I feel like social media has changed human behavior for the worse and we're too far gone in trying to get it back.
I was just getting into development when social media was coming on the scene. It was so cool to be engaged in communities with people who I loved to see what they were doing, finding emerging technologies and development frameworks and techniques. People were willing to tell you about stuff they were working on. It really felt like a community. Every new platform someone at work would find it and send out invites or get us to sign up and run it through its paces. It was such a great time and I really felt like my growth as a developer was accelerated by being apart of these early communities.
Now? Its not about bringing people together with common interests. Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes.
It would seem the entire purpose of social media these days is just about getting people to react negatively to what you're posting in order to generate MORE negative content. It turns into a self fulfilling cycle that is now in a space where I have no idea how it will be broken.
As a footnote to this, there are still very good people, still posting very good content that does not have that purpose. One account I found a few months ago was trailerparksports on instagram. Its a black guy who got interested in Hockey after the Four Nations Cup and how crazy that tournament started out with the Canada/USA game. His interest was 100% genuine. In the last four months, he's detailed how much he's learned and the outpouring from hockey fans AND the teams themselves has been unreal. The LA Kings flew him out for a few of their games, he's been going to games in other cities. He's 100% into the sport now and its been really cool to see him go through the process of picking a team to support, learning the rules and the strategies.
So yes, there are still very honorable and decent content creators who are sharing ceratain aspects of their life with the internet and getting a lot of positivity in return. But man oh man, it takes a LOT of digging to find them these days.
> [...] Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes.
An easy way to solve for this is customization -- if no two users have the same "algorithm" powering their feed, it becomes hard for anyone to do this, because perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.
> So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money.
Did you intentionally call “thirst traps” “rage bait” erroneously so that someone would correct you? Engagement bait works surprisingly well on HN, I just wasn’t sure if that was an ironic wink at the audience.
I think a lot of us want the same thing - a minimally commercialized social network with content exclusively from people we actually know or like. But much like with group chats (or real life) the people we know are not going to be consistently engaged, let alone entertaining, and we'll get bored fast.
Cognitively, yes. This is like saying "a lot of us want the same thing - healthy, fresh food that makes us stronger, sleep better, and live longer". Of course. But fast food is a $400B industry in the US. Social media is fast food. Nobody says they want it but their behavior indicates otherwise.
I was recently thinking about how early Facebook was a harmless or good thing for the world that was easy to have a healthy relationship with.
I could check it once a day, know that I had seen every post from my friends and family, like the cat pictures, ask for the recipe for the lunch picture, and be done. Of course it's not very profitable for Facebook for me to be done so now it tries to show me a bunch of stuff I can't look away from. That drowns out posts from my friends, so those posts get less interaction, and now my friends don't post pictures of their cats regularly.
I think the EU is on the right track. The network effect prevents progress. If big corporations need to provide APIs that might change. We might even get an app, where you can chose to only see what you want to see (e.g. only content from your friends) and still be able to talk to people that use Fb, Insta, whatever exclusively.
I think people actually do find social networks, and apps that support them, to be deeply useful and in high demand. The problem is almost every social network app, or website, is really just a massive spynet trying to capture as much personal information and data as possible to sell.
The social network part is really really simple. The early form of Facebook was remarkably effective, simple, and useful. The same goes for Instagram and MySpace. The business side, however, has poisoned that original creation into a profoundly corrosive "content delivery system" and a spy network that hides behind a fancy profile page and algorithmically (read: business interest determined) "feed".
This might sound like a strange position to take, but in my experience at least one social media platform has managed to retain its original direction (just being a place for people to come socialize) and that platform is 4chan. I've seen people there theorize that it hasn't gone belly-up because it literally cannot be sold to advertisers due to its reputation. This is not to say that 4chan doesn't have its own problems, but it did somehow manage to stay on mission for nearly 20 years now when we watch other social media platforms struggling; being allergic to advertisers may have been a blessing in disguise. It might not be the most enlightening conclusion to reach but, maybe the issue is (and always has been) trying to monetize a space that doesn't actually create a product?
>I think we need a new social media platform to emerge from the web.
There are a very large number of major platforms? None of them fit your needs?
Many of the examples throughout are reddit. Though many of the memes are more facebook.
The big question to me; can you be social and interact with people on many subjects. Say what I want, when I want. I want to see what I want. Just because a small group of people dont like what I said, they dont get to unilaterally hide what I said.
When you go on reddit and you say something that many people agree with, but many dont. Suddenly my message is disappeared. Why bother being on reddit? You now have a small group of people curating content.
If you go on X and say something many people agree with and many dont. I top comment. The people wont dont like what I said can leave a comment but they cant hide my message.
This is the fundamental flaw in many social media.
