Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor).

We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc.

Fast forward to today and the club is rebooting again. I asked the current club president "What social network is everyone on these days?" His response: "Really there is no one place where everyone goes anymore." I then asked him how clubs share their info etc and he says "The bulletin board at the student center?"

While social media definitely has its downsides (echo chambers, extremism etc) I do feel like it's a bit of a net loss to not have a "commons". That model makes it super easy to start up new organizations, get the word out etc.

Part of me hopes that we got back to the late 1990s dedicated websites/forums. That seems to be the Discord model but let's see.

I noticed last year that FB did some change to their recommendations engine, that they’ll show posts by random people based things you’ve searched. A friend was diagnosed with cancer last year, I searched extensively, and now I’m exclusively getting posts from random people with cancer on my feed.

Isn't that how it has been?

No, it used to be a shuffled timeline of the posts and likes your connections/friends have made but I guess when half your platform are bots, you don’t want to store that metadata anymore.

I've noticed that a lot of my friends switched from text based status updates (Facebook) to image based status updates (Instagram stories). Personally, I got tired of going on Facebook because it was all rage baiting political stuff, and that was all from friends, not even ads.

Back to 2015, I stopped posting on Facebook when I noticed that it’s no longer about connecting with my friends, but a never ending stream of boring posts from groups and people that I don’t know or care to follow.

All my “social” life just moved to direct communication in WhatsApp (meta owned as well)

2015 for me too. I wonder if there was some early day over juicing of the attention mechanism that put people off in that year, before they tuned it to reduce churn…

Emotions experienced chart - that is insightful and matches my anecdata.

I think you get bad emotions when you have high expectations about social media and it is your main source of social life. Where positive happen when you have low expectations about social media and it is just addon to your life.

Example of gaps is being lonely, low self esteem, low self worth, no work network, no business network. So you stay glued to FB to build your life, to keep online friends, because you may have not many in life. Or you have no real work network so you need to stay current on LI because your next job is there.

To keep people engaged, social media platforms have shifted from showing you content from people you know to prioritizing viral content. The algorithms know viral content offers an endless stream of entertainment that keeps people scrolling longer.

"Viral content" got nerfed to oblivion in 2013-2014 something when Facebook made companies pay up for group exposure. (Promoted post)

Before that a popular article could be shared among different friends networks to like total exposure to like everyone logged in that were somewhat interested in the article.

I was kinda a journalist then it was a really obvious flip.

Like the writer I'm also a 'boomer' still keeping connected to an older friend group using Facebook and Instagram. For Facebook, I use the plugin "FB Purity" to filter out the generated cr*p posts and force chronological order. It's shocking too see how few posts are left, by agressive algorithm filtering and FB then deciding that "You're all caught up", refusing to show more posts. So my FB time is about 20 seconds every day...

This is an ad for Incogni

Like every pcmag article, there’s a corporate sponsor

We're all in small groups on discord or in signal now. FB feed is just not the best medium for keeping up with friends.

Not sure if I see a bad thing in this. I'd like too know what old friends are currently up to and checking their social media has been a way to do so during the golden age of facebook.

Lately I feel more value in connecting with them personally, talking and letting them now, that I am still interested in what's going on for them.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. At the very least, it should be used occasionally to post things as a kind of "public memory," not to expose your entire life just for likes and exhibitionism.

I wonder what would happen if: if I post 2 pieces of content, my friend would have to comment on the first one to see the next one.

I suppose the app will then mostly be full of throwaway comments in the form of "Cool" or "Wow". But maybe add a modifier that if the poster doesn't have any meaningful reply to a commenter's (let's name him Elon) comment, then the poster's next content will not be shared with Elon next time.

It seems like so much of social media is just individuals shouting into the void.

It's stochastic communication, sometimes other random voices come back from the void.

Social media mostly polarise people (both women and men, in different ways) and generally speaking what you post will be used against you at some point.

So yeah, no wonder that social media is dying. People are just catching up to the fact that the best way not to lose is to just not play the game.

url: https://www.pcmag.com/news/death-of-the-status-update-why-55...