I gave up on social media soon after it became popular. I remember early days of Twitter when people were using it to discuss the attention economy and future trends. That was useful, but it quickly became a fight for attention using "content" and anger. Social media today falls apart and doesn't even bother to deliver the basic features. I recently started a new Instagram account for a photo project. I noticed that I was not getting any followers despite posting on a specific niche tag that people interested in the kind of photography I do follow. The tag is not controversial, it's the name of a brand of film I use and the posts were simply scans of photos I took using it, the photos are definitely safe. Turns out Instagram just stopped showing posts with that tag when you search for posts with it. My posts are not seen by my followers, but they and I do get shown a stream of shit posts (quotes, motivational bs, and funny animals) using the standard Instagram pattern of 3 shitposts, 1 ad, 3 shitposts, 1 ad, ... I decided to remove my accounts and posts from instagram, facebook, and other outlets. I am going back to blogging.
You should check Glass[1], which focuses strictly on photography. It does cost some money, but I see this as an advantage. There is basically zero spam, zero self-promotion, no "algorithm", no ads. And it even has RSS, which is how I mostly view photos (users may opt-out, though).
If you really don't want to spend any money, Pixelfed [2] is a good option.
Personally, I publish my photos on my own photography website and then syndicate them to Glass, Pixelfed and Instagram.
I feel we need a better word than the blanket term "social media". After all, we're on social media here, right now. Granted, HN is still more civil overall, due to its moderation and user selection, but it's social media nonetheless. Similarly, Reddit is social media as well, and can be an absolute cesspool as well as a treasure trove of civil discussion, depending on where you go.
> After all, we're on social media here, right now [...] Similarly, Reddit is social media as well
I don't agree, but i can't really formulate why. For example is 4chan social media, or Something Awful? I'd say no, they're forums. How is that distinct from Twitter or facebook? Fundamentally the model feels completely different to me. The idea of user centric feeds/content doesn't really fit. Maybe it's that the content is not the OP but the latest days worth of posts?
I see how on that metric HN is not forum-y but social media-y. But there it's the user vs content centric aspect?
I mean, it's a matter of pedantics and subjectivity.
Technically, Social Media is a super set of all of those things. They're all media platforms that primarily operate around user socialization (aka engagement). They are, by definition, social media, and in turn social media has been around long before Facebook (eg, slashdot, BBS, Usenet, etc).
I do agree there's a difference/nuance to be recognized here though (eg, old web vs new web social interactions). I think user vs content focus kinda misses the mark, as the truly key differentiator for me is what influences the activity, both in terms of driving people to post in the first place, but also in curating what they can('t) or should(n't) post. In other words, is the platform a community trying to serve it's users, or a company trying to serve it's stake/shareholders?
In fact blogging would be more than enough to compete with social media if everyone was to implement standards such as WebSub and Webmention (see W3C standards).
We have the tools to compete with proprietary platforms, we just need to commit to them.
This is very interesting. I'm an art photographer part time and have used IG to share my work. Previously (let's say a couple years ago, maybe less), Any posts I added with specific related tags would at least get some traction (I never paid for followers or ads of any kind) and more recently, they barely do at all. I at first suspected that it was because Instagram decided to take a tedious stance of minimizing post exposure until you forked money over for their paid offerings, but now there's this wider enshittification angle to consider, of garbage saturating other's feeds either because it does pay for publicity or games their idiot algorithmic protocols better.
Instagram have been changing the way algorithm works for a while and they did say they are prioritising reels over photos. The enshittification is real. When I block one "quotes" account, say "_quotes" then posts from "quotes_" appear immediately in my feed. Could it be done on purpose to inflate ad impressions and engagement?
I can only imagine this kind of idiocy eventually hurting the absolute core of success that is engaged users. If people who want to post know that their content will be crowded out even to followers and friends by an avalanche of spam, AI garbage, bullshit clickbait reels and so forth, they'll stop posting, and also maybe stop visiting because they know that they'll be hit by the same flood of crap on their feeds.
A social networking platform with over 1 billion users (though I wonder how many of those a real people organically using the site) has a lot of inertia built into it for apparent forward motion, but if the thing that made it work falls apart, it will rot.
Also, for all the newly polished PR talk you hear from Zuckerberg these days about helping users, shit like the above and many other similar things is worth remembering. As the controlling individual at his company he both absolutely knows about these slides into enshittification, and has the power to change them, but apparently doesn't..
As a lone hobbyist programmer, I will say that engaging with someone and their projects is one of the most wonderful things you can do for them. It really is something that can save them from some rather dark thoughts.
