[Insanity]

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.

[estearum]

Curious how old you are?

There was definitely a sweet spot if you were in highschool or college in like 2004 - 2010 (so born something like 1986 - 1994?) where online social media was almost painstakingly manicured to mirror real-life social dynamics.

Many people remember the drama of deciding who your "top friends" were on MySpace.

[semitones]

This was my experience - when I was in high school was right around the time that Facebook started to replace Myspace. Who you were friends with online and who/how many people liked your photos was a big deal, and it very much mirrored the actual IRL dynamics/relationships we had in school - what happened online was directly related to what happened in real life. Around 2013 it felt like that started to change as the social media sites shifted more towards algorithmically recommended content, like joke sites and videos, with some ads. At that time it was still fun to watch it and share it with friends, because it was so new.

[trollbridge]

Yeah - MySpace accurately mirrored high school circa 2004, and Facebook accurately mirrored college circa 2007 (complete with it being elitist where it was hard to get into when it first launched, just like real colleges).

But that was 20 years ago.

[al_borland]

I worked at the IT help desk at my college when Facebook was first rolling out. We’d constantly get high school seniors calling up to try and get their college email address early, just so they could register with Facebook.

None of my friends at the time used it (or even MySpace) and I didn’t even have an account, so I found this very odd. The first time I realized it may have actually been popular was when a couple sorority girls came in and wanted me to make an account to friend me… not to actually be my friend, but because they had a contest on who could get the most friends. I did not make an account that day, and it told me everything I needed to know about how shallow the connections were. Those were in the glory days, 2004-2005, and it was already pretty shallow in certain circles. It only went downhill from there.

[_whiteCaps_]

For me it was when Facebook sent the C&D order about the Whopper Sacrifice.

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

[austin-cheney]

I was in college at that time and I did not get this feeling in any possible way.

Instead I can remember online topic focused forum boards, of which some I had numerous daily interactions with the same people over years. These online forums made no pretense about replacing real life social dynamics and yet they were still so much better for real social experiences than the social media that replaced them at that time.

To me social media has always felt artificial for people who shout into a vortex hoping for attention.

[cjrp]

It's been downhill since FB removed pokes.

[jezzamon]

I think they're still there, but deeply hidden in their menus

[wraptile]

I regret not taking advantage of this sweet spot. In that time I took a strong stance against Facebook etc. due to privacy violation and consolidation of the web - who knew that it would get a million times worse and my boycott meant absolutely nothing.

At least I got to experience irc, forum boards and other early group chat apps - that was some of the best internet experience. Early Reddit was incredible as well.

It's sad that today's youth will likely never get anything remotely similar to this.

[Insanity]

I was in high school when Facebook took off in my country (2008). And fair enough, first few years were maybe more “social-ish”. I left the platform by 2012 though.

Might also say more about me and my social behaviour than the social media platforms themselves, I never cared about it too much.

[hinata08]

personal blogs, tumblr, forums, BBS, some kind of irc and platforms like Discords remained active throughout the 2010s to actually be social

a bunch of ppl turned to Facebook as it was just what the mob did, but it still required to be active in groups indeed

[bamboozled]

I think early instagram was like this for about 12 months.

[microtonal]

For a window, it was really social, early to late 2000s (anyone in NL remember Hyves?). It was a great way for keeping up with friends as you went to different schools, when they were traveling, etc.

There were a bunch of things that destroyed it: Ajax [1], async tech made it possible to continuously push new dopamine shots when viewing a page; the rise of smartphones, since before smartphones you could only check social media when you were behind a computer, which was not true for most people most of the day; and the realization that dopamine shots + ads can bring in a lot of money.

Even though we had cell phones in the early 2000s, in most countries it was just for calling and some SMS (which was expensive outside the US). You would only go to Hyves, Myspace, or whatever when you had some time in the evening. I am sure some people got addicted, but it was much harder than having a device that tries to entice you all day to look.

That said, I still find social networks like Mastodon very useful. Not so much as a replacement for keeping up with friends/family, but it makes it very easy to discover what people who are in niches I'm interested in are up to. And since it does not have an algorithmic feed or ads, the addiction factor is much lower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

[nehal3m]

I’d krabbel your HN profile if it let me. Respect!

