Comment by nostrademons
18 hours ago
In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days.
It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see.
Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.
To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.
I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"
No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
I think some of this is caused by the non-obvious mechanisms of how interactions on these platforms work.
When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you reply to this HN thread), your reply „lived” in that thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm wouldn’t show that reply to your dad.
I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and being horrified when some of my friends and family got a „John liked this comment, join the discussion!” notification served straight onto their timelines, completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to whomever, without my knowledge.
Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much different experience when your youtube account wasn’t linked to all your personal information.
If you comment on a social media post, what’s going to happen? How sure are you that that comment, however innocuous it may seem now, won’t be dredged up 8 years by a prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment it’s still a valuable data point that you’re giving to Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the world.
The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ, they all change depending on the room I’m in and on the people I’m speaking to - but on modern social media, you can never be sure who your audience is. It’s safer to stay quiet and passive.
Most of her friends are probably women. Try making an account with an obvious female name and you will see a marked difference on most social platforms I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
funny story: I got the wife of a friend to install tinder, a couple of years back when I was dating. I was having a hard time getting matches, so I figured I'd see how the other side lives. She created an empty profile, with a blurry hippopotamus as a profile picture, and a single letter as name. Just "H". For hippopotamus. No bio. Within five minutes she was matching with every other guy she swiped right on. Which wasn't all of them, mind you. Within another five minutes, half of the guys she had matched with had messaged her. Regular looking guys. A lot of them had same opening line. "Did you know hippos are the most dangerous animal in the world?" After that, I got why I wasn't getting any replies >.<
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I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)
Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
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It's really telling how most replies to your message are about "sexual market" or online dating. That's all some men can think of when talking about women online.
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Over the whole population, I bet the difference between sexes is very small when it comes to what % posts online comment. You're saying "most social platforms" - what's the biggest one in the world? Probably still Facebook. Yet I'm fairly sure it has a higher female than male DAU, at least in the West.
r/kpop has 3 million subscribers. Take a look at the most followed accounts on Instagram. How many of them have female-dominated comment sections?
> I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
You're saying this as a guy who doesn't understand the world the general population lives in, outside your highly-educated male-dominated tech bubble. You're considering only the spaces you have been visiting for most of your life.
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That old trope is pretty tired ("you can't possibly understand or talk about anything that you have not personally exactly experienced for yourself").
Of course men don't know exactly what it's like to be a woman, just like one person does not know exactly what it is like to be any other person. You can still have an understanding and talk meaningfully about things, in many cases.
The internet is not "dangerous for a woman", like you might say it is for a child. It can be much less dangerous because there is a very low risk of unwanted physical contact. I have never in my life "made an account" with identifiable names that are public on the internet. I don't post my sex, address, age, photos, bank account details, or mother's maiden name on internet forums either. So I have had exactly the same experience as a woman who had done the same thing in anonymous forums. I might even be a woman.
An identifiable woman will obviously attract unsolicited disgusting and horrible comments and content of course, not just sexual but threats of violence too probably more than men do. This is not some high mystery or something so complicated that we're befuddled trying to understand it. Offline is a completely different story, but online? I can see messages people I know get.
Online is about the safest a woman (or man) can be, and still talk and interact and collaborate and share with people. And I have been "stalked" (in an online anonymous account way), sent horrible graphic sexual and violent threatening things, for having differences of opinion. It's not nice, but it's not "dangerous" for me. I got ambushed and beat up walking in public one day -- offline -- that was dangerous.
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Thats just what the internet of the mid to late 90s was like. People rarely used their real name, there were hundreds of forums, some private. You could have different nicks on them.
Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an online identity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
The idea that everyone has only one identity, one whole, is harmful.
People change over time. People change even a little based on who's around them. Even memories change as people see things in new lights.
The Internet of the late 90s and early 2000s was spectacular in that everyone could be as authentic and deep as they wanted to be, and as shallow and invisible as they wanted to be depending on context.
