Why Modern Social Networks Suck

[TWD]

After more than 20 years of being chronically online I can't help but feel a slight bit of disappointment at the current state of the internet. Perhaps it's just nostalgia? Due to changes in brain chemicals during our teen years people have a tendency to remember those years more fondly. I was a teenager during the years that forums like BeyondUnreal were at their peak. Perhaps my current dissatisfaction with internet culture is as simple as that? Or perhaps I've just been online far too long. I remember when YouTube was bought by Google. I remember when Facebook was opened up to my university. I remember when Digg collapsed to be replaced by Reddit. I was there posting every day when short form video content took off with TikTok. Watching Elon Musk buy Twitter and rename it to X has been some of the juiciest drama the internet has ever seen. Yet I feel more and more disconnected from it all. Maybe in your late 30's you just get bored of that stuff? I have two toddler boys now so it's not like I have tons of time to give anyways.

And yet I still find myself instinctively reaching for my phone, or opening up a new tab. As though there's something I wanted to look up, and had simply forgotten that it existed. Perhaps there was something on my Facebook feed that I missed? I open my feed to find it almost as I left it with Facebook showing me the same posts from 3 days ago. How can it be that I've added thousands of people on there, but it still only shows me the same 20 people or so? Maybe it was something on Reddit? There's less activity there since the revolt over API changes, but it's still more active than the disappointing alternatives. I see a few replies, but it's just the same old hive mind opinions regurgitated. Sometimes I wonder how much of the activity is from real humans. Does it even matter? The users have names, but I rarely bother to read them. It's just another name in an endless sea of names that I'll probably never see again.

As I browse I come across some stories about Epic Games. They've been in the news lately as they lay off a substantial portion of their workforce. It seems the company is finally giving up on trying to replace the steam store. Instead they're focusing all their investment on creating an open metaverse. Which really just means trying to compete with Roblox. Perhaps that could be an opportunity? Last time I stood at such a crossroads I decided that I just didn't like Fortnite, and watched that game blow up without me. Maybe Epic is about to create that custom content sandbox we always wanted? Can I even find the time and attention to invest into such a thing? Or is that just going to turn into another dystopian nightmare? Why wouldn't I be skeptical? That's just always the way it's gone. Especially with Epic Games who I feel is more like an abusive lover now more than anything. I can't get myself to hate them, but I certainly don't trust them.

Which is why I don't think my dissatisfaction with the internet is just nostalgia or burnout. It's because we screwed it up. The community that I made my home in my teen years died a slow death because the economic engine behind it was discarded. I've been involved in some good communities since, but it's just not the same thing. Society became so enamored with becoming viral sensations that we crushed the small communities. The places where you recognize the names. The places where you have history (even if that history is the embarrassing things you did as a teenager). Places where what you create can be appreciated even if it's insignificant. You're interested in what others are doing because they are part of your community.

Instead we're just digital refugees, and it sucks.

Anyways, the forum is still here. Plus there's Discord. I'll try to check in more often.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

I don't think it's just nostalgia. For those of us that grew up in a time without prolific "Internet" or a way to easily communicate, especially with people we didn't know or live around, the promise of the Internet stood before us with almost infinite opportunities for anything we could imagine. I think it's pretty common among that age group to look at where things have coalesced to and be pretty disappointed with what those infinite possibilities have culminated into.

 

[Manticore]

I agree with all the above.

 

[The Dopefish]

When these forums had their heyday, there wasn't really any social media, certainly not to the extent that we have it today where things can be "reported" instantaneously (for better or for worse). A great example I can think of off the top of my head was 9/11/2001. I was in high school, in a computer class no less, but when the events of that morning were unfolding the typical news sites were getting hammered. So it is interesting to consider in retrospect that this the information on this forum (and indeed others) was crowdsourced basically live by all the active users getting all their info from wherever (mostly television media), not much unlike how we would on Twitter today. Now you look at Twitter and how quickly misinformation can be spread (see: Israel/Palestine) and how that can be seen by some as more important than the truth because we live in a society that is so used to extreme and partisan views; what lies in the middle is quickly squashed by the need for something grander and more severe, even if it isn't the healthiest option.

