"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. "
It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.
Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me. For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years.
Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.
It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
You can say porn. It's an adult website
You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/
While number of active users still grows, one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
“Who is left on Facebook besides dopamine junkies and bots?”
“I only use it in this limited circumstance”
You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.
> It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/20110...
> Take a 2002 Times/CNN poll on the eating habits of 10,000 Americans. Six percent of the individuals surveyed said they considered themselves vegetarian. But when asked by the pollsters what they had eaten in the last 24 hours, 60% of the self-described "vegetarians" admitted that [they] had consumed red meat, poultry, or fish the previous day.
I'm happy they've been able to build a $1,660,000,000,000 company on the back of me logging in once every two months, scrolling 3 posts, getting disgusted with slop, and closing the tab. Gives me hope that my harebrained ventures may also succeed!
I love the unabbreviated $1,660,000,000,000 lol It reminded me of Waxahatchee's
> You let me take my own damn car
> To Brooklyn, New York, USA
I don't buy it. You use it more than that - otherwise you'd just delete your account.
So if someone doesn't use something they must delete instead of letting it rot?
I’m down to 3 hours a week of social media woot!
Does that include HN?
A very aggressive noprocrast could certainly get you there!
How long until Claude has noprocrast?
I keep mine alive a) to squat on the account for my identity, b) just because I know there are family members that will do posts/messages once in awhile instead of sending me a direct SMS, so I log in every few months
That is about right for me. I scoll a little longer but as soon as it changes from people I care to follow to slop I'm gone for a couple more months. there is value in following distant friends but it isn't worth hours per day of sorting through slop to find it. When it is only every month or two the non-slop still seems to rise to the top. (But God only knows what non slop they choose not to show me) I wish there was a way to block all 'so-and-so shared' as that is where most of the slop comes from. (Ads at least I can say is how they pay the bills and so I accept a few as non-slop)
It's for messaging with old people. It's like having a telephone doesn't mean you're talking all day. It's for people to be able to contact you and vice versa.
> who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
Political activists, like a former partner of mine.
… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …
… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …
… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
> I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery
There is some percentage of the world-wide population that would find interest in both ads simultaneously.
While true, in the context of the other things they show, I think it is more likely to be an example of them not knowing which advertiser to pitch my eyeballs at, and less likely to be them identifying me as a member of this set.
I take poorly directed targeting advertisements as a performance indicator for how well my data privacy efforts are working. When the ad targeting has you dead to rights is when you need to worry.
To an extent, sure, but I think also a sign their analytics were never as good as they claimed.
For example, so far as I know my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?
> my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?
Probably so you can suggest it to your partner.
The growth is across the family of products (inc Instagram and WhatsApp) not Facebook itself. Facebook itself is a zombie, and I don't believe they have a way to innovate out of it. I'm not going to predict the end of Meta, they have more than enough products, but agreed that it's actually quite difficult to understand who's really left.
Around me I see this usage:
- Older folks.
- People using marketplace
- People exchanging inter-personal tips and info: best stroller, contractor, etc.
Not saying FB is best for those things but it doesn’t seem dead at all.
Plot twist: all old folks were also on Facebook only to chat with other old folks. Once this fact was spotted, they all just moved to Discord.
Your friends don’t produce much content yet people had a need for frequent entertainment. Also, people realized that posting things to social media meant that it was there forever. This led to a bifurcation: friends / family updates are mostly relegated to temporary formats like stories while “feed” content is professional produced.
> These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone
They clearly work for advertisers, and that's all that matters.
hey you know there is a feed on mobile, built into the app that only shows you your friends feed? not a fb employee or defending them just relaying info.
Too late. (And I don't do mobile anyway.)
I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.
and keep your kids away from it too before Mark’s robots get handsy
https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat...
Warning: truly disgusting
The funny thing about the friends feed is that it highlights for me who is extremely active on the platform. People resharing stuff all the time. And, it's one of the few feeds you can't endlessly scroll through. It will tell you to "check back later" once you get to 3-4 days of updates. No money in showing people their friends feeds, so why let them endlessly scroll.
For many people, the alternative would be that their feeds are completely empty since a lot of folks don’t post any updates on Facebook really.
People seek novelty. Real social networks do not change as fast as that.
I was always perturbed by the shift from calling them "social networks" to "social media". It signalled a friends-to-famous shift (plus ads) that I didn't particularly want.
Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.)
They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)
I guess social networking service is actually a more appropiate name for the thing.
