Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.

Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

This article has struck a nerve in the comment section. It's describing how traditional social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are not used for social features anymore, but for content discovery. The descriptions of how people are using Facebook to find new content anonymously are not that different from how we use Hacker News, which has reignited the debate about whether Hacker News is social media.

I had to use the Wayback Machine to dig this up:

> 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features

> Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100414160040/http://ycombinato...

Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site and that social news sites could be "dangerously addictive". The goalposts for defining social media keep moving as people try to avoid any definition that captures their own internet usage, but I think it's important to be honest about what we're all doing here.

Also the noprocrast feature is still there right in your profile, though I don't know if it's documented anywhere.

If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-friends (and ads).

It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.

Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.

Social media was never really “social” in my opinion. Reading updates from hundreds of people you have shallow interactions with offers the illusion of having a social life. So I’m not sure if this change to “fads” makes it meaningfully less social than it already was.

I miss when social media was mostly about my friends’ lives. It actually helped us stay in touch.

So much of social media now feels built around whatever is trending that week, not the relationships you actually want to keep up with.

That’s why I’m building Dearest (https://dearest.co) : a private, email-based Sunday photo digest for families and friends. Everyone sends a photo and a short update by Saturday night, and contributors get the group’s digest on Sunday morning. Hopefully this keeps us social and in touch.

A new game: determine when you meet someone if they use tik-tok or not without asking them.

People's opinions are groomed and programmed. It's pretty hilarious how small minded people are.

The attention economy is real, your eyes have value that is surprisingly high, and buying out that attention so you can have a pure you-centered experience would just be too expensive for most people.

Instagram gets ~$27/mo/user from advertisers. Would you spend $27/mo for Instagram? Probably not. Hence the financial void is filled with ads.

Yes, we've moved from town squares to private parties - whatsapp chats, discord servers, even IRC still exists. (Bluesky is a bit of an exception but they'll need to get enough stable revenue at some point.)

Interestingly, in-person "nerd" events seem to be going just fine - LARP, D&D, board games, historical reenactment, trading card games and tournaments like M:tG, and a lot more.

If this subject interests you, and you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

I used to browse through my instagram feed a few times per month. Just to keep updated about those friends who often posted there. Now it's mostly crappy shorts and I can't even find the "friend feed" anymore. No idea if it's just well hidden or completely gone. Now I don't use it anymore at all.

I think I'm on an A/B test on the Facebook app, now whenever I open the app it goes straight to reels and starts playing videos with sound enabled. I looked through all settings to try to disable this but couldn't, so I finally just gave up and uninstalled it

I open the app to keep up with what my friends are doing, and also check the dating portion of the app for new matches. I purposely always avoid reels on any app, because I hate them and what they do to people. So when I open the app and it immediately starts playing reels with sound on and no way to disable it, it feels like a slap in the face

It's so frustrating when this is brought up as if this hasn't been the case for almost 10 years now.

Maybe I'm in the minority here (early 30s, married + kids), but my social media feed is primarily my friends. Though, if we go into the Reels tab, my friends and I share videos back and forth through DMs.

I have an alt account for business / lifestyle content that I like consuming. That's the only place I actually follow content creators. And even then, I check the account once or twice a day and rarely view/engage with Instagram stories.

Back to my personal account - I have 2-3 people out of the 198 that I follow that are trying to hop on trends and become influencers. Rest just do photo dumps + daily stories. But the reality is only 20-30% of my friends actually share something (post or story), rest are just silent observers.

I (mostly) stopped looking at Facebook around 2016. It just wasn't fun anymore; and at least for me, my feed was all political nonsense trying to manipulate me.

While I partly agree, I also disagree. I still use Instagram a lot to keep in touch with friends I've made in different places. Generally as long as they are making posts then my feeds have those posts. It's only when they do not and supposedly IG "runs out" that I don't.

Personally what I hate more is that there are some content creators I've been happy to support over the years and now instead of doing regular content posts they now do the "collab post" thing as an ad that looks like a regular post. Some of them may do but many do not.

I'm bored when I see how inactive platforms like Discord and forums have become

snobs used to be thought on users who liked popular culture or "jejemons", "kikoolols", "eternal september,... posters who used to be actually active, experimental and creative, but at least newcommers were still posting

nowadays the creative part is gone. Forums are dead. You're encouraged to use your actual identity everywhere on social media and to sign apps. You're indeed not guided to post and be creative. The internet became just passive :/

This is usually why I collapse the 2-3 top-most ranked comment threads. They’re very often gamed and calibrated for engagement. Every so often anecdotes/stories that completely ignore the subject matter (sometimes dangerous if medical). I wish there were other ways to organize comments (rip slashdot) but this usually helps to make HN less social media-y.

