Aggregates

Evidence: High: 1 Medium: 8 Low: 2 No Data: 20

Theme Radar

PaulKeeble 2026-02-22 13:26 UTC link

"Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends and more and more content from random strangers. "

It still baffles me that Facebook fills up my feed with random garbage I have no interest in. I barely use it now because their generated content gets in the way of the reason why I opened facebook to begin with. These algorithmic feeds clearly work for someone but its not what I am looking for, I want to see what I follow and nothing else unless I explictly go looking for it.

benjiweber 2026-02-22 13:31 UTC link

This reminded me of this video from a more optimistic time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

creamyhorror 2026-02-22 13:32 UTC link

I was always perturbed by the shift from calling them "social networks" to "social media". It signalled a friends-to-famous shift (plus ads) that I didn't particularly want.

Why fill my personal feed with stuff I normally get on dedicated discussion/news sites? (Rhetorical; it's obvious why.)

They still call it SNS (social networking service) in Japan. We need to keep moving to a new iteration of this - hopefully one that funnels less money and influence to a small group of players. (I'm working on my own ideas for this.)

dhruv3006 2026-02-22 13:34 UTC link

Any other platforms like Mastodon which are doing things well - are you guys on lemmy?

black_puppydog 2026-02-22 13:36 UTC link

I still think it's worth reflecting which of the toxic patterns we want to, or don't want to reproduce on non-commercial networks like mastodon. Infinite scroll, quote reply, the like button... all these aren't neutral, and discussions were rightly heated about introducing them.

adithyassekhar 2026-02-22 13:46 UTC link

This might be controversial. Please disagree with me.

When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.

So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.

Almondsetat 2026-02-22 13:59 UTC link

IMHO, any social network that offers an "explore" section (i.e. a feed of strangers' posts) is doomed, independently of whether it is algorithmically filtered or chronologically. I ultimately dropped Mastodon because the "dumb" feed from my instance was already enough to waste my time.

To prove this, just use Instagram or Facebook from your browser with the proper extensions and they'll stop being absolute worthless time sinks

asim 2026-02-22 14:08 UTC link

Mastodon really isn't the answer. You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits..not everything needs to be expressed online. Genuinely I think people need something else. The format fails.

What's the alternative? I don't know. But I'm trying to figure it out. Why? Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it. So I think there are new tools to be created but they strip away the addictive behaviours and try to avoid the forms of media that caused the issue in the first place.

dangus 2026-02-22 14:15 UTC link

The title of the article is arguing semantics. Like it or not, the term “social media” is what we use to describe scroll apps like TikTok.

The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else.

I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.

pvtmert 2026-02-22 14:15 UTC link

Unrelated to the topic described in the blog itself, I overall like the theme of `susam.net`. The name itself reminded me of a sesame seed in Turkish for a while. (I think author had recently mentioned one of the recent posts that they wanted to get susam.com but that was already taken by a Turkish company selling some spices...)

The content (that shows up in HN) is also good. Since I am on mobile device, I cannot tell the exact font used, but seems like Georgia to me. While https://github.com/susam/susam.net hosts the actual source code of the website.

Another remark: Would be really nice to have a same theme adaptation for BearBlog and similar places.

grishka 2026-02-22 14:29 UTC link

I myself started making the same distinction when I talk about these things in English, except it's "social media" vs "social networks". Though I have no idea how to make that distinction in Russian, social "media" never caught on as a term there.

An extra annoying problem about social media for me is that while I can make most of the platforms give me a chronological feed of content authored only by people I follow, most other people see mine in an algorithmic feed. This includes people I have zero social connections with. For example, I just gave up trying to discuss politics on Twitter, because every time I post anything political, that tweet ends up in the feeds if hundreds of people who hold the radical version of opposite views, with predictable results. And there's nothing I can do. I can't opt out of being recommended.

gradus_ad 2026-02-22 15:07 UTC link

I will admit, one thing the crowd attention model does exceptionally well is surface the best comments on content. Whether it's HN, Instagram, YouTube, etc... the top comments are usually the "best", depending on how best is defined in the given context. On the silly Instagram meme videos my algo serves up, the top comments are invariably hilarious, often funnier than the actual content, and as you scroll it's impressive how the ordering by like count matches hilarity quite well.

mmclar 2026-02-22 15:48 UTC link

I'm surprised there's not more discussion here and in general about symmetric- vs. asymmetric-relationship networks. Facebook worked in the beginning because relationships were symmetric and there was no concept of getting "follows" -- friendships are modeled after real life ones, where the friendship is between two people.

I can see why the big networks moved away from that: pushing "content" has a lot more friction when relationships are symmetrical. What I don't understand is why there is no upstart trying to bring that back.

bravoetch 2026-02-22 16:05 UTC link

My family has moved to group chats. It's great.

jwr 2026-02-22 16:39 UTC link

Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see.

As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me.

Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.

Trickery5837 2026-02-22 17:18 UTC link

The final transition happened with the death of online forums. I still miss those dearly. I've met extremely interesting and competent people with a true desire to interact with passionate peers. They thought me how to ask for and give advice, how to express opinions in public, the value of growing a community around common interest, and the joy of laughing and getting angry on the OT section.

isodev 2026-02-22 18:48 UTC link

I’m quite literally experiencing a physical reaction whenever I need to browse some algorithmic timeline. Even YouTube, what used to be a couple of related videos is now a wall full of “recommendations” - the unskippable ads on every video are more relevant than the actual videos…

Mastodon and related (for me Loops mainly) are a breath of fresh air and I wish more people can (re)learn to enjoy that.

TrackerFF 2026-02-22 19:23 UTC link

FB is still a social network, but seemingly only when you use groups. And you actively need to moderate those. Public pages, and things like that? AI/bots and ads wasteland.

lukeschlather 2026-02-22 19:27 UTC link

The funny thing about Facebook is that it's got a perfectly good social network in there, I think the only one that exists. In the menu is "Feeds" which is what you want. It only shows friends and followed things. If they made that the default when you go to facebook.com I don't think I'd have any complaints feature-wise, though an ad-free option would be nice. It's a genuine social network.

Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.

with 2026-02-23 02:50 UTC link

The real social network is the group chat / friend group you already have. Everything else is algorithmic brainrot with some kind of "friends list" for "legitimacy".

The problem isn't the feed, it's that people actually use "social" networks instead of just talking to actual friends. Just close the apps, lol