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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the coffee-klatsch-2.0 dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:40PM (3 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:40PM (#616790) Journal

    Probably has an add-on that eliminates all the red green stuff. Almost all of my windows and tabs are dark background, with light coloring. Generally, black background, with white text, but it varies a little.

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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:52PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:52PM (#616800)

    So, you really do see the world in black & white.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:59PM (1 child)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:59PM (#616805) Journal

      Uhhhhhhh - no - the background doesn't smother images. I look at images on my browser pages, and there's yellow, blue, various shades of red and blue that I can never identify, etc ad nauseum.

      To much white space hurts my eyes, so I've eliminated most of it.

      • (Score: 2) by chromas on Tuesday January 02 2018, @06:24PM

        by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 02 2018, @06:24PM (#616815) Journal

        To much white space hurts my eyes, so I've eliminated most of it.

        The dream of many college students.