Part of the reason is Lemmy's default sorting algorithm for comments, "Hot", addresses reddit's biggest flaw, which is that earlier comments snowballs with upvotes, so it buries late-comers to conversations, leading to the rat-race of everyone trying to get their funny one-liners in as early as possible for maximum karma (which also isn't a thing here.)
The "Active" default sort for posts also means that comments are a lot more concentrated to what people are actually talking about and posts tend to be stickier. (also, botting upvote is a lot harder on Lemmy, since it's easy to bot upvotes, it's a lot harder to fake real conversations in comments. )
In fact, it is pointless to comment at all past like 4 hours on any post on reddit since it will just sit unread for hours, but here you can comment 1 day after a post and still have people talking to you.
for me, I was motivated to make this my first post because I want to help solve the death of content issue we still have. it's gotten quite a lot of attention. I think that anywhere bigger, anything of relevance would have already been posted by the time I see it
Also, for me, it's the fact I do not feel my data and privacy are being siphoned, sold, and fingerprinted on this platform. Another factor is that I feel the people and interactions are pure and authentic, rather than astroturfed and ambiguous. That may change as the fedicerse grows, but for now it is bringing me back of the older days of the internet.
You bring up one advantage I see from Lemmy. Even though I've seen this article posted before (I think by L4Sbot in this technology community), the nature of de-centralized content means that cross-posting onto various servers is actually encouraged to get input from a variety of users from different communities and configs (for example, people who have disabled viewing bot-account posts).
On Reddit, people would be quick to say "boooooo repoooost", but I've not seen that too much of that, just a few complaints of "there's too much orange guy and muskrat in my feed".
I comment about as much as I did on reddit, but I feel like I see less negative replies. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’d post on there, somebody somewhere would have something shitty to say. It’s not my fault society can’t accept my seal clubbing hobby.
Absolutely, I post much more here because I know actual people will actually read it and may actually respond like they would to an actual human. It's like the old days of the internet.
Hey me too! Just the Lemmy side (was never into twitters whole thing) but I actually post stuff here, even if it’s just cross posting.
I always used an alt to post on Reddit and did so very infrequently. I think I posted maybe 3 things on the 4 years on Reddit?
I comment a lot more, and have posted a ton more (even without removing the posts! And yea, 5 is a ton more since it’s in the last 2 months rather than 4years!)
I don’t even clear my comment history as a compulsive thing (I changed me behavior somewhat, to allow for this) because I don’t want to remove activity from the platform. I know it needs me to contribute so I do!
Entertainers are supposed to be entertaining though.
These people have all the "entertainment" value of a late-night infomercial at best. "Oooh, watch me get excited about unboxing this item. Whatever could have Disney sent me this week?"
The worst problem is that these influencers do gain huge amounts of followers, but rarely fact-check or do hard sciences needed to ya know, give information to viewers? See Linus Tech Tips and the whole crap they're into right now.
Hey, I take offense to that! I'm going to write a vitriolic response to your seemingly-normal-but-different-viewpoint-than-mine opinion where I'll use non-applicable slurs and misinformation and then call you dumb if you post a sensible reply!
tfw you just stand on the sides and then meme on what’s happening with a lame joke instead of contributing your two cents on the socioeconomic practices that are happening in the US that are currently choking its working class to death
Hey, I take offence to your office! I’m going to write a nonsensical response that parallels your comment where I’ll use no sources and not really make any point whatsoever!
It had the potential to be good. But as with everything, once capitalisms tendrils flowed through it the benefit to anyone except those wishing to reap a profit is gone. I’m hoping the fediverse gets the support it needs because infrastructure is expensive and we have something good here
There used to be a time when corporations were taxed so hard they did everything they could to reinvest their money into the company/employees/communities just to avoid it going to taxes. Unfettered capitalism destroys the humanity in everything it touches.
The worst part is the Cambridge Analitica kinda shit that they figured out eventually, the orange cunt, brexit and other modern calamities were fueled by the social networks reach into private activities or otherwise. It sucks cause it exposes how easy normal people will go down the rabbit hole.
I was in college and I still do not understand it. My friends were like dude there's girls on it and you can poke them. But there's girls out in the real world. Now it's the reverse where meeting people on the internet is more normal than meeting IRL.
