Is social media a thing of the past?
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Interesting article in the New Yorker.
Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over
During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial, the Facebook founder’s argument was, in so many words, that platforms like his are not what they used to be..What, exactly, does a social network do? Is it a website that connects people with one another online, a digital gathering place where we can consume content posted by our friends? That’s certainly what it was in its heyday, in the two-thousands. Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of A.I.-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible. The people we follow and the messages they post increasingly feel like needles in a digital haystack. Social media has become less social.
As I mentioned in the Happy birthday WTF thread, I found a back door to the OCR on PW. I’ve been reading some of those old discussions and while there were a lot of political threads there seemed to be a lot more social threads going on than we see today. I’m not on FB, so can’t comment on the content that appears on Zuck’s platform.
Looking back over the last 20 years, do you think the nature of online has changed in fundamental ways?
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Interesting article in the New Yorker.
Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over
During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial, the Facebook founder’s argument was, in so many words, that platforms like his are not what they used to be..What, exactly, does a social network do? Is it a website that connects people with one another online, a digital gathering place where we can consume content posted by our friends? That’s certainly what it was in its heyday, in the two-thousands. Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of A.I.-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible. The people we follow and the messages they post increasingly feel like needles in a digital haystack. Social media has become less social.
As I mentioned in the Happy birthday WTF thread, I found a back door to the OCR on PW. I’ve been reading some of those old discussions and while there were a lot of political threads there seemed to be a lot more social threads going on than we see today. I’m not on FB, so can’t comment on the content that appears on Zuck’s platform.
Looking back over the last 20 years, do you think the nature of online has changed in fundamental ways?
@wtg said in Is social media a thing of the past?:
Looking back over the last 20 years, do you think the nature of online has changed in fundamental ways?
Absolutely. First of all, the post count, on Facebook, on the piano sites frequent (this one included) is way down. And the usefulness of FB m, for example as a source of hyper local info, is significantly diminished, though not zero.
It makes me sad actually, bc it was pretty cool back in the day.
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It used to be a thing of the future.
We all remember that.
I view it as a way tech companies consolidated platforms of internet communication for corporations' and governments' benefit.
This person is a creep. He's always been one.
I do my best to ignore him.
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During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial, the Facebook founder’s argument was, in so many words, that platforms like his are not what they used to be..
He's right and the blame lies at his own doorstep.
The internet overall is not what it was 20 years ago and "social" media is certainly not the same.
I have maintained that losing my FB account was a blessing in disguise.
In its early years, FB was far less intrusive on one's page. I recall having a sense of community with my friends and the feed was not filtered such as what it became. By the time my account was hacked I no longer felt in control of the experience. Meta was deciding what I would see and they gave lip service to giving one the tools to tailor the experience. They were always in control.
That type of unsocial media is far different from bulletin board sites where a feed is exactly what the users put into it, no more, no less.
I do not consider YouTube to be social media. It's a video sharing platform which allows others to leave comments. The comments are not filtered or manipulated. My subscription list is what I put in it, no more, no less, no meddling from Google. My shortcut to load youtube goes directly to my subscription page.
Don't get me started on today's search engines, they've been going downhill for a while to the point where it's an exercise in frustration. I fear the heyday of good internet is behind us. AI is quickly making a mess of it.
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I remember the early days of Piano World when I couldn't wait to have my coffee with all of you every morning. So many of those friendships are real, live, in person, and the engagement we had even before we met each other was real engagement. Facebook feels nothing like that. It's basically become a place to post announcements and ads. There aren't conversations. I'm not making friends.
I do have some friends I met through FB years ago, but I hardly see those people any more on that platform. It seems like it's a husk of what it was. People have abandoned it.
I think social media in some ways has ruined us as a culture.
