Not just America. It’s a trend worldwide thanks to the abundance of AI slop taking over any ‘social network’.
See also the privacy-invading aggressiveness of most platforms, and the political ads and propaganda inundating people’s feeds. If social media had just remained a way to keep in touch with friends and post pictures, it would probably have remained popular.
But unprofitable
No, just not as profitable.
They could have had guaranteed medium long term return, if they played nice. But now there’s backlash against both the brands and even the very concept of that form of social media.
So they’ve had high short term gain that could all come collapsing down relatively soon.
I thought all of the social medias were bleeding money until they had the customer base locked down enough to exploit with all of the aforementioned shit?
Bleeding money expanding as fast as they could so nobody else got there first.
Huge capital investment to capture the market, and as you rightly put it, exploit with all of the aforementioned shit.
But that doesn’t mean they had to go down that route. Income via vaguely targeted advertising has been a standard practice for decades by newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels. They could have improved upon that old model without turning to the evil manipulators and spyware companies they are now.
Take, for example, DuckDuckGo, this is their model:
It is a myth that search engines need to track you to make money. The majority of our revenue is from private ads on our search engine. On most other search engines, ads are based on profiles compiled from your personal information, such as search, browsing, and purchase history. Since we don’t have that information per our Privacy Policy, search ads on DuckDuckGo are based on the search results page you’re viewing instead of being based on who other companies and their tracking algorithms assume you are as a person. For example, if you search for cars, we’ll show you ads about cars. We’ve even created a way to show localized ads while still keeping you completely anonymous.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/how-duckduckgo-makes-money
How long can you be profitable if users are leaving though?
It pretty exists ai. While it was novel and actually social, it was fun and a good way to keep up with friends that you see less often.
Then they started pushing influencers and people starting posting an idealised version of their life. Then the feeds all devolved into junk, even before AI slop.
Its because they took the joy and monetised it while making people trust them less and less. Post about an engagement, get wedding ads. Post holiday photos, then find out they were data mined. Wish someone happy birthday and find it’s just a stream of 100s of cookie cutter messages on their page.
So people moved on or became lurkers that don’t post. A lot of engagement moved from social onteractuin with people you know to Facebook community groups which became effectively ragebait and clickbait.
Essentially they pushed so much crap into your feed that your friends got pushed out.
So then what was the point of posting your current status when your circle might only see it two or three days later?
The immediacy was lost, and thus so was the usefulness.
No one gives a shit what I ate for lunch.
If I ate something new or interesting, my friends actually cared. Unfortunately Facebook decided no one wants to interact with the people they know and started pushing news posts down everyone’s throat. It’s not a social network if you actively work against me interacting with my social network.
You are so right - early social media was kind of magical. Your friends posted when they went to a cool new restaurant or did cook something awesome. I discovered so many new restaurants and food styles because of that. Your friends are all going to that new syrian restaurant near the lake and like it? Let’s try it ourselves! They are also your friends, so you can talk about that. They are posting pictures of some cool thing they cooked? You can ask for the receipe! You might even be invited for dinner the next time they are cooking that!
And then Facebook killed it. They started to hide the posts of your friends. They showed you some shit from some “page” or shoveled rage-baiting news in your face. They pushed Farmville everywhere. But that short little moment in time? That was awesome
You have an @lemmy.world account We already know what you ate.
Beans.
What about your shit after lunch?
You think I’m just gonna give that away for free?
If you have a Dutch shelf toilet, it’s there in all splendor.
Ah the famous lay and admire toilet.
Wait, have I been sitting on it the wrong way around?
Do the Dutch sit facing the other way or something?
What do you mean? They sit the correct way, where they have a little shelf for their chocolate milk.
Its to allow inspection of faeces prior to flush, I believe. For health purposes.
I can examine my turds equally well in a regular toilet.
Germans call them “Flachspüler” (flat washer). I appreciate that the falling dookie doesn’t splash water onto your ass. A fine feat of engineering and VERY off-topic. 🤣
Now that’s an odd design. Is there some reason they made it wrong?
There are toilets with AI that will make measurements and will check the health of your shit etc. Etc. Where do you think that data goes ;)
Now we are talking, go on…
What did you eat for breakfast?
My man spiting facta! Preach!
I mean, I still post to social media every day, but it’s pixelfed. It’s not toxic, it’s just me throwing in my art on the pile with everyone else’s art that I also get to flip through and enjoy, in chronological posting order, with no advertisements or other subject matter present.
No ads and no “algorithm”. That’s all I ask for
Mine is at https://pixelfed.social/tanisnikana, if you want to get an idea of what gets posted. There’s much better artists than me on that site too!
It’s a really interesting thing that happens, Pixelfed put me in touch with some amazing industry photographers like NatGeo dudes and such, and it’s actually got my photography career properly started.
It’s a really interesting thing that happens, Pixelfed put me in touch with some amazing industry photographers like NatGeo dudes and such, and it’s actually got my photography career properly started.
that sounds amazing!
Ah, OK! So it’s basically de-enshittified Flicker.
