Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
One of the not-funny ironies of the 21st century has been that everything we thought was social media is actually just mass media, except it’s terrible and broken. Luckily, journalists and creators are finally figuring out how to leave the old media models behind and enter the future.
The term “mass media” became popular in the 1920s to describe pop culture in the age of industrial production. Mass-produced books, movies and radio shows created a paradigm for audiences where thousands or even millions of people could experience the same exact piece of media at the same time. Before the 20th century, most people experienced their entertainment live, in theatres, bars and concert halls, where the performance was always slightly different. But a movie or radio show was the same for everyone, no matter when or where you experienced it. You could buy standardised media products for the masses, just like shoes or cars.
Social media didn’t change this formula. Platforms such as X, Facebook and TikTok were made for mass consumption. Every post, video and livestream is a product aimed at the broadest possible audience. Yes, you can target your media at certain demographics if you like, or create filter bubbles. But the whole reason why follower counts matter is because we are still in a mass media mindset, looking to see who can deliver content to the largest number of people. That isn’t “social” anything. It’s mass production under a different name.
What if we tried to make media that was truly social, without AI slop and political scapegoating? One possibility is something called cosy media, which refers to apps or other content designed to help you connect with small groups of friends, often in a friendly, calming environment. Imagine the media equivalent of meeting up with friends to knit or play cards and talk beside the fire.
The game Animal Crossing, with its low-stakes missions and cute, natural setting, is an iconic cosy-media experience. App developers are trying to reproduce that aesthetic in social apps too – anything from a group chat to an online book club can be cosy. But it isn’t just about aesthetics. A cosy social app is designed to limit your social interactions with random strangers, steering you towards trusted friends instead.
I have been using the photo-sharing app Retro a lot recently. Unlike Instagram, where Retro’s creators cut their teeth, Retro is primarily intended to be used among small groups of trusted friends. And there are no algorithms pushing videos from strangers into your feed. When I open Retro, I feel like I’m hearing from my pals rather than tuning into a fire hose of nonsense and advertising. Nothing I post there is intended to go beyond a few dozen people. Like a group chat app, Retro lets you choose who you want to talk to in a mindful way, rather than shouting into a giant algorithmic void.
We may need cosy media to soothe ourselves in a frenetic, scary time, but we also need news and analysis. Unfortunately, many of our trusted news sources are falling apart. Journalists in the US, where I live, are leaving media outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and National Public Radio, citing diminishing resources and editorial freedoms.
Some, like economist Paul Krugman and technology researcher Molly White, have created successful, crowdfunded newsletters for their work. But most journalists don’t want to go solo: good reporting and analysis often require a solid team. That is why many are forming worker-owned co-operatives to start new publications, where they get institutional perks like lawyers, editors and helpful colleagues. This model is also good for consumers, who don’t want to search out and subscribe to dozens of individual newsletters just to catch up on current issues.
The worker-owned co-op model has already been a smashing success for several publications that started in the past couple of years. 404 Media [Paywall warning] is one such site, breaking news in the worlds of tech and science. Defector is a worker-owned co-op that covers sports and politics; Aftermath covers games; Hearing Things covers music. Flaming Hydra (to which I contribute) is a collective that publishes political analysis, interviews and cultural criticism. Coyote Media is about to launch in the San Francisco Bay area, to cover local news. And there are many other worker-owned local media co-ops forming.
Like mass media, social media often leads to loneliness and isolation. The point of cosy media and worker-owned publications is to rebuild community and trust. We might be witnessing the birth of a new information ecosystem, designed to help us understand the world again.
Related Stories
The Absurd Pirate's Internet Blog asks, is gen alpha screwed?:
However, I do think there is a STARK contrast between a curated show from the 90s-00s and a show like Cocomelon that is designed to be like heroin for babies. I walked in on my MIL and daughter watching Cocomelon together one time, and it was jarring seeing how, for one, low effort the animation and songs are, and two, how stimulating this show is, between the incredibly saturated colors to the jump cuts every second. What I learned was that this show uses focus groups of children to make it so there is not a break in the concentration. If a kid shifts his eyes away from the screen, the scene gets edited to address that.
