The Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media
https://ca.pcmag.com/social-media/16790/the-death-of-the-status-update-why-55-of-americans-stopped-posting-on-social-mediaOpen linkView original on lemmy.zipSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
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179 replies
Probably because it's been overtaken by exhausting far right narratives pushed by the companies themselves.
My Facebook page doesn't even show me stuff from people I actually know any more. One of my cousins had a baby, it didn't even show me that. Instead what it thinks I want to see are badly written posts about immigrants and "lefties" being to blame for everything, as if the UK government is left wing in any way at all...
Yes the far-right astroturfing is becoming very blatant lately. I've noticed a recent worsening trend
I may be wrong (I left the algorithmic social medias when they abandoned linear timelines [kept reddit until about a year before the exodus, since only fedi]) but:
Is that not because that is the content you interact with (argumentatively, likely, but still) or hover over longer with their eye movement sensors, or all the other ways they track you, and so they think "ahh he 'likes' (hate engages with) this content so send more!" in a loop to keep you engaged and keep making money for them through advertisements?
Like, if you ignored that shit (and iirc there's often a way to "reset" your algorithm in some settings, after all, they want the data they sell to be accurate, it's more valuable to sell...) and started only liking/lingering on family shit and cats (how can you ignore the kitties after all), they'd send primarily that, yes?
I could be wrong about that, this is my understanding as an outsider, but I'm curious. At the end of the day I'll forever advocate for the end of such algorithmic practices entirely long term, and the end of one's individual involvement with it in the present moment: "Bruh get off that shit it is rotting your brain. Like actually, by design, and it wants to keep you locked in. Don't look at the Basilisk."
It's some of that, on some platforms. Other platforms also get paid to promote posts or advertisement. Depending on who pays the most, you can see different things based on your demographics.
An important thing to remember is that they will show you something in the money making category. If they know what you want, they make more if they show you something that's likely to be effective. If they don't know what you want, they make more if they show you something targeting your demographic. If they're fuzzy on everything, they show you something.
Which political geographic is more likely to target Facebook? Which one is more likely to spend demographic money to try to court younger white men from a low to middle income bracket?
Good to know.
Second question,
Are young people still on Facebook? I thought it was just "for boomers" now.
Absolutely no idea. I almost logged on when typing the previous reply to see if they were still offering me the "thin blue line commemorative gun holster" they were the last time I was on, but I realized I really didn't want to.
I feel like I see it being used as a common enough way for events to share details though, so it probably isn't just older demographics.
Idk, I don't use any of them, but I've definitely heard people say facebook is for the olds. I thought the kids had all moved to TikTok tbh.
I quit Facebook when I realized I was mostly seeing things I didn't want to see and it was making me like the people I knew less. That was like 15 years ago
There's a (possibly apocryphal) story about Zuckerberg originally being very resistant to turning Facebook into another Yahoo or MySpace or similar ad-swamped interface, on the grounds that it would scare people away and create a drag on growth. It even got a send-up in The Social Network movie.
Whether this was an intentional business strategy or a second order effect, Facebook was originally one of the cleanest Web 2.0 sites. They did a genuinely pretty good job of focusing on media you were flagged as caring about and showing you activity of friends and family who you wanted to follow. More savvy early users even commented on how creepy Facebook could get, precisely because it could find your friends better than you could and bait you with interactions that drew people together.
The modern iteration of the company is so far away from what it was originally designed to be. The Shrimp Jesus clickbait era Facebook might as well make it a different website. I cannot imagine anyone seeing this site coming into college Freshman year and finding anything that makes it appealing.
Yeah, but there's still this:
As soon as posts were no longer ordered by post date and time it was over for me.
SAME. Seeing posts from a week later it because a certain friend is shadow banned just ruined the whole experience.
On reddit you can sort by “new”…
Can't do shit on reddit anymore without being signed in with an account.
Jesus, that's a form of psychological abuse.
Yup, I fought it for a while by clicking the appropriate tab or sort button, but they kept changing where it lives until I gave up and never logged on again.
Now it's just here for the community, and youtube for the consumption - at least they let you just look at your subscription by new without any junk mixed in (yet).