Very thoughtful analysis. I particularly like the insight around the industry metrics and Goodhart's Law. “DAU” and the like align with social media companies’ interests of increasing attention and time on site, which lead to more ad revenue. But, they are at odds with their users’ interests, or at least don’t consider user costs (ie time). I wonder if a social product could thrive based on the principle of “efficient” usage, a la the platform works on my behalf to keep me efficiently informed on what’s going on in my network and considers the cost tradeoffs of my time and attention. I suspect I could feel very “up to date” on the things I care about most by checking into a social product ~weekly with a thoughtfully curated digest of content.
Aren't a lot of users on there simply to waste time?
It costs next to nothing, provides some sort of sensation in your brain that you're doing things, you might see some neat pictures or videos. It's like a different kind of video game where you can't win and it's appealing to nearly every age group, gender, demographic.
I can see a platform that gives you just the data you need to stay informed working, although what data you wish to receive and how quickly seems like a potential stumbling point.
Perhaps you don't want to receive news about celebrities, _unless_ it involves someone you care deeply about, for example Michael Jackson. It would require quite a bit of tailoring for a platform to be able to curate for that.
Having tried (and failed) to build a more privacy friendly social network, I can confidently tell you that the big players in this space do the shady things they do solely because users reward them for doing so.
Trying to grow a new product is super hard. Trying to move into an established market is even harder. Trying to do that while also foregoing all the dark patterns is … well I won’t say it’s impossible but ugh it would take a huge head start in terms of name recognition, funding, or something else truly extraordinary.
somewhat unrelated, but i really wish platforms like youtube and instagram had the ability to "opt-out" of certain features. i find that the short form content in youtube shorts / instagram reels can be really easy to waste a few minutes on.
if anyone knows any solutions (ex. browser extensions) that solve this, id be really interested
Social media platforms cost money. Until we solve that, without monetizing it and giving rich parasites an advantage, we'll continue to be pitted against each other to there benefit. Fediverse, mastadon, other open source systems are likely the way, but until everyone abandons the fake monetized social media, they'll continue to reign.
Mastodon is a piece of software. mastodon.social is a social media platform, which happens to interoperate with many others, and not with many more. That's important to remember. chaos.social is also a social media platform, which happens to interoperate with many others including mastodon.social.
In the open source world there's this tendency to confuse software and services - people write software with which a service could be run, and then declare that the service exists. Highly P2P software (like Bitcoin) is an exception since the software and the service are basically the same thing.
Services don't have to be expensive to run, but they do if they want to host image and video uploads. IRC is still available for free. The most expensive part of running a service in the current environment is most likely mitigating the legal risk when someone uploads something the government doesn't like. Note this expense doesn't exist if you run it on the dark web, but then you won't have any users either.
I prefer to pay with my wallet than my data, mental health, and time, you can create a good social media site that is subscription based, you can fully monetize it that way, sure many users wouldn't even approach it once they see the word "paid" but you don't need to appeal to everyone, a service being paid makes people consider their choices more carefully.
Now imagine a celebrity appearing on the network. Suddenly there is a ton of people who want to know which events the celebrity is attending. And what pictures the celebrity shares. And what opinions the celebrity holds.
Then someone discovers that they can attract a lot of followers by posting not only about events they attended, but also cat pictures and funny jokes.
Hello, mentions, retweets, tags, and other ways of mass broadcasting. Hello interactive drama machine.
To avoid this, you have to actively resist broadcasting, force the users vet their subscribers, etc. All this works against the network effects, and thus against the money-making potential of the service.
An interesting thought (to your point) is what people hope social media can actually become -- in the ideal scenario, is it just us being able to engage with people online in better ways? Is it us being able to consume content from others in the ways we want?
After reading all the posts, I feel this is far too strongly centered on Reddit. What about the other services? They seem to be mentioned in an aside, if at all.
I read through the whole series, and there's definitely some thoughtful analysis in there. I'm pretty skeptical of the proposal at the end though.
What's proposed is a centralized platform with some sort of identity verification and no community moderators. It presumably aims to avoid many of the issues the series describes as being wrong with other platforms but doesn't say how it's going to handle the enshittification problem. Many of the issues mentioned are related to the only business model we've seen work for large social platforms; good intentions at the start won't keep them from popping up later when the incentives are aligned in their favor.
Decentralization is my favorite solution to that problem, but it's not compatible with the ideas of one account per person for life and no community moderators. I'm interested to see what comes next in this series.
I hope to have some of the followup posts soon, although you are right that my idea is based around a centralized platform with ID Verification.
RE: How to solve for enshittification, I'd mention two things:
1. I think a good product can _stay_ good over time with strong centralized leadership, aka a "benevolent dictator". Think Steve Jobs at Apple, DHH at 37 Signals, etc.
- Once that power structure changes, however (new leader, etc), that can quickly fall apart, so it's definitely not a bulletproof solution.
