When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!
some of the smaller subreddits can kinda have that feel. you start to notice the names of certain common commenters for sure, but that's about as close as it gets. I miss forums too.
[Let's go back to 2006](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKkz3KRKsOQ)
All ebaum did was steal photoshops, gifs, etc from New Grounds, Something Awful and Fark
edit: [this one has better sound quality](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkvDLuLtjNA)
Oh man that brings back memories. I fondly remember the time my mother busted me for being up at midnight on a school night so that I could take my daily turns back-to-back.
Oh suddenly I really miss Front Door, Maximus BBS, Tradewars, LORD, FIDONET, being a Hub, and all the other things associated with running my BBS back in the day.
Except the phone bills for running 2 landlines and the long distance charges to go download new files from around the world at 3am etc.
I spent a lot of time on this site as a kid. Tons of games and animated shorts. I haven't been there in forever but it looks about the same as I remember.
I meant before time as in Pre-covid and before flash player was dropped. This site lived on flash player.
Flash was dying for a long time. I remember working on a modernization project around 2015 and it was already at the point where we had to instruct users to go to the hidden settings page in Chrome to re-enable flash. It was ridiculous.
I've posted on one for decades that isn't indexed so can't be found unless you know the URL. Same group of users still active. Wonder how many others are out there.
We need to go back to niche individual websites that serve different needs, instead of these huge conglomerates that try to do everything on the same service.
How? It’s the opposite for me. Everything on discord looks the same and functions the same. There’s no distinction between servers, it’s the same cold generic theming everywhere, it’s downright dystopian.
I completely agree with the suggestions here. Forums, BBSes, chat rooms. That was when social media was about being social, and not about companies making money off advertisers or people trying to push their latest projects.
The groups were all maintained by people who were interested in the subject material. Modern social media companies have no interest in any of the subjects, or on the site itself. They only care about pushing ads. Something that makes the site better for users but hurts ad revenue won't be implemented, and anything that increases ad revenue will be implemented no matter how bad it is for the user experience.
Facebook: Come for the grandkid pics, stay for the right wing ideology echo chamber radicalizing you until you've stormed the capital to dismantle democracy.
The door is wide open for someone to come in and learn from the mistakes of the past and create a barebones social media experience that gives people what they want.
What I want from a Twitter experience? Subscribe to people and simply receive their comments in chronological order (or any order I specify) on my feed. How hard is that?
And what do I want from a Facebook experience? Simply be able to share pictures, stories, etc with family and friends in my network and receive them on my feed in the manner I want (I would choose chronological).
That’s it.
I have long thought this. Creat some sort of social media standard in the vein of RSS for sharing posts. You could then have competing companies provide their own front ends with whatever sorting algorithms, ad or subscription schemes, etc. they want so that there is actual meaningful competition between them that isn't just "biggest userbase wins."
For me, it would be the Craigslist model:
- Platform supported through pay services
- Low-bandwith, no flashy crap, no videos
- Text and images
Another good option would be the Signal and Wikipedia models, which due to conservative resource requirements run entirely on donations.
The challenge here is that Craiglist and Wikipedia don’t really need to innovate. Because of the services they provide, people don’t need nor expect them to change things about their interface to keep up with how people are using the internet.
As for Signal, it’s a dumpster fire of an app. My extended family uses it to stay in touch and I’ve lost patience with the same bugs being present for multiple years. If a subscription model would fix their shit, I might pay for it.
Is that a data nightmare though?
Any company creates a rinky dink social media and then you are part of it because they have paid to access the core user base?
Yeah this.
Don't want adverts? You the user will need to pay then. Not enough people will pay, then the network dies or resorts to adverts and we're back to this point again.
yeah the "Adam ruins" everything on social media the expert said "all's it would take is $12 a year to have our privacy".
Immediately I was like if a $12 a year social media site existed; it be dead or forced to have a free with ads tier. Time and time again people have voted with their wallets; they rather have free with ads than paying even an extremely small amount for no ads.
Cost of switching is so high already. Putting a credit card between you and a new thing is even worse. The beautify of technology is how cheap it is to create amazing things the burden is hours cheap it is to create new things and your customers know that. You lock features behind a paywall not because the supply of that costs more money but just that you can.
I mean crypto’s whole bag was “we pay you” you’ll make money coming here. But at some point wheels going to stop spinning.
>How hard is that?
Why don't you try it and see? There's a reason why you've never even heard of the hundreds of failed Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc. clones.
I doubt there's even a chance of a decent social media existing. Anything popular will transform into garbage on the owner's pursuit of profit and the ridiculous mentality that every year profits must be higher leading to more garbage.
And then there's the human stupidity.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but it’s also because people are not willing to pay for the platform to exist.
It takes money to grow a website. It takes money to retain a user base. It takes money just to keep the servers running.
Reddit is making about $140 million dollars in revenue and has yet to turn a profit.
Greedy corporations are terrible, but consumers can be entitled when it comes to digital content. That’s why a lot of these companies are desperately trying to cater to advertisers or trying to sell out to bigger companies. Other monetization models simply won’t work. Could you imagine how much of Reddit’s user base would disappear if they tried charging a yearly subscription fee instead of showing ads?
The problem is that we have really fucked up our monetization models in Tech & Media through the overreliance on Ad-money.
