Millennials: It’s ok to mourn the death of social media::Wired writes how “first-gen social media users have nowhere to go.” Ouch.

  • @BedSharkPal@lemmy.ca
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    1542 years ago

    I’m just excited the internet is in part going back to its non corporate backed roots with Lemmy mastodon and the like. The internet started that way, and thanks to the enshitification it will hopefully slowly revert back to it

    The idea that corporations were involved in social media was insane looking back. The results were exactly what one would have anticipated

    • VaultBoyNewVegas
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      562 years ago

      I remember when I first started using Reddit and there was so much weird and crazy shit that it really did feel like there was a sub for everything. Now it’s so sanitised that it’s nowhere near as diverse in its content and subs, hopefully Lemmy/fediverse can have as many different instances as old Reddit and the active community too.

      • Corgana
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        302 years ago

        What I don’t understand is who is moderating the big subs and why? When r/funny, r/holup, r/publicfreakout, r/damnthatsinsteresting (and I’m sure many others) are all basically the same memes and short videos, what kind of “community” is that? What kind of person signs up to clear the spam out of what is essentially 9gag 2.0 for free?

        There are many smaller communities that would probably be happy to move to the Fedi if it were easier and bigger, and I hope Lemmy evolves to the point where those can be absorbed. Reddit can keep the endless meme scrolls.

        • @whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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          132 years ago

          It’s only the smaller ones that I really miss in the fedi. Like, my pipeline for memes is doing fine, I doubt i’m missing any cultural touchstone moments, but on the corpo-net if you needed info specific info about your window box AC unit, not only was there probably a sub, but there was a larger sub just for general AC that would probably ban your post and say something like “hey post this in windowAC.”

        • @cole@lemdro.id
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          72 years ago

          this is why r/Android moved to !android@lemdro.id. We even made our own instance dedicated to technical content. The reason most people I’ve been around mod is because they want to either fix a perceived quality problem or maintain a community that they enjoy frequenting.

          • Corgana
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            12 years ago

            Nice, r/StarTrek made its own instance too

        • Takatakatakatakatak
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          52 years ago

          In many cases I believe SOMEONE is paying these supermods.

          It’s more about controlling public discourse than it is any sense of moral compass IMO.

          It’s a fairly cheap way to control the narrative on just about whatever you like if you can steer acceptable speech around hot button issues on such a large platform.

          • Corgana
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            32 years ago

            idk, I was in a Discord with many of them during the vaxxhappened protest and I didn’t get the impression any had particularly strong backbones. Not saying it doesn’t happen but I really have a hard time picturing most of the “powermods” as having the will to control anything. They (largely) seemed pretty afraid to rock the boat or upset Spez.

        • @pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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          22 years ago

          Power hungry douches that have nothing better to do with their lives. Some of these people actually consider it a job, even though they don’t get paid.

          • @Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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            32 years ago

            This is why our society is so fucked, someone with community spirit wants to help maintain a fun community which is free to access for everyone in the world and what do they get? Nothing but hate and abuse.

            • Corgana
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              32 years ago

              People who don’t appreciate moderators but also don’t like unmoderated places like 8chan are like the “No take only throw” dog.

      • @pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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        132 years ago

        BreadStapledToTrees had me so confused the first time I found it. It still confuses me. Even though I have only been active on Reddit for the past 5 years, even I saw a massive change in it.

        When I first found GoneWild and the like I was like “Mother of God, this is amazing…” and now 85% of the porn subs are just OF advertisements.

      • @Wahots@pawb.social
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        52 years ago

        This, every time I see a post in the frontpage here where someone has taken a picture of a pear stuffed up their ass (etc etc), I breathe a sigh of relief knowing no advertisers or asshole CEOs are ruining this place. Feels like the old days of the internet, roughly. Sure it’s small, but it feels real, not sterile and clean for advertisers and shareholders.

      • Corgana
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        2 years ago

        Bluesky is not really decentralized like Mastodon. It’s more like crypto where the bigger you are the more influence you have over the network. There is zero incentive for someone to host a server off of .social since they will control it. Having a BS server does nothing besides provide Jack Dorsey and co with a little free hosting.

        • @sucricdrawkcab@lemmy.world
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          12 years ago

          I use both and mainly curious because it doesn’t take as much as Mastodon to show you what you want to see. Or maybe I think that because I came from Mastodon to Bluesky, but I understand what both are. People know what Bluesky is but when I bring up Mastodon people are not really interested. Jack Dorsey is also no longer involved.

