Comment by graypegg
2 days ago
> The first way is to not have recommendation media (think Instagram, TikTok, and all the rest). I'm pro deleting these accounts completely, because it's really easy to re-download the apps on a whim, or *visit them in-browser.*
Tiktok having a borderline unusable web app has done wonders for me. I'll end up on it because someone sent me a link, I can watch that ONE video, a single time, before normally I get a spot-the-boat style captcha or an "install the app" modal. Even trying to get past that point, it feels like the site is somehow falling apart at the seams as you navigate around. I know the concept is "well people will install the app then" but that's also annoyingly frictionful.
They unintentionally made the most literal social media experience: some one sends me media, I watch it once, I leave before the site crumbles to pieces like an ancient tomb that was only held together by a load-bearing dog video.
I like Reddit, I pay for an app on iOS to have a reasonable experience. The mobile web experience otherwise is terrible.
Social Media sucks now. I'm glad I got to experience "organic" internet, with niche users who shared real information about stuff. Not the marketing machine we have now.
I'm firmly convinced we will, eventually, look back at algorithmic social media with the same revulsion as we now look at leaded gasoline or ubiquitous cigarretes. No less harmful.
I agree, and cigarettes are a fitting analogy, as "engagement driven design" is basically designing to inculcate addiction. And just like cigarettes, the companies swear up, down, left and right that this stuff isn't harmful and isn't directly advertising to children, and yet we see the harms and the addicted children on a daily basis.
Even recently, there have been leaked documents indicating that Meta is designing its AI to interact with 8-year-olds, in which it's explicitly stated that the following is an acceptable AI/chatbot response to an 8-year-old: Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece - a treasure I cherish deeply. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
100%. I've been sleeping poorly recently. Made the decision to leave my phone in another room. Immediately started falling asleep within 30mins (instead of 2-3 hours) and felt much better. After a couple of weeks I brought the phone back in. Instinctually, before I even knew what I was doing, I was picking it up. A few mins would pass, I was still awake, I'll watch some Reels. It was completely unintentional. As an ex-smoker I can confidently say this stuff is much more addictive and much harder to quit. And just like the cigarette companies, the engineers and data scientists know what they're doing. It's evil.
The arc of social media is truly breathtakingly awful. At this point it’s hard for me to see any value in it at all.
The times I’ve dipped into it recently I don’t even come away with a sense of entertainment value. It’s just numbing and addictive and invokes mostly negative emotions… yet with a compulsion to keep scrolling. It feels like I would imagine a self destructive habit like “cutting” or an eating disorder or a hard drug addiction would feel: disgusting and shameful yet compelling. It’s vile.
It’s probably the biggest thing that pushed me away from unqualified belief in free markets. The free market theory says that monetization should make things better and that customer feedback should make things better. What I see is that it often makes things considerably worse. Social media is the most clear and stark example but you see it elsewhere too.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that it’s cheaper and easier and often more profitable to extract value rather than create it. A casino is more profitable than a school or a hospital. Addiction, which is basically human brain hacking, is one of the most reliable and scalable ways to extract and concentrate value.
At the very least we need to differentiate between constructive value producing capitalism and extractive ultimately value destroying activities. The latter should perhaps be taxed into the ground.
It is amazing to me how dogshit the reddit mobile experience is. Some comments load, others don't. Will the child comments load? Who knows. Is this ordered in any way? How about 5 links you don't care about instead of the discussion thread you clicked on.
old.reddit.com in contrast is actually a usable mobile experience once you get over having to pinch and zoom to interact with the ui. Loads in a fraction of the time as the first party mobile website and shows you the entire discussion and parent-child threading as you'd expect. No nondeterministic behavior.
They used to have i.reddit.com, and spez promised to never reduce the mobile experience, but we can see how well that turned out.
I miss i.reddit so bad. Blazing fast, no new tech, exactly what I needed.
It was a solved problem with apps like Reddit is Fun from the time I got my first smartphone (it ran Android 2.2), but the fun had to end with locked APIs.
Which app is this, if you don't mind divulging?
I generally only use the old.reddit.com via a browser on my phone.
Yeah, after Reddit killed Apollo on iOS I just stopped using it on mobile.
Instagram has had broken web notifications for a month or so. You click the notifications and nothing happens; the post doesn’t open. The first days I thought someone had messed something up but after a month I’m not so sure. And there obviously is no way of telling them (and have a human read the report).
> You click the notifications and nothing happens; the post doesn’t open.
Glad I'm not the only one.
At least the same(?) update finally fixed the browser back button and you don't have to scroll all the way down again after hitting it.
Instagram is the worst. I started on there because I got back in photography and people said I absolutely needed to be on it.
Notifications has been broken off and on for months now. Before you would see there were message on your post. Click on post? Nothing. First it would load the image and show zero comments. Then it wouldn't load the image and just a blank screen. Now its the same problem in the notifications menu. Can't click on the comment, won't bring up the notice, nothing happens.
Its 2025 and its the worst UI experience I've had on any social media app and its not even close. I just keep wondering how this can be this bad for this long without anything changing.
> started on there because I got back in photography and people said I absolutely needed to be on it.
That can't be true anymore, Instagram is a black hole for artists
This might be the most poetic description of TikTok's web experience I've ever read
This is exactly my experience as well, and partially why I only use tiktok and facebook from a browser.
Instagram works just a bit better but roughly the same. And that helps keep me off.
I am putting the load bearing dog video on the example shelf right next to the load bearing (disproven) TF2_coconut.jpg