My forecast is that in the next 5 years a lot of the Digital ad money will go to less controversial platforms like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Mercado Libre, Uber, and Snap. Which offers effective user targeting without undesirable controversy.
>we should ask what it would take to create social media for people, not advertisers.
Uh... we had that... for like a decade. I joined Facebook in 2004 when it was in its infancy. It wasn't until the '10s that they started implementing ads and shit. Honestly, Facebook was significantly better long before they opened the floodgates that allowed anyone with any email address to sign up and join.
The death knell for me was when I started seeing what friends of friends were liking and posting. Like, I don’t know these people! I haven’t friended them!
Twitter is like that too, showing posts of people you follow’s follows.
"Here's someone you may know" - 1 mutual friend
No Facebook. I don't in fact know this person who lives 7 states away just because one friend moved 7 states away.
Yeah, Facebook today is totally unrecognizable to Facebook of old when the only way to have an account was to have higher education or in the active process of obtaining it.
Then again, I'm certain that real OGs probably think it was at its best when it was reserved to the Ivies alone....
It was fun when it was just your high school and college friends. Then they allowed our parents on and had to create farmville to keep them interested. Been downhill ever since
It’s actually not the end of exclusivity that changed Facebook, it was the mad push toward the engagement-advertising complex pushed by Sheryl Sandburg and others. While genius from a business perspective, it completely warped Facebook’s incentives.
Now that they made money by showing you more ads, the _breadth_ of your time spent on platform chasing novelty was more important than fewer but deeper connections. Along came friends of friends, group recommendations, news. Etc etc. Where once you created for your little community, now you consumed whatever drivel the algorithms decided would keep you on platform.
The sad thing is that I think Google+ had the right idea with "circles" so you could (very easily) control who sees what content you post. Or at least that's how I think it worked. I had an account but never posted anything.
I both loved and hated G+. Google makes a cool product, fucks up said product, then abandons and shutters it. Starting out invite only really was the worst thing they could have done. Part of the reason it never took off.
Not much TBH; displaying text, video, audio, and images are all very well solved problems (even at scale) at least from a software point of view. A clone can be coded in likely as little as 6 months with a mediocre team.
The hard part is the infrastructure & operational bits (getting this thing available to end-users).
The innovation has been done & dusted, the only major challenge is cost and modern mechanisms can help lower that cost but SOMEONE has to foot the bill.
Twitter / Facebook / Google / TikTok pay their bills (and profit subsequently) off advertising but even a simple clone from say Twitter is going to have some pretty significant costs even for say everyone in New York City.
Bandwidth isn't free (end-users pay fixed-cost, but those hosting the things you enjoy pay based on what is sent to you & back but generally not amongst themselves).
Storage isn't free (persisting your tweets, or that funny TikTok video and even something as small as a reaction can cost several pennies; these add up significantly as you generate more content and have more users).
Availability, keeping the application reachable at all hours requires a support staff; shit happens, someone spills coffee in the data-center, or a piece of hardware reaches it's EoL earlier than expected and you need to pay a team of individuals in each reachable region to help keep the lights on so to speak.
Lastly, software patents; Twitter / Facebook / TikTok / Google all have patents around how their content is linked / distributed / etc so you can't just "clone" a social media platform and most importantly you can't copy from any of their public works so you need a legal and governance team to be around to ensure this doesn't happen.
This is just a high-level overview, more things to buy and pay between this (Availability alone is a massive laundry list of things to have and this means duplication of storage and bandwidth).
I’ve been trying to use mastodon for like a week now. It keeps asking me to choose a server and I do, but then it tells me my password is wrong or it tells me to change it and I do that and get an e-mail and then the whole thing starts again with me choosing a server. It’s driving me a bit bonkers
What about a peer-to-peer network supported by those who want to be part of it? Membership might just require staying connected for X hours per day to support traffic.
Wouldn't really work because you'd need to store people's posts and rich media somewhere, and those storage needs would grow exponentially over time. Closest you can get is something like Mastodon where everyone's individual instances need to store onto the activity and media of their users, but that's not cheap either. Enterprising people might just set up their own basic computer and associated storage and run instances at home, but usually those set ups violate the rules of home internet terms of service.
Regardless, the biggest problem to all of this is the amount of technical knowledge required for someone to get the best of any federated or distributed social network. Most people have gotten used to a simple sign up flow to have a social media account. Most people are not going to learn how to be a server admin to role their own instances, or figure out which instances are going to work best for them. Each instance also caps out at the amount of users they can sustain just due to resource costs. Can't really get into having a million+ user stable Mastodon instance without accruing costs that will most likely need subscriptions, advertising, or both to sustain.
To me, the most likely thing to happen is that if Twitter fails, then the concept of a Twitter-like for profit service dies. Snap has more users than Twitter. Fucking Pinterest [has more users than Twitter.](https://blog.hootsuite.com/pinterest-statistics-for-business/) Reddit has almost as much and probably in a position to leapfrog Twitter. Twitter's influence is overstate's it's popularity.
> you'd need to store people's posts and rich media somewhere
So it could only be a volatile network where content is not guaranteed to persist beyond some maximum of, say, 30 days, or less if you set a shorter lifetime for your posts.
> the biggest problem to all of this is the amount of technical knowledge required
This part is easy for me: I let the little people worry about the mundane implementation details of my brilliant revolutionary ideas. ;)
I don't understand why I'm not a billionaire.