Firefox? Want to know how to really sell yourself. Be 'For the User', like TRON (but avoid that for copyright reasons and because normal people don't understand). The user should be able to TRUST that Firefox isn't selling them out, spying on them, or doing anything strange. That when Firefox creates identity sandboxes they're firewalled from each other to the maximum extent; including resisting device fingerprinting (just look generic and boring).
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But your friend is wrong. She does know at least one person who comments on online forums. I bet she knows more too.
Completely agree. Look at some videos on YouTube. 20,000 comments on brand new videos sometimes. A lot of good people are commenting on the internet. The problem is that the trust in public institutions is at an all time low, and that is leading to much more doom and gloom and those of us who are from the 2000s can feel the difference in the comment sections.
Don't ask don't tell.
exactly!
Most of the internet users are passive content consumers, and it’s been the case since a long time ago. There's a post about it from 2019:
https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-read-o...
I never tell people I comment online. No one I know knows my Reddit username (as far as I know…). Few of my friends even know what HN is.
I know. In fact, millions of us know your reddit username
> No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.
Perhaps time for a revival - text mode only, please, to keep out those that I don't want on there (the platform appearing too unattractive might be the way forward to avoid the TikTokers).
To be fair, back in those "good old phpbb days", people trolled just as hard as anyone does now, and maybe worse, since the consequences of it were not as visible, and getting in trouble for things you said online was virtually nonexistent. Everyone used a fake name, and while it might be possible to dox someone, it wasn't an operational concern for anyone who just wanted to be a jerk...
> people trolled just as hard as anyone does now,
Trolling had (has) a different character in smaller, more private forums: it tends towards more effort. A low-effort troll just gets banned and loses their platform, so the troll needs to at least ride the line of legitimacy. Drawing the line back to Usenet, the sheer effort that went into some trolling garnered respect if not necessarily acceptance.
Drive-by interactions reward volume since the 'game' isn't repeated. Curated social media feeds like Twitter are even worse; the troll has their own audience predisposed towards acceptance and the victim is just set-dressing.
I analogize this to in-person interactions: ostracization is mutually costly. A small group loses a member who was at least making a 'warm body' contribution, but the ostracized person loses a whole set of social benefits.
The trolling that happened on IRC would put modern day trolling to shame. Imagine posting a link to an exe claiming to be one thing but would actually contain Back Orifice (a Trojan that gave you remote access to the victim's pc). People would blindly download exes and run them on completely unprotected Windows 98.
To be fair I do miss the "old Internet". Less corporate, money grabbing, more freedom.
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Which Reddit thread was that, out of curiosity? And how do you know which commenters were bots?
> she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums.
Yet she knows you and you and me are strangers talking to each other on this forum. I think we don't know even close friends what online communities people hang out - the reason she didn't know about you being on HN.
Niche forums still exist with real humans like for example, LTT or openZFS forums. But main stream ones like XDA, reddit or YouTube etc are totally ruined by AI.
I don’t see any obvious evidence of bot activity on that thread (and all of my spot checks strongly leaned human). Were some comments removed or something?
I noticed a few people on HN have started complaining that anyone arguing with them is a bot. I think it's a coping mechanism at finding people who challenge them, but maybe they've been on too many bot-infested forums lately, or are just young (that might overlap with both users of bot-infested forums and those who haven't had their ideas challenged much).
They don't write on forums but they like or share a story. It's just more passive/consumer-minded.
I know I self-censor a LOT.
> how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots
I am sure there are some dead giveaways, but how can you be sure about that?
What I have experienced is both going into forums/discussions someone said was bots talking to bots, with no real clear indication by any of the many markers I am aware of that it was in fact bots; and also comments calling responses bots seemingly as a manipulative dismissal in response to something that was not the consensus or commonly approved position.
I say that because my impression is that what is happening is a full on breakdown of civic discussion and conversation as a whole. The internet destroyed IRL public forums (pubs/bars, clubs, etc) and the draconian COVID policies took the death knell to many more, and now bots and the seemingly bigger issue of immediate distrust of everything, seems to also be destroying online conversations of all sorts.
