What Happens After the Death of Social Media? (noemamag.com) 111
"These are the last days of social media as we know it," argues a humanities lecturer from University College Cork exploring where technology and culture intersect, warning they could be come lingering derelicts "haunted by bots and the echo of once-human chatter..."
"Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks... " In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet's largest repositories of AI-generated spam. Research has found what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine-written posts now flood public groups — pushing scams, chasing clicks — with clickbait headlines, half-coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools like Midjourney... While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.
And much of it is slop: Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as "mostly reliable" — down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s... Platforms have little incentive to stem the tide. Synthetic accounts are cheap, tireless and lucrative because they never demand wages or unionize. Systems designed to surface peer-to-peer engagement are now systematically filtering out such activity, because what counts as engagement has changed. Engagement is now about raw user attention — time spent, impressions, scroll velocity — and the net effect is an online world in which you are constantly being addressed but never truly spoken to.
"These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content," the article suggests, "but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care..." Social media giants have stopped growing exponentially, while a significant proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds even took deliberate mental health breaks from social media in 2024, according to an American Psychiatric Association poll.) And "Some creators are quitting, too. Competing with synthetic performers who never sleep, they find the visibility race not merely tiring but absurd."
Yet his 5,000-word essay predicts social media's death rattle "will not be a bang but a shrug," since "the model is splintering, and users are drifting toward smaller, slower, more private spaces, like group chats, Discord servers and federated microblogs — a billion little gardens." Intentional, opt-in micro-communities are rising in their place — like Patreon collectives and Substack newsletters — where creators chase depth over scale, retention over virality. A writer with 10,000 devoted subscribers can potentially earn more and burn out less than one with a million passive followers on Instagram... Even the big platforms sense the turning tide. Instagram has begun emphasizing DMs, X is pushing subscriber-only circles and TikTok is experimenting with private communities. Behind these developments is an implicit acknowledgement that the infinite scroll, stuffed with bots and synthetic sludge, is approaching the limit of what humans will tolerate....
The most radical redesign of social media might be the most familiar: What if we treated these platforms as public utilities rather than private casinos...? Imagine social media platforms with transparent algorithms subject to public audit, user representation on governance boards, revenue models based on public funding or member dues rather than surveillance advertising, mandates to serve democratic discourse rather than maximize engagement, and regular impact assessments that measure not just usage but societal effects... This could take multiple forms, like municipal platforms for local civic engagement, professionally focused networks run by trade associations, and educational spaces managed by public library systems... We need to "rewild the internet," as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon mentioned in a Noema essay.
We need governance scaffolding, shared institutions that make decentralization viable at scale... [R]eal change will come when platforms are rewarded for serving the public interest. This could mean tying tax breaks or public procurement eligibility to the implementation of transparent, user-controllable algorithms. It could mean funding research into alternative recommender systems and making those tools open-source and interoperable. Most radically, it could involve certifying platforms based on civic impact, rewarding those that prioritize user autonomy and trust over sheer engagement.
"Social media as we know it is dying, but we're not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces..."
"The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones."
"Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks... " In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet's largest repositories of AI-generated spam. Research has found what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine-written posts now flood public groups — pushing scams, chasing clicks — with clickbait headlines, half-coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools like Midjourney... While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.
And much of it is slop: Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as "mostly reliable" — down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s... Platforms have little incentive to stem the tide. Synthetic accounts are cheap, tireless and lucrative because they never demand wages or unionize. Systems designed to surface peer-to-peer engagement are now systematically filtering out such activity, because what counts as engagement has changed. Engagement is now about raw user attention — time spent, impressions, scroll velocity — and the net effect is an online world in which you are constantly being addressed but never truly spoken to.
"These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content," the article suggests, "but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care..." Social media giants have stopped growing exponentially, while a significant proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds even took deliberate mental health breaks from social media in 2024, according to an American Psychiatric Association poll.) And "Some creators are quitting, too. Competing with synthetic performers who never sleep, they find the visibility race not merely tiring but absurd."