I have this tendency to start projects whose entire purpose is to prove to myself that something is possible and that I'm not crazy for thinking it. Even when I see it working right in front of me, I feel like I'm insane and that my projects make no sense. When another mind shows up and the idea resonates with them, it changes everything for me. Suddenly it's not insane anymore. Someone else understood it.
I think advertising is unethical so I try really hard not to advertise my stuff. Against all odds, people have managed to find my work despite that. It's incredibly motivating when it happens. It feels like I finally reached out to someone. I've received email about things I've written and published and it really made my day. It's motivated me to participate in more and more open source projects, and it's motivated me to email blog authors too. It turns out people respond when you email them. I used to think they were too busy to reply to me or something.
Receiving praise for one of my projects made me a lot more active about praising others. It feels fantastic to know that someone loves your work.
Meanness hits much harder, and sometimes I would have given up if it wasn’t for nice people reminding me that my work is valuable.
I have made a conscious effort to be nicer online. Above all, I just don’t bother being mean. It’s easy to forget how deflating a mean comment can be to the human on the other side. Some comments have lived with me for days, and I don’t want to inflict that upon others.
I want to build a community, both online and offline. I am trying to figure out how to enforce decent behaviour. If you have any resources, I would be grateful for it.
I recently read somewhere that only 1 in 20 is active in the social space, most are lurkers. And I think personally it might be a lot less.
So if you are a lurker reading this, start to become active! Start upvoting good stuff. If you have a bit coin, give a little to the peeps mentioned it the article. It makes such a difference.
I am the author of this piece and I should have mentioned joining forums as a Nice activity. I have also recently joined some forums and tried upping my participation levels. Some forum users can be prickly, it is not all roses, but so long as you avoid the drama it is a rewarding experience.
The best thing you can do is create some top-notch content and don't post it on the big networks but instead on a small one. And also, don't write an SEO copy of what is already out there.
I started using the web in the mid 90s at around nine or ten. The most positive interactions I remember weren't on nascent chat rooms or forums but through email. As a space obsessed kid I managed to build a small email list of contacts within NASA and their internal librarian even mailed a bunch of stuff to my home address in New Zealand. I'm not sure if you could have that same experience now, instead of an email address people will now list their Twitter handle. But that's no place for kids.
One of my earlier, formative internet experiences (last 90s) was on a forum. It was a reply to one of my comments, from Douglas Adams.
The internet used to be a vast number of places you could travel to, each populated by a small but generally friendly set of people. You could have a discussion with the group about shared interests surrounding a specific topic. Sure, there were trolls, but they were few and far between.
Today's social media landscape is a handful of sites where everyone goes to discuss everything. As a result, it's much, much harder to have productive discussions that don't get derailed or out-and-out attacked by bad actors.
My rule for online presence is simple, try to convince yourself to not being impulsive.
If you convince yourself you don't have to always write or participate or give a hot take, you will find yourself to be generally positive and more constructive and factual.
Any platform you enjoy has ALWAYS been a result of everyones kindness and politeness. Any platform that encourages impulsive behavior is not a good platform for your mental health or others. People are never impulsively positive. Even when a platform have a general thematic negative tendency towards something, avoiding negative interaction in general is the best course. Even if you can't be always positive , you can atleast be constructive, neutral and factual. At the end of the day, a good community consists friends and if you want to be part of the community, you have to make friends there.
Unfortunately it is profitable to be a dick. Farming karma, influence type stuff.
The solution is being aware of emotional bait-and-switch techniques. “Does this post try to make me feel strongly about something? Does it push me to polarize difficult subjects?”
Marie Kondo (Konmari) had a bestseller in the NYTimes called "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" in... 2010. Wow, I can't believe her book came out that long ago! Lots of useful fun ways to do things in there, which aren't as obvious to non-Japanese people because many of them stem from Japanese cultural values.
The world is harsh and uncaring. Today's internet reflects that. What used to be a safe space for dorky techies is now a cross-sectional slice of the entire society, a live reel of human nature in motion.
You're also a human being with agency and the ability to think and decide how to act towards others, and why. Not behaving like a total trolling, raging adolescent has nothing to do with ignoring the harsher edges of the world and society. You can still firmly defend X or Y argument, while making it as if you were speaking in person to the people on the other end.
It's wild how low-empathy humans can get simultaneously offended and unironically self-righteous when you basically tell them something as simple as "Be nice" or "Try not to hurt people".
…I see that the top-level comment has been edited to be less aggressive, though. Previously it said something to the effect of "If you can't handle that, you have no business being on today's Internet".