Yes, you’ll be able to have small group meetings and maybe even voice/video only conversations, but that brings a whole host of other systems changes with it, especially as mass surveillance long surpassed anything the worst tyrants of history could have ever even dreamed of implementing. It all seems a shift into unhealthy territory as a civilization in general, including since essentially all western governments cannot be trusted by their own people anymore.
I think the idea that nobody would talk to strangers online is a bit too general. We are all mostly doing it here. I do it on reddit all the time in the same recurring subreddits that I've grown to trust. IRC was also pretty hostile back in the 90s. But again it depended on the communities. Just think you can't generalize the internet this way.
most people just don't tell other people about what they do online. it's very private.
like, it's a running on joke on most social media websites that "i hope no one i know irl finds this account..."
i think your friend is just overestimating her knowledge of her friends' lives
And yet, here you are, posting ...
BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...
> And yet, here you are, posting ...
Correction, I am posting while pooping. I don't care much about social media these days and I draw the line at the toilet door.
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For what its worth. I recently joined "Carpokes" which is a free members only Porsche forum being run by a man hell bent on keeping it a friendly, bot-free, community. Its been great engaging in a forum again where I look at it maybe once a week.
> Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
Tumblr is still doing pretty well on that front. I'm there for a fandom, and it's a super positive atmosphere where everyone just wants to make and talk about cool art.
This thread is working pretty decently. No bots so far
I’m a man who had to do this because of stalkers. Literally serious, life damaging stalkers.
All my real HN friends are on https://news.ysimulator.run/news
The forum where Skynet becomes self-conscious :)
Reputation management is what it will take to bring trust back to all forms of media. It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.
Unfortunately, for common people whose aim is not celebrity, this means handing over your privacy in order to have a voice.
We can do this in our IRL circles of trust, people know you because they have met or interacted with you personally.
Online, this means someone like Zuck creating a digital identity for us after we entrust them with our privacy, or some kind of open source complicated technology identifier like a cryptographically verified signature that is techno bro-free that will only be adopted or understood by tech literate.
It's a dark day for genuine human interaction and trust.
You just reminded me that a few years ago I was doing some product research and one of the questions I'd ask people was what technical communities they turned to regularly. To keep up with news, if they had a question to ask they needed an answer to (this was pre-LLM hype days). HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and various Slack communities dominated the results for people I spoke to in the USA. I was shocked by how much private WhatsApp groups dominated amongst the respondents from Africa (Nigeria representing the overwhelming majority of people who I spoke to).
At the time it felt to me they were missing out on so many other useful resources. Maybe I was wrong. It's interesting to see things trending in a similar direction now.
Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years.
I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.
I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page.
Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.
Yeah LiveJournal (my username there is lightfixer) really came close to replicating how we actually social. Deciding who is able to see what I posted on an individual level was great. Could create groups etc.
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I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing!
Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.
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+ also got a bad rap due to what happened to Youtube - merged accounts - and yeah Google acted in some awful ways in more than one way but they were also trying to solve a problem of Zuck's shifting views on privacy (or rather the same view, that it shouldn't exist)
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One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG.
Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.
Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.
My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting how bewildered many young people are when confronted with anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a challenge. Tech savviness among young folks feels more like it was in the mid-90s. They're infinity more online-savvy, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing anything about how that works, they're cooked.
I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.
Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.
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I'm working on it! I have a little NUC that I'm learning Linux (Is that the proper term?) on. I plan to self host a few services for myself and host family photos on it someday.
I'm going through a "Deep, Vast, Trough of Learning" at the moment :>
I just set up a little cube server with a Mini-ITX board I had lying around. Overall I'm very happy with it, but right now it's basically just Unraid with the built-in containers running for Deluge, Jellyfin, and the Crafty minecraft server.
I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.
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Too bad all of the RAM and NAND flash are going to be unaffordable for the next few years at least.