Yet his 5,000-word essay predicts social media's death rattle "will not be a bang but a shrug," since "the model is splintering, and users are drifting toward smaller, slower, more private spaces, like group chats, Discord servers and federated microblogs — a billion little gardens." Intentional, opt-in micro-communities are rising in their place — like Patreon collectives and Substack newsletters — where creators chase depth over scale, retention over virality. A writer with 10,000 devoted subscribers can potentially earn more and burn out less than one with a million passive followers on Instagram... Even the big platforms sense the turning tide. Instagram has begun emphasizing DMs, X is pushing subscriber-only circles and TikTok is experimenting with private communities. Behind these developments is an implicit acknowledgement that the infinite scroll, stuffed with bots and synthetic sludge, is approaching the limit of what humans will tolerate....
The most radical redesign of social media might be the most familiar: What if we treated these platforms as public utilities rather than private casinos...? Imagine social media platforms with transparent algorithms subject to public audit, user representation on governance boards, revenue models based on public funding or member dues rather than surveillance advertising, mandates to serve democratic discourse rather than maximize engagement, and regular impact assessments that measure not just usage but societal effects... This could take multiple forms, like municipal platforms for local civic engagement, professionally focused networks run by trade associations, and educational spaces managed by public library systems... We need to "rewild the internet," as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon mentioned in a Noema essay.
We need governance scaffolding, shared institutions that make decentralization viable at scale... [R]eal change will come when platforms are rewarded for serving the public interest. This could mean tying tax breaks or public procurement eligibility to the implementation of transparent, user-controllable algorithms. It could mean funding research into alternative recommender systems and making those tools open-source and interoperable. Most radically, it could involve certifying platforms based on civic impact, rewarding those that prioritize user autonomy and trust over sheer engagement.
"Social media as we know it is dying, but we're not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces..."
"The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones."
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm growing to hate social media. This last week I've been using a browser plugin to just block facebook, twitter and instagram due to the fact its just a sea of people hating and accusing each other of psychotic bullshit over the CK murder and like...... get a fucking grip americans.... Its just bad for the soul to be flooded with hyper partison aggravated political bullshit all day. So I've blocked it, and despite my inner idiot wanting to get on there and yell at people, I'll take the dopamine loss and just do something else. Like play the piano, or run the storyline on that new Dune Awakening expansion. Or go and drink rum with friends. Or fucking anything other than doomscroll on facebook again.
If AI kills social media , then maybe AI might just be good for something.
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As for youtube; it's now swamped with British Robot Guy#2 and midjourney clickbate titles. Nigh on useless. Rare signed out use only for me now without cookies.
From my peer group, people are absolutely switching off, so I am starting to think the cre-ai-tors have to vibe-code their
Re:Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
Some people's YouTube usage patterns must be drastically different than my own if it's turned useless due to AI. I've started to come across AI generated slop here or there and it's annoying but it hardly makes YouTube unusable.
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I enjoy watching videos about theoretical particle physics, space exploration and discussions/lectures on science. Holy crap the last six months has seen an explosion of A.I. Slop videos! Scripts that are ChatGPT-created, voiced by A.I., with imagery that is either A.I. created, or simply stolen from the internet.
For this subject of videos on YouTube I’d say that 1 in 5 are A.I. Slop these days. It’s pretty crazy.
Perhaps to its credit I just noticed last night that YouTube had added this to the
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Hate hearing about your problems with educational content. Of all the areas this could be an issue in that strikes me as some of the worst.
Now if we could just get a setting to completely ignore content with that warning...
There definitely needs to be a filter. It would never be perfect but it would make things a lot better.
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Yeah science videos are really getting brutalized by AI right now. Theres just floods of absolutely horseshit videos of the "SCIENTISTS DISCOVER PROOF OF GOD IN JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE" type shit that'll have some utterly banal voice droning on for 10 minutes about made up hallucinations from cGPT over a combination of stolen imagery and AI slop images. And you can see these vids having 1 - 2 million views filled with imbiciles on the comments "praise lord! i knew it was true" type shit.
Its really depressing w
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Bear in mind its only a small percentage of people who post like that, most people have better things to do with their lives that waste time getting into online arguments (says someone posting on social media right now albeit a tech site).
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I'm growing to hate social media.
He posted in an online discussion forum...
