Telegram channel for a podcast I listen to, and it's plugged in every episode. Discord has issues, but group chats there are still mostly fed by public activity like subreddits or YouTube channels.
Closed just means you can't open a page and read the full history like a forum. It doesn't mean it's only knowable to people currently inside and people they invite.
I think a social network that combines something like Discord and old Facebook timelines would be interesting. Basically group chats would become first class citizens, and the platform should help you discover group chats that your friends are in. That was the missing piece from Facebook messenger group chats. They tried to introduce "Rooms" but it failed since other platforms had already taken over that space. Maybe it is still too late.
I agree. I setup a Discord server for a few friends and it turned out to be infinitely better then current social media platforms when it came to keeping up with what everyone was up to.
+100. I have different slacks and discords for different groups. One for extended family--we share pix there.
I sometimes post the same content to two groups, but it's pretty rare.
I do miss the broader reach of classic Instagram where I could follow friends without them needing to be in a close circle with one another. Lots of them are unwilling to join the chat.
But I don't miss it enough to put up with f---ing TikTok behavior.
> A closed, private space that admits no outsiders, marketers, or clout chasers, but strongly discourages developing relationships with new people or expanding one's horizons.
I find it much better. If I want to, there are hobby groups like discord, anonymously, not show off to all for likes and follows kind of social media.
There should be no need to passively know what people are doing all the time. If anyone do that, it becomes addiction.
>A closed, private space that admits no outsiders, marketers, or clout chasers, but strongly discourages developing relationships with new people or expanding one's horizons.
I've been thinking about these exact tradeoffs in building Haven[1]. Completely private, self-hosted or paid-hosting so no ads, or tracking. Built on RSS so you even get interoperability with the rest of the web.
But also no discovery.
I haven't decided yet if there is a reasonable way to do discovery which doesn't turn into a cesspool of promotion--I think it would have to lean on peer recommendations of some form, kind of a pseudo curation. Or maybe we just leave discovery to FaceTok.
Agree. I still check FB from time to time hoping to see something from friends and acquaintances, but my main "social media" has become a family group chat on WhatsApp.
I think "recommendations" are polarising rather than exclusively a (business) mistake. some people, like me, you and probably most of HN, see them as an intrusive waste of time and go out of their way to avoid them; however, I would imagine there is a very large slice of society that doesn't actively moderate how they spend their free time, or really question the things they're presented with online, to whom "recommendations" will have become a very engaging way to find new content and spend their time. that description isn't a euphemism for "stupid" either. I know plenty of intelligent people who scroll through a feed endlessly when they want a way to occupy their mind
Recommendation feed engines probably gives encouraging numbers in the beginning, until the users realize that they are fed BS clickbait instead of baby pictures and other gossip.
While I am quite sure some are hooked on the feed, the core of Facebook (friend gossip) is gone.
> There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing.
IMO it’s pointless to “passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing”. We should either actively keep up (thus actually maintain the relationship), or let it go~
Sure, but there is a desire or even need to have robust and interactive options in our communication devices for keeping in touch with all the people we know in a more inclusive and less active way than just directly messaging or calling a specific person, which to be clear people are still doing.
People want something like Facebook as an option. It has usefulness- sharing photos, inviting people to events, a simple platform for small business. I’m not going to get into the negatives of Facebook which, I feel, outweigh the benefits.
Facebook has become a net negative on society but in the early days it was quite good. The problem isn’t social networking apps as much as the sad reality that these services can’t exist without ads or sweeping changes to drive growth. If only it were possible to have something like Facebook but without the suits.
This is the single use case that kept me on Facebook for a while, I decided it wasn't worth it but just by their network effects so many people were on the site that it was very good for that.
I think we need some public alternative(s) - then you don't have to worry about funding it through advertising or the company trying to use the users for profit by selling data.
I used to be a DJ for a few years and Facebook was useful for organizing and promoting my parties. I’m not interested in getting into a semantic debate if such a need is necessary or good for society, but it was useful for me and many people did want to go to my parties. This is a modest example.
Also, people are artists or learning. It’s nice to have a simple and organized way to save your public work online to share with friends.. I can keep going. It’s easy to forget the usefulness of facebook.
To be clear, Facebook has done harm and the company is at fault for much, but I do think there is something in the structure or DNA of facebook which could be salvaged and become useful.