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Yeah why put anything on social media. Your content is just a means to put ads alongside, and then trained to death by their AI.
I’ve been thinking about setting up a family domain and just hosting my family’s pictures to it as a way to share internally. But the risk exposure of running anything online is just so bad now, it feels risky and a pain in the ass to both give family access to see and post but also seal it off from spammers and scammers.
The way in which any open text box on the internet is guaranteed to turn into a malware vector is new now, and makes casual and marginally technical users trying their own thing much higher stakes and annoying.
I was thinking about something similar. ( Family photo sharing) The problem is: family is so used to Instagram and co, that they won't use it.
If you setup a server at home, you can expose it via a cloudflare tunnel, meanwhile it's behind your firewall + NAT. This will obfuscate the server IP a bit. It allows allows you to use very simple cloudflare Zero Trust rules to only allow people to access your server/website from people with a user account on that domain. (Or geographical restrictions, etc, etc)
Apple has photo sharing where you can share photos privately.
Agreed, Apple shared albums seems to be the default. It’s not amazing, but your photos and contacts are already there, no new network required.
It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family.
It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.
Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but
1. Reddit communities tend to get too large
2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading
3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.
The culture on discords tend to be way better than anywhere else on the internet, but discord really sucks to use. Somehow still doesn’t have a usable search, really underpowered notifications control, they have the worst pop ups imaginable that seem to just float on top of the whole interface and make it impossible to use.
I really wish something better would come along.
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The problem with Discord is that I have to know exactly where stuff is for me to access it.
There is absolutely zero chance I find something interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon the server link somewhere other than Discord.
And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active, forget about seeing what people were talking about before.
All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord is completely walled off and hidden away and might as well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the internet.
I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible things that has happened to the internet and the fact that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.
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99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does
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> 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).
You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.
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I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus.
Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
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The problem about this, for me, is discoverability. I have loads of hobbies that I'd love to engage with the communities of, but how do you engage with servers of that size without actively being invited to them?
Whatsapp, viber, line and tg groups are very much a thing too. Everybody is a chat of their apartment complex and district it seems
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If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.
Ugh. Sigh.
My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements.
It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime.
https://imgur.com/a/eoa8arH
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I'd actually flip that and suggest that people stop trying to use Discord for things that aren't aligned with Discord's product UI/UX priorities!
Discord is what it is, and my teenage kids love it. However I'm constantly baffled by it LOL.
Or just not a buggy piece of crap. It’s more stable than it used to be, but I still run into random problems here and there. Much more often than with any other piece of software I use regularly, but I suppose most are becoming web apps anyways…
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everytime discord ask me to claim this account i just quit the app. they operate in some bs tech realm that no other service does.
Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was really even a thing and they lived on until things like Slashdot and Digg took the reins.
It's more of a bad IRC replacement than a reddit one.
One thing that's having a little comeback is the email newsletter (see Beehiiv). There's something nice about being able to get exactly what you signed up for and nothing more. No ads, no recommended content, no infinite scroll.
Yeah ever since email spam filters have been effective, email can now work as a social network. I genuinely think it's an untapped opportunity for the next "great thing".
Discord is IRC, just with modern features.
I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades.
Probably not.
Slack had the ability to be Discord, but they explicitly decided they wanted to be business-only.
React was the first open-source community I knew of that outgrew/got kicked off of Slack and moved to Discord. Now, it seems Slack is only used by companies, and occasionally by smaller groups (apartment buildings, school parents, etc) where someone in the group knows Slack from work and doesn't know it's hostile to non-businesses.
Discord was the opposite. I was working on an open source initiative at Google at the time, and the Discord folks openly welcomed us. They even gave us someone's contact info, in case we had needs they weren't addressing. This was when it was still targeted just for gaming, but they were very welcoming of OSS projects using it too!
As I write this, I realize that Discord is what "Google Apps for your Domain" was and Slack is the "Google Workspace" it became.
finger comes to mind, LinkedIn is almost a shit version of this
None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
I think the platforms have changed. FB used to be 100% posts by people you know. I opened it today, and maybe 1 out of 50 posts were by someone i know, the rest was "trending" content.
