There’s that old saying “God gave you two ears and one mouth, please use in that proportion.”
So much of the social aspect of the internet has been about “giving more people a voice”, and we’ve chased that desire at the blogging, milli-blogging, micro-blogging level.
I’m undecided, but I have a hunch that the increase in “speaking” via the internet has not increased at the same level as encouraging people to “listen.” I think there have been increases. Wikipedia is an asset I didn’t have as a kid. I can search for more stuff and read more stuff. But it doesn’t feel like they’ve increased at the same rate.
Or put as quasi math, if
M = desire/effort to use mouth and be heard online
L = desire/effort to listen/ingest ideas of others online
Then it feels like M/L is rising as a number over the last 2 socially netified decades.
I want to agree with your ideals but there are 1,000x more people who read and rarely share. The viewed stat on a top rate hn submission is probably 50,000 views on average where comments are measured in the hundreds.
If you talk about anything in a public place, say in a pub, it won't take long to hear a differing opinion.
We've worked so hard to create closed communities on the Internet, that you're not exposed to opposite ideas unless you work hard at looking outside your bubble. Social media with its very smart recommendation algos will try to keep you firmly in your echo chamber.
Yeah, you can listen on the Internet too, but you often only hear the choir.
I wonder how much opinion was an important factor in societies before internet. To an extent you can go to a pub every night, full of people you disagree with yet you all live in the same area / space ..
I often feel human groups are not about high level ideas.. but emotional flow and basic needs. Most of the time we don't discuss to debate but to share feelings and share needs.
Social media algorithms might not be the only thing keeping people within a bubble. For example, Fediverse instances or Reddit communities (infamously known for the “hivemind”).
People might simply be tribal in nature, however this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t improve.
If the response counts as a comment, then that ratio is impossible to fulfill - although in that interpretation it'd be impossible to fulfill IRL as well, so I don't think we can use comments vs replies as a metric, unless you only count root-level comments as "talking" and sub-root comments as "listening", in which case I feel like the ratio does hold true
My favorite takeaway from social media has been realizing that many people have an agenda to push, and will use charged language to push that agenda.
Riling people up and making them angry at other people is a good way to get attention, and from that attention you can make money by selling that attention to other people. The more angry and upset you can make people, the more money you can make selling ads.
It's a cycle and I want no part of it. When I catch myself doomscrolling I remember this, and start skipping the electric stories in favor of ones of beneficial interest to me. It's done a little good for my mental health.
You're suggesting that one of the old Rules of the Internet, LURK MOAR, should be more suggested. I agree with you, but I think this is one of those problems that the Eternal September brought on.
- we are social animals so we like to interact and depending on where we live and how we live finding similar cohorts of people in desired quantities it's not that easy without some form of telecommunication. Banal example: I like computers, classic desktop systems, Emacs, zsh etc even in a CS faculty I was able to find only a very small cohort of people with a similar "hobby", I like to climb, again finding other climbers is not such hard but also not that immediate, it's not that popular. I like offroad, shooting, downhill MTB, Ski-Alp. All such sports are not that common, finding people with similar interests it's easier with a bigger agorà (like internet, with usenet or the web);
- MODERN social networks have replaced older ones with a far different target: older ones have a simple target, matching people, making them communicate on common areas of interest. Modern ones have the target to profile, project and direct people discussions, isolating, matching some but not others etc. Witch means modern social targets are political and economical AGAINST their users, exploiting their characteristics.
The result is that in modern era people are hyper-connected to someone else computer system, but also hyper-isolated humanly. And that's not a side effect but a target. You can steer even an entire civilization without most noticing or even knowing who you are mastering social interactions.
That would be more like group chats. You hear the people close to you. Social media is different where a small group are screaming very loud and drown out the majority.
Everyone has a voice outside the internet too, but your spoken word carries social and physical consequences, which tends to teach one pretty quickly not to run their mouth.
Social media won't improve until there is a button I can click to slap the person who wrote it, paraphrasing that famous bash.org quote.
Mind you, I'm not talking about government laws. In the real world, moderation is highly distributed: anyone that has to listen to you can "moderate" you.
>outside the internet… your spoken word carries social and physical consequences, which tends to teach one pretty quickly not to run their mouth.
