[ishanhegde]

I feel more and more disgusted by social media like twitter nowadays. Too much shilling, too much pushing of extereme unhinged ideas, not to mention the crypto bots, and now the only fans, porn bots. You have thousands of popular accounts exaggerating stupid gimmicks like being against seed oils for some reason. There is such an absurd amount of transparent grifting that twitter looks like some sort of fish market.

The moment, twitter added monetization, engagement farming got much worse. Was Social Media always destined to be like this?

[JCharante]

Threads is such an example of this. The first people to sign up to threads wasn't authentic people, it was a bunch of marketing departments going "well, this new social media site is live, we should put our presence on there too" and a bunch of influencers who go "hmm this new platform could be a good way to gain new followers if I post enough content before everybody else gets in on this".

Personallly, I think an anonymous social media could work better. If people view content as content without carying about who published it, then you would get good stuff trending and not a 2am selfie from some random celebrity who at this point is famous for being famous. Brands would also have a hard time because their junk wouldn't get engagement unless it was actually good.

[indigochill]

> Personallly, I think an anonymous social media could work better.

I'm leaning hard in the opposite direction. In my mind, a social network graph that is extremely personal and reflects and behaves like an _actual social network_ is "the way".

I run my own ActivityPub node. There is no reason for anyone to want to join who doesn't know me personally and want to join in just for personal reasons.

Then I federate with nodes that I personally know, not for exposure but because I want to follow their updates and occasionally chat with them about things (e.g. I follow Codeberg because I think what they're doing, particularly with Forgejo, is interesting).

I also _do not_ federate with generic instances like the main Mastodon one because they're not focused/personal enough for my taste (that's where you get the "eh, might as well" crowd").

This does mean I have a low rate of discovery of new stuff, but that's the way real socializing goes as well. Most of your time is spent with people you already know and occasionally either you change contexts and meet someone new or your existing actual social network introduces you to someone new.

That said, there are different use cases for social networks which is more the "publishing" angle that needs a much broader but shallower network (probably same for discovery which is probably just the other side of publishing). I haven't thought as much about these use cases, but it seems necessarily fraught because once you get to publishing, bad actors get interested, even (/especially?) if it's anonymous. I'm not sure there is a solution to that problem.

[skydhash]

Also leaning in the personal direction. The only Meta product I use is WhatsApp (bad telecom services) and status updates from your contacts is interesting enough because you know everyone.

Focused and text based platforms like Reddit’s subreddit and HN are also nice as long as you have moderation that keeps things civil. And no user specific algorithm.

[ishanhegde]

An anonymous social media could work if you moderate it extensively and/or restrict who can sign up in the first place. Not to mention, the need to monetize or support the site.

Creating a good Social Media site is a hard problem IMO.

For all the snark Hacker News gets, I think its not a bad attempt at creating a tech focused social media. Reddit and its many subreddits is something else that works to some extent.

[numpad0]

I don't think complete anonymity is the way to go. It'll attract clinical psycho people with actual difficulty understanding identities and ethics. I've seen it. They'd have difficulty understanding who posted which, have too little incentives to listen to anything, and openly complain that they would have to follow rules if enforced. All in straight faces.

For a social media to work, some sort of consequences must be forced upon responsible users. Else people quits functioning. I'm guessing that the reward scoring don't have to be exposed to the public, but there has to be something, and forcing users have pseudonymous usernames is a workable implementation.

[carlossouza]

“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”

Charlie Munger