Its essentially an entirely different website now.
For what it is worth, here is my experience with Facebook, [a platform that I have learnt to love after my Twitter ban]: I go to the main page, I immediately click the magnifying lens, so I get the list of unread posts of the 10to20 groups I follow. I read them quickly. Then leave. I do that, on a daily basis. Time spent: usually 20 minutes.
Reddit is 99% search only. I go there only on a purpose. [might be replaced by Gemini, eventually]
HN and Alterslash are probably the only source of random info that I still consume.
May be that information containment is a reaction to my 15+ years of addiction to [the good old] Twitter. Or because I have reached age 50.
But the consequence is that I get the news late, and usually because of a search I did. Not because of a proactive algorithm.
Additional thought: in the end I suppose my information un-déluge is the proof that algorithms eventually failed to deliver [i.e point me at things meaningful to me]. The biggest example is Spotify proposals. That is 1% of my music discovery, whereas traditional non-commercial radios and dedicated podcasts are [human curated and] much more diverse.
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Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist.
If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?
AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.
But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting, liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.
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How about distinct public posts per day per user?
My experience is that consumption is as high as ever, but the median person's non-private sharing is down.
Are bots included in those numbers?
My two kids absolutely do not trust open social media (thankfully). My 16 year old has a IMessage group with his friends as well as a discord and that’s it. My 13 year old just uses iMessage with his friend group. My wife and I have taught them the risks of social media but never to the degree of their current distrust. They seem to have picked it ip on their own and want no part of X, insta, TikTok or anything else. They just want to talk to the friends they know.
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended
I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up.
They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.
I don't think the vibe shift they're describing has fully taken place yet, but I think the foundations have been laid and it's started. It's probably going to be a while and take further societal changes to fully come into fruition, though.
AR glasses coupled with a sophisticated input device (fingertap? tounguetap?) will eventually be able to fully replace a touchscreen interface. And from then on it'll eventually become dated and rude to resort to pulling out touch screens during a social event.
Mind you, inconsiderate people will be as distracted as ever, and will continue to halfheartedly pretend they're listening to those around them. They'll just need to find a new method to achieve maximal obnoxiousness.
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Many people are simultaneously sharing to the broader internet less (the claim you're responding to) AND more addicted to media shared by the ones who DO share stuff then ever (the claim you're making).
The alert checking is a thing.
But I’ve noticed with my 14 year old son and his friends that they are all about Snap and iMessage. Instagram and TikTok are their public fora.
People didn’t leave social media, social media left them. Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic content. Same for the other networks. People are still there but it’s now the new tv.
Everyone should be simply posting algorithmic content to Facebook. Screenshots, etc not giving them your own life stuff imo. We need to push back on personalized feeds. Share a high percentage of what you see so that there is a digital commons and not just some island for each person.
Social media platform used to be less about passive consumption.
It's the people with money, houses, and kids that departed the 'simple local' lifestyle when the Internet and social media become large. It's them that are re-discovering the joys of the simple local lifestyle.
The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).
> The simple local lifestyle is that which was lived by all of humanity for all of history up until the last ~75 years (give or take).
A percentage of people still traveled, communicated, traded and migrated to other places in the past. Cities were a mix of lots of people, commerce, news. It was just slower and a smaller percentage. Look at the letters of Paul in the bible. He was writing to different communities around the Roman Empire, and traveled to them when he could.
Looking at the big picture, trade, communication and migration are the norm over human history. We colonized the world before the Industrial Revolution, some humans did it thousands of years prior.
I'd say it was much shorter than 30 years. Facebook opened to the public in 2006, and I was surprised to learn Myspace (the first "normie" space on the Web) isn't much older. And before that your digital persona was separate from your offline persona, unless you were one of the grognards with a faculty .edu address.
> It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend.