There's a certain merit to posts with high interactions getting a higher priority to posts that were sent more recently. I didn't enjoy the Facebook spam that started popping up as people gamed the system. 10,000 "Your friend is playing Fart Hospital! Your friend just pooped himself in Fart Hospital! Your friend has made an Epic Fart at Fart Hospital!" posts because someone didn't realize the game they were playing was posting to their feed.
But they got the Reddit disease, where engagement was everything. And then you started losing sight of media you cared about under a pile of Shrimp Jesus clickbait.
I think, at the end of the day, the Facebook internal metrics changed from "Are our users happy?" to "Are our users meth addicts?"
Only 45% more to go. We can do this guys!
Dude they filled my timeline with a bunch of ads and AI generated nonsense. We stopped posting because no one ever saw it thanks to all of the filler.
For me, it's the death of the chronological view. That's when I stopped using social media. I'd see random, irrelevant stuff from weeks ago instead of what my friends were up to today.
When social media started it focuses on friends. You add someone as a friend and you could see what they were up to.
Then Facebook came along and made it competitive, it became less about seeing what friends were doing and more about posting things that people liked.
As Facebook grew, it changed. One day you didn’t see the stuff your friends posted unless you constantly interacted with their posts or a lot of other people did.
It’s gotten worse and worse since then. They have added more and more ads and posts from people and pages you might know that you no longer see stuff from people you do know.
It’s absolutely worthless.
Facebook died to me when the timeline was no longer linear
Yeah, that was the moment it changed from a social media platform to an advertising platform.
when instagram changed the algorithm a decade ago to no longer show your friends' recent posts, that's when they lost me. prior to that, it was actually useful for sharing trips and events with friends.
now it and Facebook are entirely ads / sponsored posts, and random shit fb thinks I'll hate
The algorithm ruined it for me. Insta was once so great to keep up and share updates with friends; I've no interest in interacting with strangers shoved down my throat unprompted.
I'm not.an American, but I'm sure the sentiment is universal!
You can unfollow everyone but your friends
The really shitty part is that I used to post my art on Instagram app the time and started to get a lot of followers, then they changed their system. Now I didn't get hardly any views.
Oh hey, you can still get views! You just need to open an advertising account with them, and them pay them anywhere between $50-$1000 and they'll then show your one sponsored post to anywhere between 2 and 50 percent of people who like that kind of thing, for anywhere between 3 days and two weeks. Just select how much you want to spend to get that sweet exposure!
What's that? You want to reach all your friends and followers? All of them? For free? Sorry, they don't do that kind of thing anymore.
Status update: I am pooping
Is it out yet?
Nearly there!
I’ve now realizing that these Tech giants have poisoned their entire well:
Want to make AR glasses? Cool! Oh… Uh, I guess we run a platform that handsomely pays pervs for engagement, so that’s not going to work.
Let’s start gaming services. Oh… why does no one want to make an account with us, or trust we will keep it running?
Generative models for creative media. Oh, uh… back to the AR glasses issue. And some others.
Ah, so our LLMs need to reference the web to be at their best which…. We… Kind of killed for a quick buck? Oops.
There are hundreds of examples of this.
And now? The whole reason people use these platforms is being consumed by cancer. Rapidly, from the feel of things.
I’m a cynic. I believe companies like Meta can carry on destroying people and getting away with it, no matter what, and users will be indifferent.
But now I’m starting to suspect they they have nowhere to pivot to, because they’ve burned the forest down.
Because no one fing cares about your hourly updates and you're just advertising your insecurities.
Social media is 75% ads, 15% shared content (more ads), and 10% people you know creating actual posts. You're a gluten for punishment if you hang out there.
"gluten for punishment", thanks autocorrect for another genius coinage
Darn it! I'm not changing it. I shall live with my shame of not proof reading
For some, gluten could indeed be punishment.
looks with novautocrrect look of superiority
the article actually says the opposite - that it's the random nature of pushing internet algorithm-chasing influencers that pushes people away instead of it being a way to keep in touch with people you know and love.