This all was well before the Internet really took off and became a way for corporations to make money. As with most things, once capitalism got involved the ceiling of potential gradually got lower and lower. (In my opinion) Twitter was a great source for live and fairly trustworthy news up until Elon Musk got involved. Now it's a free-for-all with decreasing journalistic legitimacy, instead allowing Johnny Everyman to pay money to advance/enhance their perspectives over those more serious entities. To the best of my knowledge, no other social media platform has reached the same sort of quality Twitter had pre-Musk. Same thing happened with Facebook: money got in the way of every other priority and we've seen the consequences for that all over the Western world.

Ultimately, what can you do when the pursuit of the dollar trumps everything else?

 

[TWD]

When these forums had their heyday, there wasn't really any social media, certainly not to the extent that we have it today where things can be "reported" instantaneously (for better or for worse). A great example I can think of off the top of my head was 9/11/2001. I was in high school, in a computer class no less, but when the events of that morning were unfolding the typical news sites were getting hammered. So it is interesting to consider in retrospect that this the information on this forum (and indeed others) was crowdsourced basically live by all the active users getting all their info from wherever (mostly television media), not much unlike how we would on Twitter today. Now you look at Twitter and how quickly misinformation can be spread (see: Israel/Palestine) and how that can be seen by some as more important than the truth because we live in a society that is so used to extreme and partisan views; what lies in the middle is quickly squashed by the need for something grander and more severe, even if it isn't the healthiest option.

This all was well before the Internet really took off and became a way for corporations to make money. As with most things, once capitalism got involved the ceiling of potential gradually got lower and lower. (In my opinion) Twitter was a great source for live and fairly trustworthy news up until Elon Musk got involved. Now it's a free-for-all with decreasing journalistic legitimacy, instead allowing Johnny Everyman to pay money to advance/enhance their perspectives over those more serious entities. To the best of my knowledge, no other social media platform has reached the same sort of quality Twitter had pre-Musk. Same thing happened with Facebook: money got in the way of every other priority and we've seen the consequences for that all over the Western world.

Ultimately, what can you do when the pursuit of the dollar trumps everything else?

I always hated Twitter, and I still hate it. Maybe that's primarily because I've never had much success on the platform? However, I pay their verified user subscription so that I can still access tweetdeck to read breaking news. I haven't really noticed much of a change on the site. The community notes feature seems to work well though.

Machine learning algorithms are simply optimizing based on a reward. When you overoptimize towards one metric things tend to go awry. Hence why YouTube is nothing but clickbait thumbnails now. An economy is the same thing only it's composed of multiple agents trying to maximize their rewards. How do you balance out such a system to include other factors into its decisions?

Community is able to provide at least some of those missing incentives. The actors involved know each other, and know that they will continue to interact with each other regularly in the future. Your own success hinges in part on other members of the community. So there's then an incentive to make every member of the community as strong as possible.

The only problem is that communities don't seem to scale very well past Dunbar's number of 200 active people or so. Larger than that and the incentives disappear as people see each other as strangers. So we create laws to give those incentives. Which then brings along all the issues we are so familiar with in the modern day. Laws have unintended consequences. The system becomes too complex. It gives considerable power to lawmakers which is its own perverse incentive. It seems that once you incorporate discretionary decisions into your system those decisions then become the weak point of the system. The only way you can improve the system is making better decisions. Something I'm not too confident in society doing any time soon.

At which point I feel that the only thing we can really do is to focus on smaller communities. I don't know if there's a real solution to the bigger issues, but I don't think we're going to get there if our communities are weak. Yet that's what we've let happen over the past 20 years both in real life and on the internet.

 

[Igoy]

I remain hopeful that there will become where social media will become so toxic (more than it is already) that it'll kind of implode on itself and people will seek out smaller communities with similar interests once more.

There was certainly something 'magical' about the heydays you're referring to, perhaps as Brizz said, it was the "promise" of what was on offer whereas everything is at our finger tips now. For better or for worse.

That said, I don't think it helps life doesn't particularly lend itself well now to having the free time we all once had to invest in social networks as we once did. Having 3 / 4 hours to myself to game is a luxury these days when trying to balance work / life / relationships etc. But even looking at IRC -v- Discord... IRC, we'd all sit there chatting sh-t with each other all evening, some playing games etc. Discord largely is now condensed down to somebody popping up out of the woodwork, a few messages get exchanged, and it goes quiet again for a few weeks.

That said, to echo my thoughts in the BuF Reunion Thread - pleasantly surprised to see so many people still around. Definitely still some members I think of and wonder how they are etc.