2. If incentives from the start are built into your platform to make the "user" the biggest customer on your platform, incentives will make sure that you keep those users happy.
- If you have to choose between customers who give you $0/month and advertisers who will give you $1000/month, you'll eventually choose the advertisers to the detriment of the users.
> All existing large social media platforms of today use one or more (if not all) of the above methods to incentivize users to consume, engage, and create content on the app — and that’s been the state of the social web for the past ~30 years.
I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition.
All existing large social media platforms of today are for-profit. Moreover, being large, they require large amounts of capital. Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification, which is why all large social media platforms have followed this pattern for the past ~30 years, even if they started with good intentions and user friendliness. What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?
Unfortunately, it appears that social media platforms are not the type of product that many users are willing to spend money for, thereby maintaining some level of respect for the users. If the product is not free, it won't become "large". Several platforms, including Twitter/X (and remember ADN?), have tried and mostly failed to promote subscription funding. As the old saying goes, if you're not the customer, you're the product.
> I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition.
It's a fair point that Mastadon was left out, and yet it does tackle some of the problems I mention -- perhaps worth a followup post. That being said, I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.
> Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification [...] What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?
I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here -- it grew fairly slowly compared to other social media platforms, but now feels like it has quite a lot of staying power (although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify).
That being said, I think a lot of problems I mention can be solved just by giving the customer (e.g. the user on the social media platform) more choice. Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.
burningChrome|9 months ago
I was just getting into development when social media was coming on the scene. It was so cool to be engaged in communities with people who I loved to see what they were doing, finding emerging technologies and development frameworks and techniques. People were willing to tell you about stuff they were working on. It really felt like a community. Every new platform someone at work would find it and send out invites or get us to sign up and run it through its paces. It was such a great time and I really felt like my growth as a developer was accelerated by being apart of these early communities.
Now? Its not about bringing people together with common interests. Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes.
It would seem the entire purpose of social media these days is just about getting people to react negatively to what you're posting in order to generate MORE negative content. It turns into a self fulfilling cycle that is now in a space where I have no idea how it will be broken.
As a footnote to this, there are still very good people, still posting very good content that does not have that purpose. One account I found a few months ago was trailerparksports on instagram. Its a black guy who got interested in Hockey after the Four Nations Cup and how crazy that tournament started out with the Canada/USA game. His interest was 100% genuine. In the last four months, he's detailed how much he's learned and the outpouring from hockey fans AND the teams themselves has been unreal. The LA Kings flew him out for a few of their games, he's been going to games in other cities. He's 100% into the sport now and its been really cool to see him go through the process of picking a team to support, learning the rules and the strategies.
So yes, there are still very honorable and decent content creators who are sharing ceratain aspects of their life with the internet and getting a lot of positivity in return. But man oh man, it takes a LOT of digging to find them these days.
eggbrain|9 months ago
I touch upon this in https://www.scottgoci.com/social-media-platforms-whats-wrong... and https://www.scottgoci.com/social-media-platforms-whats-wrong... -- but as you mention, this is a result of engagement being a core metric of social media platforms, and users attempting to game the platform's algorithm for their own purposes.
An easy way to solve for this is customization -- if no two users have the same "algorithm" powering their feed, it becomes hard for anyone to do this, because perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.
aspenmayer|9 months ago
Did you intentionally call “thirst traps” “rage bait” erroneously so that someone would correct you? Engagement bait works surprisingly well on HN, I just wasn’t sure if that was an ironic wink at the audience.
soupfordummies|9 months ago
standardUser|9 months ago
glial|9 months ago
Cognitively, yes. This is like saying "a lot of us want the same thing - healthy, fresh food that makes us stronger, sleep better, and live longer". Of course. But fast food is a $400B industry in the US. Social media is fast food. Nobody says they want it but their behavior indicates otherwise.
Zak|9 months ago
I could check it once a day, know that I had seen every post from my friends and family, like the cat pictures, ask for the recipe for the lunch picture, and be done. Of course it's not very profitable for Facebook for me to be done so now it tries to show me a bunch of stuff I can't look away from. That drowns out posts from my friends, so those posts get less interaction, and now my friends don't post pictures of their cats regularly.
esafak|9 months ago
smokel|9 months ago
_ink_|9 months ago
kdamica|9 months ago
beezlebroxxxxxx|9 months ago
The social network part is really really simple. The early form of Facebook was remarkably effective, simple, and useful. The same goes for Instagram and MySpace. The business side, however, has poisoned that original creation into a profoundly corrosive "content delivery system" and a spy network that hides behind a fancy profile page and algorithmically (read: business interest determined) "feed".
blueflow|9 months ago
pizzadog|9 months ago
incomingpain|9 months ago
There are a very large number of major platforms? None of them fit your needs?
Many of the examples throughout are reddit. Though many of the memes are more facebook.