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's exactly sarcastic shit like this that pushes people away.
Who is pushed where? Social media is more active than ever before? It seems to me that the outrage and sarcastic shit is what people are here for.
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Yes - but I don't consider this "social media" as used in the vernacular as I'm not posting my foodie pics here... nor am I seeing any posts about travel pics, dogs and cats, etc;
Now sure, there is the same inane "the world as I see it" type discussions here but that's to be expected in a "discussion forum"!
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If AI kills social media , then maybe AI might just be good for something.
I am so stealing that.
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If you limit social media to those you listed I agree, but there are some more specialized forums around that don't suffer from the flood of slop and they are alive, even though they have been pushed back by Facebook and some have died those that are left are fine.
Social media will just find new forms.
Re: Good. (Score:2)
I've been advising people to learn guitar. It's considerbly easier than piano for beginners, and truly a very fine instrument, that can bring a lifetime of enjoyment.
I knew this was all coming when I began encountering odd pages of gibberish close to 10 years ago.
One can hope! (Score:3, Insightful)
"not to be harvested, but to be heard" (Score:5, Interesting)
The world does not need to hear from most people. And by most people I mean a staggeringly large percentage of the population. Including me, in case you're leaping to point that out... I agree. What the average person has to say should mostly be heard by their family, some of it by their community, perhaps a tiny bit of it by their township, and virtually none of it beyond that. The idea of global connection as a positive force is a delusion.
I believe that people are generally good. And good people can connect locally with other good people. You know who has the greatest need to reach out of their swamps to find other like-minded folks? Shitty people. It's those representing the worst of humanity who find connection online the most attractive, because exposing it in person is dangerous. If you hate women, the internet is your perfect escape. You can commiserate with your misogynistic brethren 24 hours a day. Then you put on your game face and hide IRL.
We have a word for it when people harboring some dark tendencies reach out into cyberspace and evolve their positions. It's called "radicalization". And why are they radicalized? Because every jackass can be heard. And those shrieking the loudest aren't our best.
Know what we don't have a word for? The process of that person reaching out and discovering things aren't that bad, and choosing positive directions.
Would we really lose much of value if all social media suddenly vanished? Well, unless you're prepared to defend the idea that people didn't lead vibrant lives in 2002, the answer is mostly no.
Our brains did not evolve to live in this mess of connection and isolation. We've been beta testing a new way of being for the last 20 years, and the data doesn't look good.
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I wrote my comment - just below - before I read yours. You 'went specific', and I took a wider view. That said, I suspect that you and I would have some interesting conversations were we ever to meet.
I guess that's why I keep coming here - every once in a while I find smart, stimulating people who are worth engaging with. The older I get, the more precious that is to me.
The idea of global connection as a positive force is a delusion.
I never thought of it that way, but you may be onto something. That said: given the reach of corporations and the fact of world trade, mayb
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given the reach of corporations and the fact of world trade, maybe individual citizens having global connection via the internet is better than not having it?
I wouldn't extend my argument to the entire internet. I think there's a great deal of it that is wonderful. I'm ranting about social media in the broadest sense. I like commerce via the internet... mostly. Although again there is a dark side to modernity. We are advertised at and sold to 24 hours a day, and that's new. When I was a child, most stores
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I hear you, and I too wish the internet was less commercialized. As for store hours, I'd like to go part-way back to the way things were when I was a kid.
I think having longer shopping hours is good, but I think having one day a week where the majority of the population isn't working would be better for society. Sunday seems the natural candidate, given that there are several stat holidays on Mondays, at least in Canada. One day a week where families and friends can count on being able to get together in re
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It's the scourge of a new breed of mal/adware from html-load.com. More and more sites are using it, and it very much is malware, integrating like a virus into the page loading using javascript. It uses deceptive practices such as the domains html-load and css-load.
If you don't use chrome, I find the following filters added to ublock origin seem to block it completely on slashdot and most
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Thanks - I'll try those suggestions, and the ones of the commenter below.
Re: "not to be harvested, but to be heard" (Score:2)
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What's up with ads on Slashdot getting past uBlock in Firefox? 'Block Element' isn't working. If this keeps up, I'm done
I have been successful fixing such issues in the past by uninstalling uBlock Origin and then reinstalling it (can't update it otherwise?).