Yea, it was actually pretty great when there wasn't an algorithm forcing-feeding us bullshit. It was just us and our friends keeping in touch with each other. It was a boon for many introverts.
Now though? Why post when we know the algorithm won't show our posts to our friends unless they dig through mountains of grift, brain rot, and propaganda.
I stopped using sites like Facebook years ago when I noticed I was seeing posts from random meme pages I didn't even follow that were days old yet I hadn't seen any posts from my actual friends in days. So, went check their pages to see they had been posting daily and the algorithm just never showed them to me.
that's the case for me and it seems like most of the people in my circle
yeah none of us care about the hourly updates. but our circle doesn't do that, we generally would only share things other people actually want to see. but it's been a long time since anyone did that. now the only sharing that happens is just Strava and in group chats
That's how I felt when I tried bluesky. I missed the boat on Twitter and it'd already gone down the shitter so I never tried it. Figured bsky would be an opportunity to try the whole tweeting thing for myself.
And even still, it was just nothing but political bitching, navel gazing, and glorified (or actual) advertising. Like... what's the point of it all? Deleted my account within the month.
Lemmy has its share of faults but at least people are willing to have actual discussions and conversations here. On bsky it felt like talking to a bot. People talking past each other instead of actually communicating.
Doesn't it depend on who you follow? The only things I see on bsky are those I follow.
Not just America. It's a trend worldwide thanks to the abundance of AI slop taking over any 'social network'.
See also the privacy-invading aggressiveness of most platforms, and the political ads and propaganda inundating people’s feeds. If social media had just remained a way to keep in touch with friends and post pictures, it would probably have remained popular.
But unprofitable
No, just not as profitable.
They could have had guaranteed medium long term return, if they played nice. But now there's backlash against both the brands and even the very concept of that form of social media.
So they've had high short term gain that could all come collapsing down relatively soon.
I thought all of the social medias were bleeding money until they had the customer base locked down enough to exploit with all of the aforementioned shit?
Bleeding money expanding as fast as they could so nobody else got there first.
Huge capital investment to capture the market, and as you rightly put it, exploit with all of the aforementioned shit.
But that doesn't mean they had to go down that route. Income via vaguely targeted advertising has been a standard practice for decades by newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels. They could have improved upon that old model without turning to the evil manipulators and spyware companies they are now.
Take, for example, DuckDuckGo, this is their model:
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/how-duckduckgo-makes-money
Reminds me of royal road
Think about people asking for a feature to view ad history (what ads they have been served)
And at least some being willing to pay for such a feature
How long can you be profitable if users are leaving though?
It pretty exists ai. While it was novel and actually social, it was fun and a good way to keep up with friends that you see less often.
Then they started pushing influencers and people starting posting an idealised version of their life. Then the feeds all devolved into junk, even before AI slop.
Its because they took the joy and monetised it while making people trust them less and less. Post about an engagement, get wedding ads. Post holiday photos, then find out they were data mined. Wish someone happy birthday and find it's just a stream of 100s of cookie cutter messages on their page.
So people moved on or became lurkers that don't post. A lot of engagement moved from social onteractuin with people you know to Facebook community groups which became effectively ragebait and clickbait.
Essentially they pushed so much crap into your feed that your friends got pushed out.
So then what was the point of posting your current status when your circle might only see it two or three days later?
The immediacy was lost, and thus so was the usefulness.
I agree fully with the crap in the feed. The inmediacy though, not so much. I recall when they started that and people were still posting they tried to use it for engagement. A new post from a friend that had engagement would be repeatedly resurfaced in your feed.
It did mean less consequential posts from days earlier did feel stale and pointless when they were pushed through again, though, if that's what you meant.
The problem is that an algorithm defines "less consequential posts" and it doesn't have your best interests at heart, at all.
I did wonder if posts from friends were deliberately delayed so that you would be guilted into responding to their Big Thing that you didn't see on your feed. Eventually, you'd be trained to keep scrolling to find posts from your friends, and they'd be trained to keep checking for replies days after their Big Thing, thus maximising user engagement and profit.