I remember trying bluesky and realizing it isn't just the services I don't like. I don't like ... what all the social media users like. The heavy memeification / gamification for attention. Trite posts, posts that seem like the middle of a conversation ... really all negative bits about internet discourse.

But most everyone there likes it that way...

I've deleted all my social media and haven't looked back. It's safe to assume Meta tracks every little detail about you: what kind of content you like, how long you look at each post, your political stance, etc. Every single metric you can possibly think of... they're collecting.

Humans are predictable (more than we'd like to admit). Now they have AI to crunch all that data and find patterns to predict your next move and find out what content will give you the most dopamine. Escape while you can.

We used to call them social networking sites, now they're social media sites.

But I think the problem is that people don't contribute very much too them, so if none of your friends are sharing things that interest you then the media part has to come in as a fallback

The only social media I really use is linkedin and X. I find linkedin useful for following companies and colleagues, and im pretty picky about who I accept or request as a friend. I also find X to be insightful, but I only use it to follow people for stock research.

The pendulum has finally swung the other way. There is no longer the need for people to shamelessly air their life on live feeds, and when something serious happens, people prefer to share it in a messaging group.

The extreme gossipy porn of the past two decades has finally worn off.

I think it has little to do with privacy concerns as they are hypothesizing.

Given that even reaction videos from modern Jerry Springer figures with 20 million subscribers can attract 20,000 comments that all parrot their guru and demand doxxing of the target or worse, it is no longer a mystery how totalitarian states form.

Maybe that is unfair to Jerry Springer. He at least heard both sides of a story.

Does anyone remember Path?

Limit circle social network, I think capped at 50 people. Beautiful app, and I remember it was a great place to spend time when you really just wanted to be with true friends.

Time for someone to reboot this

Social media does not only spread bad ideas, but degrades the symbolic machinery people use to form ideas in the first place. It trains reflexes where thought should be. There is no symbolic lattice for things to land and it turns people into reactive zombies.

I actually used hacker news to get off of social media 2 years ago. I consider it ‘medically assisted treatment’ like suboxone for heroin addicts.

"we were promised social networks, what we got was social media" -- Elad Gil

i have cut off social media related to my actual career, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Because people laughed at me for becoming a programmer. So I created my own homepage, and for communication, I mainly read posts on large Chinese tech communities, Hacker News, or dev.to.

However, when I try to communicate through GitHub or something, I wonder if I'm just using another form of social media. My main daily routine is to gradually add posts to my own homepage that no one will see, and start from there.

I have never been interested in the “normal” social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and the like. The content never appealed to me as a consumer enough to get started. Occasionally something would go viral enough that a friend would eventually link it to me and that was the whole experience.

Recently, I made a dumb little app for my kids and decided to try marketing it on social media just to see what it is like. It is fascinating in a sense and disheartening as well. I have been very unsuccessful, but the most signal tends to come from the dumbest content I have tried.

In doing this, I have come into contact with the social media feeds I never felt the need to look at and man… they are like a drug. I find myself mesmerized by random IG reels. It is one thing to understand what they are on an intellectual level and a totally different to feel it first hand.

I miss MySpace.

Facebook stopped being good when they took away the order by most recent option IMO.

Social media feeds have been completely broken for many years. What social media used to be, has now moved to group chats and channels.

But, I guess, there's still room for those channels to be run through the enshittificator. Wouldn't surprise me if we in the not-so-distant future start to see random ads and paid content in group chats.

I've been able to quit short-form content, but does anyone have any tips on how to quit long-form content like YouTube or Netflix?

Yes, Tiktok staff made this point when they emerged in 2020 - "Tiktok isn't a social media platform, they're an entertainment platform". Meta's catching up.

Social media hasn't been "social" in more than a decade. It stopped being that when algorithmic feeds and infinite scroll were introduced.

I built a safari extension called Scrolless [1] to try and solve this issue (Disclaimer: it's a $4.99 one time unlock). If you use social media in the web instead of the native apps, and use Scrolless, you'll only see posts from your friends, no recommendation algorithms anywhere.

It's absolutely insane how much influence we have given over to social media algorithms as a society. I know so many people who I'd consider to be intelligent just completely believe whatever they see on tiktok/reels. These recommendation algorithms can create such intense polarization, I really hope we can find a way to scale back their use and encourage people to think more for themselves.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrolless-feed-blocker/id67588...