Also, I see I've added custom filters
as.slashdot.org/
h t t p s://html-load.com/contents/
over time, for some reason.
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Thanks - I'll try those suggestions, and the ones of the commenter above.
Re:"not to be harvested, but to be heard" (Score:5, Interesting)
The world does not need to hear from most people. And by most people I mean a staggeringly large percentage of the population.
As a grizzled veteran of the earlier internet, I have to agree with you. There was a time when there might be kooks on the internet, but at least they were smart kooks. A time when you had to have some savvy to get on it. Now you walk into a smartphone store, and walk out w full netizen. Caplocks loaded and ready to rumble.
I believe that people are generally good.
I wish I did.
You know who has the greatest need to reach out of their swamps to find other like-minded folks? Shitty people. It's those representing the worst of humanity who find connection online the most attractive, because exposing it in person is dangerous.
I believe it is a core competency of humanity. If there is a bit of anonymity involved, the evil within that is inside people comes out. It is in everyone.
If you hate women, the internet is your perfect escape. You can commiserate with your misogynistic brethren 24 hours a day.
If you hate men, you go to TikTok and there's a lot of content that will allow for confirmation bias, and amp up the misandry.
Point is, whatever one might hate within, they can find like others online, and enjoy their hatred in community.
In regards to radicalization, I helped a friend get connected to Facebook. And it radicalized the bejabbers out of him. He went from a middle of the road guy to full on MAGA with conspiracy underpinnings in a short time. The algorithms do this. Click on something on Facebook or Youtube and the algorithm serves you up something a little further along so to speak. Filling your head with unadulterated crap.
On Youtube now, I clicked on something about Charlie Kirk. Feed fills up with more of the same. I read one of those goofy AI generated revenge stories where a man or woman suffers some indignity at work or with their significant other, so takes revenge. So my feed really went nuts. Sometimes I don't get anything that I'm actually interested in, a screen full of revenge stories, and whatever political thing I might have watched.
The weird thing is it kinda took over from my real interests, like Woodworking, cars, motorcycles, WW2 history, and other guy stuff. The occasional psychology stuff, Content generated by actual people.
Would we really lose much of value if all social media suddenly vanished?
No.
Social media is suffering the same thing as UseNet (told you I've been around the net a long time) The tragedy of the commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] In this case, with unfettered access by anyone, it destroys the resource. And AI generated crap is just taking it to a tipping point.
And if I may note, this was becoming obvious long ago. I run several list servers with a lot of features. Files, images, databases. We don't do videos because of bandwidth. All with specific main topics. The rules are simple. Keep roughly to topic. Conversations are allowed to go where they may as long as they are civil. Non commercial sales are okay. Avoid politics.
If someone violates a major item, the list goes on lockdown. Like the time a guy posted a conspiracy theory about O'Blama flying diseased Mexicans into the US in order to kill white people. It was hilariously stupid, but created a temporary kerfuffle. And lockdown took care of it pretty quickly.
The danger of course, is overzealous moderation. I don't want to become some sort of Reddit, with little fiefdoms ruled by cock-a-hoops. But we've been active friendly communities for around 20 years now.
Boundaries. For as much as many people won't admit, boundaries are needed. Without them, things fall apart.
Well, unless you're prepared to defend the idea
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On Youtube now, I clicked on something about Charlie Kirk. Feed fills up with more of the same. I read one of those goofy AI generated revenge stories where a man or woman suffers some indignity at work or with their significant other, so takes revenge. So my feed really went nuts. Sometimes I don't get anything that I'm actually interested in, a screen full of revenge stories, and whatever political thing I might have watched.
If you do not login to watch YouTube, when your feed gets all messy like, just wipe out your cookies. It resets the algorithm. If you are logged in though, you are fucked forever as far as I know. There is no way to stop them from tagging you for that crap.
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I think part of the problem here is "what is social media?". Slashdot is a primitive form of social media, and hey, we're all still here, and AI doesn't seem to have taken over, and whilst some of the editors have been spearheading slop long before AI got into the game, there's not really any algorithm at play here.