I see this written a lot on the internet, but it diverges pretty strongly from what I see in real life, i.e. people run their mouths all the time.
The difference I see is that, on the internet, pretty much every interaction is with a stranger you’ll never talk to again, so there is no point in trying to build a rapport.
It seems to me that the deaths of Twitter and Facebook are being greatly exaggerated (by this article, and by the vibes generally). A decrease in users is not the same thing as a mass exodus. And I'm frankly skeptical of any claims that Twitter is facing an existential decrease in users.
“The great resignation”, “quiet quitting” and now “social quitting” are all instances of the media turning tiny observed trends or even normal operations in to some great names social shift when the reality is not much has changed.
The builders of the next generation of social tools are doubtless already busy. I’d venture to say we’re looking for the wrong thing, if we’re expecting the Facebook-killer to be another giant platform.
My bet would be that the next big social platform will come about when Apple and Google agree an open messaging platform for Android and iOS.
That will at a stroke provide an alternative network to Whatsapp available on every phone and desktop.
Apple is currently resistant but I think they'll come round to the idea once they realise that that they can pretty easily displace Meta from day to day messaging.
Hmm. Think you could be right. Question to me is whether they can provide anything compelling beyond stability of identity / ease of connection. That would itself be pretty huge though, so is maybe enough to displace WhatsApp and the like.
My wish is that this big tech cycle has been long enough for us to have collectively learned at least some lessons about what’s desirable and what’s not in such vital communication infrastructure.
Is it really good for human psychology to have these hyper-connected, star-maker platforms so prominent in our lives? Online fame does very strange things to people, warping the way they interact with their actual physical surroundings, and the real people who inhabit them. Brings to mind the girl doing her TikTok dance in the middle of a lecture. It’s quite bizarre, but worth trying to understand.
Anyhow, none of this is to disagree with you, sadly. Except to say, I think there is also appetite for more humane technology, which doesn’t try to sink such deep hooks into us.
> My wish is that this big tech cycle has been long enough for us to have collectively learned at least some lessons about what’s desirable and what’s not in such vital communication infrastructure.
This is how progress usually works. Advancements are made, there are pitfalls / consequences, we learn from those, then new advancements are made.
The modern age is progressing too quickly though, it's just "advancements are made, people just barely begin recognizing the downsides, new advancements are made way before we adapt to the previous advancements". The life of someone from 1700 vs someone from 1850 is more similar than the life of someone from 1990 to 2020
This is essentially why I decided not to give up on all these years of experience building tech.
Not to claim any special insight, but taking just a couple years out has been enough to see that the flaws of the current generation are not inherent to the tech, that things can be built differently, and that I can be a hopefully more mindful builder.
Similar to when a couple people move out of San Francisco and they call it an "exodus" and there are handfuls of articles making up these stupid claims based on a couple interviews of people moving to Austin or Portland or, in more fringe cases, Colorado.
People are tired of being abused. The powers-that-be don't like it and are trying to change the narrative to things like "people don't want to work" or "quiet quitting".
As Doctorow says, the permanence of these institutions is taken for granted until it starts to unwind - and very quickly downfall becomes obvious and inevitable. It's not obvious to everyone yet, but he's saying it soon will be.
I'm sorry but I'm unable to take anything nick land says seriously anymore
But in general I don't think I'm taking the permanence of twitter or fb for granted - they both fill a clear need and I don't see any new players emerging to dominate the niche they fill (mastodon is not going to replace twitter)
And I'm frankly skeptical of any claims that Twitter is facing an existential decrease in users.
I agree but mostly because I think the exodus happened years ago. If you look at the view counts for tweets that don't 'go viral' most of them get seen by about 10% of the account's followers. Even a popular account like Elon's doesn't get more than 20 or 30% of the followers seeing the tweets most of the time. Whacky timeline algorithm fun aside, that implies a large number of users aren't regularly checking their accounts any more. Twitter probably peaked a long time ago.
> Twitter got bought out by a low-attention-span, overconfident billionaire who started pulling out Jenga blocks to see whether the system would fall over, and when it did, we all got crushed by the falling blocks.