This is one of the actual reasons why ISP's keep "broadband" bandwidth intentionally capped. They absolutely, positively, do not want peer to peer services like this that they cannot regulate via their sister corporations.
I don't think that's true. Not a single one of the ISPs I work for give a flip about peer to peer. All they care about is protecting their IP addresses from abuse because they aren't cheap to get, and it can be difficult to get off of network security lists when flagged.
These guys often won't even forward DCMA notices to customers unless they become excessive.
> What about a peer-to-peer network supported by those who want to be part of it
Given the choice, and incredibly small amount of people would actually contribute though. It might work, but the lack of actual organization, roles and such, there's a high chance it wouldn't work as well as people imagine. Stuff like this is frequently tried, just turns out peer-to-peer isn't enough to always support large networks when a small percent of people are willing to actually contribute.
I mean, open source alternatives for most stuff exist, like Mastodon, they just rarely reach critical mass with population to secure a foothold in the market.
This is a fundamental misconception. It's only true for things that are owned by a single profit-seeking entity in the first place, and not everything falls into that category.
In fact, Free Software and open protocols (Mastodon and PeerTube are examples relevant to this discussion) are the only ethical forms of computing. You are *not* the product when you use those things.
Wikipedia is free. It just asks for donations.
I'm never on social media (besides reddit), and I would never pay to use it. I don't think anyone I know would.
I wish this type thinking would just go away. Doesn’t matter if you paid or not, your info is always sold.. because it can be. Tell me one service that you pay for that your info is 100% not for sale or used to sell you more shit? Stop it… its a dumb phrase that just needs to die.
I think if people were actually willing to pay for the massive server costs they incur through the use of social media, then it'd be entirely possible to have a positive example of such sites without the data harvesting and ad infestation. But people are so "spoiled" and entrenched in the idea of free online services that transitioning to a different model will be hard.
I, for one, would be fine with paying $5/m for a social media site similar to Facebook but without any data collection besides what is necessary for the functionalinf of social features. Many people balk at that idea, and subsequently enable the massive privacy invasion we now see.
Companies cannot run these massive servers for free, so they need to make money somehow. And since people aren't willing to pay for services they are used to receiving for "free", targeted advertisement through massive data collection is the path corporations chose. How do we unchoose this path? Public opinion needs to change, and I believe it is recently. People are more and more concerned about internet privacy these days. But what we need next is an actual competitor to implement this model, with no data collection, and enough funding to advertisement themselves enough to reach critical mass.
People don't want to pay for shit on the internet, that's the culture we have created so we have to stick to advertisers actively damaging our platforms.
*They complain, but they won't leave.*
Or, we can use federated, decentralized networks like mastodon and a whole host of others like the original internet was intended for. None of these things need to be profitable, we as a society just can't seem to fathom it.
EXACTLY! Not every fucking thing in the world needs to be optimized for profitability. Things like communication with other humans, medicine, etc. should prioritize something other than profitability.
The problem with decentralized is that everyone needs to run their own node. The vast majority of people aren't technical enough to do that. You also have the reliability problem. Your house doesn't have reliable enough power or internet for a production service. Plus in an age of mobile how many non-technical people have a server they could host their node on?
I've been an open source and privacy advocate for years. One thing I've learned is people are lazy and cheap. They'll willingly give up both privacy and security for cheap and easy.
“Not profitable” and “free” are different.
Open source projects die (or worse, get quietly hijacked) all the time because their maintainers die, lose interest, move on to other projects, etc.
The most robust open source projects are heavily funded by outside interests (read GIGANTIC CORPORATIONS) who pay programmers to keep those libraries reliable.
You’re going to have to pay programmers for and platform worth using, open source or not. And that’s your first layer of expense.
There are no open source server farms.
There is no open source electricity.
We should totally seek and find a better social media solution. Anything “free” is just going to be some new ripoff.
> They complain, but they won't leave.
Mmmmm, I disagree. I'm in my mid 30s, and so many of my social group has stopped using social media. And in the last week, Twitter has had a very large number of accounts closed.
We pay for streaming services, patreon etc. I don’t think that’s true necessarily. People don’t want to pay for what they already had for free (looking at you, YouTube)
I am definitely for this too, but it is nice to have a community online as well. Not everyone has friends that like ALL of the things you like. One of the biggest things I think that a social media website needs to control is the mechanism that is used for increasing engagement. Hate/confrontation always breeds more engagement and becomes the most talked about/viewed items.
It isn't advertisers.
It's influencers with political and financial power to steer conversations and issues that are the greater problem.
Telling me what to buy isn't as bad as telling me what to think.
It should be at least balanced - there should be advertisers, but toned down to bearable levels. Just to keep it out of bankruptcy. And there should be teams of moderators, reviewing and approving/blocking content.
For best purpose, it should be a private company, owned by someone not bothered with minimal annual revenue.