Contrast to "the big ones" we all know - the slop problem is very real there, and so are the echo chambers. It's hard to know what to do about that. My personal view is that education is probably
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I actually compartmentalize forums and social media. I don't think online discussions by knitting fans is more toxic than Thursday night in person knitting groups are (or were). The problem is when the crap leaks over from social media. When your forum is about the finer points of hand building ukuleles and somebody posts rant about Jews, that's where the friction resides. But the difference is that forums like that can and should be moderated for topic, it's not a Wild West. There is supposed to be a point
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I was in Oslo this summer and went to the Nobel Museum; they had an insightful and inspiring art presentation on echo chambers. The key is really to understand when you are in one and seek out new information... which is exactly why it is hard to break the cycle as people have to want to change.
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Slashdot is "good" social media, but I don't think it's from it being primitive or the lack of algorithms. There's just nothing to exploit. And it's the exploitation that makes social media bad - whether it's the parent company making the experience worse to tweak ad dollars or the opportunists who do the same from within the platform.
Lilo & Stitch (2002) is hardly the most well-watched movie, but a monster bent on destruction and mayhem simply ran out of things to do because it was on an island disco
Re: "not to be harvested, but to be heard" (Score:2)
Example. LetsEncrypt. Free certificates are just great right?
Sure. Think about it. Google or whoever is behind LE now has the email addresses of millions of highly educated and deeply embedded systems operators.
I'm guessing that could be pretty valuable. Are we that valuable? Maybe not, but we're probably worth something to the digital overlords.
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In the absence of the internet, voices were still heard globally. But I get your point. It's a mess. I don't know that there's a solution. I suspect there isn't.
But what I do suggest is that we can do without social media and be better off for it. It doesn't right the ship, but at least we can slow the rate at which we take on water.
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Would we really lose much of value if all social media suddenly vanished?
Nope, not at all. Well said on the rest.
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We have a word for it when people harboring some dark tendencies reach out into cyberspace and evolve their positions. It's called "radicalization". And why are they radicalized? Because every jackass can be heard. And those shrieking the loudest aren't our best.
The irony is that the very thing we celebrated the Internet for in the early days, it's ability to bring together niche interests and organize marginalized voices, is also its greatest weakness and probably its downfall. So assume you're in favor of LGBTQ+ rights. Yes, the Internet was a blessing to the movement, helping the community organize and build a voice. People who may be closeted were now able to explore their identities and ideas with others online even if they lived in communities that may have m
Re: "not to be harvested, but to be heard" (Score:2)
Amplification != free speech
One word (Score:5, Funny)
What Happens After the Death of Social Media?
Life.
\o/ (Score:3, Funny)
Back to normal?
Re: \o/ (Score:2)
Define normal
Enshittification is a human trait (Score:5, Insightful)
From assaulting pristine wilderness and slowly turning it into vast tracts of dormant, rusting, poisoned industrial wastelands; to taking the internet from a vibrant new frontier to the equivalent of a shot-spotted mattress in a ratty cheap hotel; we humans seem to excel at taking things too far. We're rapacious, and we're wont to foul our own nests, forever moving on until there's nothing left to spoil.
I'd rather not believe that, but just about everything I see and read leads me to that conclusion. I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise, so please feel free to contradict me.
I think that there's much in humanity to love, and I see it daily. We're adaptable and ingenious and industrious and generous and compassionate - but God! we can be so incredibly fucked up and self-defeating.
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Is it sad or "fucked up"? I suppose, compared to some imaginary ideal that never existed in reality. But at s
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It's funny, I've been doing a lot of thinking about life - not just human life, but all life and its history on planet Earth - over the past few years. So I recognized what you were saying immediately, because of similar thoughts I've had. But when I wrote my comment, I indulged myself in a kind of 'human exceptionalism' without realizing it. So thanks for the reality check.
But at some point it's like getting angry with dandelions for trying to grow in your lawn. We were never not this and neither was anything else.
Too true - and thanks again. And yup, I still get irrationally angry at the dandelions, even as I marvel at their persistence and hardi
who cares? (Score:2)
"social media" has been dead for years even before the AI slop, when we had the idiot slop and then the spam bot slop.