I remember when Facebook used to just show your friends posts in reverse chronological order. You could react to stuff in real time and it felt great. People would do stuff like watch sporting events and TV shows live and then react with all your friends online.
Then it changed to just pure alogrithm garbage filled with ads.
I use vernissage rather than pixelfed, but yeah, it’s the only one I deliberately try and post to every day!
Back in the day, I posted on Instagram to share things with my friends and scrolled to see their updates. The chronological feed with no suggested posts was the only way it worked, and now that’s impossible. There are no “people” on Instagram anymore.
What happened to Facebook is happening to Instagram. What used to be just a feed of my friends is now a bunch of suggested posts from accounts I don’t follow. It gives me a feeling of having my own friends used as bait for them to churn more content, souring the whole experience.
Makes sense. It’s the same company now, and they’re going to “reuse” patterns and stuff that they feel worked for Facebook and bring it over to instagram.
Just another way for zuck to push his incel fascist agenda
It was all over when Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline. It’s just taken a while for people to notice how awful it’s made everything.
That was what got me off - I kept feeling like I had to scroll much farther back to see the updates from friends I missed past what FB decided I should see, until I decided Facebook had made it no longer worth the effort
Because it’s stupid, you get nothing out of it and you lose time on top
Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.
For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there’s a lot of posts that you can’t see without having an account and logging in. That’s a big ask for something that you’re not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn’t sidestep that using the old reddit interface.
Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can’t see much of anything without being logged in, but they’re trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you’re human before you can use your account.
If you’ve scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you’re actually a human, and if you don’t have an account, the content that you can see doesn’t seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.
Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.
Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that’s mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.
Reddit is even worse on mobile. They’ve moved to putting up a banner that tells you to use the app. On iOS, it kills the scroll and swiping to go back doesn’t work. Go to the app? Fuck you, log in. Desktop mode is rough on mobile and they’re already talking about nuking old.reddit.com now.
Old reddit is the only way I interact with the site at all, and only for communities and stuff that for whatever reason haven’t moved on to greener pastures. Once old reddit’s gone I guess I’ll finally move that site into the graveyard.
It was a cool place while it lasted.
maybe we could help handing them nails to their coffin. Lets start demanding they add even more obnoxious things. Like for reddit, make even more posts no visible to those who are not logged in, have premium members be even more exclusive and away from the view. That should be a decent blow to any new people considering to join there since why would they want to do it if they cant even see what is there. And lets say they do it anyway and maybe even pay something, they will just get shit that isnt worth their money or they are kind of people that make it even worse place.
it could be sold to the crazier users as a way for them to be oh so exclusive and vip users so they would join in too. The executives would likely be extatic to see people demand same kind of shit they would want to put in anyway.
I dont know enough about facebook or shitter to have any ideas how to make them even worse, but for sure there is room there too.
Worse commercial social media becomes the better since it will push people away and eventually make it crumble.
And I still use social media the way many people originally imagined it: as a way to stay connected. My feeds have always been a mix of far-flung relatives, old friends, and high school band chums (because, let’s be honest, band buddies are the best buddies). Most days, I carve out a little time after work to catch up with the people who matter.
The last thing I’d want is for doing so to be…just more work. And yet, more than half of respondents agreed with the statement “Maintaining an online presence feels like work,” with about a third of those checking the “strongly agree” box. Only 16% disagreed, with the rest remaining neutral.
A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer?
I don’t really care about the following-people form of social media, the Twitter family. I’m more interested in the forum sort, the Reddit family. There, I don’t need to singlehandedly maintain a flow of content, because people aren’t coming to see @tal@lemmy.today, but because they’re coming to see what’s going on in some community that I only incidentally participate in.
This exactly. I like the thread style formatting, because then I’m following a topic, and not an individual person, because I really don’t give a shit what you had for breakfast, and don’t need your food pics lol. I’m not into that, but if you post something interesting in a technology forum, then I’m quite interested.
I haven’t had breakfast yet. I’m still working on my Americano. #espresso
I’m having coffee. Because I’m dragging ass. Because yesterday was my grandson’s first birthday. But that was just the pièce de résistance of a week that saw me working through last weekend and putting in about 100 hours this week because my team was behind in a deliverable and that would hold up multiple other teams, making delivery by end of September impossible.
So I coded and refactored on a project I’ve never touched before because I’m the technical lead, which means I spend all day every day in meetings and unblocking people and planning new projects. All this, only to find out on Friday, with 4 hours of sleep, as I was running back and forth between meetings and helping set up for the party, that some other team didn’t understand the requirements until they tried to implement the design which we provided weeks ago.
They were supposed to build a landing page to call the registration and login API and orchestrate the results. They have done none of it and now want to re-architect the whole back end to give them less work. After I nearly killed myself getting my team’s ducks in a row.
So I’m exhausted I think I’ve slept 10+hours each of the last two nights and the only fuel I have left in my take is rage and venom. And I have to process this all by tomorrow so I can figure out how to calmly and diplomatically explain to this other team that they can eat shit.