Companies are literally designing everything for addiction these days. Trying to get you hooked on whatever they can profit off of as early in your development as possible.
The points raised there are discussed further by Andre Franca. He adds,
The author also mentions the "mental death" of parenting under modern life, and I totally get that. There are days when I'm so drained that a screen feels like a life raft, so the comparison of high-stimulant shows to "baby heroin" makes total sense to me. That crap is bad enough for an adult; for a child, it can be devastating. I've watched my oldest son's behavior shift in real-time depending on what he's consuming. When it's junk, he turns into different person - more reactive, less patient. It makes me realize that parenting today is largely about shielding them from a culture that wants to outsource their development to an algorithm.
What happens when a substantial portion of a whole generation achieves an age of majority with an nearly complete substitution of life experience for exposure to mindless digital heroin?
Previously:
(2025) Ban Social Media for Under 15s, Says French Report Warning of TikTok Dangers
(2025) Social Media Is Dead – Here's What Comes Next
(2015) Kids These Days: Six or Seven Nicknamed Generations
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Sunday July 27 2025, @02:31AM (12 children)
Let's just call the era of large, corporate-run websites a failure and go back to geocities.
(Score: 5, Informative) by sgleysti on Sunday July 27 2025, @04:39AM (11 children)
Neocities [neocities.org] is all about this. I have a page with them.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:23PM (8 children)
If all you want is a static website, Digital Ocean will host it for essentially free. My monthly usage charges are usually around $0.01, and I just noticed that I have around 1GB of content on the site.
You do still pay for a domain name, if you want one.
https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/website-hosting [digitalocean.com]
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:59PM (7 children)
Did you click the single link in my 11-word post basically pointing to that link? Neocities [neocities.org] offers free hosting. Like $0.00 free.
(Score: 1, Troll) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @04:40PM (6 children)
My point is: if you're allergic to quasi GeoCities branded training wheels hosting solutions, you can do your own thing elsewhere, also for Free - with zero advertising injection by the host.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by sgleysti on Sunday July 27 2025, @06:43PM (5 children)
Did you click the single link in my two short posts basically pointing to that link? Neocities [neocities.org] doesn't inject ads.
I get the sense you didn't click the link. I'd encourage you to at least take a brief look. Sure, it's not for everybody.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2025, @07:54PM (1 child)
You must be new to the Internets. Nobody ever clicks links. Ever.
(Score: 3, Funny) by sgleysti on Sunday July 27 2025, @08:27PM
Nah, I just never learn. I also still believe conversations would be better if people clicked links and read a little bit in order to obtain some kind of information about what they're replying to before replying...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @10:52PM (2 children)
The link that leads here? https://neocities.org/browse [neocities.org]
It's just a different vibe with in browser HTML editing, etc. from a "bring your own tools" hosting solution... GeoCities was fine for plenty of people, but it did seem to be marketed squarely at the 14 and under crowd and NeoCities seems to be riffing on that brand - not that you can't build whatever you want in NeoCities, just that it carries that aura of blink tags and two frame animated GIFs.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by sgleysti on Monday July 28 2025, @12:37AM (1 child)
Yeah, sure, you can get there from that link. For what it's worth, I used a text editor on my computer to make the site I have with Neocities and just uploaded it. Don't have to use their in browser editor if you don't want. I suppose I don't care about the "aura" of a webhost if they offer the service for free and it works.
It was just weird that your first response mentions Digital Ocean, claims it offers free hosting for static pages, but then mentions a monetary charge, even though it is small ($0.01). A cool thing about Neocities is that I don't have to enter personally identifiable information (like a payment method) to host a webpage there because the hosting is actually free.
It was also weird that your second response mentioned ad injection, which I'm guessing Geocities had but Neocities does not.
These responses made me think you responded without looking at what I was posting about. Just an odd way to correspond on a forum...
In the spirit of reading things before responding to them, the OP of this entire thread was talking about bringing back Geocities. That's what Neocities is up to.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 28 2025, @02:05AM
For what it's worth, my websites in the 1990s were all hand edited HTML in Windows Notepad or Notepad++... I tried a number of 100% Free hosting solutions around those years and eventually settled on just paying for one to avoid the hassle of having to find a new one and transfer my domain every time one of the free sites closed up or started charging or throttling or whatever.