I will admit, one thing the crowd attention model does exceptionally well is surface the best comments on content. Whether it's HN, Instagram, YouTube, etc... the top comments are usually the "best", depending on how best is defined in the given context. On the silly Instagram meme videos my algo serves up, the top comments are invariably hilarious, often funnier than the actual content, and as you scroll it's impressive how the ordering by like count matches hilarity quite well.
> the top comments are invariably hilarious,
Sadly that is all that reddit is, now. Have a serious question? Expect multiple top replies to be some sort of [un]funny joke answer.
It's a wasteland and devalues the platform when everyone competes for Internet Points.
/r/aviation is just one example of being full of this crap.
Oddly enough, I don't see it as much in gaming subreddits, even the more generic ones.
This works on platforms like HN, Less Wrong or niche subreddits, which
i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them) ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations)
Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree.
In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.
Excepting small communities: if you're looking for anything but humor, sort by best typically ruins the comments.
Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.
PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.
Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.
> depending on how best is defined in the given context
That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).
"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.
Speaking of instagram - i have found the ads sometimes incredibly helpful - sometimes exactly the thing i am looking for.
Facebook on the other hand has become too very bad.
You have simply redefined “best” as “hilarious” “often funnier” or “hilarity”
Is it your intention to suggest that the highest possible form of commenting is humorous?
I regularly see pretty bad/misinformed takes upvoted to the top though.
Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see.
As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me.
Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.
Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails.
What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.
I would like to see social networks that facilitates real life, face-to-face encounters to a much larger extent that the current state of affairs. The Fediverse has the pieces to this puzzle, but I do not know of one project that combines them in the right way yet. We do have Mobilizon for events, we have Mastodon and all the other similar projects for sharing and commenting, but we need something that puts the pieces together in a new configuration.
I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.
But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!
> You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits
There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
Or how in a private group someone who was invited suddenly leaves the group membership, hops off the channel. Comparative to walking out of a meeting without saying a word and provide a reason. A simple "I enjoyed it here, but I have to spend my time elsewhere" is just simply a polite thing to do, and costs only 2 seconds of time.
Social media has strong parasocial tendencies.
> you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle
The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.
But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.
I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time makes your life actively worse even if in the moment you feel good. Social media should be thought of through that lens -- if you think you want to preserve "the good parts," you're like an alcoholic who keeps finding a reason to continue drinking. "No, the problem was just drinking alone. Now that I'm drinking at the bar, socially, it's OK!" To an extent, but mostly it's harming you.
Yeah the first three paragraphs of the article really resonated strongly and then the fourth was an ad for mastodon, which is only slightly less bad IMHO.
> Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it.
Don't start drinking or smoking, because with this logic you'll have a really hard time quitting
When you say leave behind...do you mean you lose something by not interacting with them, or do you mean that you have some kind of duty to help get them un-addicted? I don't think you are obligated to go hangout at your local bar once a week just because alcoholics exist.
It’s not a small group of people that we can afford to “lose”. It’s widespread in an entire generation (at least), a fact that threatens our society as a whole.
We have a duty to help them..and I don't think society gets this right in other places. We're not proactive about it. In religion and islam there's something called dawah, effectively preaching, but the idea is you're calling people to something with higher purpose and to eliminate all these bad habits. And I think it's the same whether online or offline. We need to help people. First you have to help yourself but then you have to go back and get everyone else. It speaks to a moral imperative we should all have to help our fellow man.
What we take for granted is it was always addicting, as far back in the 90s when we didn't call it social media. There was just a smaller privileged demographic frequenting it. That said, as much as it was the wild-west, it was probably "better" for us then than it is now.
I think the challenge is that the addictive formats will naturally outcompete the healthy ones because they’re, well, addicting. They exert a force pulling people into their orbit and starving anything designed for healthier (less frequent) engagement.
I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.
And the social media companies, who have essentially unlimited resources, would fight it tooth and nail
IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time.
To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks
What extensions do you recommend?
This feels like the most important comment here. Do other Mastodon users feel the same? The OP Madden me want to try Mastodon.
I have never used the explore function of any social media app ever. I never want it, I have never found it useful. If I want random submitted content by strangers I go to message boards/forums/etc. That was a great space reddit filled for years, now HN for me.
Social media is at its best when it’s just stuff from people I choose to follow or know.
This might be controversial. Please disagree with me.
When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.
So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
"We deserve it" is the tldr I gather from you here, just like people addicted to opiates are ultimately responsible for the way those drug companies systematically set them up for that, right?
I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.
