IMHO Social Media is a toxic mutation of the capabilities offered by the Internet and is the opposite of federated, open communication. I don't consider blogs, forums, or IRC to be "Social Media". When you add the idea of followers and audience and attention seeking (both from participants and the platform) that's when you get "Social Media".
We live in the Infinite September. Scale is not conducive to valuable or fulfilling communication. Decentralization, variety, and focus are. When I want to read about motorcycles I have a forum for that. When I want to plan a vacation with the family we use email. When I have a question about a software project I get on their IRC channel. At no point is my racist uncle (or yours!) involved. This is the potential of the Internet and it is not social media.
When I want to be depressed by all the things that other people have better than me I go to Social Media. I can't think of a single fulfilling experience I ever had on Facebook or any other social media platform. It's just not possible when you put everyone in a room. It's like studying philosophy on a bus.
Social Media is by (my) definition the valueless corruption of the Internet. In that sense I am glad it is dead, I hope it stays that way. Facebook and Tik Tok are the inevitable end-state of "Social Media". There's no "good" social media and there never was. Anyone who builds a platform for "everyone" is doomed to die the death of social media.
> There's no "good" social media and there never was.
As much as I hate Facebook/Meta and everything it stands for, I got a lot of value out of Facebook and Instagram during my teenage years. I lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere, not very walkable/bikeable but also without any other kids my age to hang out nearby. My school was really small (I graduated with a class of less than 30 people) and there weren't many like-minded students.
During the 2000s, Facebook was an absolute lifeline for me. It's where I lived. It's where I met new friends. It's where I shared (cringey) posts about my passions, my interests, books and TV shows and movies and games. And my friends talked about that cringey stuff with me on Facebook, over chat and in comments.
But that was a world before Facebook killed the chronological feed, before they introduced ads in the feed (remember sidebar ads? Not enough $$$ to pay tens of thousands of engineers, I suppose), before they started "recommending" content. They were still manipulative, but they provided a valuable service.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that early-stage simple social media was useful to many people, and that's likely why late-stage social media remains popular today -- people want that core functionality. I made lifelong friends on there, just like you did on blogs, forums, and IRC. At the early stage, it wasn't about influencers and ads. Just slightly-more-than-local attention seeking.
I recently friend requested a bunch of people I went to high school with who all thought I was a weird loser and I am very excited that I am doing much better than all of them. It’s made me like my social media feed a lot more seeing the school bully who loved ICP post about how “he’s ready to find the right girl and settle down (at 35)
So I guess I use social media for the exact reason you don’t like social media. Nobody’s supposed to like that stuff, but I mean, why else would you care what everyone else is doing other than to compare status?
If you come from a wealthy background, you get the really depressing version: the school bully who loved ICP posts about how they got a new job with McKinsey, the slimy moron who used to spread shit about you is the CEO of a up-and-coming startup, and the guy who was too dumb to understand how truly dumb he was is now at a senior position in a thinktank.
A more positive one would be those people actually got better at their skills and improved as people. I'd like to think I'm a better person than I was in high school.
But if you're constantly exposed to their social feeds, you would have the data and probably know better. :)
I guess from plain statistics, you could say that the number of talented people from wealthy backgrounds is roughly the same as talented people generally, so my feeling is that there is a sizable slice of jobs where you just secure rents through connections and you don't actually need to be talented.
From my observations, some industries (film, for instance) will give people a chance, then get rid of them if they don't work out - so a lot of people I vaguely knew had very brief acting careers.
Other companies seem to trundle along with really dysfunctional leadership, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, I suspect it's because the explicit aim of the company (say, mining) is not what the company is actually doing (say, some kind of rent extraction) so it doesn't matter that the CEO has no skills to speak of.
Also, when you know the people, and you see like an interview they've given, you can usually tell if they're bullshitting.
I mean I don’t actually revel in it, I was being a bit cheeky. I just wanted to reconnect with high school people during Covid so I friend requested a ton of people.
It’s sad seeing a guy who was in the “gifted and talented program” with me is apparently now a janitor who posts pictures every day about what concert or sports game he’s at and he’s always alone. I was excited for him because he took a picture with a woman and I thought he’d met someone but it turned out to be his sister.
We live in the Infinite September. Scale is not conducive to valuable or fulfilling communication. Decentralization, variety, and focus are. When I want to read about motorcycles I have a forum for that. When I want to plan a vacation with the family we use email. When I have a question about a software project I get on their IRC channel. At no point is my racist uncle (or yours!) involved. This is the potential of the Internet and it is not social media.
When I want to be depressed by all the things that other people have better than me I go to Social Media. I can't think of a single fulfilling experience I ever had on Facebook or any other social media platform. It's just not possible when you put everyone in a room. It's like studying philosophy on a bus.
Social Media is by (my) definition the valueless corruption of the Internet. In that sense I am glad it is dead, I hope it stays that way. Facebook and Tik Tok are the inevitable end-state of "Social Media". There's no "good" social media and there never was. Anyone who builds a platform for "everyone" is doomed to die the death of social media.