Social media in general is in the following stage of Enshitification:
Launch
Growth at all costs, user focus
Use size to bring advertisers
Gradually shift focus to advertisers and money bringers
Ensure users are way too invested to quit
>> Sell out <<
It's no surprise that people only end up seeing "carefully curated" content, it's what "sells", or rather, ensures people stay in the stupid app. From TFA: "While sharing has tailed off, consuming content hasn't slowed"
I have an Insta account for some of the part time 3D printing I do, but since I'm not a "content creator", my stuff has almost zero reach. Whenever I open the app, it's roughly 1:1:1 posts of "recommended", someone I actually follow, advert. 2/3 of everything shown to me is stuff I didn't ask for, not to mention when the advertises are actual scams or fucking pyramids
I redownload insta like a month ago because I thought fuck it. Other than reels from old friends from highschool, it's all adds and the same regurgitated memes and stand up comics.
It was creepy that after nearly 4 years of being inactive it knew that I liked golf, and drink too much.
I still visit Reddit but I no longer engage in any way, other than reading comments. No up/down voting, not commenting, no reporting spam. Nothing but reading with multiple layers of ad-blocking.
PS: the overall quality/value has dropped precipitously
I deleted all 6 of my accounts. I can’t upvote or comment and I like it that way. Reddit no longer values me as a content producer by eliminating my fav apps, so I no longer value Reddit.
I have used it just a handful of times where adding "Reddit" to the end of a search would get me what I was looking for - usually "peer reviewed" options on some topic.
1 time I went for commentary on a niche reality tv show to feel validated in my hate for the designated villain.
I deleted my main Reddit account but still find myself going back there occasionally for specific topics. For example, I haven't found a good place on Lemmy to ask travel questions.
Good luck. One poster would ask if you like sex and travel, then tell you to "Go and get fucked."
Another would accuse you of being a bourgeois lib who is killing the planet with your capitalist excesses.
Another would go on a rant about privilege and how your very ability to ask such questions in a public space speaks to your total lack class consciousness and your ignorance of "The Movement" or something like it.
In short, check out Vang Vieng in Laos and have a great time.
This is really interesting to think about. On my photography IG the one users who are still having good reach are the ones who are promoting their patreon/presets/editing services, are constantly trying to earn money in some way and are posting a million reels every day.
More casual photographers like me are getting zilch. I used to get 1000 likes on 95% of my stuff with some going viral. Now I get 200 if I'm lucky, my reach in general is in the hole and I refuse to spend hours editing reels and begging for the algorithms attention. I'm close to shutting it down but I help mod a page right now so I'm hanging on for a bit yet.
Has any communication system managed to do that? Once certain types of people catch the scent of profit, they tear the medium apart searching for every penny of it.
Letters became junk mail. Email became spam. Newspapers and magazines became mostly ads and shilled content. Television became for-profit news and reality content.
That authenticity is just going to make it more appealing to astro-turf.
we need to shitpost more. a neighborhood that is high in crime does not appeal to advertisers. like north korea, they live in paradise whilst convincing the rest of the world that it's a shithole.
ah i guess that's in the process of changing. you can see this happening right now. more right-wing memes, more "look at this cool movie/toy/outfit... i found. it's really me, a normal human being just like you!"
I also noticed how my social media usage (even on Lemmy and Mastodon) is consistently declining, I haven't opened the clients I use for either platform in days (or possibly more than a week). It's bad because I was pretty invested in the fediverse, but it's good because now I can actually do something productive, or even go outside.
No app better defines the changing nature of social media than Instagram. The app started as a digital scrapbook — a place to keep up with real-world connections, close friends, and family. While other networks had more users (Facebook) or generated more news (Twitter), Instagram seemed to define the ideal form of this era of social media. Instagram became a verb, an aesthetic, and a generational signifier.
huUURP! BLAAaahhriifgghhh. . .
Garbage marketing platform dies horribly. Thousands of clueless "journalists" bereft.
Discord is better than IRC imo. I used IRC for a VERY long time and Discord was the one that finally killed it for me. We'll see if it lasts. I guess if they kill themselves (and they keep trying to), IRC will still be there waiting. Used to be on Rizon!