I don’t think that Likes, algorithmic feeds, or sharing political/insane links with everyone you kind of know are quality features of facebook.
Events and parties (organising and discovery) were something no platform ever got close to being good at. Facebook completely nailed it, probably purely through the social connections. It's still maybe the number 1 thing everyone i know agrees is a big loss, and nothing has come close to taking its place as we're so dispersed again
> simple and organized way to save your public work online to share with friends
I think Instagram still works for that. You can also do that by having a blog.
But if anyone needs more than that, it's addiction generated by fb, the red notification, likes, followers, desire to open the app, desire to know what others are doing, gossip, all this kind if things. Fb was pretty effective to create this desire and it permanently changed how we function mentally.
I agree with Instagram being better.. but we are either forgetting, or weren’t present for, the internet just before facebook. It used to be Geocities for sharing amateur art. Instagram exists because of photo sharing on facebook.
My main point is that there are functions or core uses in FB which are worth having.
Sure, I'm not arguing there aren't genuinely beneficial uses of FB, et al. I was responding to:
> there is a desire or even need to have robust and interactive options in our communication devices for keeping in touch with all the people we know in a more inclusive and less active
OP seems to take this as axiomatic. I'm not so sure.
It's been an interesting path. It went from the early days where you'd post just about anything, then people tightened up on what felt "good enough" and some of the charm was lost. I got the sense that people became more anxious about what reached that "good enough" mark. A friend who was making a living from putting up Instagram content just abruptly started turning down money and stopped posting. No one should be fretting about sharing content because they worry about how their grid looks - it's idiotic. I think that slowdown in content in part (also, fending off rivals) brought about Stories.
I grew to appreciate Stories as a way to tell the behind-the-scenes story of the main feed highlight shot/video. And the ability to save those screens into actual stories (of an outing or a project).
Then they ramped up ads, added Reels and wrecked the way the main feed works with integrating Reels. Reels feels like the step too far. Revert the main feed UI, let me switch off all suggested content (not just for 30 days, you bastards), tone down the ads, and I'll be OK.
> I got the sense that people became more anxious about what reached that "good enough" mark
Bo Burnham has some interesting comments in his "Inside" special about how social media makes us disassociate from ourselves and think about both living in the moment and how it will be perceived afterwards. I think that's a big part of what causes this - after you know that you're not just posting for fun then you have to think about why you're posting something and what it means. This has caused by to basically stop using them because it never seems "worth it" to post something
The feed anxiety thing predates the pandemic. People using it semi commercially were stressing about the right colour tones of their grid, etc. I find myself avoiding posting shots in a particular sequence because I don't want a cluster of ocean photos or video icons adjacent, etc - less so because I care, but because my prospective clients would think about it showing a lack of attention to detail. Very silly.
In a scrolling feed, no issue. If you were creating a collated folio of best work, no issue. I think having a chronological grid is what irks people. Better to let people choose a grid that represents them. A photographer could have their best work, someone else might choose to have their most popular, and others could leave it chronological.
Food blogs were one of the first genres to develop once they evolved beyond links. There were jokes about how nobody wants to read a blog about what you ate for dinner before there were jokes about how nobody wants to read tweets about what you ate for dinner.
Bitcoiners in general say this too. Blockchains don't make sense except in the single, highly specific use case for which has already been implemented.
I have two Instagram accounts. One just for my friends and family. And one for mindless content feed, brands, entertainment, etc. The separation has helped me reduce the mindless scrolling amazingly. I log into my friends and family account and catch up in five minutes per day. I very rarely choose to switch to the other account. Splitting into two accounts has been really healthy for me.
Yeah it's always been an option to use Instagram this way. Most people don't want to use it that way apparently, using it as a content machine instead of a traditional social network. But I know plenty of people who still do just share photos of themselves/family and only like/comment on culture stuff.
The time thing is the biggest takeaway for me, not only I spend less time overall on Instagram but I also feel way more "productive" (Weird word to use, but you know what I mean) as I actually look at every story from my friends instead of navigating through a bunch of spam from {SPORT} or {CELEBRITY}
> There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing.
Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal fill that place quite nicely.
I regularly check my Whatsapp contacts status messages. Most of them are filled with things from their daily lives.
I have a bunch of groups in Telegram, both personal and professional.
I feel FB style of "feed" thing has become a chore solely due to the mind-numbing complexity of the interface. WA is dead simple. I know what I am looking at, I can interact with the person who put the status message, I can block them or delete them or archive them.
