SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Americans got tired of big social media in 2017. Or at least, we stopped wanting to look at it, and we stopped pretending to like it.
This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it’s true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey of Americans’ attitudes towards tech’s biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they “greatly” or “somewhat” disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. More than 10 percent of respondents described Facebook’s effect on society as “very negative,” and 10.5 percent said the same about Twitter — in both cases a higher number than the other four companies combined.
The survey doesn’t reveal why Americans feel the way they do, but last December, writing about the impulse to call 2016 “the worst year ever,” The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino articulated a pretty good guess as to why spending your time on the web’s massive, news-saturated platforms might feel so bad: “There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the internet,” she says. 2016 couldn’t possibly be the worst year in history, Tolentino decided, but it was the year that convinced her the promise of the social media had been false, and that “the internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.”
[...] The old promise of the internet — niche communities, human connection, people exchanging ideas, maybe even paying each other for the work they’d made — never really lost its appeal, but this year it came back with a miniature vengeance.
We can see this longing for community — and specifically, the sort of small, weird communities that populated and defined the early internet — everywhere. There’s Amino, the Tumblr-inspired app that lets fandoms build online spaces that are essentially club houses, then coordinate the creation of elaborate works of fan art, fiction, cosplay, and fandom lore. At the request of its largely teenage audience, the platform released its first cosplay yearbook this December, and doled out honors to the best writing, photography, and tutorials around cosplay. The thousands of fandom-specific rooms are lively and strange, each with their own moderators and byzantine rules.
And there’s the kids who are bending major platforms to their will, having their fun on Instagram but circumventing the intended use by making “finstagrams,” separate, strange accounts that aren’t tied to the Facebook social graph and therefore let users post weirder, funnier content they wouldn’t share to everyone they know.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:37PM (4 children)
Ummmm...were they REALLY your friends? Doesn't quite seem so.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday January 02 2018, @11:42PM (3 children)
He said "over time", so that's not unreasonable. You need to maintain friendships or they decay. I believe the study on it said you needed to have a friendly contact (not necessarily in person) once a month to prevent the decay. If they do their contacts over Facebook, and you don't use it, then the friendships are quite likely to decay over time.
Perhaps you used to meet at the same coffee shop now and then, but one of you moved, or got married (or divorced), and the schedules shifted, and now you no longer meet IRL, and you don't share the same internet communication channels. So, yes, the friendships can decay. If you get back in touch you may pick them up again. (That's happened to me on occasion.) And if you do you can quickly be just as close a friend as you were before.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:14AM (2 children)
My point is, will they ONLY maintain contact over FB?
They can't pick up the phone? Email? Snail mail?
How did friends stay in contact when I was a kid? There was no FB, no cell phones. Gee, you picked up the land-line, or sent a letter. Mail them a cassette of Black Sabbath.
Noooo....today's 'friends' need FB, cause they're too lazy to pull out the record, put in a cassette, do a recording, get stamps, a small box, tape...THAT was friendship, not Like! Like! Sent you cookies!
Grandma knew what was going on because you visited them or phoned them (actually, the FB generation is probably why all those old people die unnoticed in Japan): you know, real contact.
Wait! A party? Well I'll phone Archie and Betty, you phone Cheech and Chong, get them to phone someone: PARTY!
Noooo....have to arrange it on FB, cause I'm too fucking lazy to phone 'friends' cause they're like fake news: FAKE FRIENDS!!!
It's NOT hard: it's called Old School! You should try it! (Hint: REAL friends make the effort.... REAL friends don't make friends use FB cause it's easier.)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03 2018, @09:51AM (1 child)
Exactly. And the difference is also easy to spot other way: many people have 0 or 1 real friends while many social media users have 400 "friends".
Social media is just for lonely exhibitionists and voyeurs. And ironically the more you do it, the lonelier you will become.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 03 2018, @04:19PM
Yup: i'd rather have that 1 true friend. Even no friends would be better.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---