[mbesto]

I am very critical of social media but this is far too of a myopic take. There is a ton of real life social benefit to these platforms.

Simplest example - someone posts a picture/video of them in a city that I also am in and now I know they live there / traveling there and I can meet up with them.

[PaulHoule]

I fell out of touch with my relatives in New England and got back in touch because I got back on Facebook so something social does come out of it once in a while.

[Ajedi32]

Yes the social aspect does definitely still exist, it's just half buried by all the other nonsense.

[switchbak]

What annoys me is this is how a lot of people expect social interactions to happen - so if you want to stay off the corporate platforms to maintain your attention/mental health, etc - you get treated like you're snubbing them.

[everforward]

This is bizarre to me, because anyone I know well enough to link up with on a trip also knows where I live and vice versa.

That’s just a really odd relationship to me. Maybe it’s a social media thing.

FWIW, I hear things like this but have never heard of any of my friends that use social media actually doing it. In the same way that you could use an Emmy as hammer, but nobody does.

[mbesto]

> trip also knows where I live and vice versa.

Do those people also have access to your travel schedule? Mine don't.

Maybe you're just not as globally social as me? I've lived in 5 different countries and have friends all over the world and in probably 20 different US states that I can name off the top of my head.

Do I have close friends that I regularly contact? Do I send them a message when I'm in town to see if they are there? Absolutely. But it's not mutually exclusive with a cohort of people I will link up with when I'm traveling.

> well enough to link up

It seems bizarre to me that you only limit yourself to these people. I regularly try to meet up with people I don't know super well but want to get them or their city better. Social media has absolutely helped facilitate this.

[everforward]

> It seems bizarre to me that you only limit yourself to these people. I regularly try to meet up with people I don't know super well but want to get them or their city better. Social media has absolutely helped facilitate this.

It’s bizarre to me that you can’t find enough people locally to be inundated in events (unless you live somewhere remote, which is an aspect of social media I hadn’t considered).

I don’t even consider myself particularly social and I’m inundated with events and people I need to text because it’s been a while. I had to cut back because it was too much. Magic on 3 separate work nights with different groups, an event every Sunday with the locals from the bar, a family event most Saturday’s and friends if not.

And then trying to weave in the new acquaintances into existing stuff, because I’m a lush and 3 beers in I’m everybody’s friend and am setting up a grill out with a stranger to see if his jackfruit tacos actually taste like chicken so I can tell if he’s just a vegetarian or a vegetarian _and_ a liar!

There are something like a couple million people within a half hour drive of me, I really don’t have to use Instagram to find someone doing cool stuff around me.

[shimman]

Yeah I agree with this. It's great being social in your community because those are the people you routinely run into periodically. It makes relationships easier to maintain too, especially when you're just a walk away from people. The cost to maintain these things (time + energy) are extremely low when everything is local.

[Insanity]

Yeah this is my feeling as well. I have a handful of friends in different countries, when we are near each other we just send a quick text.

I don’t need Facebook to tell me someone I vaguely remember from high school is in my area to then meet up with them. If I vaguely remember with them I hardly care.

And if I am actually close with someone, I don’t need Facebook either as we’d be in contact over text or discord.

That said, social behaviours do differ so YMMV. For me personally, I’m glad I’m not on social media as it seems like a huge waste of time with more downsides than upsides.

[pwndByDeath]

Sounds like adict talk to me ;) Seriously though, the legit claims of benefits are from people who need outreach and don't want to pay for advertising. But your favorite taco truck gets attention while you get to slip into depressive oblivion.

[mbesto]

There are legitimate benefits. I just think its very easy to argue (which I agree) that the benefits don't necessarily outweigh the harm for most people.

[tantalor]

You're confusing social networks and social media.

Social media was never meant to be a virtual extension of social life. It's what it says on the tin: media created by users, and shared from user to user. Old-school BBS were social media.

Of course you can have actual social experiences, make friends, etc. on social media. But that almost never happens.