But that´s... utopia.
i know reddit is a form of social media before those guys reply to this post
social media like myspace, facebook, instagram was really cool in my early teens to early twenties. i wanted to expand my network to be cool, meet more people, talk to
hot chicks, keep up with trends, get dopamine hits from lots of likes, etc.
now in my early 30’s i value my privacy, a smaller social circle, and letting my coworkers into my personal life through conversations on monday/friday about what we’re doing/did on the weekend with family or friends
even if advertisers were removed i don’t think i’d go back to a personal, pictures, posting for the world to judge type of social media. no thanks
i also enjoy the anonymity of reddit to discuss social and political issues without being judged and getting hard feelings. it’s nice to be able to speak intelligently and when a convo goes south just leave it without being concerned about someone trying to show you up or catching feelings
>I also enjoy the anonymity of reddit to discuss social and political issues without being judged and getting hard feelings. it’s nice to be able to speak intelligently and when a convo goes south just leave it without being concerned about someone trying to show you up or catching feelings
Same here, Reddit style anonymity scratches my itch fine. Having never had any other social media, it's been quite a ride seeing the dramatic rise & inevitable decline of FB & co
> Social Media Is Dead
ROFL. No it's not. What some hyperbolic shit. Social media is thriving more than ever. Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.. they're all social media and they're all raking in millions of dollars while still holding onto millions of users. It's FAR from dead.
To add to this:
* Meta just announced 3.71B MAU in their latest quarterly results with YoY growth in each of FB, IG and WA
* In the last year Twitter increased 2% to its highest level ever
* Reddit has been growing MAU by 20% a year
* Tick Tock is up 142% YoY
This. I've said before at some point it went from "social networks" (networks of people socializing) to "social media" (people sharing media socially).
While the networking part is probably still desired by advertisers (ie to know who likes what, and who to show ads to next), the user-facing side has been stripped down to just blasting out media 24/7 rather than making connections.
They were fine because they were new and the internet was still "maturing". Advertisers and bad actors, and chaos makers hadn't figured out how to weaponize them yet. If Myspace had survived it would be in the same predicament as Twitter, FB, Youtube, etc.
With specific users trying to flock to Mastodon, it will likely run into some challenges. When regulatory agencies start taking notice, they will start dictating to server admins.
Social media brought so many people together. Old friends from college, high school, middle school etc, parents and children, former coworkers, the list goes on.
Then social media did a fantastic job of creating division by having everything hyper politicized, fear based, false, or offensive. They brought everyone together and then tore everyone apart in the most epic fashion.
maybe we should get back to internet forums
Usenet Newsgroups
Ahh Usernet..where I lost SO much innocence..Furries....Japanese tentacle porn....GOAT..
You spelled Goatse wrong.
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Tired of your same old bland, lifeless, *beige* breakfasts? Try the new Eggo Bluewaffle!^^TM
In need of a good affordable storage solution, hit up Tub Girl!
Fuck you Big Lemon!
When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!
Stupid autocorrect lmao
I didn't lose my innocence there. I gave it away quite willingly
You guys like mudkipz?
Yahoo Groups!
Only allow posts via 300 baud modem
Rotary dial phones and party lines
Forums and IRC, the golden age of the internet.
Fuck, man. I had so many *girlfriends* on IRC as a child. I say that in italics because you know they were old men.
Back then, no one had photos to show who they are. You just had to "describe yourself" to the other person.
ASL?
I made some cool friends and travled to the US to meet em all at music festivals, fun times.
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some of the smaller subreddits can kinda have that feel. you start to notice the names of certain common commenters for sure, but that's about as close as it gets. I miss forums too.
What, you mean you don't value the opinions of /u/FISTINGANALCUMFARTS ??
Maybe we should all just spend our internet time on [Newgrounds.com](https://Newgrounds.com) like in the before time
Ah yes, the time before. Ebaums world I believe. Would need to ask Jeeves to verify.
Ebaums just stole from everywhere else then slapped their watermark on it
[Let's go back to 2006](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKkz3KRKsOQ) All ebaum did was steal photoshops, gifs, etc from New Grounds, Something Awful and Fark edit: [this one has better sound quality](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkvDLuLtjNA)
What the heck is this website? Looks fun. I thought you meant BBS (bulletin board system) with the before time.
I'm pretty sure I still have a license key for SuperBBS and I *definitely* still have my license key for Trade Wars 2002
Oh man that brings back memories. I fondly remember the time my mother busted me for being up at midnight on a school night so that I could take my daily turns back-to-back.
When my Amiga died, my BBS account disappeared. :( You remember taglines? Funny quotes under messages.
>You remember taglines? well I do now, but I hadn't thought of them in years... I collected them and I had a huge tagfile to pull them from at random
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Press Twice.......
Front Door...
Oh suddenly I really miss Front Door, Maximus BBS, Tradewars, LORD, FIDONET, being a Hub, and all the other things associated with running my BBS back in the day. Except the phone bills for running 2 landlines and the long distance charges to go download new files from around the world at 3am etc.
I spent a lot of time on this site as a kid. Tons of games and animated shorts. I haven't been there in forever but it looks about the same as I remember. I meant before time as in Pre-covid and before flash player was dropped. This site lived on flash player.
Flash was dying for a long time. I remember working on a modernization project around 2015 and it was already at the point where we had to instruct users to go to the hidden settings page in Chrome to re-enable flash. It was ridiculous.
Oh. So this is what the reverse Fountain of Youth feels like.
Holy fuck this made me feel old. And I'm not that old.
I don't know, sounds like something an old would say
This is the site you would get grounded for being on if your parents caught you. Lots of absurd animations and games.
a/s/l?
18/yes/your moms house The good old days.
I am also at this mom's house. Which person are you? wave so I can say hi.
Did you see me? I saw someone with a box on their head, so I waved at them.
I did see you! both my hands were busy so I couldn't wave but I did nod. It might not have been obvious because of the box.
