The only problem is people expecting niche experiences with large general service platforms.
Want to have engaging and enriching discussions about a topic? There's probably a website for that exact topic. It has a forum or IRC chat room and probably a mailing list. It might have a twitter/facebook account, but those aren't the channels you use if you're really involved.
Want to find those places that have engaging enriching discussions about topics? Stop looking at Facebook, Twitter, et al. That's not where it's happening. And my money is on it never happening. That's not what they're for.
It is just not true that there is some other forum or IRC or mailing list for the topics one wants to discuss. One example is local politics, Facebook is the only platform where you can find people willing to discuss topics like that, there will never be a forum or IRC channel to discuss the planned railway tunnel in Varberg, my home city. And it is obvious why, most of the non-internet affine people are already on Facebook but will never install a IRC client.
Just a thought or observation, which I have not properly thought through at all...
I don't use social media at all. I have dabbled in the past, but I just gave up relatively quickly. Do I miss out? No. There is useful stuff there, absolutely, but what I have found is that traditional media works as a sort of filter. So, I'm a F1 fan. Lots of F1 people twitter. But, anything important and useful appears in the usual traditional places. So, I have no need what so ever to follow any one on twitter. If something important comes up, it will appear on, say, the BBC's F1 sub-site.
So, these days, I would suggest that twitter, facebook, etc, are like a raw feed, with traditional journalists filtering the information for me. So far, I have not ever missed out.
Is that what's happening in general, or is that just me?
Another thing I have discovered recently is that live news is misleading knee jerk stuff, that in the end doesn't really help most people. The latest example I can think of is the attack in London. So much info was flying about, but most of it was inaccurate and contradictory. My missus was glued to 24hr rolling news and twitter, and frankly talking nonsense, with it changing all the time. In the end, I told her to turn it all of and watch the 10 o'clock new later on, by which time a more coherent picture would have emerged. Which is pretty much what I do now. Do we really need our new instantly? Or is it better quality a few hours later?
I would, of course, accept that this sort of raw live information is very useful to those involved in one way or another. But most of us aren't.
So you think. And I would agree that Facebook, Twitter, et. al. have failed miserably in serving their purported customers (their real customers are probably more than happy, but I won't get into that). But I think the whole reason those things were appealing in the first place was that traditional media had failed even worse.
At least with social media you have more control. Control over who you associate with and what you pay attention to. What can you do with TV or a newspaper? Turn them off or throw them away; at best you can scan through them while trying to avoid content (including ads) not relevant to you.
There are other alternatives though; take HN for example. It's not unfiltered, but it definitely gives you more (and most likely more relevant to your interests) stories. Aggregators such as HN, ./, et. al have been far superior to anything I've ever experienced from TV or newsprint. Much more relevant, much more in depth, much more accurate (not a high bar to beat), and most importantly, filtered to my interests (who gives two shts about the Hiltons or the Kardashians?). They're not perfect, but they are definitely a step in the right direction. I've discovered so many things via HN, ./ and other aggregators that I never* would have discovered via traditional media (or probably FB or Twitter for that matter).
I've been facing this exact same problem for a while now. I've always wanted a network where I'm not confined by just the "friends" I know or the people I follow. I want content, conversation, not fame driven profiles. This isn't a spam or commercial for my own service. But my friend and I just released our own service to address these issues. We created raveler to focus on "tags", aka categories of content. You follow tags and receive the contents related to that. On top of this, we made sure that everyone (people who follow or not follow the tag) can contribute to the conversation by simply reply. Kinda like HN I guess. Take a look and I'd love to improve the service based on your feedback. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/raveler/id641285606?ls=1&...
You have places that are kinda nice. They are few and far between and short lived.
Either you have less than 500 subscribers and nothing happens ever. Or you have 20000+ subscribers and the herd mentality takes over. I think there is a cut somewhere between 10 000 - 20 000. It seems that the thoughtful flee after that, and only the loud and narrow minded are left behind.
Part of the problem is that if there is a subreddit that you find interesting and someone posts something about once a week it's probably buried by the bigger subs in your feed. Subs that are mediocre at best. You can unsubscribe from bigger ones, but you cannot make all of the subs you follow to have just single post on your front page every day. I admit the "res" functionality solves this to some degree.
There used to be periodic complaints how reddit is going worse. That died of as anyone who cared deleted their accounts and headed somewhere else.
Reddit does one thing very good and that is the red letter.
I mod an /r/ with 140,000 subs - and it's been a tough thing to keep the community happy and in agreement, neither of which I feel our community currently is.