Discord is sooo awful imo. Every server has annoying “rule bots” or people constantly changing the look/feel of the channels or trying to engage you with @all or @channel (which you can ignore but it’s still annoying)… even the more technical ones have the same vibe. IRC is so much easier to communicate in IMO.
I believe it's an app, where you randomly get a notification and mist poat within then and 2 minutes. It takes a pic of both the front and back cameras on your phone. The idea is that you can't make yourself look good, like with Snapchat filters, or even Instagram where you can find a nice angle or whatever.
My Facebook is only memes, only from the large meme pages, not the ones I like that I have to check manually since they'll never end up in my feed. And news articles.
It started with Facebook just hiding what your friends are posting. It still happens that someone shares a photo once a year or so, but I will never get shown it. I just browse my friend's profiles manually.
That was extremely dissatisfying about Facebook. I’d see an endless stream of crap from people that I barely knew and didn’t care about at all, and then when I’d look at a profile of someone I actually knew and did want to keep up with, I’d see posts about significant and interesting things that happened in their lives which Facebook never showed me. I tried to get them to stop showing me irritating posts about politics - unfollow people, block people, mark “show less posts like this”, then it would come up with more political posts from people I didn’t even recognize. Meanwhile, oh, colleague got married…. sure, just never show me that post and show me 15 idiotic political memes instead.
I almost never use Facebook anymore because whenever I’m on it, all I see are posts from groups I’m not even in, ads, videos, and interspersed in all that algorithmically chosen content, the occasional post from people I actually follow and know. Social media isn’t social any more.
Even fricking tumblr now has videos on it, and you can only shut “tumblr live” off for a week at most before they come back.
A solid amount of new memes I see are from Tumblr posts. A lot of people went back prior to Twitter changing ownership, and then many more after that too.
There was a bizarre transition to "other page" content on Facebook. It realised nobody posts there anymore, and tried to transition to a quasi Reddit. But the content it displays is pure garbage.
Facebook now fills half my page with the worst boomer memes. Then something updated and it scrolls the page right while I'm reading something. I don't know why I even bother anymore.
God yeah Tumblr is so frustrating now. Like I get that a site needs to make money and I'm not even opposed to the gimmicks they have. But changing the look of it (which has been changed before but at least it made sense a lot of the time) to what is essentially a clone of Twitter. It's frustrating to see a site I love so much, decide to kill itself and for what?
That and also the fact that they allow racism, transphobia, homophobia to fester. You'd think that a site that is pretty popular with the LGBTQIA+ crowd, they sure like to keep people around who would harm us.
it's interesting how many comments show that people like to read the headline and are content with that to form an opinion. literally the first paragraph says that it's not "THERE ARE NO POSTS" but it says that the "feed is swamped by a combination of perfectly curated photos and professionally created content." - the problem is that the paid content creators have become GOOD. so many of them really look like they are just opinions and casual mentions of movies/clothes/...things. viral marketing is really at a point where so many fronts that have been established have been broken down in the guise of "irony" or "sarcasm". "I'm only buying the Barbie merch ironically" etc.
it’s interesting how many comments show that people like to read the headline
I read articles about India landing on the moon, ancestors of humans nearly dying out, tech employees being dissatisfied in Austin, etc. I don't care about social media enough to read an article. That's probably a lot of people here.
It's not just about content creators becoming good though, the article also explains how the algorithm pushes that content over others.
Granted, the quality of the content is still a big part of it, another point it makes is that people refrain from posting things because it's not "good enough" compared to others.
I dont even want to talk to half the people I know anymore lol. I stopped using FB but keep it running because there are many years of pics and what not for family. And when I bring it down people freak out and think something is wrong with me. Other than that, it has been stripped of any identifying information, only has people I know and I never use it anymore. That was the only real 'personal' place I had on the internet. Everything else is fake names and whatnot, always has been.
Could I ask why you don't want to talk to half the people you know? I have the opposite issue where I try to talk to people I know but they don't reciprocate, I'm finding it hard to imagine the inverse.
