I've never really got social media in any of its forms. I use messaging apps to stay in contact with people I like, but that's about it.
I skimmed this article, I still don't get it. I think group chats cover most of what the author is taking about, public and private ones. But this might be my lack of imagination. I feel there article, and by extension, the talk could have been a lot shorter.
But you're posting here, in socisl media, no? So you sought out something here that a group chat wouldn't give.
Most of the article here is focused more on making sure any social media (be it chats, a public forum, or email) isn't hijacked by vested powers who want to spread propaganda or drown the user in ads. One approach to that focused in this article is decentralization, which gives a user the ability to take their ball and go home.
Of course, it's futile if the user doesn't care about wielding that power.
> But you're posting here, in socisl media, no? So you sought out something here that a group chat wouldn't give.
This is true, of course. I'm here interacting with strangers. But, for me, HN is about discovery not community like what the article talks about. I'd be just as content not posting if the ability wasn't there. I just don't agree that social media is that important.
I personally think what the article talks about is already available in the form of group chats on platforms like signal. My impression, from the article, is the author is extremely politically motivated and seems to believe social media is somehow a good thing, as long as the people they don't like can't control it , and likely can't use it? That last point might not be true.
I think the author is more saying that no political party (whether or not they like them) should be able to control it. I don't see anywhere in the article that would suggest they don't want certain people to use it. Just that they don't want people in positions of political power to be able to spy on users of social media and/or take their data at their will.
Group chats are where real people socialise with their actual friends now. Social media is where people consume infinite slop feeds for entertainment. The days of people posting their weekend on Facebook are long gone.
> By open do you mean not centralised? I don't get the significance of big S social media. Functionally how would big S improve on group chats?
Social media has two functions: chat (within groups/topics/...) and discovery (of groups/topics/...). So unless we rely only on IRL discovery, we need a way to do discovery online.
Discovery is probably the main problem social media creates. Almost all of these problems solve themselves when you remove discovery. If someone in your friends group chat is spamming porn you just remove them. There's no need for the platform to intervene here, small groups of people can moderate their own friend groups.
Once you start algorithmically shoving content to people you have to start worrying about spam, trolling, politics, copyright, and all kinds of issues. The best discovery system is friends sharing chat invite links to other friends who are interested.
Yeah this is pretty much my sentiment. I want to discover I teresting stuff, main reason I'm on HN. But big S social media is a cancer on attention as far as I'm concerned, it serve no benefit to society.
The only times on the internet I've felt part of a community was on old web forums.
I used some of those similar web type services for discovery in the past but they became shit fast or shut down. HN is the nearest I can find that surfaces stuff I'm interested in. Social media might have stuff on it but I'm unwilling to waste my time trying to find it
I skimmed this article, I still don't get it. I think group chats cover most of what the author is taking about, public and private ones. But this might be my lack of imagination. I feel there article, and by extension, the talk could have been a lot shorter.