> claims it offers free hosting for static pages, but then mentions a monetary charge, even though it is small ($0.01). A cool thing about Neocities is that I don't have to enter personally identifiable information (like a payment method) to host a webpage there because the hosting is actually free.
While that is cool, I have maintained a .com domain since 1997 - and keeping anonymous with that was much harder back then than it is now, but even now you're still quite traceable and paying for the domain.
>ad injection, which I'm guessing Geocities had but Neocities does not.
In today's environment, I would guess that Neocities will probably "play it cool" for much longer than those free hosts of the 90s did, but back then, in the Geocities days, rapid enshittification was the rule - not the exception.
>bringing back Geocities. That's what Neocities is up to.
Let's hope Neocities lasts considerably longer than Geocities did.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:24PM (1 child)
What's the catch? Did you read the Terms of Service?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Informative) by sgleysti on Sunday July 27 2025, @04:13PM
I just skimmed the TOS headlines. You can't use it for spam, SEO, distributing copyrighted material, etc.
The free version is limited to 1GB of storage space and 200GB of bandwidth per month; it doesn't support custom domains. See https://neocities.org/supporter [neocities.org].
Allowed file types are limited in the free version. See https://neocities.org/site_files/allowed_types [neocities.org].
The service really appears to be created by a guy who wanted to bring the spirit of geocities back to the web. Apparently he makes pretty good money from donations and people paying for the "supporter" service tier. See https://www.reddit.com/r/neocities/comments/w4d549/what_neocities_is_and_isnt_for/ [reddit.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by Barenflimski on Sunday July 27 2025, @04:05AM
Sounds great. I'd love to invest. How do we monetize this?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by anubi on Sunday July 27 2025, @04:18AM (6 children)
I won't participate in anything but tech forums.
I tried Yahoo groups and just made a lot more enemies than friends. And those friends were about sex discussions, not tech, fixing stuff, or philosophy. Few wanted to discuss where their viewpoint was coming from; just a quick resort to name-calling trying to foment hate and demonstration of ignorance.
The only way for me to come out psychologically intact is not to play.
Its just like how I used to open my email in a text editor that only displayed ASCII and hex codes for embedded unprinting control codes.
Then the big boys got control of it and rendered it damn near useless.
E-mail to me was a comm channel, NOT a forum for camouflaging embedded executables. I didn't even want links. The browser was supposed to recognize that and offer to go there. If HTML in my mail wasn't bad enough, JavaScript. Game over. I can still talk to some friends, family, and my bots on my old dumb system, which is still online, but most commercial emails use my burner phone to open, lest some less-than-honest webmaster toss a virus in there.
I don't like coming back to my house only to find evidence someone else has visited and rifled through my things, not do I like turning on my machine and
It now works different than it did before. So, my calendar won't work anymore...what else did they screw up or copy? Did they leave any time bombs?
Influencer people are using psychological warfare techniques to spin the message. I sense it. I see it much like decoding businesstalk. They all seem to intone there is something wrong with me and I need their product to make myself socially acceptable.
I could go crazy trying to meet everyone's expectations...First thing I deleted when I got my new phone was to delete/disable the preloaded Facebook.
I have more than enough to do already.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2025, @05:34AM (2 children)
And to the generations coming up now, this constant attack for your attention is normal.
And you wonder why they are having problems focusing.
The expectation that you will always be reachable is NOT normal.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2025, @11:28AM (1 child)
I've noticed a lot of people consider it a mandate to always answer the phone. Immediately. Even if someone is talking to them. I don't share my private phone number, so only my whitelist goes through. I let Lenny talk to them
( 423 ) 468 4041
( Automated number...it's just a recording of an old man deliberately crafted to trap telemarketers in a long pointless conversation . It starts off : "Hello! This is Lenny! " ).