The big question to me; can you be social and interact with people on many subjects. Say what I want, when I want. I want to see what I want. Just because a small group of people dont like what I said, they dont get to unilaterally hide what I said.
When you go on reddit and you say something that many people agree with, but many dont. Suddenly my message is disappeared. Why bother being on reddit? You now have a small group of people curating content.
If you go on X and say something many people agree with and many dont. I top comment. The people wont dont like what I said can leave a comment but they cant hide my message.
This is the fundamental flaw in many social media.
nick007|9 months ago
TheCondor|9 months ago
It costs next to nothing, provides some sort of sensation in your brain that you're doing things, you might see some neat pictures or videos. It's like a different kind of video game where you can't win and it's appealing to nearly every age group, gender, demographic.
eggbrain|9 months ago
Perhaps you don't want to receive news about celebrities, _unless_ it involves someone you care deeply about, for example Michael Jackson. It would require quite a bit of tailoring for a platform to be able to curate for that.
cvwright|9 months ago
Trying to grow a new product is super hard. Trying to move into an established market is even harder. Trying to do that while also foregoing all the dark patterns is … well I won’t say it’s impossible but ugh it would take a huge head start in terms of name recognition, funding, or something else truly extraordinary.
zyx_db|9 months ago
if anyone knows any solutions (ex. browser extensions) that solve this, id be really interested
notben|9 months ago
sckleinis_8|9 months ago
I don't use Xitter anymore, but when I did, Control Panel for Twitter was my go to.
It's insane how better (and boring/less addictive) social media becomes by simple enhancements.
id34|9 months ago
webdoodle|9 months ago
immibis|9 months ago
In the open source world there's this tendency to confuse software and services - people write software with which a service could be run, and then declare that the service exists. Highly P2P software (like Bitcoin) is an exception since the software and the service are basically the same thing.
Services don't have to be expensive to run, but they do if they want to host image and video uploads. IRC is still available for free. The most expensive part of running a service in the current environment is most likely mitigating the legal risk when someone uploads something the government doesn't like. Note this expense doesn't exist if you run it on the dark web, but then you won't have any users either.
sckleinis_8|9 months ago
amelius|9 months ago
nine_k|9 months ago
Now imagine a celebrity appearing on the network. Suddenly there is a ton of people who want to know which events the celebrity is attending. And what pictures the celebrity shares. And what opinions the celebrity holds.
Then someone discovers that they can attract a lot of followers by posting not only about events they attended, but also cat pictures and funny jokes.
Hello, mentions, retweets, tags, and other ways of mass broadcasting. Hello interactive drama machine.
To avoid this, you have to actively resist broadcasting, force the users vet their subscribers, etc. All this works against the network effects, and thus against the money-making potential of the service.
jjulius|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
bananabreakfast|9 months ago
eggbrain|9 months ago
sigmaisaletter|9 months ago
Zak|9 months ago
What's proposed is a centralized platform with some sort of identity verification and no community moderators. It presumably aims to avoid many of the issues the series describes as being wrong with other platforms but doesn't say how it's going to handle the enshittification problem. Many of the issues mentioned are related to the only business model we've seen work for large social platforms; good intentions at the start won't keep them from popping up later when the incentives are aligned in their favor.
Decentralization is my favorite solution to that problem, but it's not compatible with the ideas of one account per person for life and no community moderators. I'm interested to see what comes next in this series.
eggbrain|9 months ago
I hope to have some of the followup posts soon, although you are right that my idea is based around a centralized platform with ID Verification.
RE: How to solve for enshittification, I'd mention two things:
1. I think a good product can _stay_ good over time with strong centralized leadership, aka a "benevolent dictator". Think Steve Jobs at Apple, DHH at 37 Signals, etc.
2. If incentives from the start are built into your platform to make the "user" the biggest customer on your platform, incentives will make sure that you keep those users happy.lapcat|9 months ago
I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition.
All existing large social media platforms of today are for-profit. Moreover, being large, they require large amounts of capital. Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification, which is why all large social media platforms have followed this pattern for the past ~30 years, even if they started with good intentions and user friendliness. What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?
Unfortunately, it appears that social media platforms are not the type of product that many users are willing to spend money for, thereby maintaining some level of respect for the users. If the product is not free, it won't become "large". Several platforms, including Twitter/X (and remember ADN?), have tried and mostly failed to promote subscription funding. As the old saying goes, if you're not the customer, you're the product.
eggbrain|9 months ago
It's a fair point that Mastadon was left out, and yet it does tackle some of the problems I mention -- perhaps worth a followup post. That being said, I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.
> Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification [...] What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?
I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here -- it grew fairly slowly compared to other social media platforms, but now feels like it has quite a lot of staying power (although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify).
That being said, I think a lot of problems I mention can be solved just by giving the customer (e.g. the user on the social media platform) more choice. Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.