I appreciate your comment, and how you argued your disagreement. Yet I think you missed something in GPs post.
First, I absolutely agree with you that the companies "knew what they were doing". 100%. They were maximising everything that could be maximised, and it's impossible they did some of the things without knowing. There are also some leaks and releases that note this. But the way I see it, the networks were catalysers over something that is mere human nature. Yes, they benefited from it, but I don't think they caused it. Amplify, bring forward and profit from it, that we can agree on.
I disagree with you that companies are the sole root problem, and tend to agree more with GP on "human nature", because I've seen it happen before. In the 90s and early 2000s we had IRC networks, before the messenger apps. On IRC you had servers and then channels. Even then, with 0 "corporate" incentives, the people controlling the servers were "fighting" other servers (leading to some of the earliest DoS/DDoS attacks), and the people admining the channels were doing basically what GP noted.
Admins would boast with how many people they had on their channels. Friends of admins would get +v so they could send messages even when the channels were moderated. People chased these things. Being an admin, having power, being a moderator, etc. This is human nature.
Then we had similar things on reddit. There was this one dude that started using sock puppet accounts to boost his own main account. Not for corporate interests, but for human nature. He wanted to be popular. He found that upvoting his own posts early on, plus some fake questions would net him tons of karma. And he did it over and over again. There were also people doing this regularly on writing subs. They'd plot the history of votes, and figure out at what time they should have to post their stories to get upvoted. And they'd upvote with 2-3 accounts immediately, guaranteeing the very basic algorithm would put them up and keep them up. Reddit also played around with hiding upvotes for a time, and so on. These are all, at the core, "human nature" and not corporate things.
I'd add the stackoverflow demise as being related as well. Moderators, and "influencers" got so "powerful" as to basically ruin it for everyone. I very much doubt the corporation behind SO wanted this to happen. And yet it did happen, because human nature.
Capitalism at work…
I think your experiment was valid, even if anecdotal. This article from January 2009 was talking about the phenomena of what it actually meant to have friends on facebook. Are you a "loser" or a "social slut"? This was at least a few years before most of the algorithms that we perceive as dangerous and enshittifying became core to the platform. The specific study they referenced (new link below) argued that there is genetic components in how we perceive our social networks.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/200901/faceb... https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0806746106
Where FB and Instagram are to blame is not just being aware of the psychological impact but amplifying it make it worse, especially onto a teen audience that has no capability of distinguishing the real world from social media. To them, it's the exact same. Your online social circle may be all you have in real life, not to mention the cyber bullying, unrealistic body standards and all the other awful parts that come when you gamify and reward capturing people's attention.
I won't deny that individuals are also responsible to guard themselves and especially parents, but these platforms have been accused (and are currently in US court) over the fact that they knew about the addictive potential of their platforms and made no safeguards over improving that. As a platform owner, you are responsible for all aspects of its success and failures, its highs and lows.
That’s nonsense. Nobody asked for algorithmic feed pushing schizo agenda on you.
> They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
Imagine the government saw the fentanyl crisis and started making fentanyl to support the habits of its citizens.
Not every single trend humans take on should be encouraged. We can be dumb as individuals, as well as collectively. At least in bursts.
Between the history of crack cocaine in inner cities, safe injection sites and the current trajectory of American governance, I’m flummoxed by your incredulous posture here.
I imagine this is not the first time you've been flummoxed given the take you've just presented.
I still think it's worth reflecting which of the toxic patterns we want to, or don't want to reproduce on non-commercial networks like mastodon. Infinite scroll, quote reply, the like button... all these aren't neutral, and discussions were rightly heated about introducing them.
You're so right... Some of these patterns are, to their very core, parts of what make these social media bad.
I myself started making the same distinction when I talk about these things in English, except it's "social media" vs "social networks". Though I have no idea how to make that distinction in Russian, social "media" never caught on as a term there.
An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.
Sure you can. You can not post political things on social networks. They're not doing any good anyway. They're not changing anyone's mind. They're not providing depth or width to the discussion. I don't say this to be insulting, but rather a realist.
My point is that I just want to be able to discuss any topic with my followers without self-policing lest a bunch of anonymous accounts butts into the conversation and completely derails it.
Why do you assume that there needs to be a purpose other than discussing a topic that you're interested in?
Politics is a complex topic. If you want to learn more, social media is not the way to do it. Well reasoned books and essays are. If you want to convince others of your positions, social media is not the way to do it. Personal relationships in real life are.
What's left?