There is another paid version of an AI assisted telemarketer trap that's a lot more sophisticated with various sound effects to model various events to keep telemarketers on the line. Persistent kids, doorbells, wives, husbands, dogs, babies, that sort of thing. All done with AI to spoof a telemarketer along as long as possible without agreeing to anything.
Its called "The Jolly Roger Telephone Company".
I am perfectly happy left alone. I have plenty of things to do. I do not involve others "entertaining" me. I prefer to do my own thing. I only have one old TV, and it's mostly off as there's usually nothing on of interest. There are some really old black-and-white stuff I will go for, but in my mind, the movie stars I liked now only exist on "celluloid". Its the stuff I used to watch with Grandpa. I have my own life to live, which to me is a helluva lot more than watching someone else's.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:28PM
Recently met the parents of one of our (21 year old) son's school mates... the husband spends 95%+ of his time at the restaurant table deeply engaged with his phone screen. He's capable of conversation, though his favorite topic seems to be series he binge watches, but three times now he's spent all of dinner - before ordering - waiting for the food - after eating - staring in his phone screen, and he eats quickly.
Grown ass 50+ year old man, looking like a heroin junkie but with a screen instead of a needle. He seems happy enough, and his wife is apparently past caring - she's down around our social group's baseline of 0 to 1% phone interaction while out to dinner with friends.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Sunday July 27 2025, @06:29AM
Why not both? [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:01PM
I suppose you could call my engine-swap kit Facebook group a "tech forum" of sorts... there are only about 200 kit owners worldwide, plus the inevitable curious might-buy-one passers through, but for the most part there's about 20 active to semi-active members in the group and it "feels small" - even smaller than Soylent News (which itself seems to be pretty cosy as compared with the green site.)
Most people simply act differently in "cosy" settings. They're more circumspect about their politics, less obnoxious overall. There's less to gain and more to lose in a small group by being a highly polarizing figure. When people compare face-to-face to online interactions, one thing I believe they usually neglect is the difference in scale of face-to-face settings, they're inevitably smaller - until you're at a convention or concert with jumbotron projection of the speaker's face and live global streaming, and even then the speaker / performer can only respond to a few hecklers in the crowd if they even choose to do that, and for the rest of the crowd: are those hecklers actually plants / part of the act? Being part of the crowd you may feel the general mood of the audience but you're restricted in conversation to less than a dozen people nearest you.
I went to an "underground restaurant" the other night, table for 16 - about 12 showed up. My wife and I only knew our friend who invited us, but the other 9 attendees were at least somewhat accessible throughout the evening, but in reality we could only converse with the 3-4 people closest to us. If anyone "went rude" they risk having a hostile conversational bubble for the remainder of the evening, so - being adults over 50, nobody did that - even though there was a spectrum of socio-political backgrounds (and LOTS of vegans...) It was a pleasant evening, we may attend again next month even though the food is vegan and not gluten free and we are not vegan and try to be gluten free most of the time.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:42PM
I don't even participate there anymore because my own comments over the years have been turned into AI responses.
Give me a tech forum that is locked down to readable by members only and I'll start playing again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday July 27 2025, @10:31AM (1 child)
Politics Industry, Social Media Industry, Advertising Industry, Entertainment Industry a Gaming Industry have fused.
It's because they have a common barrier of financial expansion: limited span of attention of humans, as an integral sum over the total population. You can sell more gadgets, phones or computers just by persuading users they absolutely need something very new and throw out the old.
But you just can't sell more games, more movies, more adverts than you have real lifetimes of humans as target audience. Obviously a saturation of the market.
The real competition is in time domain, which cannot be inflated, physically.
Thus, unlimited capitalist expansion at monetization of human attention is just impossible. It's a limit of human consciousness.
There will be a short period when artificial users who will pretend to consume advertisings to inflate, then the ads industry will collapse in deflation, because of its inevitable inefectiveness and the market will realize that with some phase delay.
Gaming industry will collapse first, just by tens of thousands of games created by generative AIs, all looking the same. Music, movies, advertisings industries all will suffer the same fate later.
In this burst, fragmentation of society to small groups, cooperating, keeping up their own interests, defending their own information space, is inevitable outcome.