More like "no thanks". It's so bad that Greasemonkey scripts are needed to fix.
I just signed up for my local Nextdoor; holy crap, it’s 75% commercial ads, about 10% personal ads, about 10% dogs/cats/kittens, and 5% misc. Utterly useless.
You're lucky then. For me there was at least a double digit percentage of just plain racism.
Photo of black man walking: "ANYBODY KNOW WHO THIS IS?!"
Car broken into: "I BET IT WAS THAT MEXICAN".
Absolutely vile place. Boomers talking to other boomers with no filter, an HOA board given a social platform.
I think Nextdoor encourages it. I'm from a very liberal state (Maryland). Around here, people started posting on there complaining about a house right beside an elementary school always flying some garbage flag. For a while it was a Confederate flag, then a FJB flag, etc. So someone posted a picture of it asking if there was some kind of ordinance it was violating for which they could submit a complaint, and then people piled on about how much they hated it and how inappropriate they thought it was. The next thing I see is that the post was taken down and the poster was given some kind of warning for endangering the owner/ doxing them, even though the street address was not posted and the owner's name was not mentioned. Everyone in the community knows which house that is and could look up the owner from the county records if they want to!!
but nextdoor is happy to keep racism alive, it's the bread and butter
Yeah I'm originally from a very notorious southern state for racism and the nextdoor app was like that there too.
Hated it. I've not been in it ever since. Also, a lot of people being very nosy about weird stuff.
I thought it was going to be like a community app, a good way to meet people. How naive I was.
Too many people tell me they prefer small towns because people are "nice". In my experience, absolutely not. They may say hello to you, but that does not mean they are nice people. My experience aligns with yours. Selfish, ignorant, nosy. After you leave they'll immediately start talking about you, your family, and anything else gossipy. Not much else to do in a small town.
Say what you will about big cities but no one gives a damn about you and its great. Someone rude to you? You can literally never see them again. It's wonderful.
I grew up in a town of 2500, and after having to spend 3 months there due to my father being in hospice and then dying in the last year, I would NEVER live there again. Holy shit. The only plus for my mom now is that like 25 family members live within a 2 mile radius.
I can honestly say I lived through that exact scenario (except not father, but another family member) recently. Fully agree, horrid experience. So many people come to you and act like they care, but they just want the latest gossip. I'm sorry about your father.
I grew up in the city because my parents couldn't stand the gossip, conformism and backbiting of small-town life. I've been to where they came from (there are still relatives there), and getting the hell out of there was one of the best things they ever did for me.
I'm in a small city now. The neighbors are friendly but not over-curious and the crime rate is minimal. I live near the center so everything I need is within a 20-minute walking radius. And the last time there was a racist demonstration here, the counter-demo was five times larger and the fascists got back on their bus and fucked off: they weren't even locals, they were a rent-a-mob. That matters greatly to me since we're an ethnically diverse family. If those assholes get the upper hand, they'll be coming for us.
It sounds like you found a very nice place to live! Congrats to you!
Lol what, i have lived in a big city my entire life and had plenty of nosy weird neighbors who got up in my shit because they were old and bored. and just random strangers come up to me and start trying to start a fight or whatever because they are just weird and miserable.
my life in a small town, was relatively free of any of that. i remember in my hometown nobody ever bothered us. it was glorious.
You must have lived in a very different small town then I grew up in because everybody in the town knew what time you took a shit
a mean, a significant chunk of the pop was too drunk or strung out on opiates to really care about anything... so that helped.
Fortunately I live in a pretty diverse area; a fair number of the posts are in spanish. Probably 5 or 6 non English languages spoken in my court alone.
Mine was 75% commercial ads and 15% DOES ANYONE KNOW WHO THIS IS PARKED ON THE PUBLIC STREET IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE I NEED TO BE ABLE TO PART THERE ITS TOO FAR TO WALK
And let's not forget the racist curtain-twitchers. "I saw a brown person walking down the street near my house this morning. Should I report it?"
But I hate Nextdoor even more because I don't see any reason to put my real name and address into any social-media app.
Exactly—i used my initials and throwaway email and refused to give my phone number, so I can read but not participate. Which is fine.