Yes, I edited the original comment, because I realised that you took offence in it and thought that I was addressing "you" — or the OP — specifically. It was a hyperbolic statement. Does the edit make it clear?
My argument is simple: the internet today is very broad, and humanity — let's face it — on the whole is not very nice. It's admirable to try to create pockets of positivity in it anyway. I simply want to highlight that it is futile, and maybe a more realist perspective is what we actually need to find a way forward.
> It's admirable to try to create pockets of positivity in it anyway. I simply want to highlight that it is futile, and maybe a more realist perspective is what we actually need to find a way forward.
The issue I take with that is that as the problem is entirely social in nature, the perception of futility is also a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s also something that has been historically true over and over, sadly. All ‘nice’ pacifist societies ended up getting wiped out or subjugated by their uncaring neighbours. Sustainable niceness does not exist. I wonder if we should accept this fact rather than continue to fight it.
You say, after the the last thirty years have probably been the safest, most peaceful, most free, and most human-rights-respecting time period in all of human history for the world at large. And, I assume, you probably say while living in a liberal democracy that has specifically outlived multiple oppressive totalitarian regimes which have kept trying to dominate the world.
I think that's an easy bias to fall for, but also not actually true. If it were true, the world would only ever monotonically get more and more violent over time, until we lived in some kind of exaggerated parody of an apocalypse slasher film, which is not the case.
Sustainable naïve niceness does not exist as the norm. It is still possible to be kind as a default without immediately rolling over for anybody who does not share such values, even if you sometimes have to do so by reciprocating hostility where it is encountered.
Cruelty and conflict are ultimately destructive forces, wasting goodwill, physical resources, and cooperative potential. The social equilibrium may not bend towards kindness as sharply as we would like sometimes, but it certainly isn't a straight drop to apathy and cynicism either. Although perceiving and portraying something as inevitable can go a long way to rationalizing it, or to trying to justify giving up.
Yes, everything about us is ultimately "determined by the world," but that doesn't mean that we have to be as harsh and uncaring as the world at all.
Just as easily as, seeing the harsh and uncaring nature of the world, we could imitate and perpetuate it deterministically, we also could see that harsh and uncaring nature, and choose to be more caring, compassionate, and understanding as an equally inevitable reaction, a rejection or countermeasure to it. It isn't free will, it's just that our individual experiences and personalities as people determine how we process and predicate our actions on what the world is like, and so we can all choose differently.
And in fact, even the exhortations and rationale of strangers are part of the stimuli in the world that may change how you act. Which is why I think it is worth it to say what I'm saying now.
Superficial determinism is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Personally, while I am not always nice on the internet because I struggled to countenance fools, rationalizations, and people who lie to themselves, which happens surprisingly often, I do really try, and more importantly even if I am not nice, even at my least nice, I try to always be as genuine and authentic as possible, and always be open to having my mind changed and genuinely put my beliefs on the line. And I think that in itself can be surprising and refreshing for the people I interact with.
Does it not get exhausting to swim against the current all the time? Don't you ever wish you could let you go and let your inner little mind take control, if not just for a moment? What you describe as being genuine and authentic and open minded sounds like a cross you have decided you must bear. It's okay. You are not Jesus. You don't have to do this.
I just adjust the amount of time I spend online down in order to compensate for the added emotional strain, and also adjust what sorts of social media I interact with to ensure it is sustainable. I've also been slowly learning how to just disengage after a certain point: if a discussion really seems like it's going down the drain or not going to go anywhere useful then I'm learning to sort of just let someone else have the last word and move on, which has been good for my health. I don't want to engage with someone that isn't going to meet me on some fair level of discourse.
Because you are correct, making top level posts on a twitter-like social media constantly with this ethos was actually so emotionally exhausting for me it physically affected my health, but the solution to that is just to not do that anymore.
Also, I do this not because I've arbitrarily decided that I've got to bear this cross, as you say, but because it is my default mode of interaction, in fact the only one I know, and it's something I very much like about myself that I always interact in this manner, and I think trying to learn how to be less genuine and less invested and less open, even if just for my online interactions, would sincerely leak out into my character in general in a way I don't like. So I'm not really doing it out of a sense of duty, but essentially out of a sense of convenience, because I don't want to have to go through the effort of learning how to context switch between a mode of interaction for being online and a mode of interaction for being offline.
Not sure if surrendering your free will to decide how you treat people, and all the moral implications that come from being seen as a person rather than just a creature, is the position you want to be taking.