The kinder you are, the easier it is for wicked people to morally coerce you.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:11PM
>small groups, cooperating, keeping up their own interests, defending their own information space, is inevitable outcome.
That's already happening, but I don't believe it's the inevitable - or even likely - result for the masses.
The masses are the target of all the focused industry marketing efforts, they try to reach as many as possible but inevitably fail to hit 100% saturation. There's a certain rebellious streak in human (and animal) nature whereby at least some of the population will refuse to follow the masses - closely related to children's tendency to rebel against their parents at some point, strike out on their own to "do their own thing."
As long as there is a powerful industrial complex (of goods, energy, entertainment, services, etc.) they are going to continue to succeed in collecting a significant portion of the population under their influence to perpetuate their power.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by VLM on Sunday July 27 2025, @02:19PM (7 children)
Trust them to be propaganda outlets, now easily ignored.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2025, @02:26PM (6 children)
Serious question, where do you get your news?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2025, @02:43PM
Bold of you to assume news is gotten.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:20PM
I read stuff on the internet, written by people I don't know about things I have no way of verifying.
Then I decide I'll agree with whatever I like, and ignore the rest as "fake news."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:47PM (3 children)
Bloomberg, the local newspaper, and Yahoo Sports. Yes, I pay for Bloomberg.
Bloomberg's whole model is making money for its subscribers, due to reputation of being right about markets. Everything else is just noise. As they say in "The Wire," follow the money and it will show you the real trends.
Also, there are a fair amount of East Asian newscasters and East Asian focused stories on Bloomberg Television, moreso than the other "binary" news networks. We are living in an East Asian world now, whether or not we want to admit it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by sgleysti on Monday July 28 2025, @12:40AM (2 children)
I'll bite. Do they keep publishing articles that suggest buying and holding low cost index funds over and over? With slightly different wording, of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31 2025, @07:23PM (1 child)
It's not targeting 20 year olds who are making six figures for the first time in their life. I would argue that there are very few people watching Bloomberg who aren't already maxing out all three of their 401k/IRA/HSA and in VT or FZROX or whatever the Schwab equivalent is. That's basic stuff. Bloomberg is targeting a professional and technical audience. It's expected that you are a certain height for this ride.
Similarly, you aren't going to get stories about how today's event is "the worst thing ever" or how people "feel" about things. There aren't stories about "did Jesus show up in this guy's cereal" or stories about the latest Catholic relic started crying during the latest heat wave. It's actually refreshing to watch compared to what passes as normal "news" in the USA.
Seriously, you can just watch it for free.
https://www.youtube.com/@markets [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Friday August 01 2025, @01:00AM
Active fund managers, who are well educated in finance, have many resources at their disposal, and whose job it is to obtain good fund performance, consistently fail to beat the S&P 500. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/raulelizalde/2024/03/08/active-equity-funds-consistently-underperform-the-sp-500-choose-this-instead/ [forbes.com]
And it's not like a few of them consistently beat the index and others don't. The ones that win in one year tend to lose in the next year.
So if these highly educated, well-paid people with access to better info than Bloomberg news can't beat the index, why should I go out on a limb and pick stocks?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday July 27 2025, @02:42PM (2 children)
There's three aspects missing in the otherwise pretty good (or not awful, anyway) analysis.
1) Power law scaling of use / abuse / addiction. You see this a lot in social media, crack open my high school yearbook and track everyone down and like most addictions, social media use is on some kind of power law where each decile of user is like 90% of total use, much like cheap liquor consumption stats. So 10% of my HS grad class is 90% of total use, the next 10% of my class is 9% of use, the next 10% is 0.9% of use. I have entire classes from my senior year where no one seems to use social media. Sure they have an account and probably a mobile app on their phone spamming notifications at them all day, but they don't post anything, or rarely. The advertising scam is "buy ads because everyone uses social media" the reality is its like buying ads on a malt liquor bottle where most folks don't and those that do, see that ad a dozen times per day making the ad spend pretty useless.
2) Social cultural group dynamics where "chronically online" has become a distinct set of cultural beliefs and those people and their beliefs are NOT even remotely popular IRL and calling someone "chronically online" is a bit of a slur. This combines with extensive centrally controlled censorship to push all other views out of social media, causing the crazies to go even crazier in a spiral.