SM has evolved itself into chat apps, which, funnily, was what we used FB for in the first place.
The likes of IG, TT, etc are a mixed broadcast medium, that are natural evolutions of the Twitter model.
Also, FB is finally evolving into a form that is close to how users use it.
What OP means with WhatsApp status is the photo/video stories that only last for 24 hours. What you're describing is now called the "About" section of your profile.
> There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing.
The Facebook general experience is to slowly (or immediately) dislike your family. Instagram's general experience is to like posts from strangers and occasionally your friends. Tiktok's experience is to really disconnect from your social circle and get sucked into shockingly personalized content from strangers.
Facebook's feed is a dying product, Instagram is barely keeping its head above water, and Tiktok is growing so fast the government is worried that it's a national security threat.
> and Tiktok is growing so fast the government is worried that it's a national security threat.
Nah. The government calls it a national security threat because Facebook has been lobbying pretty hard for it. They did ban tiktok in india for this very reason. Though for the same so called national security threat. But interestingly, facebook allows ruling fascist party's pages to call for genocide quite openly on its platform, and has recently invested a ton of money into businessmen close to the ruling party.
Then just leave for Telegram which is infinetly better (their native windows client is just incredible compared to the other atrocious electron based chat apps) or even better for Signal which is not as feature rich yet but open source.
The “if we just go back to the old app” theory ignores half the problem. People learn how to be good at instagram and how to use it to their advantage over time.
To pretend that Facebook is the only party extracting value is wrong. People (who aren’t you) cause a lot of the problems that drive these apps to the places they end up.
Turns out that most people would prefer to see the Kardashians over their friends most of the time. Sad, but there it is.
Mmmmm yes, documenting my shitty cringe opinions in an immutable record forever with the full force of a global distributed hashing network.
Unironically though, imagine where we would be if logging to social media was even a tiny bit more expensive than free, PoW was originally invented to combat email spam after all.
> There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing.
Is this something that people really want to do though... I did that for a bit back when fb was still new but quickly and I mean quickly fell off the habit and stopped using fb.
Just as myself and most of my friends and acquaintances all started using FB because we’d all started using it, we also all stopped using it because we’d all stopped using it.
In theory, yes. But maybe the average circle of friends and acquaintances isn't sticky enough without more encouragement, karma, whatever? I don't mind if a platform feels quiet because it takes less time to keep up with, but the platform itself would see a downturn as a serious failing.
I have an even better idea. How about creating a big network where everyone could have their little space and put whatever they want in it? The main method of content discovery would be by adding “links” to other people's places. Since it would be interconnected like a spider web, we could cáll it “the web” or something…
> Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularity is practically impossible these days with such entrenched incumbents and no niches left to start a user base with.
Setting aside the fact that the social media platform you are cloning is probably going to sue you for copyright infringement if it takes off, you'd still be fighting the network effect. I'm not saying it is impossible, but I doubt that building a clone of a product will successfully move people from the original. Signal and telegram haven't been able to best WhatsApp.
Building it in a decentralized way probably makes it even harder.
The answer to the one platform that resisted all temptations and did this well: Twitter. The #metoo #blacklivesmatters and not to mention numerous international protests and movements sprouted there.
As both cause and effect, Twitter has missed the capitalistic financial success of similarly sized and engaged companies.
Twitter does seem to be replacing most of their feed with random posts from people you don't follow, poorly categorised by AI into topics they incorrectly think you're interested in though.
Twitter is full of self-important people and I hate that as much the firehouse ads and follows on facebook. It's more of an echo chamber. I only use it to follow a couple of people who are important to me (and not just themselves), some memes, and try to have a variety of news source from the middle out so I don't get stuck in wokeville or fascisttown echo chambers.
And for what? To show you some ads here and there? To collect data that can be used to… sell more ads and products?
Instagram was once my favorite app. There was a golden age before stories came a long where people just posted random pictures of what they were up to or what they were seeing. Things weren’t too memefied or political, unlike Facebook. Then photos got more and more glamorized and more about flexing and showing how much cooler and more awesome your life was. People started following themes and niches for their profile content rather than just posting random unorganized series of photos. Businesses and brands started getting built on the platform.
Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularity is practically impossible these days with such entrenched incumbents and no niches left to start a user base with.
…unless perhaps… we build a social network on the blockchain