This is as close as I get to social media.
Fuck I literally thought that comment word for word before I loaded the comments for this post.
We are all DigitalFrank on this blessed day.
This reminds me of an interesting dynamic I've witness this holiday season.
Now, to set the stage, most of my extended family and friends know well that I don't do social media. I left Twitter way back when it was just becoming necessary to grapple with the idea of the blue check, and Trump was still just some reality TV guy with cartoon hair the last time I made a Facebook post. I never got Instagram, TikTok, or any of those 2nd run of social media apps.
Everyone who knows me knows this about me. But this year when I talk about actually deleting my Facebook, people are aghast. No one is bothered that I haven't posted there in a decade, but me actually deleting my account is something more akin to actual death to a lot of these people. I don't get it.
Forums are definitely social media, but I like to think of them as the less shitty kind.
True, whenever I see "social media" brought up though I'm always picturing Facebook, Twitter, Myspace. This and reddit and forums definitely are a form of though. Even bbs back in the day.
I tend to divide them based on how much they want to manipulate and sell me shit. Also how much of my personal info they require.
I think that number will grow as Twitter continues to decay. People clinging to the dead corpse is pretty cringe when it comes to Twitter.
Facebook is dead already I feel and most people I know using it are only in there for old people who can’t use anything else or for the marketplace. Under the same umbrella, instagram is dead unless you’re selling something.
Forums like Reddit and lemmy I think will last the longest, but even then when the toxicity grows and transfers over from Reddit to here I probably will stop using it as much
Also I say dead as in what it originally was has been lost in the wake of “influencers” and companies
It's a shame, facebook used to be great for local stuff, but the algorithm seems to have killed that.
Tried nextdoor but it's mostly Karens.
I got next door, but only care about it as far as looking out for potential missing pets. I live in a fairly red area, and everyone is middle-aged on there, and everything I saw was super conservative people, and some hate for anything mentioning the possibility of non straight people.
Even in my very very blue area nextdoor is almost entirely crime posting and people posting doorbell cams of brown people on the sidewalk. It's a complete wasteland.
Fortunately it requires effort to come in here with is a barrier for the casual trolls.
Shuunnnnnnn
Shunnnnnn… shun the non believers charlie
By 2025 it will all be chatbots posting disinformation for the enjoyment of other bots, while advertising bots pay for it.
So one AI is hitting on another AI? This is art. I will watch that YouTube channel.
This is dark and funny at the same time. Bots, shouting into the void, in order to separate suckers from their advertising dollars.
let all social media die in flames.
its nothing but a cancer on society and counts among the worst ills to befall mankind.
So, uh, why do you post here?
Because Lemmy is a forum, not social media.
Forums are a thing from the archaic ages before you kids thought phones were the only way to be online. 👴
For what it's worth, I agree with you about Lemmy (and Reddit) not really qualifying as "social media." I think of it more as a spectrum than a binary value...
And just to split hairs even a little more, I think Lemmy is more palatable* than Reddit for me, by virtue of the smaller (and generally more tech-savvy) user base.
E: Spelling (thank you, WelcomeBear!)
You kids, ha. I'm hitting 40 soon, and Lemmy is absolutely as much social media as Reddit is, just different scale and technological underpinning. Don't be high and mighty about it, you can easily burn as much time scrolling through Lemmy communities.
You know, when I first started to become active on Internet communities as a preteen in the early-to-mid-2000s, I don't think anyone really used the term "social media" to describe them. The term may have existed already, but I didn't think of myself as a user of "social media" at all at the time.
At the time we had web forums run on software like phpBB. Later I discovered wikis and blogs. I have no idea when people started to insist on using the strange term "social media" which may or may not include all those things. Is Reddit/Lemmy "social media"? It certainly differs from most other "social media" in significant ways: we mostly don't use our real names, we don't have followers, we mainly communicate with random strangers rather than the people we know IRL. This is a lot more similar to traditional web forums than to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X/Mastodon, etc.
I don't understand what social media has to offer me anymore.
That's probably because you don't have any deplorable personality traits which can only be validated by other assholes on the Internet.