I've heard enough about Nextdoor that I never want to have an account for their site
Most of my microblogging stuff has been just shouting in the void about stuff I've been doing. And random brainfarts. I follow cool people on social media so I can see them shout in the void about what they're doing. And their random brainfarts.
I'm happy Mastodon still lets me do just that. Perfect platform for that sort of stuff.
The Algo Lords decided people don't actually want to see that, they want "popular" things and engagement bait. Yeah no, not what I want.
To be fair, engagement bait works.
Look how much Twitter ragebait gets upvoted here on Lemmy.
Whenever I go to check the source for the posts, they aren't even real; it's a bot account posting 24/7, or at the very least a dedicated engagement farmer. But people don't care, they just want that feeling.
That explains the bots.
Dead Internet theory is real.
It was all over when Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline. It's just taken a while for people to notice how awful it's made everything.
That was what got me off - I kept feeling like I had to scroll much farther back to see the updates from friends I missed past what FB decided I should see, until I decided Facebook had made it no longer worth the effort
No one gives a shit what I ate for lunch.
If I ate something new or interesting, my friends actually cared. Unfortunately Facebook decided no one wants to interact with the people they know and started pushing news posts down everyone's throat. It's not a social network if you actively work against me interacting with my social network.
You are so right - early social media was kind of magical. Your friends posted when they went to a cool new restaurant or did cook something awesome. I discovered so many new restaurants and food styles because of that. Your friends are all going to that new syrian restaurant near the lake and like it? Let's try it ourselves! They are also your friends, so you can talk about that. They are posting pictures of some cool thing they cooked? You can ask for the receipe! You might even be invited for dinner the next time they are cooking that!
And then Facebook killed it. They started to hide the posts of your friends. They showed you some shit from some "page" or shoveled rage-baiting news in your face. They pushed Farmville everywhere. But that short little moment in time? That was awesome
You have an @lemmy.world account We already know what you ate.
Beans.
What about your shit after lunch?
You think I'm just gonna give that away for free?
Yeah! You could even make like a business model out of... nevermind.
If you have a Dutch shelf toilet, it's there in all splendor.
Ah the famous lay and admire toilet.
Wait, have I been sitting on it the wrong way around?
Do the Dutch sit facing the other way or something?
What do you mean? They sit the correct way, where they have a little shelf for their chocolate milk.
Its to allow inspection of faeces prior to flush, I believe. For health purposes.
I can examine my turds equally well in a regular toilet.
What if you didn’t have solid turds, generally?
Germans call them "Flachspüler" (flat washer). I appreciate that the falling dookie doesn't splash water onto your ass. A fine feat of engineering and VERY off-topic. 🤣
Now that's an odd design. Is there some reason they made it wrong?
There are toilets with AI that will make measurements and will check the health of your shit etc. Etc. Where do you think that data goes ;)
Now we are talking, go on...
What did you eat for breakfast?
My man spiting facta! Preach!
Because it's stupid, you get nothing out of it and you lose time on top
Social media used to be mostly about keeping up with friends. Now it’s about competing with everyone for money and views.
Big change.
also the best way to disseminate propaganda.
I mean, I still post to social media every day, but it's pixelfed. It's not toxic, it's just me throwing in my art on the pile with everyone else's art that I also get to flip through and enjoy, in chronological posting order, with no advertisements or other subject matter present.
No ads and no "algorithm". That's all I ask for
Mine is at https://pixelfed.social/tanisnikana, if you want to get an idea of what gets posted. There’s much better artists than me on that site too!
It’s a really interesting thing that happens, Pixelfed put me in touch with some amazing industry photographers like NatGeo dudes and such, and it’s actually got my photography career properly started.
that sounds amazing!
Your work is beautiful. I'd heard of Pixelfed of course but never actually seen it before, and it's blowing me away. I'm looking at the explore page right now:
https://pixelfed.social/web/explore
I'm a fan of landscape and nature photography anyway, and I absolutely love this. I crave beauty in these times, and there is plenty of it there. Many thanks.