Which is where the coffee comes into play. Sorry to interrupt my gripping tale of breakfast fluids with such a lengthy rant about tech. Cheers!
I miss webforums terribly. phpBB boards were everything back in the day. Reddit/Lemmy isn’t remotely the same.
I keep hoping some of the new old web stuff will manage to strike a spark again.
I personally prefer Markdown to BBCode and not having to have a ton of different different accounts, but if you want phpBB forums, they are out there. Search a Web search engine for a string that exists on the website that the forum software displays by default. “Powered by vBulletin”, “Powered by phpBB”, etc.
searches
It’s annoying to have different accounts but at the same time I feel like it’s a necessary component if you wanted to retain the same feel. Plus password managers making keeping it all organized dead simple.
Because no one fing cares about your hourly updates and you’re just advertising your insecurities.
Social media is 75% ads, 15% shared content (more ads), and 10% people you know creating actual posts. You’re a gluten for punishment if you hang out there.
“gluten for punishment”, thanks autocorrect for another genius coinage
Darn it! I’m not changing it. I shall live with my shame of not proof reading
For some, gluten could indeed be punishment.
That’s how I felt when I tried bluesky. I missed the boat on Twitter and it’d already gone down the shitter so I never tried it. Figured bsky would be an opportunity to try the whole tweeting thing for myself.
And even still, it was just nothing but political bitching, navel gazing, and glorified (or actual) advertising. Like… what’s the point of it all? Deleted my account within the month.
Lemmy has its share of faults but at least people are willing to have actual discussions and conversations here. On bsky it felt like talking to a bot. People talking past each other instead of actually communicating.
They’re already trying to track everything I do. Why would I help them?
AFAIK, these companies are making record revenue.
From what? Is my mom clicking on that many ads and buying their shit?
Spoiler: >!Yes she is.!<
My mom: I don’t want ad blocker I want to see what the ads are selling!
Also my mom: Malware ridden phone I have to clean every two months
She has a constant stream of useless, scammy shit from temu ripoffs being sent to her house constantly and I just had to get some AI face filter subscription she swears she didn’t sign up for off her bank account.
But she’ll constantly tell you how much she hates technology.
The cringe I crunge at “I want to see what the ads are selling” like that is some straight up boomer mindset, like nothing against your mom, but like it’s insane to me that there’s an entire cohort of people who kind of think this way. Like they always had so much money they needed ads to help them figure out how to spend it. Must have been cool
Nah, I agree entirely. I cringe very often when in her presence. She is the stereotypical oilfield money boomer.
Do we have the same parents?
Hello brother
Just because they buy ad space doesn’t mean those ads are effective.
Facebook shows an after every two posts in my feed.
From scams
No mention of centralised versus decentralised social media. The thing that makes the biggest difference. No ads. No algorithm. No lock in, swap networks keeping friends and followers. Tune your timeline to suit you. Calling everything social media is trash journalism when those issues are already solved. Clearly he has no clue about the topic.
What are the federated “replacements” available so far? Obviously Lemmy replaces Reddit, I think Mastodon is a Twitter replacement? Has anything tried to tackle the myspace/TB/LJ kinda thing?
And then you’ve got the “new old web” stuff like Neocities and CozyTalk I guess.
I have 1200 “friends” on Facebook.
Less than a 10th of them “follow” me.
Therefore it is and was a literal waste of time to spend any time on their site.
On top of that if you open Facebook or Instagram, you won’t see a single one of your friend’s posts. You’ll see AI slop, random propaganda or “Influencera” and an ad every two posts.
You have to search for a friend if you want to find them.
Facts.
I dropped off Twitter in 2020 and finally deleted instagram and Facebook by 2025.
I had friends on twitter and really enjoyed talking to people but after COVID hit there was something evil out of that site that hit me real bad and I started losing friends as I was concerned for loved ones health around me and everyone else wasn’t. So I left. There were other things I didn’t like on twitter but I figured it was just me. I guess it wasn’t. Instagram I never posted on but Facebook I was active until late 2020. Active arguments with people through 2020, trying to plead with friends and family to be cautious didn’t do much so I gave up talking and my Facebook on stayed active to talk to my father. Moved him to discord in 2025 and deleted Facebook then.
I’m sure looking back there were more platform specific things that I didn’t like but I know it’s only worse now. My best friend has stated multiple times that twitter doesn’t care about what’s posted anymore so you’ll see illegal videos of death all the time. Once you realize that social media (like that) breeds a kind of conflict with those around you, it’s much less fun.
These days I only have signal and this. Delete discord back in March lol
Discord was also grabbing your data. Matrix servers are supposed to be better.
Wasn’t there something about matrix being linked to Israel somehow?
I also heard that at some point. I ended up moving a fan server to Stoat and it’s been okay but a lot of people didn’t wanna leave discord so it’s tough. It’s rough to even find populated chat servers to talk to anyone anymore either without having discord
Social media used to be mostly about keeping up with friends. Now it’s about competing with everyone for money and views.
Big change.