Friends haven't been a focus of social media feeds for almost 20 years now.

There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations, engagements, and baby announcements. Well, maybe there is, but there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division.

Meta in particular is a great example of why you cannot judge companies purely by profitability and why you shouldn't ever let the CEO also be the primary shareholder and chairman of the board that's meant to govern the company's behavior.

What I find unsettling is the monoculture that is being created by platforms like Instagram. You will see a 30 year old man from Alabama engaging in the same trends as a 19 year old girl from Japan. Suddenly everyone likes matcha and is posting photos of themselves in photo booths. On dating apps, tons of women from all ethnicities suddenly love sushi or have a photo at the exact same location with the exact same pose.

Same people who run these platforms will preach about diversity while destroying it.

parasocial media

It’s always been this way - people just don’t realize it.

Before, people were reposting memes, articles, chain letters, etc. Most of the content you’d see wasn’t created by the person you are friends with.

This isn’t really new. And as someone who makes original content and posts it regularly - people do enjoy original stuff from their friends. It’s just that it’s hard for people to do. Most people are very insecure, have little original thought, and/or the interest in sharing anything they think to a broader audience than 2-3 close friends. I buck the trend here.

A publicly-traded company which must increase shareholder value each year is incompatible with Social Networks. You cannot build an infinite growth machine on photos of people's dogs. So they stopped being social networks, and became a generic entertainment channel. Neither Facebook nor Instagram nor X nor Bluesky nor <fill in the blank> are Social Networks in 2026. The only true Social Network platforms are obscure things like SpaceHey.

Imagine if everyone called it "fad media" or something more accurate. It would be dead overnight.

The only thing keeping it afloat is the lie that it's social.

As soon as devices inserted themselves as a barrier between people and called it social, when it was really the media in waiting, they could hide and direct the nature of interactions, and ultimately, attention.

Now? It's been like that for a decade.

hot take maybe: but alot of these shifts have come with the sheer explosion in number of people on these platforms and online in general - the arrival of many/most of the mainstream/normies as it were. Perhaps the reality is that alot of these people's lives on and offline actually are dominated by 'fads' and so this is just naturally following that.

Think 'keeping up with the jones', 'the latest fahsion, food, entertainment, music, x, trends' etc. People live by what I dunno, magazines, Oprah, local morning show hosts, entertainment news shows, etc, tell them. They've brought that view of things with them online.

I deleted my FB when they gave us the Your Data Or Your Subscription ultimatum. I don’t scroll TikTok, Instagram, or any other video “content”. I do watch some YouTube shorts but only while sitting at a personal computer type laptop or the ones which are connected to external monitors.

I read this site. But lately it’s been more difficult since the AI “content” stresses me out. Maybe social media always did that. But it’s come to the point where I cannot kid myself. Many times it just makes me more wound-up than it winds me down. So then what’s the point? Then I intentionally search for specific topics. When I’m out of those I can stare out the window. Which is a nice change.

In other news, water is wet.

This has virtually always been the case and it is only "social media" is an Orwellian sense. It is an antisocial consumerist machine.

In consumerism, everything is for sale.

> What we're seeing is social media splitting in two [...] young people publish a lot of content but it's more funny parodies and remixes of existing material. The goal is to make people laugh, not to tell people about their lives. [...] Whether it's TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, we are a long way from the "digital town square" of personal interaction that social media was even just a few years ago.

I don't understand why this article has to play dumb. This is how most of the internet always was until commercial interest invaded social media. They yelled their billions of dollars worth of messaging so loudly for over a decade that it drowned out anything authentic.

Now that there's a political break away from all the tone deaf pseudoprogressive messaging and the money for it has dried up, what did they expect to see there? Most people never posted sincere "life updates" unless they had something to sell or were a naive part of the bandwagon.

This thread is doomed by a common HN* affliction: People are bandying around key terms without defining them, assuming and pretending that the definitions are universally accepted.

Here, the term is "social media", which can also be pronounced "boogeye man". We all seem to agree it is bad, but very few are willing to lay down a solid definition.

It isn't limited to bad terms. It happens anytime we argue over whether X displays consciousness, or X has a mind, or X can think.

* And other forums, obviously.

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Anti-social doesn't mean what this ignorant BBC employee think it means.

Not that I would expect anything intelligent coming from BBC but they could at least look up a word before they use it

And this is a revelation to the BBC? Who doesn't know this?

The "NPC" insult thrown at leftists exists because of this phenomenon. Recreational outrage fads dominate social media feeds.