To add an additional perspective, it's not that I dislike these people, some of them I love, but my time has so many asks as it is, and I just cannot maintain active relationships with that many people who have no other impact on my daily life. There are a few I would make time for when the opportunity comes around, but I can't keep sustained things going with more than a few people. I say can't, but what I mean is that I prefer to spend the vast majority of my time with my wife and kids, and I will use just about any amount of time that I can spare for parents, siblings, and their kids. I have a few friends who fit into the same group as the family. After that, it's occasional messages, Christmas cards, and the rare visit/meet up. If you are there for the good, you should be prepared to be there for the bad, in my opinion. I cannot offer that to too many people beyond immediate family. Also, I certainly don't have the money to support some of those folks through their rough patches, and saying "no" to people you care about sucks.
Getting older. Lots of drama. Lots of political bullshit I can't stand anymore and don't want to hear about. Not saying my situation is the healthiest in the world but that is how I am feeling these days.
There are people I liked a lot in earlier stages of my life, that I no longer have the desire to talk to not due to anything they did, but just them being from a period in my life I’d rather forget or move on from. In some cases it might be people whose main shared interested with me was what we did for work, which I no longer do.
My following on insta is dominated by meme pages, influencers, and that one person in your social group who practically shares their life on social media.
In broad strokes, yeah. I'd even consider older, more traditional forms like forums and IRC/BBS to be proto forms of social media. As long as the internet exists there will be social media, what form it takes is malleable depending on the desires of the userbase at hand.
I'm not sure "they don't matter" is something I could get behind. We still have every reason to remember that there's (probably) a person on the other end, one we should extend common courtesy to, and with whom we might exchange perspective-changing ideas, even if rarely.
That said I agree the "reddit" format is the one I always liked best. It just makes more sense for people who want to discuss the same things, to group up online, rather than into arbitrary parasocial masses around a select few persons, as well as the people you know IRL and may or may not have any interest in actually interacting with.
Yeah the way you describe it makes it sound like we could build an AI forum where each user is the only one in there and all the rest are ai bots whose only purpose is to generate the content and interaction we're looking for.
I kind of hate getting replies here and I can tell the person I'm talking to isn't paying attention to who in the thread they are talking to. It's like people aren't seeing each other as people.
I know this conversation is had nearly daily here, but by fuck am I glad that the fediverse is so much less astroturfed than every other social media site.
we need to work on keeping it that way. we have the advantage with no corporations to silently manipulate us and we own the infrastructure, but we still gotta root out bot accounts and malicious instances
Bereal is great, you get a notification and take a picture, front and rear camera, that's all you get for the day, then you can see what your friends are up to.
I get it but man, I'd never want to post pics of myself on the Internet for anyone to see. I also don't think anyone would wanna see me anyway. ¯\(°_o)/¯
I've been trying to cut down social media use ever since 2020. I don't blame people for not posting most social media platforms are either boring or a toxic shit holes.
George Floyd showed me that the hope I had for this nation is lost. People are just argumentative assholes and have zero perspective. Hearing people defend the police and everything that followed made me dump it.
Granted I know there are those trying to do their job. It wasn't them. It's the keyboard warriors that have never been close to a cop, trying to defend a dude killing another over a written check just got to me.
I'm pretty big into the mechanical watch community. Insta used to be popular in that community, but the best content and discussion has long since moved off "social media" and into various private Slack and WhatsApp groups.
I've heard of a similar movement in other hobbyist/enthusiast communities.
For people I actually know IRL, it's virtually all WhatsApp.
It's kinda niche, but it's where you and your friends can only post once a day at a random time. But it's all at the same time, so you kinda get a slice of life of what everyone is doing. I like it, it's much worse for influencer type stuff, so everyone I know just uses it with their friends which is nice. It starts conversations that might not happen otherwise.
Holy crap that sounds godawful. Do what you’re doing and dance on command when the randomly timed notification comes in? Sounds fun to do on a lark when you open the app because you’re having a boring day or something, but as a daily thing?
I would argue that the quality of content is in decline more than numerical users. Also, the quantity of ads are much much higher, which hides what little good content there is.
Mix that in with political splits in social media sites (from left leaning Lemmy to the Facebook right), and you generally find yourself in an echo chamber with little to surprise you, and a lot of things confirming what you already know.
The three things cited in the post summary? Never been on them. I never ever heard of one of them. It seems to me that it's more that these few platforms are struggling, and other (twitter/x, reddit, facebook, and other) just keep sailing smoothly.
