I've been telling people this. I went through the exercise of unfollowing everyone on Instagram that wasn't a real person that I actively interacted with in the past year. Lo and behold, turns out none of the 100+ people that remained EVER posts anything, except for stories. Why do we have this entire 'social' platform if only 10% of the screen (the tiny 'stories' bar) is dedicated to actual social interactions?
I dunno what he's referring to but the big changes for me for Facebook were:
1. They let non-uni students on there. Suddenly my crazy aunt was sending me a friend request and they had no option for "be polite but I don't want to have anything to do with her". That diluted the amount of stuff I wanted to see.
2. They allowed sharing posts. This just gradually turned it into shit Reddit.
- most posts I saw on Facebook were from my friends
- Instagram was full of photos from my friends
- on Twitter I mostly saw tweets from people I knew in person or open source contributors I followed
Then my Facebook feed started having more and more „suggestions” then pages and groups, more brands than people. Instagram started showing me influencers and over time moved from photos to videos to counter TikTok. Twitter also started showing algorithmic feeds with more and more „suggested” people rather than those I followed. I stopped replying, commenting, eventually posting, social media turned into consumption-heavy media
the social part was phenomenal back in the day. when facebook took off I reconnected (and stayed connected) with a lot of people. my “feed” was nothing but posts from my friends and family that I cared about. I extensively used DM to talk to my friends privately. everyone got hooked on it purely because it was as social as it gets outside of real life
I've been telling people this. I went through the exercise of unfollowing everyone on Instagram that wasn't a real person that I actively interacted with in the past year. Lo and behold, turns out none of the 100+ people that remained EVER posts anything, except for stories. Why do we have this entire 'social' platform if only 10% of the screen (the tiny 'stories' bar) is dedicated to actual social interactions?
Real answer: we've normalized and deified placing greed above literally everything else in life.
> studying social media like it's 2010
Social media wasn't social in 2010 either.
It was mostly. You still had mostly posts from your social group. it changed in 2014
What exactly was this big shift in 2014?
https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/facebook-audience-network-...
It also purchased whatsapp
I dunno what he's referring to but the big changes for me for Facebook were:
1. They let non-uni students on there. Suddenly my crazy aunt was sending me a friend request and they had no option for "be polite but I don't want to have anything to do with her". That diluted the amount of stuff I wanted to see.
2. They allowed sharing posts. This just gradually turned it into shit Reddit.
Pretty sure non-uni students were allowed on Facebook way before 2014
Yeah I didn't mean those happened in 2014.
For me it was:
- most posts I saw on Facebook were from my friends
- Instagram was full of photos from my friends
- on Twitter I mostly saw tweets from people I knew in person or open source contributors I followed
Then my Facebook feed started having more and more „suggestions” then pages and groups, more brands than people. Instagram started showing me influencers and over time moved from photos to videos to counter TikTok. Twitter also started showing algorithmic feeds with more and more „suggested” people rather than those I followed. I stopped replying, commenting, eventually posting, social media turned into consumption-heavy media
Everyone I know can't make discussion with me for five minutes before pulling out their phones. We need to fix this.
Not that the ‘social’ part was ever very good in the first place, but they are right, it’s not social anymore.
the social part was phenomenal back in the day. when facebook took off I reconnected (and stayed connected) with a lot of people. my “feed” was nothing but posts from my friends and family that I cared about. I extensively used DM to talk to my friends privately. everyone got hooked on it purely because it was as social as it gets outside of real life
Direct pre-print link: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6nue7_v1
[dead]