Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @11:14PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 02 2018, @11:14PM (#616963) Journal

    I can't really recall seeing that. Maybe years ago. It seems I remember that phrase, or question, but I can't actually remember seeing it. Certainly not in the past few years. Do people still Yahoo?

    Probably, those emails that might contain that phrase go to my spam folder. Let me take a look.

    OH MY GOD!! I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED! A SEARCH FOR THAT PHRASE FOUND AN EMAIL FROM MR. JAIME COPELAND!! I've gotta get to JFK ASAP!! I don't know how that went to spam, instead of my inbox!

    COMPLIMENTS TO YOU,

      We wish to inform you that the diplomatic agent conveying the consignment
    box valued the sum of $ 500,000.00 Thousand United States Dollars has
      misplaced your address and he is currently at (John F. Kennedy
      International Airport) NY USA now. We required you reconfirm the
      following information's below so that he can deliver your consignment box
      to you today or tomorrow as information provided with open communications
      via email and telephone for security reasons.

      FULL NAMES:
      DELIVERY ADDRESS:
      MOBILE PHONE NUMBER:
      NAME OF YOUR NEAREST AIRPORT:
      A COPY OF YOUR PASSPORT/ID:

      Please do contact the diplomatic agent with the email below with the
      information's required.

      Contact Person: DHL COMPANY
      EMAIL: (atmcard9813@yahoo.com)
    MOBILE: +1 561 408 0431 (TEXT OR CALL HIM)

      Go ahead and see that you contact the diplomatic agent immediately
      because he is waiting to hear from you today with the information's.

      NOTE: The Diplomatic agent does not know that the content of the
      circumstances should you let him know the content The consignment was
      moved from here as family treasures, so never allow him to open the box

      Best Regards.
      DHL COURIER COMPANY LIMITED

    Alright, more seriously, I didn't find that phrase in either my inbox, or spam. There are a total of about six dozen emails with return addresses at yahoo.com, and all of them turned up in the search. But that phrase isn't there.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday January 03 2018, @02:30AM

    by dry (223) on Wednesday January 03 2018, @02:30AM (#617039) Journal

    I'm still subscribed to some egroups mailing lists. Egroups got bought out by Yahoo many years back. Looking at one from today, at the bottom where I don't usually scroll down to, I see this (First line is a link)

    Have you tried the highest rated email app?
    With 4.5 stars in iTunes, the Yahoo Mail app is the highest rated email app on the market. What are you waiting for? Now you can access all your inboxes (Gmail, Outlook, AOL and more) in one place. Never delete an email again with 1000GB of free cloud storage.