It's like the "disable" option that you have in system apps. But for user apps. In fact, once you disable them if you search them in play store they appear with an "enable" button.
The advantage is that your userdata is still there. And you can quickly open it (unfreeze) from the Ice Box app.
Noticed this on reddit's All/Hot in the last two years or so. Not even just the posts but the comments in particular were very Bot-like. Front page was almost all recycled reposts and thinly veiled marketing.
Before doing Lemmy full time I scrolled through Red with the official app just to see if I could compromise somewhere, but it smelt of Dead Internet to me.
Dead Internet Theory in short is a conspiracy theory that most of the Internet is just algorithms and bots posting back and forth at each other for marketing purposes and to nudge people's beliefs. It's dead because theres hardly any humans posting.
The ads went out of control in like 2019 when the post 2015 social media boom started to cool. One of the knockoff effects of 2020 pandemic is it artificially extended the life of social media companies for like 2 years.
The funniest part of the musk buyout of twitter is the company would probably be doing very similar bullshit if he didnt buy them out, probably in a slightly more savvy way, but they'd still be dripping money.
I heard it used to have very solid ad management options. It was good for business too, as direct feedback/curation = more appropriate ads = more valuable ads. But i guess as algorithm shit and data harvesting "automated" the process it went downhill, and advertisers fleeing twitter post $8 checkmark was the coup de grace
I don't get group chats. It seems like the worst parts of IRC had a baby with the worst part of internet forums and created a thing destined to make you always late to the party.
And woe betide those who get into a group chat with a bunch of chatty people who never stop texting. Then you turn off notifications for it and you miss all kinds of things.
what did it take from internet forums that IRC couldn't have realistically already done?
Most group chats to me are pretty much the same as IRC was back in the day, unless you examined the protocols themselves. Upload limits are also much larger (except for that brief period skype was popular and you could upload gigabytes)
Honestly the only thing group chats are bad at is archiving, and it's mainly because it's designed for real-time conversation (so people are spamming more) and sites can't search the stored text at all.
I have been wanting to get back to making stuff on social media but due to work and no longer being the IDGAF teenager I get nervous on what to talk about.
Like I was hoping to do a podcast for my Facebook friends but I only uploaded one episode cause I want to do a few about how work sucks. But then I worry it'll be depressing.
We've run a private chat server for friends 10+ years now with channels and that's where most sharing goes on, whatsapp chats with some, and I've basically moved to Discord for other interests and still use forums for some. Public social media is more for profile curation, displaying a highly curated identity.
Other apps like Dispo, Poparazzi, and Locket have all used various gimmicks to try and recapture social media's halcyon days — each had a moment in the sun at the top of the US Apple app-store charts — but none have truly broken through.
For instance, the content creator Nina Haines launched a group called SapphLit, a self-described "sapphic book club born out of the queer BookTok community."
Victoria Johnston, a 22-year-old software engineer, imagines the ideal social-media platform as a "safe space where people can just connect and you don't feel pressured to have a big following or a presence or be really well known."
And as more users and creator communities migrate toward closed spaces, the behemoths like Instagram are also trying to capitalize on this reality by introducing features like paid-subscription services that offer exclusive group chats.
Lia Haberman, an adjunct professor at UCLA Extension and an advisor for the American Influencer Council, said that Gen Alpha, the age cohort of 13 and younger, are "not embracing traditional social-media platforms and customs."
It's hard to know how the change will affect the online atmosphere over the long term — some evidence suggests the shift will create a healthier digital experience, but it also risks further dividing people into like-minded echo chambers.
The original article contains 2,197 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Is it? Don't like to play devil's advocate but I'm pretty sure my Instagram is pretty much alive and my BeReal feed is an at all all-time high, with several new joins lately too.
I agree that it's much worse, that on anything that isn't BeReal it's harder to find your friends posts, that the ads got way too many - but at least here people are absolutely not stopping to create content for them.
if you red even the first sentences, you will see that the author doesn't claim that there are NO posts. they say that most of the posts are not social media anymore but corporate designs
What's the over/under on this having been posted and inspired posts on literally every social media platform within an hour of publication, thus proving the headline ridiculous?