I’m not sure how consistent application of moderation rules, refocusing on actual user safety like CSA instead of preferred pronoun use, and transparency when it comes to government manipulation of political conversation is ‘pulling out the jenga blocks’ but Musk can certainly done a better job with Twitter than Doctorow did with Boingboing.
Anecdotally I know exactly one person using Twitter to tweet and that's only because he shares some of those tweets to a Telegram channel. When he does I might check those messages on Twitter but I often don't.
All the messages I exchange with friends in WhatsApp groups are not happening inside Facebook groups and are diverting traffic from there. In the last many years FB has been a site I use to announce work events and to say thank you to happy birthday messages once per year. That's too be polite because my direct contacts say happy birthday to me on WhatsApp or in person.
I also know very few people who use Facebook, however a couple of degrees seperated from me, most people do. They all use Facebook Messenger (but just call it messenger). Other people a couple of degrees a different way use Twitter extensively.
On HN, we're in a bubble as we're people who give a shit about privacy and the companies running our social media. I'm fairly sure we're a tiny minority.
Vibe shift is just another term for a change in elite aspirant opinion. The vibe is localized to highly trend conscious social and professional milieus. These scenes are often regarded as a cultural vanguard, but are in fact often detached from the majority of the population, and are less harbingers of broad shifts in public opinion, and more simple reporters on their own microclimates. That is all to say, the hard numbers might not materialize for some time, if at all, and not for the reasons presently stated.
Even if a vibe shift is recognized it isn’t necessarily described so.
Looking at the earliest comments that include “tiktok” on this site, the product wove its way into mentions before some article blew it up.
That said if you were on the service when the boss walk was just breaking, and experienced the product’s progression (as a user) to Old Town Road, it was obvious something big was going on—before the numbers were there.
I wonder what Musk's plan looks like. ~90% of Twitter's revenue comes from ads, and they are not doing too well since Musk took over. He may have to double down on non Western markets where large companies are still willing to work with him.
Facebook is still a thriving host of non-technical
communities and classifieds. The features and experience across both of those use cases are constantly being degraded and are user-hostile, but FB is still winning.
Something in the vein of Discord will eventually replace FB groups, I think.
Classified is probably the service best protected by the most of FB’s network effect.
It's unreal to me how poor Facebook's actual product is. I regularly get white screens of death on the site, viewing a photo from the feed dumps the feed in the background forcing you to rescroll the whole page to get back where you were, account pages are little more than naked HTML... It's so shitty! Don't start me on how poor the business experience is either. Get locked out of an account or get flagged in error? Ha fuck you customer!
>It's unreal to me how poor Facebook's actual product is. I regularly get white screens of death on the site,...
I've wondered for a really long time how so many non-technical people could stand using Facebook; it always confused the hell out of me and was just awful to use.
I think non-technical people are ok with the abuse because everything on their computer abuses them. And if something goes awry, they figure it's their own fault for using their trackball mouse incorrectly [0].
Nextdoor also has a local ads / classified ads section. I expect that would be the next destination for the FB Marketplace users (since they mostly fled Craigslist previously).
> "Twitter got bought out by a low-attention-span, overconfident billionaire who started pulling out Jenga blocks to see whether the system would fall over, and when it did, we all got crushed by the falling blocks."
I've spent years mocking Twitter for it's short character limit (designed IMO for the low-attention-span trend) and the siloizing/bunkering effect of Facebook and groups (where never a contrary opinion is tolerated, much like with many of Reddit's subreddits). As an experiment I created a Twitter account for the first time when Musk took over the platform.
It's not terrible but not great either - there are some decent sources of information and interesting accounts to follow, but the search function is still very poor, and there's what feels like a lot of algorithmic optimization of engagement going on. Finding interesting and informationally accurate accounts to follow is a bit of a struggle, but once you do it's not too bad. I doubt it was drastically different in the past.
> and there's what feels like a lot of algorithmic optimization of engagement going on. Finding interesting and informationally accurate accounts to follow is a bit of a struggle, but once you do it's not too bad. I doubt it was drastically different in the past.
I have never been able to use Twitter without this being dropped blatantly on my face. You can't go straight to a Twitter user's profile and read their own messages in a meaningful manner, let alone the main feed or search feed. And don't get me started on the threads and the arcane magic necessary to follow them completely.