3) Dead internet theory means most users and most clicks on most sites are bots. That will crater ad sales eventually, making the idea of a "profitable website" a novelty again.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:18PM
>Dead internet theory means most users and most clicks on most sites are bots. That will crater ad sales eventually, making the idea of a "profitable website" a novelty again.
There have been bots using BBSs and the internet for 45+ years, it's a perpetual arms race, websites still seem to be profiting - though only the ones that keep up with the latest in bot management techniques.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by khallow on Sunday July 27 2025, @07:53PM
So anyway, because social media encourages interaction, it's very different from mass media which is passive consumption.
So when the author claims that social media is dead and then compares it to mass media, we should ask: so what? With mass media you have to view whatever is on the channels or what the newspaper chooses to print. With social media you have much greater variety and can provide your own input. I think that has legs - and there's no serious rivals. Sorry, boutique "cozy" forums won't replace the big social media sites because they don't serve the same wants.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:34PM (5 children)
Mrs. Turgid is on the likes of Farcebook for keeping in touch with friends and family. She also uses it for a few hobby things, and even so is pretty tired of the bad behaviour there and all the ridiculous memes and conspiracy stories. I'm not on anything like that. I do Signal for instant messaging select friends and that's about it.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:48PM (4 children)
The thing about Farcebook is that it gives the illusion of a cosy space for interaction, but it's more like sitting at a table of a food court in a crowded shopping mall - all kinds of people passing by in earshot, all kinds of wares being hawked to you before you reach your friends and after you stand up from the table.
The trick is: how do we get a "free to use" site (because otherwise the majority of people won't use it) that doesn't attempt to maximize the value they obtain from our attention?
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday July 27 2025, @04:05PM (2 children)
You could still bring in some money to cover site costs and such. Meta/Facebook made a profit of $62.36 billion last year. I think they covered their server costs a few times over if that is all they wanted to do. So we just need someone that is not a greedy dumb fuck to run the thing ...
That said I am not sure if the small boutique curated websites for "small" groups of friends is the wave of the social-media-future. They tried that before the current iteration and it failed, or it was monetized so heavily that it failed. It seems to me that "AI-chat-bots" that bring you all your answers that you want to hear. Combine it with a few "AI-agents" that trawl the net for things you like and you don't have to interact with another human at all. Friend-Computer is all the friend you need. No pesky humans needed. Behind all the layers tho is some creepy corporate that will want to monitor and monetize you. That thing is just to good to give up. It's just a matter of how you are going to hide that aspect from the users.
Also Soylentnews -- a head of the curve. Small. Curated. News. We might not all be friends. But we beat the curve this time ...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @04:55PM (1 child)
> we just need someone that is not a greedy dumb fuck to run the thing ...
When you say "the thing" that implies a monopoly, or at least a very large enterprise. As you ascend into the rarefied air of global leaders, the density of greedy dumb fucks increases exponentially. Just ask Ben & Jerry.
>small boutique curated websites for "small" groups of friends is the wave of the social-media-future. They tried that before the current iteration and it failed
Failed to what? My small boutique website from 1997 is still chugging along, as irrelevant - yet available - on the global stage as ever. Lots of "small stuff" from 15-20-30 years ago is still "out there" neglected by their creators, but available and with the same potential to blossom into a social happening as ever.
>Combine it with a few "AI-agents" that trawl the net for things you like
Whether it's AI-agents or magazine editors (ala "The Devil Wears Prada"), are they trawling the ether for things you like, or presenting you with things that you will like after you see them?
>Friend-Computer is all the friend you need.
For a segment of the population (probably around 3%, I'd guess) that's as true as it ever has been. Maybe if "Friend-Computer" grows new capacities like interactive chat, robotic embodiment, etc. that may increase to as high as 30%, but there's a few Billion years of evolutionary development that has tuned most of humanity to crave social interaction of "their own kind" and until soft warm hairy smelly robots are passing the Turing test with flying colors, they're never going to satisfy everyone.