Even if they do have disposable income to spend, the lack of working ads means that they're getting their vendors in a different way.
Some speculation follows: If advertisements as the main driver of sales went away, wouldn't that help smaller players gain a foothold against incumbents? Because, while incumbents can use their war chest to push all newcomers to page 2 of the results. If the awareness is coming from somewhere else, being on page 2 of the results doesn't matter anymore, because no one is even seeing page 1 of the results anyway!
The brief period where I could check Facebook and reliably find someone's name I forgot or figure out how to contact people or invite them to a gathering was pretty nice. Now everyone's on fifty apps I don't use, or installed but never remember to check. Oh well. Sorry, too stimulating for me to join your Discord and get hundreds of notifications, most of which don't concern me at all.
> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
Not true. People post their entire lives (OK not entire, but the positive parts) on social media every day for the public to see.
From my own experience as one grows over their 30's, or probably much older, to get to what you mentioned "money, houses, kids, friends", these ads pretty much don't target u very effectively any ways because one's priorities are shifted and you care more about other things than what the attention economy is all about. IOW these ads all about the people who have attention to spare.
100% this. I used to be a "digital native". I guess I have migrated away from my native lands and now I am a boring old local again.
I’ve known a lot of neurodivergent and LGBT people, and I was in my late teens when The Internet happened and a young adult when the Web happened.
If you’re not within a couple standard deviations of boring, local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that they weren’t alone, they were just surrounded by (my words, not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were. They voted with their feet in droves.
Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has. Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has. Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things they do, stop being gaslit.
Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes back.
Yeah that's absolutely true that it was a lifeline for people who were isolated and that's less true with how ephemeral everything is now.
> WhatsApp
This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is.
To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations.
Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.
I am a gen-z and most of my peers look at me weird when I express the same. It was once cool to have social media and presence -- I was only 8 when I made a facebook account. But now, things are different. I actively avoid social media and don't like to show myself online anywhere other than my personal website.
> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
That's a nice narrative, but its simplicity clashes with reality.
I regularly do improv every week, which is essentially improvised live theater. So some time is spent not watching youtube or some sort of electronic intermediaries.
Which is actually pretty odd, because improvisational comedy as we know it today is younger than the film industry.
> my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions
I can attest to this based on my circle of friends and acquaintances. Email not so much but yeah WA etc. I think people are done putting content that matters to them on public platforms. So all we see now on FB/Insta is memes, influencers or ads.
Meta appears to believe this, and so is pushing chatbot integration into private chats on Messenger and WhatsApp; presumably that will be the vector by which they push product advertisements.
> In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels
The Return of Content Curation. Peer-to-peer: research, retrieval, review.
> If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?
> Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?
Because a lot of the economy is focused on creating and maintaining a surplus[1]: make people buy things that they don't really need, make them discard and replace things that they've been convinced are no longer worth it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus%3A_Terrorized_into_Bei...
That's the current state yes. But that doesn't mean it's the only possible state. If that wasteful consumption disappear, would anyone be worse off? Hardly. But it would free up capacity to do more actually useful and valuable things. Sounds like a win to me.
What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.
Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
That doesn't really sound bad to me. I think we expanded our social reach too far and need to scale back to where we can feel like we have an impact and our voice matters.
> people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person.
maaaaybe 2% of the people…
I think you're correct to a degree. Instututions like social media and google ads were given a very generous chance, we gave them our money and attention, they gave us scams (especially facebook) and enshittification.
The loss of faith in institutions takes quite a long time to occur but I think it will be quite a bit of effort to reverse.
This is 100% what I see too.
100% this. I remember when I took advantage of being online and not really competing in SEO, it was simply a matter of being real. At the time, I didn’t realize it was just arbitrage: I was naturally in a space with fewer participants and most organizations didn’t even know the rules yet.
Now that advantage is completely gone, and I have to build business the way it’s always been done in history: walking the streets while the online "broadcasted" world is a massive distraction.
> If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
Shh! One must never question the ponzi scheme.