Online social networks on the other hand basically do not exist any more.

[blitzar]

I 'member when facebook was campus only. For about 5 minutes my friends were friends.

10 minutes later it was just a frenzy of (trying to) poke people that I thought I might have seen at some point that year, and conversations about how many "friends" people had.

[piva00]

For a brief period it was social. Even if you had hundreds of people you had barely interacted with there were still people you continued to interact in real life from that lot.

Getting updates helped me even to form friendships long after the first interaction where we had added each other, I'd see someone I had connected with visiting a place nearby, and could go grab a beer with them while they are around. Or the other way around, I'd be visiting their city and would try to catch up, more often than not it helped to keep in touch, develop a deeper friendship, etc.

That is absolutely dead nowadays, it's drowned in noise on any "social" feature (feeds, Instagram stories [and similar features in other "social" apps], etc.), just a barrage of ads, influencer bullshit, and the odd friend update that isn't just a meme...

The worst part for me is that it was a deliberate choice from these companies to disappear with most social aspects of these apps in favour of the money printing scheme that created the whole influencer culture.

I still have hopes for the rebound, when people get extremely fed up with how these apps work, and something different appears to retake what "social" means, not this doublespeak-esque meaning it came to be.

[IshKebab]

Facebook definitely was social before about 2010. Especially if you were at uni in the golden era before they left everyone in.

You pretty much only had people you actually knew as friends. People posted photos and messages about real life. No sharing of posts, memes, few stupid people. It was great.

We'll probably never get that back.

[overgard]

Facebook, when it was only-for-college-students was a much nicer/more social experience. Once it became a general social network it really fell off the cliff in quality, in my opinion. Like, when I had 30 friends and I actually knew them and cared it was a lot different than having like 1000 friends and regularly being like "who is this person?"

[LtWorf]

It was quite social if you only added your actual friends instead of everyone.

Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see someone I know.

[skydhash]

As someone that was raised in a small town, the feed was very shallow compared to my actual interactions with friends. It was great for status updates (especially for friends in foreign countries), but messenger was way more popular than the feed.

[bluGill]

Close friends are better. However I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing. I want to know when they have babies, see a couple pictures of their kids dance reticle - it gives me something to talk about when our next reunion comes around.

My life is worse because instead of see the above I see only fads. Now that I only check my feed once a month I see less fads are more real life - but I also have reason to believe there is more going on from those distant friends that facebook chooses to hide from me because I don't interact with them enough.

[skydhash]

> I want to know how my now very distant old friends (ie from high school) and relatives are doing

YMMV, but I got all of these through words of mouth (and WhatsApp status updates). I think it’s ok to be estranged from a friend or a relative. The next time, we meet, I can ask them how everything is going and what has happened. And if they want they can show me pictures then.

[emodendroket]

All right, but "I personally don't care for that" wasn't actually the proposition anyone was arguing with.

[dbspin]

For some context, messenger (originally FB chat) didn't launch until 2008. A year later in 2009 FB started sorting posts by popularity, by 2011 they'd switched the newsfeed to a blogspam / advertising feed, burying your friends posts. Depending on your age, you may never have used 'golden age' Facebook. As someone who was in college 2003 - 2008, there was a period in which Facebook was an insanely useful tool for organising your social life. You could literally make a facebook post about an event or even stating where you were on a given night, and know that people were likely to see it.

Facebooks business model after around 2011 explicitly became disconnecting people. This isn't stated loudly enough or often enough, but algorithmic feeds and mixing 'news' 'entertainment' with real status updates meant that social networks in general became forces for disconnection and polarisation around this time.

Early FB and Twitter were useful and operated in precisely the opposite way - because they didn't use any algorithmic filtering whatsoever.

[emodendroket]

When I was in college it served as a useful directory of everyone I met (like, "oh, who was that guy again?" type of questions) and also essentially every offline event was organized through Facebook. It served a clear social function that posting in meme groups does not.

[pryelluw]

I wrote a humor post about it https://open.substack.com/pub/yelluwcomedy/p/old-school?r=7c...