    • @pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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      132 years ago

      I just moved to Miami and don’t know where to meet groups of like-minded people. There is nothing on MeetUp, but there are groups on Facebook. I hate that I had to sign into that garbage fire for the first time in years. My whole feed is filled with “suggested posts” of people I don’t know nor things I give a shit about.

      • Herbal Gamer
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        72 years ago

        I mean, you did move to Miami… why are you expecting sophistication?

        • Flying Squid
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          32 years ago

          Personally, if I moved to Miami, I would expect this at the very least.

      • @Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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        02 years ago

        Yeah, the other day I had to wade past fucking stacks of junk that doesn’t apply to or interest me, there was a whole wall of stuff that makes no sense at all for me, adverts for services I’ll never use and even study areas that I’m not ever going to need because I’m not at school! Fuck libraries we should burn them all down, how dare they don’t serve and cater to me and me alone!

    • Fish [Indiana]
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      22 years ago

      I mean, I’ve been rooting for the demise of social media for nearly 20 years. I don’t know why I’d be mourning.

  • @spyd3r@sh.itjust.works
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    692 years ago

    As someone who was on the internet before social media existed, please let it die in a fire.

    Everything now is curated and cultivated by corporations and political entities to weed out any “unacceptable” discourse and content that doesn’t support a particular agenda or narrative.

    • @Adalast@lemmy.world
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      132 years ago

      100% agree. I was learning networking and internet coding back when Javascript was new, web 2.0 was going to revolutionize our lives, and Macromedia was releasing a little animation software called Flash. As an elder Millenial I can confidently say that the death of social media would be the absolute best thing that could happen for our society as a whole. The society was not mature enough for it, still aren’t. Maybe next time it is invented we will be ready and someone will remember to keep the damn corporations out of it.

    • BeautifulMind ♾️
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      112 years ago

      TBH I’m right there with you when it comes to wishing corporate social media a fiery demise.

      And yet, I’m happily using decentralized/non-profit social media that I’d very much like to see flourish. The thing I don’t like about social media today is that it’s billionaires selling personal info to people that want to direct advertising or propaganda to intellectually defenseless people, I really think democracy can’t withstand the firehose of bullshit that now empowers bad actors to lie at scale that used to require traditional media or state resources.

      • Cethin
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        32 years ago

        In of the opinion the term social media needs to be broken into two groups. Ones where you’re yourself by name and one’s where you’re an online handle. The “personal” social media are all garbage, but there’s some alright “unpersonal” social media, like Lemmy for example. BBSs would mostly be the later, but probably would be social media if the term existed when they were popular

  • Captain Aggravated
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    562 years ago

    I don’t mourn “social media.” I mourn what we had before they started using that phrase.

    • @Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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      22 years ago

      You mean traditional media owned and controlled by people like Murdoch? Or rumors and innuendo spread by word of mouth in pubs?

      I know you were le born in le wrong generation like every other hipster complainer on the planet but you’d have hated wherever was popular at any time in history because it’s not about finding a balanced and sensible view it’s about hating whatever is popular.

      • Captain Aggravated
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        52 years ago

        Also no. I meant the forums, chat rooms and instant messengers we had right before Facebook and Twitter ruined it all.

        • @Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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          32 years ago

          I grew up on those and they were all awful, take off the rose tinted glasses and you’ll see those chat rooms were basically twitch chat with more sexual predators.

          And forums still exist and they’re still awfull, having to read fifty stupid comments of people saying totally off topic ‘yes Bob, we got our cat six years ago’ but it fills the entire screen because he’s quoted the entire script of life of Brian in his signature. Finally you find someone replying to the question you were interested in but it’s only to ask another question do you got fifty more comments from poorly replying to questions in the OP which have been answered hours ago but they didn’t bother reading the thread before posting.

          And there’s a million great messenger apps out there, of course none of them are as good as they used to be because they don’t have my childhood friends on, or if they do they’re all to busy with kids and carers to come ride bikes.

      • @Flambo@lemmy.world
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        22 years ago

        Hey, I’m fully on board with your defense of social media, but I think in this case the commenter is just saying “i miss the social media we had before they started calling it ‘social media’”. Even 2004 facebook fits this description, and I’m inclined to agree. I miss social media when it felt more like IRC and craigslist, when facebook was a glorified personal guestbook, etc.

  • naticus
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    442 years ago

    It’s also all right to laugh maniacally as it all burns down.