Yeah, every time I tried to use Twitter, I got the impression to be dropped into some kind of jungle where you couldn't see past a couple feets (posts) before your view getting blocked and you getting lost...
> and there's what feels like a lot of algorithmic optimization of engagement going on
It's pretty easy not to see these algorithmic optimizations. (1) There's a link on the top right of the home feed that allows you to turn on a chronological feed instead of the algorithm-organized feed (2) Add accounts to a list instead of just "following" a feed (3) Use an app like twidere that allows you to quickly switch between your home feed and list feeds (with the added advantage that twitter promotions and recommendations of accounts to follow are filtered out)
The net result is pretty good. I maintain separate lists of people on either ends (and center) of the political spectrum and it's easy to look at what they're saying and arrive at your own opinion/conclusion.
Yep. I've ported myself over to Mastodon in case it is needed. The primary community that I interact with on Twitter has done the same. With that backup in place, everyone is still interacting on Twitter.
The network effects are still quite strong. Search and useful recommendations are still excellent on Twitter.
Anything paragraph-length and it needs to be broken in numbered tweets to create a "thread". It's horrible for anything different from its base use case.
Click the three dots to modify or save the Advanced Search. The saved search stays in your search field for easy access.
You still get some of the good parts of the algo in the 'Top' section of the search results.
Lists are a really nice way to dampen the more noisey accounts. I haven't found a way to specify a list in the search results.
Also, you can follow a lot of relevant people, and then specify 'people you follow' in the search. Then if you search for a current event, you can get info from people you trust more.
I wasn't aware of how Facebook won over MySpace by using a bot to allow you to use MySpace THROUGH Facebook so you didn't really lose anything when you opened a Facebook account and started using it.
Now why couldn't there be a service that was simply a super-bot, it would automatically open an account for me on all social media platforms. It would then post all my entries to all other platforms, relay the responses back to me. Why not?
> Now why couldn't there be a service that was simply a super-bot, it would automatically open an account for me on all social media platforms. It would then post all my entries to all other platforms, relay the responses back to me. Why not?
The part of the article's analysis about switching costs is spot on. Facebook is aggressive about keeping switching costs high.
It is against the ToS of Facebook users to give their password to any service like that, and they will shut down any account they suspect does this.
> against the ToS of Facebook users to give their password to any service like that
What if it was not a service but an application I download and run on my PC? I'm not sure how ToS could forbid that, me running an application on my PC.
I never understood the attraction of Ham radio, outside the technical aspect (building fancy radio equipment) if you're into electronics, and I'm old enough that Ham was still a thing when I was growing up and I had one friend that was really into it. Unlike all the online services where there were separate channels for different interests, even back in the BBS/Compu$erve days, ham radio had no such thing, it was just random people. You might as well just go hang out at a bar and talk to random people there; the quality of conversation won't be any different.
> This didn’t happen to Facebook and Twitter. Both attained a scale and durability that exceeded the networks that preceded them. For many people, it seemed like the operators of these services had cracked the nut of making eternal social media.
There is a qualitative aspect to it that is not reflected by numbers yet. In the late 2000s to early 2010s Twitter used to be this cool new thing everyone wanted to try out. Now a significant part of society sees it as a cesspool.
Just finished reading the article. I already started disagreeing with the author while reading the first line. Mass exodus? What is he referring to? How does he differentiate mass exodus from being simply out of touch with users' needs? Mass exodus from social networks looks to me like a typical low-signal-high-noise opinionated clickbait, not fact-based journalism.
If there was a mass exodus, I think we should observe it from our own eyes. In my case, nobody around me is (finally) leaving WhatsApp and nobody is quitting Twitter. I don't have thousands of "friends" but I think I can assume that I would actually see these platforms bleed out if there was a mass exodus in progress, and more particularly, I'd see where they are going to.