Ah, OK! So it's basically de-enshittified Flicker.
I remember when Facebook used to just show your friends posts in reverse chronological order. You could react to stuff in real time and it felt great. People would do stuff like watch sporting events and TV shows live and then react with all your friends online.
Then it changed to just pure alogrithm garbage filled with ads.
I use vernissage rather than pixelfed, but yeah, it's the only one I deliberately try and post to every day!
Back in the day, I posted on Instagram to share things with my friends and scrolled to see their updates. The chronological feed with no suggested posts was the only way it worked, and now that's impossible. There are no "people" on Instagram anymore.
What happened to Facebook is happening to Instagram. What used to be just a feed of my friends is now a bunch of suggested posts from accounts I don't follow. It gives me a feeling of having my own friends used as bait for them to churn more content, souring the whole experience.
Just another way for zuck to push his incel fascist agenda
Makes sense. It's the same company now, and they're going to "reuse" patterns and stuff that they feel worked for Facebook and bring it over to instagram.
You can still get chronological posts on there if you tape the “Instagram” button at the top and tap followers instead of recommended. Not well labeled but still possible
They're already trying to track everything I do. Why would I help them?
Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.
For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there's a lot of posts that you can't see without having an account and logging in. That's a big ask for something that you're not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn't sidestep that using the old reddit interface.
Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can't see much of anything without being logged in, but they're trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you're human before you can use your account.
If you've scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you're actually a human, and if you don't have an account, the content that you can see doesn't seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.
Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.
Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that's mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.
Reddit is even worse on mobile. They’ve moved to putting up a banner that tells you to use the app. On iOS, it kills the scroll, and swiping to go back doesn’t work. Go to the app? Fuck you, log in. Desktop mode is rough on mobile and they’re already talking about nuking old.reddit.com now.
Old reddit is the only way I interact with the site at all, and only for communities and stuff that for whatever reason haven't moved on to greener pastures. Once old reddit's gone I guess I'll finally move that site into the graveyard.
It was a cool place while it lasted.
I came to Reddit right at the tail end of their do-gooder phase, and just got to watch it quickly collapse into a contest of who could make the same joke first, and then the pages and pages of attempts at one-upsmanship after that. You used to click on the comments to get more information, and as the years went by the lower that information sunk into a mud pit of poor puns.
maybe we could help handing them nails to their coffin. Lets start demanding they add even more obnoxious things. Like for reddit, make even more posts no visible to those who are not logged in, have premium members be even more exclusive and away from the view. That should be a decent blow to any new people considering to join there since why would they want to do it if they cant even see what is there. And lets say they do it anyway and maybe even pay something, they will just get shit that isnt worth their money or they are kind of people that make it even worse place.
it could be sold to the crazier users as a way for them to be oh so exclusive and vip users so they would join in too. The executives would likely be extatic to see people demand same kind of shit they would want to put in anyway.
I dont know enough about facebook or shitter to have any ideas how to make them even worse, but for sure there is room there too.
Worse commercial social media becomes the better since it will push people away and eventually make it crumble.
For me it's the idea that by interacting with social media I'm working to generate profit for a billionaire-led company.
Let's get it to 85%
the sooner we all start calling it fakebook, the sooner it will die
AFAIK, these companies are making record revenue.
From what? Is my mom clicking on that many ads and buying their shit?
Spoiler: >!Yes she is.!<
My mom: I don't want ad blocker I want to see what the ads are selling!
Also my mom: Malware ridden phone I have to clean every two months
She has a constant stream of useless, scammy shit from temu ripoffs being sent to her house constantly and I just had to get some AI face filter subscription she swears she didn't sign up for off her bank account.
But she'll constantly tell you how much she hates technology.
The cringe I crunge at "I want to see what the ads are selling" like that is some straight up boomer mindset, like nothing against your mom, but like it's insane to me that there's an entire cohort of people who kind of think this way. Like they always had so much money they needed ads to help them figure out how to spend it. Must have been cool
Yep iv have read and thought for minimum 2 hours, probably way more, for a 50 euro mouse
Ive done the same for a keyboard,i know some of the flaws in the software used for the fucking remaping of keys, i could probably reflash the firmware with minimum additional research, for a keyboard i dont actualy have
And people are out there buying the crap on ads
Im simply haveing a hard time imagening what exactly they are thinking
Nah, I agree entirely. I cringe very often when in her presence. She is the stereotypical oilfield money boomer.