Again, you seem to insist on an ulterior motive, completely discounting the value or pleasure of conversation. In contrast, reading is a solitary activity. Have you heard of book clubs? People read books, and then they get together to discuss the books.
Hacker News itself is all about reading articles, and then discussing the articles with others. "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Unrelated to the topic described in the blog itself, I overall like the theme of `susam.net`. The name itself reminded me of a sesame seed in Turkish for a while. (I think author had recently mentioned one of the recent posts that they wanted to get susam.com but that was already taken by a Turkish company selling some spices...)
The content (that shows up in HN) is also good. Since I am on mobile device, I cannot tell the exact font used, but seems like Georgia to me. While https://github.com/susam/susam.net hosts the actual source code of the website.
Another remark: Would be really nice to have a same theme adaptation for BearBlog and similar places.
Agreed! I thought this site was generated in Hugo for some reason. Never knew Lisp was used until I saw that GitHub you linked.
I'm surprised there's not more discussion here and in general about symmetric- vs. asymmetric-relationship networks. Facebook worked in the beginning because relationships were symmetric and there was no concept of getting "follows" -- friendships are modeled after real life ones, where the friendship is between two people.
I can see why the big networks moved away from that: pushing "content" has a lot more friction when relationships are symmetrical. What I don't understand is why there is no upstart trying to bring that back.
What does that mean exactly, how do you see that manifesting itself? Would we even be aware of these networks, sounds like email
Not email; social networking. Symmetrical just means the relationship is the same from both sides. Imagine a two-way "friendship" relationship (old-school Facebook) vs. a one-way "following" relationship (more recent Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc.).
I struggle to see anything "social" about social media. Looking at short videos of others and ads is anything but social activity.
The problem is that people who don't know the history of the internet just call everything with user posts "social media". Web 2.0 has some overlap with social networks. But it is still a different concept. And social media is a meaningless term at this point.
Any other platforms like Mastodon which are doing things well - are you guys on lemmy?
Lemmy is mostly a clone of reddit with a lot less people on it. That is to say it works fairly well and doesn't yet seem filled with bots, but its got the same issues as Reddit since its based on the same design.
What were the main issues of reddit according to you?
The idea that community votes will result in the best content floating to the top is flawed, because what happens is the most popular content gets upvoted and not necessarily the most insightful or pertinent. This effect is magnified as the network or communities grow and welcome more a more general audience. The most prominent commentary is often useless jokes, memes, reactions etc. Slashdot, HN, lobsters have similar flaws with different strategies to overcome them.
Yep - true I do see things being easily gamed but then also lemmyverse does seem to be a personal favourite now - i hope things don't change down the line.
I'll answer - too many bots and most communities don't demand high quality comments. I still use it though - it's my only social network (although I don't think it's really a social network since I have no durable social connections with anybody there and I presume most other people don't either).
Reddit does give a lot of value - despite the shortcomings.
My family has moved to group chats. It's great.
friction is underrated as an attention design pattern. blocking feels punitive, friction just makes you notice the reach instead of being on autopilot. not saying it solves algorithmic feeds, but the pause before opening apps changes the math for most people
This reminded me of this video from a more optimistic time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
Thank you for posting this. Despite being an old video, I had never come across it, and it almost made me tear up. It showed me the hope that I wished the web would be, despite it never realizing that ambition, with businesses that only pursued engagement metrics, and governments who saw value in vassalizing tech companies to pursue their political goals.
Sure, the modern Twitter/X feed is not like the original reverse chronological timeline but the latter is still available right next to it. Maybe it's the power of the default but I find the algorithmic feed much better.
The chronological timeline is only manageable up to a point. I follow just under 2000 accounts on Twitter. They at least occasionally at least in some period in the past must have been posting interesting stuff or I wouldn't have followed them. But not all of them all the time. Algorithmic feed surfaces the good stuff, or at least popular, but lately it picks some very niche stuff successfully. Same on TikTok.
The modern feed is a clever generalization of the previous age tech. And sometimes you just like the previous gen more but there is a reason the new version got traction.
The title of the article is arguing semantics. Like it or not, the term “social media” is what we use to describe scroll apps like TikTok.
The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else.
I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.
Why won’t their stock crash and burn already???
This post has convinced me to give Mastodon another try.
Eh, watch as HN comments slowly become exactly the thing you don’t want to participate in.
That's why I am so glad to only be on Mastodon these days, the true social network, without any rich sociopath billionare or some vulture crapitalist behind it. That keeps Mastodon form becoming the attention/propaganda platforms that all these for profit platforms really are.