I think the author's vision appears to be constructed on the premise that he perceives social networks as all-powerful businesses ("Today, it’s getting harder to believe that these networks will last forever."). I think he is sharing his own delusion about social networks with the public and trying to find an escape to the dissonance that ensued from the decline of their stock price. For more than 5 years now, Facebook has been offering nothing more than a worldwide directory and a stalking service to its users in exchange for their data, in my opinion. If we do the analogy with a milk company, he is basically surprised that cows are leaving the farm because they don't get anything valuable in return (the actual customers are the buyers of milk).
What surprises me though, is the fact that he seems to miss an elephant in the room. It seems to me that these companies are failing simply because they are engaged in a very expensive operation that doesn't generate a lot of revenue anymore. And the reason for this decrease in revenue cannot be simply explained with users exodus or attrition: Meta still owns Instagram, TikTok is doing very well and many social networks are reporting massive users intake. What is happening in my opinion is just pure simple and raw competition.
Finally, he also seems to neglect the potential behind Meta's investment in metaverse tech. I wouldn't dare betting on this: there are thousands of signals worldwide that show that metaverse technologies could disrupt society the same way Internet and touch screen smartphones disrupted our daily lives. Nobody knows whether Zuckerberg is at the "right place, right time" for the moment, he may as much as he may not be. But if he is...
Unfortunately I disagree. I always want to like Doctorow. In theory we have similar political views and I love that there's a famous writer who espouses them.
But then I read his work and pretty much always find it lacking.
For example, this post. It starts with a very clear point: huge numbers of users are leaving Facebook and Twitter, to the point where these companies are in serious trouble and will soon go the way of Myspace.
But then... There's nothing to back it up. No data. You're just supposed to believe it's true because Doctorow said it and he's famous, I guess.
Except that he always does this. Leaves out critical data, doesn't back up his points. So I don't trust him.
Worse, I think he essentially writes wish fulfilment narratives aimed directly at people with my political leanings. These are close enough to the truth and even closer to what I want to be true, so they come dangerously close to short-circuiting the scepticism I work so hard to apply to everything I read.
Trends can be observed without the actual data. The fact that he doesn’t have the data to proof it, doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I’ve observed the same trend, hardly anybody I know still uses Facebook, same for Twitter. WhatsApp however is an essential communication tool: sportclubs, schools, all use WhatsApp for last minute info. Not sure if Facebook/meta is in trouble, as instagram and WhatsApp seem to pretty popular.
>Not sure if Facebook/meta is in trouble, as instagram and WhatsApp seem to pretty popular.
Realistically, how profitable is WhatsApp? Facebook itself obviously has profit potential because it can bombard you with ads. WhatsApp, not so much. I feel like some of these services (WhatsApp, FB Messenger, etc.) may not be very profitable by themselves, but only serve to keep people on the site/ecosystem. But if they're ignoring the profitable part of the system, then the whole thing might not be sustainable.
Enter stage left: some weird email I got from Facebook about the messages will be melded with Instagram or some horrible idea like that. I'm sure bookface has plenty of good uses, but it has become the least interesting of all of the social media sites and is mostly just for logging in to other websites.
Btw, that data they get from any tiny snippet of facebook Javascript code on any website is probably invaluable. They see all. That's why we gotta use Ghostery, Brave browser, etc. as defaults.
Tbh, the gist of this article would fit in one tweet. Something somthing onboading / locked-in / network effect / switch cost. He didn't even touch the actual psychology part as its addict materials.
>Mastodon has seen pretty solid increases in usage the last month or so. Certainly a lot of journalists, cs folks, and science people.
can it be people are keeping double presence, and would like to switch to Mastodon when it becomes convenient or necessary to do so, but right now are also on Twitter.
> Mastodon has seen pretty solid increases in usage rhe last month or so. Certainly a lot of journalists, cs folks, and science people.
Even if it gains 1 million users it will get to a few Million users, it's nothing vs the 250M active users on Twitter. I like Mastodon but let's not pretend it's going to be a major network anytime soon.
I wouldn't trust Cory Doctorow's anecdotal evidence on Twitter usage. His Like/View ratio is very low, and overall engagement for someone with 486k followers is some of the worst I've seen.
Part of the issue is he spams his followers with retweets constantly, all day. People may not know they can turn off retweets for someone. They may just mute them, and continue to follow.
It's very much like Cory to write a long article about this when really what's happening is him and the people he follows are becoming more irrelevant.
