I hope we can come up with a new phrase that sticks for these. Some good ones have been posted here in the comments. Ideally, an altruistic entity will trademark them.
"User Engagement Networks" Sounds perfectly fine to me. At least there would be an idea of what these apps are trying to accomplish at the expense of the user.
This might sound like a nit, but I'd call it habit-forming, not addictive. I watched friends go from obsessed with Facebook when it launched to mostly using it for sharing family photos, and this is at a time when there was a focus on user engagement. It just seems like people lost interest too easily for it to be actual addiction.
I don't want Facebook to show me anything that isn't posted by one of my friends... are there any settings that allows that? Sure it's kind of interesting to look at a bear being washed by a human, but who cares.
Is there now a gap for a new social platform that goes back to chronologically ordered content from those you choose to follow/friend rather than algorithmically curated content from other sources designed to lure you in?
There is, but anyone who would fund it would require it to be monetized in the same way. This situation will continue to persist until people are willing to pay for such a service, and subvert the advertising motive. And, even then, we have the example of cable to show us that ads will probably creep back in, and come to dominate it all over again. When people are willing to drive dump trucks full of money to your loading dock, what else can you do? </s>
I think they are not social anymore, having been overrun with politics and ads. However they are still a network. There is a network effect (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) that makes it valuable to the participants and advertisers alike, which is the large number of users. It’s just that the network’s value went from being driven by positive actions (sharing photos with friends) to something negative - which is preventing others’ political views or business competitors from winning by influencing the network. All sides feel like they have to participate because others participate and they’ll be irrelevant otherwise. In that sense it’s more like a war zone.
A thing I've noticed, and I could be wrong about this, is that social networks have not done much to increase avenues for interaction between 2nd degree connections of two people (say a and b) without needing the active participation of the a and b themselves.
For instance, if we have the following undirected connections: {(a,b), (b,c), (a,d)}. There could be a mechanism to make the graph more dense by the way of increasing interactions between (c,d) without needing, for example, a to like c's content for it to then appear on d's feed. Done naively, this could result in a lot of unwanted content on someone's feed, but I wonder if there are ways around it.
According to the theory of the author, I've found that Twitter can be used like an actual social network and I do use it like this with a group of friends. It is kind of a cluster and anyone can join only by answering our tweets and hanging out.
[+] [-] 1MachineElf|5 years ago|reply
I hope we can come up with a new phrase that sticks for these. Some good ones have been posted here in the comments. Ideally, an altruistic entity will trademark them.
[+] [-] midolzzzz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worker767424|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtnygard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atat7024|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PotatoPancakes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAdamAndChe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineiti|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Black101|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcod|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregasquith|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phoe-krk|5 years ago|reply
https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse
[+] [-] rubyist5eva|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhishekbasu|5 years ago|reply
For instance, if we have the following undirected connections: {(a,b), (b,c), (a,d)}. There could be a mechanism to make the graph more dense by the way of increasing interactions between (c,d) without needing, for example, a to like c's content for it to then appear on d's feed. Done naively, this could result in a lot of unwanted content on someone's feed, but I wonder if there are ways around it.
[+] [-] gregasquith|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RocketSyntax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pram|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksdale|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] libraryatnight|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kwdc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guscost|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] local_dev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcardo11|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tharejamudit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] born-jre|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qqii|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Strang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tacocataco|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|5 years ago|reply
"We are Borg. You will be red pilled. Resistance is futile. Where we go one we go all!"
[+] [-] motohagiography|5 years ago|reply