No 1 is to ban user tracking (Score:2)
If nothing else is achieved, eliminating tracking of individuals would restore the level playing field for traditional advertising channels.
Re: No 1 is to ban user tracking (Score:2)
I don't know the answers, but declining engagement should catch the attention of the digital overlords eventually, with a subsequent tweak of the model.
Just because it's bad... (Score:3)
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The article doesn't say anything about social media being bad. It is only speculating on the trend of mass AI slop being pushed upon the user base. Extrapolating on the major impact it's already had.
Too much "content", not enough interaction (Score:2)
Social media fails when it devolves into people commoditizing their experiences by reducing them to content for monetization purposes. The user may not profit off such content, but the host company certainly will.
AI slop removes the user's experiences and replaces them with machine-generated replicas. There's no need for people to engage with social media after that point. Bring in actual interaction between users rather than valid co-consumption of someone else's content and maybe it can serve a purpose
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Vapid, not valid. Meh.
Why 'better algorithms'? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was on Twitter pretty early (I eschewed just about all other socmed platforms), and it was really very good before algorithmic delivery of content started.*
If there's no algorithm, there's no algorithm to game, and a lot of this awful goes away. See posts from those I choose to follow. Period. That's the way I'd like it again.
Personally, I'd suggest removing the 230 protections for companies that deliver content algorithmically: by doing so they're actively acting as publishers, not neutral hosts for the content of others.
*(the original sin at Twitter was 'breaking replies'. Closing the API, delivering content algorithmically, prohibiting alternate clients all further enshitified it. The Musk disaster is just a coda.)
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If there's no algorithm, there's no algorithm to game, and a lot of this awful goes away. See posts from those I choose to follow. Period
On Twitter, click on the tab that says "Following." Never click on the tab that says "For You." It's not for you, it's for advertisers.
Then you will only see things from people you follow.
Re: Why 'better algorithms'? (Score:2)
Thanks, but I gave up on Twitter a long time ago, before the first Trump. The algorithm has turned it into a space where the latest cause of the week was all I'd hear about.
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Re: Why 'better algorithms'? (Score:2)
Nope.
You didn't read the "Period" part.
Having an optional algorithm doesn't make all the spam, the slop, the bots disappear.
Changing 230 would provide industry-wide pressure to stop algorithmic delivery.
As someone else noted: "show me all posts in reverse-chrono order" is also an algorithm, so the regulation would have to be really specific.
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Having an optional algorithm doesn't make all the spam, the slop, the bots disappear.
That's literally what it does.
You haven't used twitter for many years, have no intention of looking at it, and yet you pretend to know what is going on there.
If you don't know something, don't pretend you do.
Re: Why 'better algorithms'? (Score:2)
It's not as though I haven't seen it in years. I don't actively participate, try not to read often, but I maintain my account, mainly so no one can squat on the handle.
You seem really ready to jump on me. I'm not sure why. Hope I haven't pissed you off.
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Yeah but you have to be very careful to define what is and isn't algorithmic.
I know it's when I see it, but in a technical sense, selecting posts by people you have followed and displaying them in reverse chronological order is an algorithm. In addition spam filtering is an algorithmic process and one it's essentially impossible to eschew.
Re: Why 'better algorithms'? (Score:2)
Follow the content you want without interference , voting and therefore popularity, only by people. It seemed to work.
F*ck KimK and the beautiful people they forced to the top.
No Social Media, Charlie Kirk would still be alive (Score:3)
We probably wouldn't have heard of him and neither would his shooter.
Social media can be killed, burnt and shot into space.
Overwhelmingly it has done more harm them good. Dystopian nightmare is understatement.
If you said I am going to invent an advertising platform that will profit from people sharing horrific and hateful content, I am hoping you would say nope. I don't believe anyone who is not a monster is ok with kids seeing a man get shot, what we used to call a snuff video, in between adverts for chocolate crypto flakes.
The companies are complicit, the advertisers are complicit. Social Media is a hell hole manufactured by them for greed.
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As it was back in shit posting in 1920 classified ads or on MySpace, people want a platform to scream into the void.