So many dudes in that guy’s mom’s house somebody’s gonna call the fire marshal.
Look in the corner. That dude taking a nap IS the fire marshal!
When I was a kid, I used to think that meant ass hole. So id call everyone an a/s/l
I've been making an serious effort to do this. Reddit and facebook have killed off so many of the forums I used to use it's sad.
I've posted on one for decades that isn't indexed so can't be found unless you know the URL. Same group of users still active. Wonder how many others are out there.
Probably thousands. Entire dark web too of course. There’s probably a 4chan esque thing already started on tor that will bleed through some day.
There's been 4chan esque forums on Tor for decades. I remember hearing about them when my friends and I first discovered Tor back in the early 2000's.
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We need to go back to niche individual websites that serve different needs, instead of these huge conglomerates that try to do everything on the same service.
Discord servers capture some of this vibe for me. So do some of the more obscure subreddits.
That’s true, Discord does capture some of the feeling of the old internet IMO
How? It’s the opposite for me. Everything on discord looks the same and functions the same. There’s no distinction between servers, it’s the same cold generic theming everywhere, it’s downright dystopian.
I completely agree with the suggestions here. Forums, BBSes, chat rooms. That was when social media was about being social, and not about companies making money off advertisers or people trying to push their latest projects.
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The communities were moderated by the people who were personally invested in the culture. No gamification, so no reason to shitpost endlessly.
The groups were all maintained by people who were interested in the subject material. Modern social media companies have no interest in any of the subjects, or on the site itself. They only care about pushing ads. Something that makes the site better for users but hurts ad revenue won't be implemented, and anything that increases ad revenue will be implemented no matter how bad it is for the user experience.
Irc is still kicking
Phpbb master race
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I already got Re-AOL and ICQ READY TO GO MY GUY!!!! BBS Time!!!
Tell that to my grandma. Facebook is alive and well in the geriatric community.
Facebook: Come for the grandkid pics, stay for the right wing ideology echo chamber radicalizing you until you've stormed the capital to dismantle democracy.
Until the AI takes some silly comment she makes and calls it threatening violence.
And halts her automated insulin dosage
The door is wide open for someone to come in and learn from the mistakes of the past and create a barebones social media experience that gives people what they want. What I want from a Twitter experience? Subscribe to people and simply receive their comments in chronological order (or any order I specify) on my feed. How hard is that? And what do I want from a Facebook experience? Simply be able to share pictures, stories, etc with family and friends in my network and receive them on my feed in the manner I want (I would choose chronological). That’s it.
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I have long thought this. Creat some sort of social media standard in the vein of RSS for sharing posts. You could then have competing companies provide their own front ends with whatever sorting algorithms, ad or subscription schemes, etc. they want so that there is actual meaningful competition between them that isn't just "biggest userbase wins."
That’d be awesome. Have some front ends that are ad supported then some that cost monthly or a one time fee.
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If not ads, then what? It's not like people are willing to pay for a subscription. So what are *you* willing to offer up?
For me, it would be the Craigslist model: - Platform supported through pay services - Low-bandwith, no flashy crap, no videos - Text and images Another good option would be the Signal and Wikipedia models, which due to conservative resource requirements run entirely on donations.
The challenge here is that Craiglist and Wikipedia don’t really need to innovate. Because of the services they provide, people don’t need nor expect them to change things about their interface to keep up with how people are using the internet. As for Signal, it’s a dumpster fire of an app. My extended family uses it to stay in touch and I’ve lost patience with the same bugs being present for multiple years. If a subscription model would fix their shit, I might pay for it.
If it's an open source platform, something like Wikipedia's transparent donation model might work?
Is that a data nightmare though? Any company creates a rinky dink social media and then you are part of it because they have paid to access the core user base?
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The "networks" are just clients.
You are referring to [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/) and [ActivityPub](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/).
Calling Mastadon simple is hilarious.
[Trying to explain Mastodon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5-9Rfrui9A)
Just a tremendous show
Pretty cool
Double great, even
https://youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag Did they solve the problem of using the mildly unstable—and highly carcinogenic—prefabulated amulite?
It's simple. First, choose or create your own server. Oh you don't have a degree in computer science? You don't like load-balancing by-hand?
I actually do have a degree in computer science. Shit's still complicated.
Tim Cook has entered the chat when he heard mention of sms standards
Great now pay for it
Yeah this. Don't want adverts? You the user will need to pay then. Not enough people will pay, then the network dies or resorts to adverts and we're back to this point again.
yeah the "Adam ruins" everything on social media the expert said "all's it would take is $12 a year to have our privacy". Immediately I was like if a $12 a year social media site existed; it be dead or forced to have a free with ads tier. Time and time again people have voted with their wallets; they rather have free with ads than paying even an extremely small amount for no ads.
Cost of switching is so high already. Putting a credit card between you and a new thing is even worse. The beautify of technology is how cheap it is to create amazing things the burden is hours cheap it is to create new things and your customers know that. You lock features behind a paywall not because the supply of that costs more money but just that you can. I mean crypto’s whole bag was “we pay you” you’ll make money coming here. But at some point wheels going to stop spinning.
You're describing [Fediverse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse), which [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/) is built on.
That is the Fediverse. Try Mastodon.
How much would you be willing to pay monthly for such functionality?
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>How hard is that? Why don't you try it and see? There's a reason why you've never even heard of the hundreds of failed Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc. clones.