It's a race for external validation and bragging and painting a false image of your life, and for you to keep in touch with anyone you ever met that you never will keep in touch with. If you take a few steps back you see how truly useless it is, unless, of course, you're meta or Microsoft or whoever is just siphoning all your valuable data and selling you shit that you don't need by manipulating you.
To the comments of old people on Facebook - I'm fifty one years old. I deactivated but did not delete my Facebook account five years ago.
This past fall, one of our high school classmates finally succumbed to his addictions. He and I were inseparable back in the day to the extent that if anybody thought of one of us, they automatically thought of the other.
So I felt compelled to say a few words. I reactivated my account, and said my words. I was shocked at the number of replies I got because I couldn't believe that many people were still using the platform. I figured everybody would have left by now.
I left my post up for a week, then deactivated my account again.
Ten years ago, Facebook was a great way to meet women for people in my age group. Unfortunately, when there's a contentious breakup and you've got hundreds of mutual friends, it could and did turn into a social hell scape. That's what got me to leave. I think I got out before the rampant disinformation really got going. For this, I am grateful. (Coda to this topic: Ladies, seriously, what drives you to aggressively slide into my DMs when you see I've recently been through a horrible breakup? Why would you think this is a good time to pursue me? This happened with several people. I did not understand it and found it horribly off-putting.)
Unfortunately, without social media, I've found it difficult to stay in touch with friends who live far away. But that little downside is not enough for me to go back.
Wrong 50%, unfortunately.
That really doesn’t come out right, does it?
Just the people with some level of critical thinking will leave, the ones festering in fringe and conspiracy thought patterns will remain, and likely pull more in like them.
I wish I could retroactively go back and never use Facebook. That site ruined my life for several years
It debuted when I was living in Japan and when I got back everyone was using it and I had just finished blogging my travels and was like... Nah, doing this for my regular everyday life is way too much to bother with. Facebook continued to became a major thorn in my side for years as every social event under the sun was scheduled through the fucking thing so I missed a bunch of invites because I basically refused to play ball.
It is odd after so long to be the envy of people after a solid decade and a half of being cursed by them for not being on Facebook.
When it changed from "Social Media" to "Social Media" it really went to shit. That and when Google's new board decided "don't be evil" was no longer compatible with their goals. Yeah, the internet used to be great...
I'm somewhat surprised to hear it'd be as high as 50%. Pleased, but surprised.
I feel it has already happened.. people check social media, but I hardly see any created content anymore (status updates etc).. just reposted stuff from gullible people that they thought was magic but was just AI created rubbish.
The only thing I use social media for is purchasing items from hobby groups and I can’t see that being replicated anywhere anytime soon as eBay is full of fake rubbish
Fountain pen user here, and same, I'm in, I browse, I'm out.
Dodging aunt Mabel's anti vax bullshit like the matrix
Yep. This is the primary thing preventing me from contributing to, and recommending Lemmy. People confidently posting and upvoting harmful misinformation, and toxic/unintelligent people. I've already left Reddit and Facebook (a long time ago) for similar reasons.
Social media today has devolved into a hard-up drunk at closing time telling the drunk woman next to him that she is beautiful and really a great lady.
I'm probably leaving for the fact it's just ads.
Actual paid for ads, sponsorship ads, giveaway ads to grow, influencer ads, comment ads to grow their reach.
It's just one big advertisement.
"Over 50 per cent of heroin addicts will stop using by 2025 as negative, obvious consequences grow"
I find myself wanting to kill time by using my phone and scrolling, even Lemmy, and realizing it's not doing anything for me. Just a comfort scroll. I think I'll probably kick the social media/scrolling habit completely within the next year.
Someone once said that social media is like reading the worst book in the world which is also endless, that you can't stop reading. I think that's apt.
everyone in southeast asia gets their news from fake secondhand captioned screenshots on facebook
This is an Indian news outlet but I hope it includes the whole world. I have certainly logged off of all social media -besides Lemmy.
I did it 3 years ago and have not looked back! I do miss keeping up with some friends and Facebook events are nice but the toxicity just got to be to much
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
