The title of the article is arguing semantics. Like it or not, the term “social media” is what we use to describe scroll apps like TikTok.

The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else.

I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.

I wonder why the author did not mention bluesky as his critisism is on the timeline algo and bluesky allows to create custom timelie algos

Why won’t their stock crash and burn already???

The problem is that a functional social network is a bad business model.

A chronological feed has a "stop" point. You catch up, you feel satisfied, and you close the app. Meta’s revenue depends on you never feeling caught up. That’s why the "Feeds" tab is buried three menus deep—it’s there so they can say it exists, but hidden so you stay stuck in the algorithmic slop.

Even if they made it the default, you’re still left with the trust issue. You aren’t the customer; you’re the data being mined. At this point, the brand is probably too far gone for a simple UI tweak to fix the underlying rot.

> I stumbled upon Mastodon and it reminded me of the early days of Twitter. Back in 2006, I followed a small number of folks of the nerd variety on Twitter and received genuinely interesting updates from them.

Personally, I never got into Twitter. I'm on the Fediverse now, and check in on it occasionally, but it never draws me in. I don't connect with people on that kind of platform.

Some forums work for me, mostly because there's a small enough number of participants, or, importantly, there's a place I can go to read content from specific people. Even if we don't become friends (or IRL friends), I still feel like I know them to some degree. The people matter.

Twitter / Fediverse / Bluesky seem to be about topics, and as such, I lose interest quickly. Because no matter how much I like photography, birding, cars, board games, computers, software, etc... I don't really care what the masses have to say on those topics. I want to know about Alice, Bob, and Carol have to say on things that interest me.

Early Facebook was, as described in the article, people you knew, who held some sway in your life, sharing their life events (however inane), or their opinions. I care more about that than I care about a celebrity or complete stranger declaring some thing as good or bad or interesting.

But the network effect was always going to matter. LiveJournal/Xanga/MySpace all had some network effect where some of your friends were there, and you wanted to be there, too. But Facebook figured out monetization, and they still seem to hold the greatest network effect despite how terrible the experience has become. I can post photos there, and dozens will respond, all people I know. If I post in literally any other place, I will get less than dozens of responses, and almost none of them will be from people I know.

There is no new place like early Facebook, or even current Facebook. But of course what I want is a place where I can share with the people I know, and no one has to pay for it, but the monetization doesn't drive the service towards enshittification. This isn't a very realistic desire. Discord has been the closest for me, where I have dozens of contacts in a shared space, and very frequently get interaction with people I know about things I care about. But it also feels like enshittification of Discord is also inevitable even though there's a paid subscription option.

Luckily, the EU is tackling the most impactful feature — the infinite scroll "slot machine".

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagr...

The failure of Mastodon to thrive even when Twitter itself became very vulnerable unfortunately tells me that people actually want this pathologically bad behaviour. Lots of friends who slagged Twitter and Facebook etc for its anti-social aspects turned around and tried Mastodon for a few days and then came back to me with a "there's nothing happening there" and it's "boring" etc because they were fundamentally expecting to be force fed entertainment just like Twitter. Lots of comments on hackernews to that effect, too.

That's fine. I never liked Twitter anyways, but I do think it's interesting how two faced we can be about this.

The engagement hackers found a market and met it. Not good, but true.

I would tend to agree with this, I vibidly remember when facebook had a feed on the top right that told you what your friends were doing, playing games, listening to music on soundcloud, etc.

That was social media, not whatever the hell we have today... it's antisocial and attention grabbing.

they try hard to obfuscate this

This post has convinced me to give Mastodon another try.