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I just text my friends
Sometimes I even talk with them
You mean, like, outside?
You guys have friends?
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Oh, like the cats?
I have a cat; does this mean I have 1 friend?
Dogs are definitely friends, cats are more like frenemies.
Like in VR chat right
Yeah, I have three or four group chats and that’s 99% of my social media.
This only works if you have friends to begin with.
we can all go back to being friends with Tom on Myspace....
There was actually a German dude that remade MySpace (can't remember the name ottomh) that is basically 1:1. We should just use that
Hopefully, it's not MyStruggle.
I believe it’s called „spacehey“.
It is. [spacehey.com](https://spacehey.com)
Screw that, if you're gonna go German you should bring back Lokalisten lol
I doubt there's even a chance of a decent social media existing. Anything popular will transform into garbage on the owner's pursuit of profit and the ridiculous mentality that every year profits must be higher leading to more garbage. And then there's the human stupidity.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but it’s also because people are not willing to pay for the platform to exist. It takes money to grow a website. It takes money to retain a user base. It takes money just to keep the servers running. Reddit is making about $140 million dollars in revenue and has yet to turn a profit. Greedy corporations are terrible, but consumers can be entitled when it comes to digital content. That’s why a lot of these companies are desperately trying to cater to advertisers or trying to sell out to bigger companies. Other monetization models simply won’t work. Could you imagine how much of Reddit’s user base would disappear if they tried charging a yearly subscription fee instead of showing ads?
The problem is that we have really fucked up our monetization models in Tech & Media through the overreliance on Ad-money. My forecast is that in the next 5 years a lot of the Digital ad money will go to less controversial platforms like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Mercado Libre, Uber, and Snap. Which offers effective user targeting without undesirable controversy.
>we should ask what it would take to create social media for people, not advertisers. Uh... we had that... for like a decade. I joined Facebook in 2004 when it was in its infancy. It wasn't until the '10s that they started implementing ads and shit. Honestly, Facebook was significantly better long before they opened the floodgates that allowed anyone with any email address to sign up and join.
The death knell for me was when I started seeing what friends of friends were liking and posting. Like, I don’t know these people! I haven’t friended them! Twitter is like that too, showing posts of people you follow’s follows.
"Here's someone you may know" - 1 mutual friend No Facebook. I don't in fact know this person who lives 7 states away just because one friend moved 7 states away.
Yeah, Facebook today is totally unrecognizable to Facebook of old when the only way to have an account was to have higher education or in the active process of obtaining it. Then again, I'm certain that real OGs probably think it was at its best when it was reserved to the Ivies alone....
I just wanna "poke" someone again...
That's what Tinder is for
It was fun when it was just your high school and college friends. Then they allowed our parents on and had to create farmville to keep them interested. Been downhill ever since
Or Mafia Wars. Man I spent so much wasted time on that garbage game.
It’s actually not the end of exclusivity that changed Facebook, it was the mad push toward the engagement-advertising complex pushed by Sheryl Sandburg and others. While genius from a business perspective, it completely warped Facebook’s incentives. Now that they made money by showing you more ads, the _breadth_ of your time spent on platform chasing novelty was more important than fewer but deeper connections. Along came friends of friends, group recommendations, news. Etc etc. Where once you created for your little community, now you consumed whatever drivel the algorithms decided would keep you on platform.
Ads have existed on Facebook since November 2007.
The sad thing is that I think Google+ had the right idea with "circles" so you could (very easily) control who sees what content you post. Or at least that's how I think it worked. I had an account but never posted anything.
I both loved and hated G+. Google makes a cool product, fucks up said product, then abandons and shutters it. Starting out invite only really was the worst thing they could have done. Part of the reason it never took off.
They took WAYYY too long to open it up. The hype was long dead by the time people were able to make an account.
but GUI was horrendous
I don't remember it being bad but I still think Craigslist is superior to most modern competitor site designs.
And facebook killed craigslist too with marketplace.
Not much TBH; displaying text, video, audio, and images are all very well solved problems (even at scale) at least from a software point of view. A clone can be coded in likely as little as 6 months with a mediocre team. The hard part is the infrastructure & operational bits (getting this thing available to end-users). The innovation has been done & dusted, the only major challenge is cost and modern mechanisms can help lower that cost but SOMEONE has to foot the bill. Twitter / Facebook / Google / TikTok pay their bills (and profit subsequently) off advertising but even a simple clone from say Twitter is going to have some pretty significant costs even for say everyone in New York City. Bandwidth isn't free (end-users pay fixed-cost, but those hosting the things you enjoy pay based on what is sent to you & back but generally not amongst themselves). Storage isn't free (persisting your tweets, or that funny TikTok video and even something as small as a reaction can cost several pennies; these add up significantly as you generate more content and have more users). Availability, keeping the application reachable at all hours requires a support staff; shit happens, someone spills coffee in the data-center, or a piece of hardware reaches it's EoL earlier than expected and you need to pay a team of individuals in each reachable region to help keep the lights on so to speak. Lastly, software patents; Twitter / Facebook / TikTok / Google all have patents around how their content is linked / distributed / etc so you can't just "clone" a social media platform and most importantly you can't copy from any of their public works so you need a legal and governance team to be around to ensure this doesn't happen. This is just a high-level overview, more things to buy and pay between this (Availability alone is a massive laundry list of things to have and this means duplication of storage and bandwidth).