And just as an aside, one of the most talked about VHS videos at my school was the "Faces of Death" series. With no internet or phones, we were trading bootlegged copies of these things not even knowing the original film had been out for 10 years and that it was fake. You can either forbid it and punish your kid or you can sit down and watch the video with him and say, "Wait, is that monkey
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I have a friend that gets stressed and goes down the sea to scream at it. It's beautiful, no one is bothered by the noise of the scream, it doesn't do anyone any harm. I guess it makes her feel better or she wouldn't keep doing it.
Shit posting on social media, might feel harmless in isolation, but it clearly isn't. Ask Charlie and his shooter.
Shit positing has been monetised on an industrial scale ... "giving every idiot a megaphone"
Scream at the sea. Scream into your pillow. Scream at a noisy traffic. It's
If social media can survive... (Score:2)
How about we just talk to each other? (Score:3)
Nah, that's crazy talk.
U S E N E T ?? (Score:2)
USENET aka NetNews was the immediate discussion predecessor of social media (amongst which I count /. as one of the first and lasting). If you want to know whether and how social media is fading, look at it.
AFAICS, USENET has distributed costs and no revenue model. Social Media has serious centralized server costs by like print, but can charge for [much] advertising and some subscription. USENET died when ISPs noticed few users actually used it, so little customer value. Significant costs, running a new
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"USENET died when ISPs noticed few users actually used it" - it also died a bit when deja-news was bought by google, turning it into google groups. ISPs were now thinking (incorrectly, of course) that they were paying for some Google branded service...that was coincidentally getting less use directly because Google was offering a web page interface to the same data.
So it was a gradual fade-out at the ISPs initially as people started trying web-bb's (never totally caught on, and survivers like SJGames' illum
Re: U S E N E T ?? (Score:2)
Big Brother FCC is likely too stupid, but both of these moves corral the net somewhat (pops elsewhere).
Re: U S E N E T ?? (Score:2)
Too late (Score:2)
So many people have already been radicalised on social media, and it looks like their heads have been fucked irreversibly. They're now addicted to mindlessly repeating political slogans and hating people their politics (which is now more like a religion) tells them to hate. Even if Facebook, Twitter, maybe Instagram too were to die soon, which I very much doubt, they will just find some other social media, but one that only allows their political viewpoint. It's already been happening for some time (Bluesky
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It isn't just politics though or its why everything has to be shoved into one of two political platforms in the use (a few more in others) no matter how inconsistent or unrelated to the other planks assigned to that platform, take your pick.
People are wired to seek validation. What social media fundamentally does is connect a like-minded bunch of people however small a minority they might be, which lets them feel their wildest most disordered, anti-social thoughts actually enjoy some wide acceptance. They
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I wonder if the same things can reliably be said about religion.
When Social Media died (Slashdot, Reddit) (Score:2)
I use the AI more and more to craft the few news that interest me.
Youtube is also decent, as you can block channels you do not like and subscribe to those you like.
The search engine is shite, but with the AI, you can find new talents.
P.S: The Eternal September is real
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"Hey GPT, what sort of news would I like to hear today?"
"Well, the sprots teams you like all won their games. The politicians you don't hate are now very popular and credit your support for their success. Last night's lotto numbers were, again, the exact same numbers you picked. The popular wars are all going in the direction you want. Time magazine just named you Person of the Year, and both GQ and Cosmopolitan agree you are the sexiest person
Forums aren't social media (Score:2)
But I don't consider that social media. Social media is what you used to engage with real people in the real world. What I'm doing here isn't social I'm really just screaming into a void. This is closer to blogging than social media.
People use Facebook and sites like it to find other hobbyists or people with the same views and religion or hunt for jobs etc. and of course they use it to keep in touch with
Not even AI slop (Score:2)
People produce plenty of slop without AI. Example: on X every post that asks a provocative question, e.g., "All blondes are dumb, do you agree?" No useful information, pure karma farming.
I don't understand why the site don't filter such crap out. Surely their users would be at least as engaged by real content?
I Still Don't Get The– (Score:2)
–$$$ for eyeballs thing.
The entire ad revenue thing seems so weird to me. Yet it seems to be what drives teh intertubes.
