As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
[Social Media]: Our Blasted Digital Hellscape
AngelHedgie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, continuing our ongoing discussion of social media, the people who run it, and how it has contributed to (waves arms around), the last week has been eventful as Facebook reported its first ever net loss in user base, something that could be more impactful than thought given Facebook's operations in the digital global South, where for many people Facebook is the internet. Around the same time, Facebook tried to bluff the European Union over their data protection laws, only for the EU to point to the above and go "really?" Also, TikTok continues to eat the lunches of everyone in the short video market, which a) demonstates why Jack Dorsey was a horrible CEO of Twitter, and b) has a lot of concerns given the company's ties to the Chinese government.
Welcome to social media in 2022 and beyond.
Welcome to social media in 2022 and beyond.
XBL: Nox Aeternum / PSN: NoxAeternum / NN:NoxAeternum / Steam: noxaeternum
Echo on
0
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
It's kinda telling in one way: All these tech companies willing to adhere to China's less than upstanding demands to keep access to their market, but when the EU talks about rules they have to abide by they huff about it.
The tech industry firmly believes that it should not be regulated at all.
And yet, China.
The tech industry knows that not only it can't win that fight, but even trying will end badly for them. In the West, they can play on our cultural priors to attack regulation.
The tech industry also firmly believes there are a lot of people in China it wants access to and there's literally nothing it's not willing to do to get that access. In that they are like literally every other industry.
They probably just think the EU is bluffing. No one thinks the Chinese government bluffs.
There are also bigger concerns behind the drop as well. Facebook's growth as of late has been primarily fueled through aggressive cooption of internet and in particular mobile service in the Global South - there are a lot of developing nations where Facebook is the internet. If Facebook saw a net loss in userbase, it's very likely due to severe bleeding of users in developed nations - the sort of users that are a) more valuable and b) less likely to be recoverable.
Basically, this user base drop may be evidence that pushes to get people to leave are having an effect.
But, you know, sometimes stocks go up and sometimes they go down, too
I keep it around for the few people that still prefer Messenger over WhatsApp, because my mental health is improved by talking to them
I moved the actual Facebook app onto a folder on my phone years ago, though, so I don't see it every day and reflexively check it
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I don't buy that argument, given what we know of Mark Zuckerberg's ego.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
I think the temptation to make bargeloads of money is too great to have a beneficial massively online social media hub
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I really don't know how you have anything like Facebook without it ending up as Facebook, or Twitter, but I'm all for them being destructo'd.
I see them as very much the product of the egos of their creators, personally - and that goes for their flaws. A lot of the issues with social media can be laid at the feet of the culture of the tech community that created them.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
they did!
but it was (is?) terrible to use
Who cares? Break it up every time.
So... like most social media then?
no I mean from a technical standpoint (minor coding, which is far beyond most people (myself included!))
It was mostly as a joke, but yeah, arguably the main reason for Facebook's ascendency was while the platform is clearly fucking terrible in most ways, it's UI is about as user friendly as you can get.
And that's probably the thing that'll make it hard for something to replace it, beyond the other factors (user critical mass, and FaceBook trying to kill any competent competitor).
What's needed, is a barebones base structure that allows the plugging in of your social media platforms of your choice. Sorce mentioned ICQ which is probably the best comparison I can think of.
The problem with that, is that they tend to require a little bit of technical know-how, and that automatically excludes the majority of users. And that assumes that FaceBook don't tinker with shit to make their stuff "evade" it, meaning people resort back to FaceBook. Also I'm not a software engineer, but if it was texts and URL's, it might be simple enough, but with the increased volume of images/gifs/videos, it might make things harder to convert.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Facebook's ascendency is because it was better and cooler then MySpace and it did so right at the exact moment this kind of social media really took off. After that network effects and buying out the competition have kept it going. And even that is losing steam now as it becomes uncool.
You don't have a corporation create it. I've pointed this out in the past, but on a technical level, blogging software with an RSS feed has, like, 90% of the functionality of a social media site. Write a specification, make it so your social network can go across sites, and get decent free software in place, and you have a social network that is not tied to any one company any more than email is.
I'm not looking for some thrice sainted app that is made of pure light, just something better than facebook that will let me read all of the content I want, from the people I want, in the order it was created.
The problem isn't portability (see also: Mastadon and the issues that community has had regarding hate and such), and the focus on it is once again the tech bad penny of forking as a form of damage control - which doesn't work with social issues. The problem is that there is a culture where we say that abusers are somehow entitled to be abusive.
They were the first on smart phones. Smart phones is when Facebook really exploded. They’re one of the reasons smart phones really took off as well.
I liked the levels of public-ness in a post and some of the customization stuff, didn't it crash and burn at launch and then everyone found out it was some half baked thing on the back end?
I know it went from about 15k to about 3mil users fairly quickly but nothing really since.
How many people do you know who don't use one of about 5 email providers?
How many people do you think could, for example, stop using gmail and start using outlook.com without losing their saved emails or changing their email address?
There'd be a couple of years with a thousand different social media front-end websites and then everybody would end up congregating around a handful of sites for the features provided that aren't baked into the social media standard specification and the fact that social media doesn't really work if you need to know the unique identifier for every person and business you want to find. If there are 5 aggregating services they can presumably scrape one another/use one-another's APIs to find you all of the "John Smiths" across them without you needing to know your cousin John's account identifier and/or which social media aggregation server he uses.
It'd be a better world, at least, where you could keep in touch with people who use Facebook without having to actually use Facebook yourself, but just standardizing social media activity wouldn't take us to a world where companies don't do the same things Facebook does now.
Again, you can't engineer yourself out of a social problem.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I mean, I use a private domain for my email, Dad uses his work address, and from checking my address book, someone from church has their own domain as well, which is something I didn't know until now, but is also something I didn't need to know until now. Plus, I have a bunch of corporate emails in my address book. Changing email addresses is a pain, but for social media, you can literally just post out "Changing hosting to X" to alert everyone who follows you.
I would be completely fine with the social media scene taken up by around 3-5 large companies, all using the same standard, and all cross-compatible. This nearly eliminates the inability for people to leave a provider without also breaking their friend network, which provides actual competition.
The only real downside is the lack of moderation on arbitrary sites, so someone can just post hate all day, but I'll note that:
* This is also a thing on actual websites; stormfront and the like exist now. The real nasty ones can get pressure applied via their hosting, registrar, and credit card processor.
* Moderation is not always good, especially if the site desires being "advertiser-friendly", or the ability to access oppressive countries.
* While hate speech sites exist, they don't show up via The Algorithm, which is what actually matters. There's always people willing to seek out hate speech, and there are always dark recesses of the Internet. Having Youtube recommend a Sargon of Akkad video is a different type of problem.
I mean, email suffers from it being a pain in the ass to migrate from an old address to a new one. (which hilariously has left a bunch of people with embarrassing ones they made when they were kids, unless they are the boring types who just used their name even back then) But it's still way more open to competitors then social media because there's no network effects.