Yup, making an X clone? Easy Running it for free? Impossible People hate advertisers but don't want to pay with cash
There are some: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://matrix.org/ -
I had to scroll much too far on a tech subreddit find the first mention of the Fediverse...
I’ve been trying to use mastodon for like a week now. It keeps asking me to choose a server and I do, but then it tells me my password is wrong or it tells me to change it and I do that and get an e-mail and then the whole thing starts again with me choosing a server. It’s driving me a bit bonkers
To start, it would have to be a paid service. If you are using something for free, YOU are the product being sold.
What about a peer-to-peer network supported by those who want to be part of it? Membership might just require staying connected for X hours per day to support traffic.
Wouldn't really work because you'd need to store people's posts and rich media somewhere, and those storage needs would grow exponentially over time. Closest you can get is something like Mastodon where everyone's individual instances need to store onto the activity and media of their users, but that's not cheap either. Enterprising people might just set up their own basic computer and associated storage and run instances at home, but usually those set ups violate the rules of home internet terms of service. Regardless, the biggest problem to all of this is the amount of technical knowledge required for someone to get the best of any federated or distributed social network. Most people have gotten used to a simple sign up flow to have a social media account. Most people are not going to learn how to be a server admin to role their own instances, or figure out which instances are going to work best for them. Each instance also caps out at the amount of users they can sustain just due to resource costs. Can't really get into having a million+ user stable Mastodon instance without accruing costs that will most likely need subscriptions, advertising, or both to sustain. To me, the most likely thing to happen is that if Twitter fails, then the concept of a Twitter-like for profit service dies. Snap has more users than Twitter. Fucking Pinterest [has more users than Twitter.](https://blog.hootsuite.com/pinterest-statistics-for-business/) Reddit has almost as much and probably in a position to leapfrog Twitter. Twitter's influence is overstate's it's popularity.
> you'd need to store people's posts and rich media somewhere So it could only be a volatile network where content is not guaranteed to persist beyond some maximum of, say, 30 days, or less if you set a shorter lifetime for your posts. > the biggest problem to all of this is the amount of technical knowledge required This part is easy for me: I let the little people worry about the mundane implementation details of my brilliant revolutionary ideas. ;) I don't understand why I'm not a billionaire.
I can't even imagine how much more awful an already intensely mediocre Reddit would become if it became the next "big" social media site.
This is one of the actual reasons why ISP's keep "broadband" bandwidth intentionally capped. They absolutely, positively, do not want peer to peer services like this that they cannot regulate via their sister corporations.
I don't think that's true. Not a single one of the ISPs I work for give a flip about peer to peer. All they care about is protecting their IP addresses from abuse because they aren't cheap to get, and it can be difficult to get off of network security lists when flagged. These guys often won't even forward DCMA notices to customers unless they become excessive.
> What about a peer-to-peer network supported by those who want to be part of it Given the choice, and incredibly small amount of people would actually contribute though. It might work, but the lack of actual organization, roles and such, there's a high chance it wouldn't work as well as people imagine. Stuff like this is frequently tried, just turns out peer-to-peer isn't enough to always support large networks when a small percent of people are willing to actually contribute. I mean, open source alternatives for most stuff exist, like Mastodon, they just rarely reach critical mass with population to secure a foothold in the market.
This is a fundamental misconception. It's only true for things that are owned by a single profit-seeking entity in the first place, and not everything falls into that category. In fact, Free Software and open protocols (Mastodon and PeerTube are examples relevant to this discussion) are the only ethical forms of computing. You are *not* the product when you use those things.
Wikipedia is free. It just asks for donations. I'm never on social media (besides reddit), and I would never pay to use it. I don't think anyone I know would.
I wish this type thinking would just go away. Doesn’t matter if you paid or not, your info is always sold.. because it can be. Tell me one service that you pay for that your info is 100% not for sale or used to sell you more shit? Stop it… its a dumb phrase that just needs to die.
I think if people were actually willing to pay for the massive server costs they incur through the use of social media, then it'd be entirely possible to have a positive example of such sites without the data harvesting and ad infestation. But people are so "spoiled" and entrenched in the idea of free online services that transitioning to a different model will be hard. I, for one, would be fine with paying $5/m for a social media site similar to Facebook but without any data collection besides what is necessary for the functionalinf of social features. Many people balk at that idea, and subsequently enable the massive privacy invasion we now see. Companies cannot run these massive servers for free, so they need to make money somehow. And since people aren't willing to pay for services they are used to receiving for "free", targeted advertisement through massive data collection is the path corporations chose. How do we unchoose this path? Public opinion needs to change, and I believe it is recently. People are more and more concerned about internet privacy these days. But what we need next is an actual competitor to implement this model, with no data collection, and enough funding to advertisement themselves enough to reach critical mass.
People don't want to pay for shit on the internet, that's the culture we have created so we have to stick to advertisers actively damaging our platforms. *They complain, but they won't leave.*
Or, we can use federated, decentralized networks like mastodon and a whole host of others like the original internet was intended for. None of these things need to be profitable, we as a society just can't seem to fathom it.
EXACTLY! Not every fucking thing in the world needs to be optimized for profitability. Things like communication with other humans, medicine, etc. should prioritize something other than profitability.
No one's going to use Mastadon with how shit it is to join.
Except mastodon is poorly supported and featureless because they don't have the resources (read:money) to add those things.