>Behind all the layers tho is some creepy corporate that will want to monitor and monetize you.
Same as it ever was. Part of what protects the current "Friend-Computer is all the friend you need" crowd is their minority status. If "Friend-Computer" develops enough to satisfy the social needs of significant chunks of the population, watch out - they'll be taking over governments to ensure their access to eyeball-time. Oh, wait...
>It's just a matter of how you are going to hide that aspect from the users.
One of the rare things I "like" about the current US administration is their lack of hiding all kinds of outrageous offenses to decency in their actions. I wonder if that's part of a desensitization strategy to get people to accept lesser evils in the near future.
>We might not all be friends. But we beat the curve this time ...
Define friend? It has been a remarkably long run since the initial split, and I am still here because of the "smaller" vibe.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2025, @07:02PM
> One of the rare things I "like" about the current US administration is One of the rare things I "like" about the current US administration is their lack of hiding all kinds of outrageous offenses to decency in their actions. I wonder if that's part of a desensitization strategy to get people to accept lesser evils in the near future. in their actions. I wonder if that's part of a desensitization strategy to get people to accept lesser evils in the near future.
Almost right -- most of "lack of hiding all kinds of outrageous offenses to decency" is smokescreen ... for all the profiteering (and worse) going on behind the curtain.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2025, @09:34AM
Reminded me of one Mexican restaurant I frequent.
We had this street "entrepreneur" come in with trinkets and place them on the tables while customers were dining, then walk off. If you messed with one, he would suddenly reappear and ask for money. The restaurant manager got wind of it, and he had an employee bus the table immediately as the customer was leaving. The customers caught on pretty fast, too, and the manager saw to it the table leavings went into trash cans already having a generous amount of saucy food scrap and stale soda pop to thoroughly dirty up anything that went in, thereby cutting off the business model of recovering the bait so it could be used on the next mark.
That was hilarious to watch.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by progo on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:42PM (4 children)
I'm on a Fediverse server of 2 people, between the two of us, we follow a number of people on small servers whose posts are personal, not mass market crap.
The fact that you don't know about us specifically doing our thing on the Fediverse is a feature.
We also follow some celebrity accounts. It's a mix.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 27 2025, @03:57PM
I think a mix is the best way to live "in today's world."
Something on the order of: 1-5% of your free time / attention (FTA) going to global (8B people) concerns, 2-10% of FTA going to broad regional (~500M people) concerns, 4-20% of FTA going to focused regional (~10M people) concerns, 8-40% of FTA going to local (~500K people) concerns, 16-80% of FTA going to neighborhood (~5K people) concerns (yes, 80%, somebody's gotta keep the HOA on-track), and the balance of FTA, at least 15% up to 70%, going to friends / family / personal group activities.
If you never pay attention to anything outside your group, what do you bring to the group? If you don't pay any attention to global, regional, national affairs, who will?
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday July 28 2025, @04:51AM (2 children)
I looked into the Fediverse, but since only servers that ban statements like "I don't think people should be forced or coerced to share a shower room, locker/changing room, or naked spa/sauna with the opposite sex" are allowed to connect to most other servers, it was a no-go.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2025, @09:49AM (1 child)
Heavens no - I am a male. I do not want women in the shower with me. I have this problem with reactions to stimulus and very apt to provide a towel rack at a most inappropriate time. Not much different than my kicking my own doctor if he taps my knee with his little rubber tapper and his nuts are in the same arc as my shoe. I don't wanna do it, but I am hardwired to do so, and there is no software override.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2025, @07:13PM
> ... reactions to stimulus
I was like you as a kid. Shortly after college, I fell in with a group (usually a dozen or less people) that lived in an "urban commune", in one 2500 ft^2 floor of an old factory building. When it got hot, clothes came off. The novelty and sexy parts of public nudity wore off after a couple of days and it turned into a big nothing. Asking around, this was nearly everyone's experience.
I do remember that there was one young woman who was invited over who didn't adapt like the rest of us, but she was an outlier. No one pressured her in any way that I could observe, and I don't think she did a lot of ogling, just didn't adapt the way the rest of us did.