Do we have the same parents?
Hello brother
Just because they buy ad space doesn't mean those ads are effective.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/
Facebook shows an after every two posts in my feed.
From scams
I think this is what makes me the most angry.
My daughter wanted some toy, so I Google it, and go to one of the top results for it, thinking it's a legitimate website. I go through the checkout process, but it's weird and hanging. And then they text me some "verification code" I'm supposed to enter which is actually my CC code for my account. A total scam. I do some more searches and this is a common scam for this toy. So I cancel our credit card immediately.
But what pisses me off is that this totally fraudulent website was a top results from Google. They could have verified that shit! But instead they chose to serve me up to wolves.
There's no "They". There's nobody home. Nobody's looking at this shit, it's all just algorithms and machine learning, there's nobody customer-facing at Google who's job it is to vet this crap. Your scammy website passed some set of automated metrics Google uses to determine scamminess, so it's off to the front page of search results it goes.
Just because Google doesn't do it doesn't mean they can't. I don't believe you that they couldn't implement some automated means of vetting it; it's just more profitable not to.
I don't really care about the following-people form of social media, the Twitter family. I'm more interested in the forum sort, the Reddit family. There, I don't need to singlehandedly maintain a flow of content, because people aren't coming to see @[email protected], but because they're coming to see what's going on in some community that I only incidentally participate in.
This exactly. I like the thread style formatting, because then I'm following a topic, and not an individual person, because I really don't give a shit what you had for breakfast, and don't need your food pics lol. I'm not into that, but if you post something interesting in a technology forum, then I'm quite interested.
I haven't had breakfast yet. I'm still working on my Americano. #espresso
I'm having coffee. Because I'm dragging ass. Because yesterday was my grandson's first birthday. But that was just the pièce de résistance of a week that saw me working through last weekend and putting in about 100 hours this week because my team was behind in a deliverable and that would hold up multiple other teams, making delivery by end of September impossible.
So I coded and refactored on a project I've never touched before because I'm the technical lead, which means I spend all day every day in meetings and unblocking people and planning new projects. All this, only to find out on Friday, with 4 hours of sleep, as I was running back and forth between meetings and helping set up for the party, that some other team didn't understand the requirements until they tried to implement the design which we provided weeks ago.
They were supposed to build a landing page to call the registration and login API and orchestrate the results. They have done none of it and now want to re-architect the whole back end to give them less work. After I nearly killed myself getting my team's ducks in a row.
So I'm exhausted I think I've slept 10+hours each of the last two nights and the only fuel I have left in my take is rage and venom. And I have to process this all by tomorrow so I can figure out how to calmly and diplomatically explain to this other team that they can eat shit.
Which is where the coffee comes into play. Sorry to interrupt my gripping tale of breakfast fluids with such a lengthy rant about tech. Cheers!
Same here
Although unfortunatly multiple topics i like just arent nearly as developed on lemmy
Some are better developed on mastadon but its nowhere near the same as reddit
Others just dont exist
Some i know not to bother searching for because of how unlikely they are to exist on lemmy (rp1, for most that says shit all, maybe they think its about the fuel)
I miss webforums terribly. phpBB boards were everything back in the day. Reddit/Lemmy isn't remotely the same.
I keep hoping some of the new old web stuff will manage to strike a spark again.
I personally prefer Markdown to BBCode and not having to have a ton of different different accounts, but if you want phpBB forums, they are out there. Search a Web search engine for a string that exists on the website that the forum software displays by default. "Powered by vBulletin", "Powered by phpBB", etc.
searches
https://www.findaforum.net/Home/TopForums/
It's annoying to have different accounts but at the same time I feel like it's a necessary component if you wanted to retain the same feel. Plus password managers making keeping it all organized dead simple.