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I guess it works... ad impressions = sales, targeted ad impression = more sales
We're probably outsiders who have been using adblockers for decades, but for normies who can barely distinguish "sponsored content" from a genuine, organic post... it's open season.
But wait, there's more (Score:2)
In addition to all of the stuff in the article, there are other problems
I'm a glassworker
In the past, glassworkers used social media to show their work and make sales.
Some of the glass pieces were "functional". This is a word we use for cannabis smoking pipes.
Advertisers didn't want to be associated with "illegal drug paraphernalia". even in states where cannabis was legal, so they pressured the social media companies to delete accounts. This caused talented, hard working artists to lose sales. Some even qu
We Won't Have A Choice (Score:2)
Open internet isn't a thing anymore. Between countries deciding the plebs don't deserve encryption and others deciding to allow age-verification requirements so the third-parties can collect all the data they usually can't; there won't be any large scale communities. All we'll have are small, isolated micro-communities that exist within whatever their government allows them to access.
Garbage-IN / Garbage-OUT (Score:2)
Feed A.I. with hot garbage and you get hot garbage instead of verified vetted factual information. This is why an Enclyclopedia is more accurate than Wikipedia, etc. Human information needs to be processed by humans and validated as correct. Science is all about proving everything. Well not so online with news or social media. Nope that can be completely incorrect and is frequently so.
AI is not intelligent. It's a mimic regurgitating what it saw online. AI is useful for many things but it's not "there yet"
One bird vs a flock. Same problem. (Score:2)
Naming it Twitter was fitting and foreshadowing the inevitable end-state of Social Media.
Oh well (Score:2)
Back to email lists, newsgroups and tumbleweed /.
We just let the AIs talk to each other (Score:2)
I mean, they're already taking over social media. So let them have it. They can spout their nonsense all day long, and other AIs can reply all day long. Then the rest of us can go about life with less interference from AI, because AI will be too busy to bother with us humans.
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That's what they did with discotheques
ROOSTA:
[Shouts] Beeblebrox!! All these dancers! They’re robots!!
ZAPHOD:
[Shouts] They’re just to make the place look crowded!! Give it some atmosphere!!
ROOSTA:
[Shouts] But there aren’t any real people here at all!!
ZAPHOD:
[Shouts] So what’s new?!
Can't kill it. (Score:2)
Not while humans have psychological vulnerabilities to exploit to maintain addiction to it, and certainly not now that nation-states and other powerful actors have realized just how damn effective it can be as a type of propaganda.
There's a reason even a giant company like Facebook has given up on trying to connect people and instead wants to serve up news feeds, articles, information, etc.
The world I want to see, is one where AI is... (Score:2)
Decades-long dip in teen mental health? (Score:2)
Re:Social media is dying? (Score:4, Informative)
The UK government isn't corrupt - they're just the usual bunch of techno illiterate legal/political types who think the solution to any problem is more legislation. And not just the current Labour government, it was the same with the previous Tory ones too.
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The UK government has no idea what the issue is, let alone figure out what to solve.
Hence why they keep being replaced at each election.
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Re: Social media is dying? (Score:2)
Re: Social media is dying? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Social media is dying? (Score:5, Insightful)
100% the above. The levels of misinformation floating around the world today are drastically greater then in the 20th century to the point where we have wide swaths of people doubting once universally popular things like vaccines and democracy or believe in any one of dozens of major conspiracies that have become a thing these last couple decades. This level of misinformation floating around is not normal and quite a lot of people are not equipped for sorting through it all.
What once held great promise has become awash in misinformation that too many believe.
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The primary fault isn't from social media. It's the fault of trusted institutions which made too many mistakes and didn't properly correct them.
If you have 1st hand knowledge of a few things and see those trusted institutions getting them wrong, you might speak out trying to correct them. Except the institution or other people without 1st hand knowledge then personally attack you instead of reviewing your claims and fixing themselves. Now your trust in that institution is broken and everything they told
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Except institutions were getting things wrong for as long as there have been institutions. Nothing in this life is perfect, there will never be an institution that never makes a mistake or presents things in ways someone might not like. What's changed is now there's dishonest actors operating on social media taking advantage of people's frustrations.
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