You picked the most extreme example of any account. I'd bet Elon gets a lot of hate-follows. They won't like his tweets. You can see many real people replying to his tweets, so you can tell he gets plenty of engagement.
For others without much engagement (retweets/replies), like Cory, all we have to go off of is likes, views, followers. I don't disagree that we can come up with a more accurate formula.
I'm pretty sure you could pick literally any account and get similar numbers. The point is that Cory isn't an outlier or unpopular or anything. All twitter users are like this.
> I'm pretty sure you could pick literally any account...
> All twitter users are like this.
That's the point. Cory isn't like all users. He has 480k followers.
The reality is very few of his followers engage with the tweets. He previously had engagement, he no longer has that engagement, and thinks Twitter is dying. It didn't help that he told his followers to go to mastodon.
I really think he doesn't play to the platform's strengths: succinct commentary. His whole career has been about long-form writing.
So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter, or 1% is fine, but if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%?
That doesn't seem particularly reasonable. If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.
> So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter
Ratio between 0.05% - 1% shows good engagement. I rarely see it above 1%. Those are 'viral' tweets. I've never seen 2% or more.
Ratio regularly dropping below 0.05% without lots of replies/retweets is bad. A low ratio could mean high views from bots (e.g. Musk) or other non-follower sources, so replies/retweets help to indicate there is healthy engagement. Cory doesn't have that.
> if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%?
The 480k is his _potential_ reach.
You aren't entitled to reaching all 480k of your followers. They follow other people. Their feed has limited space.
Similar to how Youtubers tell people to subscribe AND enable notifications. Doing so shortcuts the algo. You can do the same on Twitter. If the small % of followers that see your tweets don't engage, the feedback loop of getting to more of your followers never kicks off.
This is obvious with well-liked accounts. More obvious when these types of accounts are private because the like/view ratio is a higher signal (ie no fly-by views).
> If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.
Not a problem. It's the nature of the beast. Only a small % engage. The likes create a feedback loop that gets more views, but rarely breaks above 1% likes/views ratio. You see the same limits to conversion rates in other areas (e.g. advertising or eCommerce sales).
I managed to quit WhatsApp for about a year and have recently been sucked right back in.
I nearly lost a significant sale because a client claimed they sent me a message on WhatsApp about a new purchase, which I obviously never received. It was only that about a week later I made a client contact call that I found out and the sale was made.
More recently, my young son’s sporting clubs only seem to communicate crucial information via WhatsApp - is training going ahead, what time, which equipment to bring and changes in location etc.
The above really made me realise that the vast majority of people care not a jot about the same things I do in terms of privacy and autonomy.
I did, because I don't want anything to do with Meta. Back when I used it I typed up a copypasta with the links to installers for the platforms I would be available on from then on. Since then I set up a Matrix server with double puppets for those services to add a layer of obscurity (to throw off surveillance from those platforms, their apps are no longer installed anywhere) and to consolidate all messaging to a single app.
Works well for me, but then a majority of people I talk to already had alternative platforms or installed them for my sake. The people who didn't bother aren't people I had that close a relationship with anyway.
Not much, but it has become the default way to share information for many groups: churches, friend/family groups, study groups, and even some government associations.
If you do not have WhatsApp it has become very difficult to navigate life. For example, I had uninstalled it before going to college but had to reinstall it when I realized it might stop me from graduating.
Strange. I’ve never used it, and never needed to use it. Though I regularly use Telegram, Discord, Skype, Slack, and Viber. All conversations with relatives happen on imessage/facetime.
So much of the social aspect of the internet has been about “giving more people a voice”, and we’ve chased that desire at the blogging, milli-blogging, micro-blogging level.
I’m undecided, but I have a hunch that the increase in “speaking” via the internet has not increased at the same level as encouraging people to “listen.” I think there have been increases. Wikipedia is an asset I didn’t have as a kid. I can search for more stuff and read more stuff. But it doesn’t feel like they’ve increased at the same rate.
Or put as quasi math, if
M = desire/effort to use mouth and be heard online
L = desire/effort to listen/ingest ideas of others online
Then it feels like M/L is rising as a number over the last 2 socially netified decades.