As a millennial (25), I disagree with the notion that all of Facebook and Instagram are vapid and meaningless. To me, that just shows that you're not curating your feeds in a manner that highlights what good remains on the platforms.
The problem to me is not that people are less willing to participate, but that the platforms have consumed all meaningful discussion. I'm a part of some fantastic niche groups on Facebook, follow insightful people on Twitter, and read many fantastic subreddits. I've led book clubs, played board games, and developed deep, meaningful relationships via these platforms. They problem is they have been consumed in the monolith of likes and cat pictures, and pulling the value out is growing more difficult. It's a matter of continually chopping back the vines (cutting /r/funny and /r/worldnews out of reddit, deleting friends you don't care about and unliking fan pages on Facebook).
My internet social groups are still the same as yours are. We just have different mediums through which we communicate.
From the perspective of a millennial from the other end of the generation (39), it looks like you two are talking past each other.
To your point: the way you're using Facebook/Insta is effectively the same pattern people used BBSs and Usenet back in the day, just adapted to modern devices, UIs, etc.
To OP's point: it's truly impossible to describe how much less bullshit was on the internet back in the day to someone who wasn't around to experience it for themselves. You had the same ability to be social on a BBS, but it was 100% opt-in engagement, your online presence there was scoped to that BBS alone, and use of real names was taboo.
> As a millennial (25), I disagree with the notion that all of Facebook and Instagram are vapid and meaningless. To me, that just shows that you're not curating your feeds in a manner that highlights what good remains on the platforms.
I don't know about Instagram, but Facebook will put vapid garbage into your feed if you've curated it down enough. 'You might be interested in ...' because they don't want to have a stale feed when your friends aren't doing anything.
Disclosure: I worked at Facebook, as part of an aquisition; however, I never worked on or with the feed team.
So I like twitter, and I get a handful of tweets per day - no more, no less. But I just can't resist trying to get more of my "tweets" into my phone, whether my friends want to share, or just 'liked" or commented or likes the comment I just wrote in twitter. (It's okay, it'll probably get deleted, sorry. I just love Twitter.) I also like getting 'likes' off of 'twitter', but mostly because my friends and co-workers can see those, and feel 'liked' too. Like I said, I'm a user of twitter for a few reasons and a very important reason - to engage more with people online - whether social media wants me to, or isn't too keen to allow me.
I still can't find the settings on Twitter (web) to get a plain normal feed. I still get them pushing "topics" and my friend's liked content in my feed.
I think the challenge is encroachment. As the tech companies need to squeeze more revenue to continue growth they'll try to monetize increasingly hard.
What does that lead to? Banning 2000 "altright" subreddits, even heavily moderated ones like /r/the_donald (now patriots.win). Facebook adding advertisements to messenger. Twitter letting half their users (i.e. bots) to continue to use the platform; while banning alternative opinions.
The reality is they want cash, anything with that motive is going to guide conversations.
I think you’re right about social media having consumed all of the content but the curation you mention used to be there before and was perhaps less of a losing battle. Now instead of just maintaining a list or fed of interesting groups, pages and people you also have to fight algorithms deployed by these closed platforms to monetize your attention. That and the constant flood of obnoxious people that you need to block our filter out.
It doesn’t have to be this way, we just need to break up these overgrown giants.
don't listen to what we're being told all the time, we just know what the current social media will allow for. And I think we do the Internet for the wrong reasons. I think we should treat social media as a technology-based network; and just be more aware of its current purpose, not as a way to 'like' people or to be "trendy".
The problem to me is not that people are less willing to participate, but that the platforms have consumed all meaningful discussion. I'm a part of some fantastic niche groups on Facebook, follow insightful people on Twitter, and read many fantastic subreddits. I've led book clubs, played board games, and developed deep, meaningful relationships via these platforms. They problem is they have been consumed in the monolith of likes and cat pictures, and pulling the value out is growing more difficult. It's a matter of continually chopping back the vines (cutting /r/funny and /r/worldnews out of reddit, deleting friends you don't care about and unliking fan pages on Facebook).
My internet social groups are still the same as yours are. We just have different mediums through which we communicate.