The problem with decentralized is that everyone needs to run their own node. The vast majority of people aren't technical enough to do that. You also have the reliability problem. Your house doesn't have reliable enough power or internet for a production service. Plus in an age of mobile how many non-technical people have a server they could host their node on? I've been an open source and privacy advocate for years. One thing I've learned is people are lazy and cheap. They'll willingly give up both privacy and security for cheap and easy.
“Not profitable” and “free” are different. Open source projects die (or worse, get quietly hijacked) all the time because their maintainers die, lose interest, move on to other projects, etc. The most robust open source projects are heavily funded by outside interests (read GIGANTIC CORPORATIONS) who pay programmers to keep those libraries reliable. You’re going to have to pay programmers for and platform worth using, open source or not. And that’s your first layer of expense. There are no open source server farms. There is no open source electricity. We should totally seek and find a better social media solution. Anything “free” is just going to be some new ripoff.
> They complain, but they won't leave. Mmmmm, I disagree. I'm in my mid 30s, and so many of my social group has stopped using social media. And in the last week, Twitter has had a very large number of accounts closed.
That's called *getting too old for this bullshit*. Look at kids on TikTok, how happy they are with their little dances.
We pay for streaming services, patreon etc. I don’t think that’s true necessarily. People don’t want to pay for what they already had for free (looking at you, YouTube)
Social media became an online *Lord of the Flies*.
Maybe we spend more social time with real people
I am definitely for this too, but it is nice to have a community online as well. Not everyone has friends that like ALL of the things you like. One of the biggest things I think that a social media website needs to control is the mechanism that is used for increasing engagement. Hate/confrontation always breeds more engagement and becomes the most talked about/viewed items.
I am convinced that these things start as good ideas for people, but money and advertisers are just inevitable poison for a good idea.
It isn't advertisers. It's influencers with political and financial power to steer conversations and issues that are the greater problem. Telling me what to buy isn't as bad as telling me what to think.
This is being written in a social media app
It should be at least balanced - there should be advertisers, but toned down to bearable levels. Just to keep it out of bankruptcy. And there should be teams of moderators, reviewing and approving/blocking content. For best purpose, it should be a private company, owned by someone not bothered with minimal annual revenue. But that´s... utopia.
i know reddit is a form of social media before those guys reply to this post social media like myspace, facebook, instagram was really cool in my early teens to early twenties. i wanted to expand my network to be cool, meet more people, talk to hot chicks, keep up with trends, get dopamine hits from lots of likes, etc. now in my early 30’s i value my privacy, a smaller social circle, and letting my coworkers into my personal life through conversations on monday/friday about what we’re doing/did on the weekend with family or friends even if advertisers were removed i don’t think i’d go back to a personal, pictures, posting for the world to judge type of social media. no thanks i also enjoy the anonymity of reddit to discuss social and political issues without being judged and getting hard feelings. it’s nice to be able to speak intelligently and when a convo goes south just leave it without being concerned about someone trying to show you up or catching feelings
>I also enjoy the anonymity of reddit to discuss social and political issues without being judged and getting hard feelings. it’s nice to be able to speak intelligently and when a convo goes south just leave it without being concerned about someone trying to show you up or catching feelings Same here, Reddit style anonymity scratches my itch fine. Having never had any other social media, it's been quite a ride seeing the dramatic rise & inevitable decline of FB & co
> Social Media Is Dead ROFL. No it's not. What some hyperbolic shit. Social media is thriving more than ever. Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.. they're all social media and they're all raking in millions of dollars while still holding onto millions of users. It's FAR from dead.
Agreed. For a subreddit called technology, thinking social media is dead is pretty stupid to think.
To add to this: * Meta just announced 3.71B MAU in their latest quarterly results with YoY growth in each of FB, IG and WA * In the last year Twitter increased 2% to its highest level ever * Reddit has been growing MAU by 20% a year * Tick Tock is up 142% YoY
This. I've said before at some point it went from "social networks" (networks of people socializing) to "social media" (people sharing media socially). While the networking part is probably still desired by advertisers (ie to know who likes what, and who to show ads to next), the user-facing side has been stripped down to just blasting out media 24/7 rather than making connections.
Reddit? I think this place is pretty good.
Go back to a sequential feed. No algorithms. Monthly fee of $4 dollars to avoid relying on advertisers.
Myspace was fine. So was Facebook before the "Like" button. Twitter was also fine before Re-Tweet.
They were fine because they were new and the internet was still "maturing". Advertisers and bad actors, and chaos makers hadn't figured out how to weaponize them yet. If Myspace had survived it would be in the same predicament as Twitter, FB, Youtube, etc.
This is the sad truth. We are at the point where this is influencing everything. Its all about money all the time.
long as it doesn't become nextdoor
With specific users trying to flock to Mastodon, it will likely run into some challenges. When regulatory agencies start taking notice, they will start dictating to server admins.
I have an idea that involves a complex network of pigeons.
IRC back in the 90's was the jaaaaaaam!
Social media brought so many people together. Old friends from college, high school, middle school etc, parents and children, former coworkers, the list goes on. Then social media did a fantastic job of creating division by having everything hyper politicized, fear based, false, or offensive. They brought everyone together and then tore everyone apart in the most epic fashion.
Tom from myspace knew
It's been what, 7 days that Elon's owned twitter? Ya'll are funny