    • @ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
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      2 years ago

      Forums are social media as well, though. They just have different features. “Social media” are all websites and applications which allow sharing of content between users.

      I think a forum was just less anonymous. I never remember any name on Lemmy, for example. On the forums ~back in the day~ I actually got to know the people. We even had forum meetings in real life.

        • @ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
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          22 years ago

          I fear those sections would look very different today. I watched that unfold in an Otaku forum which was quite nice and peaceful for years. It got radicalised by hateful people until the owner shut it down. The same happened with a gamer forum and several other communities I frequented.

  • @Cowbee@lemm.ee
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    262 years ago

    The worst is the ever-shortening of content into an addictive format. It reduces mental clarity.

    • @RichCaffeineFlavor@lemmy.world
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      72 years ago

      Anxiety and depression reduce mental clarity. And people tend towards shorter forms of content when they’re trying to distract themselves. The egg came before the chicken.

  • @hperrin@lemmy.world
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    222 years ago

    I feel like it should read, “Millenials, remember to drink water in between your champagne glasses while you’re toasting to the death of social media.”

    • @Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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      32 years ago

      Such a simplistic and frankly dumb take, have you really thought about what you’ve said at all?

      Regularl people shouldn’t have a voice, all media should be run and distributed by an authority of some kind? If you’re not rich enough to own a newspaper company then you don’t get to express yourself? Only the likes of Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to set trends and influence people?

      Or did you just mean ‘some women are popular on social media for doing things that don’t interest me and therefore influencers and all of social media is evil and I hate it’ because that’s what it always seems to boil down to with kneejerk anti haters.

      • @Colour_me_triggered@lemm.ee
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        62 years ago

        You seem to think that social media is about giving people a voice. It isn’t. Most social media is set up either to harvest users personal data to sell for profit or to sell products to and push ideas on users. In most cases, both. It has become the primary method of distributing propaganda and influencing public opinion generally.

        Cancer

        • @Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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          22 years ago

          you’re basically Alex Jones with that level of paranoid delusion, they’re just a service that exists not a communist plot to turn frogs gay.

          And yes of course people attempt to control narratives on social media, you think it was better when Murdoch could just print anything he liked? and if even if you could prove it’s bullshit the only thing you could do was moan about it to some dunks down the pub.

          Social media isn’t perfect but your characterisation of it is absurd and based on nothing but kneejerk hatred of change

          • @Colour_me_triggered@lemm.ee
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            12 years ago

            If propaganda comes from Fox News it’s easy to identify as propaganda, but when people you know are citing seemingly well written and researched studies it’s more complicated. Propaganda has become more believable and widespread because of social media.

            But even if you ignore the propaganda, social media is still used to push products with targeted advertising and harvests data to sell to whoever will pay for it. It’s not a conspiracy at all it’s just how capitalism works.

            Even if you remove money from the equation all together, you’re seeing the highlights of everyone’s lives which has been shown to lead to depression and feelings of inadequacy.

            Not to mention that half the posts and comments on Reddit aren’t even made by humans. Lemmy might be a bit better, but honestly not much.

            Literally the only thing social media is good for is memes and even that distracts people from what they’re supposed to be doing and have been shown to be an effective method of spreading disinformation.

            Social media is cancer.

            How about instead of getting pissy over a valid criticism of companies that you have no duty to defend, either explain why any of the above isn’t true or come up with some positive aspects to social media.

  • @Reygle@lemmy.world
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    192 years ago

    I for one celebrate the inevitable crash/death of all this social media. It’s turned normal people into unacceptable drooling trash. That is if you’re able to ignore the data collection and use of it, in which case it turned the whole internet into a dumpster fire as well.

    • @s_s@lemmy.one
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      62 years ago

      It’s turned normal people into unacceptable drooling trash.

      They always were. Social media just gave them a platform to you.

      • @Reygle@lemmy.world
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        52 years ago

        It also gave those trash people the feeling of “look I’m not alone” and amplified all of it. At least before people were worried about being seen as a fuckwit.

  • Carlos Solís
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    182 years ago

    On one hand, it’s a bit sad to see the average person not know about the Fediverse and claim “welp, there’s nowhere else to go, it’s either staying on the same ten junkyards I know or quitting cold-turkey”. On the other hand, the relative obscurity kind of comes from the fact that there’s no single main instance of the Fediverse. Sure there’s things like Mastodon.Social, Lemmy.ML and Misskey.GG that concentrate most users of their niche, but by nature, there is not (and should not be) a centralized place where everybody is, that can be used as the poster child for the Fediverse.