Funny, I'm not american, but I'm working on disconnecting my self too, that's the reason I'm quitting Reddit and I'm here.
Reddit's just so swamped with bots anymore. And even in the small subs where you're reasonably sure no one's wasting bots on, the people are just weird.
And the bots are posting stories, so you literally have a lifeless machine picking fights with people
AITA, AIO, all the variations are likely just AI bots, or a person just gauging a reaction for thier own writing/novels. plus all those ask "advice" subs about thier personal or family problems.
I have 1200 "friends" on Facebook.
Less than a 10th of them "follow" me.
Therefore it is and was a literal waste of time to spend any time on their site.
On top of that if you open Facebook or Instagram, you won’t see a single one of your friend’s posts. You’ll see AI slop, random propaganda or “Influencera” and an ad every two posts.
You have to search for a friend if you want to find them.
Facts.
No mention of centralised versus decentralised social media. The thing that makes the biggest difference. No ads. No algorithm. No lock in, swap networks keeping friends and followers. Tune your timeline to suit you. Calling everything social media is trash journalism when those issues are already solved. Clearly he has no clue about the topic.
What are the federated "replacements" available so far? Obviously Lemmy replaces Reddit, I think Mastodon is a Twitter replacement? Has anything tried to tackle the myspace/TB/LJ kinda thing?
And then you've got the "new old web" stuff like Neocities and CozyTalk I guess.
I don't know what functionality those other ones have. People suggest Friendica.
It died when it went beyond dial up and ASCII. The vibe of BBS culture in the 1980s and early '90s was so much more social than the dogshit people do now.
I dropped off Twitter in 2020 and finally deleted instagram and Facebook by 2025.
I had friends on twitter and really enjoyed talking to people but after COVID hit there was something evil out of that site that hit me real bad and I started losing friends as I was concerned for loved ones health around me and everyone else wasn’t. So I left. There were other things I didn’t like on twitter but I figured it was just me. I guess it wasn’t. Instagram I never posted on but Facebook I was active until late 2020. Active arguments with people through 2020, trying to plead with friends and family to be cautious didn’t do much so I gave up talking and my Facebook on stayed active to talk to my father. Moved him to discord in 2025 and deleted Facebook then.
I’m sure looking back there were more platform specific things that I didn’t like but I know it’s only worse now. My best friend has stated multiple times that twitter doesn’t care about what’s posted anymore so you’ll see illegal videos of death all the time. Once you realize that social media (like that) breeds a kind of conflict with those around you, it’s much less fun.
These days I only have signal and this. Delete discord back in March lol
Discord was also grabbing your data. Matrix servers are supposed to be better.
Wasn't there something about matrix being linked to Israel somehow?
It's a protocol, so I suppose anyone can use it. I guess someone could maybe define a vulnerability stack and create a protocol around it to exploit later.
I also heard that at some point. I ended up moving a fan server to Stoat and it’s been okay but a lot of people didn’t wanna leave discord so it’s tough. It’s rough to even find populated chat servers to talk to anyone anymore either without having discord
The only people I see posting are older people who have 0 idea how this shit works and too innocent (or dumb) to believe anything they see on the internet.
So maintaining social media is like doing dailys in a bad mmo.
By design. Can't have the people talking too much, or they'll get ideas about worker's unions.
No one ever answered why anyone ever started.
Basically blogging to your friends.
It was cool when it was all us chickens but now it's like influencers telling your uncle you're evil and stupid
It was a lot more fun before all of the advertising, really
People post on social media to seek social acceptance. Even here and this very comment serves this purpose. But seeking this, is pointless.
I don't think there is any use in reducing all internet conversations to just seeking social acceptance. you could just apply that to all conversations whatsoever. then why speak with others, and why go out of the house, it's all just seeking fame or whatever right?
I don't think it works that way.
Eightfold path, my dude.
Haha, the completely contrasting emotions of "Emotions experienced when not checking messaging apps for an extended period of time" are quite poignant. Peace or anxiety, take your pick.
Finally!
I don't think I've every given a status update. Unless telling people I'm playing a game with that I gotta go piss is a status update.
DIT