The difficult thing is that everyone has a different opinion of what makes the community and how it should act.
We need to keep a high-level framework of rules and enforce those rules, but for the most part let the community members hash it out.
I try to take a more hands off approach to modding simply because with our user base you're damned if you do, damned if you don't - and I don't want to censor any content per se...
The magic /r/friends subreddit could stand to be promoted better, and perhaps given some programmer attention. Maybe 1/20th of the time, instead of showing an ad, the site could stick something there saying, "Here's a recent high-profile post from your friend, which you appear to have missed."
"Social" evolves. Part of that is the society it attracts and part the society infused in increments by the creators of the walled garden.
But here's the real kicker: "Social" is just a badly made forum with an attachment feature. It's just that instead of the focus being on replying to threads, it's now new thread creation with a provision to vote, bookmark and subscribe to others' bookmarks. The more users you have in this forum, the more it gets used (the snowball effect; or rather the opposite of the "Empty Restaurant" problem mentioned by Spolsky).
From a discoverability standpoint they are. There's not really any way to find like-minded people you don't already know and strike up a conversation with e-mail, because everything is private. Which is kind of the definition of "social".
Pretty sure that nowhere in the definition of social does it enforce the need to meet or otherwise speak to people that you didn't previously know. Please don't confuse "social" as a general term with "social discovery".
For many people, having something that's pretty easy to use and lets them communicate with people that they already know is a really great thing.
Email really isn't designed as a social discovery tool. There are many other technologies (some of them built on top of email like mailing lists) that _are_ designed for those purposes, and several of them work perfectly well.
If what you're expecting is one tool that both fits and performs well at all possible use cases, then you're going to be severely disappointed.
Given the scanning that the likes of google do to gmail, it seems advertisers can "discover" me based on email. Just need to extend that to every one else.
My e-mail is pretty clean, and every now and then, like maybe once a month, I get down to a totally empty inbox. I don't subscribe to many lists (but more than none), and I reply to important things, and delete sometimes. I use a "pending" tag to move off items where I am waiting for something else to happen. It seems to me that most people don't know how to handle e-mail (which is a serious problem), but it isn't fundamentally broken.
I'm using SaneBox. I've gone from 20-25 mails a day to 1 or 2, really it saves a lot of time - I just check my @SaneLater box once a day and weed it out - if it should have been in my inbox, I move it to inbox and sanebox learns. I almost never have to go to their website.
Isn't it all pretty much worthless? A few years ago I thought with google and 'social media' (hate that term) that no one would ever be misinformed again. But look at 'em, people are dumber than ever. If every social thingamajig and comments section were deleted off the internet I think it would be an improvement.
Yeah, I see the irony of saying that in a comments section on the internet.
Human interaction is hardly worthless, regardless of the 'quality' of said interaction. We are social creatures, and the vast majority of people have an innate desire to share their lives and thoughts with other people.
Instagramming the trail when I went for a walk last night^1 didn't make anyone smarter, but it allowed me to share a piece of beauty from my day that could quite possibly have made them feel happier.
That said, I disagree entirely with the idea that people are not more informed because of social media. The first reports of the raid resulting in the death of Osama Bin Laden came from a civilian in Islamabad who was live-tweeting about the sound of helicopters overhead^2. Say what you will about Twitter/Facebook, but they were both instrumental in the Arab Spring and helped revolutionaries topple numerous oppressive regimes.
The news is being broken and made on social media. It's a communication tool unlike anything humanity has ever had access to, so some people will continue to swing it wildly like a child who has just been given a toy hammer, but that does not negate its efficacy in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
mm, Unless social interaction leads to a net negative outcome for the rest of the world: I'm thinking of Nationalism in Europe and Japan for example during the early 1910 and 1930s. I'd argue that the consensual agreement in the sub-humanization of Jews would qualify as worthless human interaction.
Sharing what makes you happy doesn't necessarily makes others happy.
And as convenient as social media was in speeding up the spread of news for the OBL raid and coordination for Arab Spring, it's also lead to witch hunts (Boston Bombings), and general spread of false information (politics anyone?).
You're right, some people suck and using social media, and others are very efficient at it. But I think for what purpose someone uses a tool is important.
you made me think that this topic is very complex. your example is nice (i mean the instagram photo), but sometimes people just post silly things, sometimes i feel it makes me stupid
Want to have engaging and enriching discussions about a topic? There's probably a website for that exact topic. It has a forum or IRC chat room and probably a mailing list. It might have a twitter/facebook account, but those aren't the channels you use if you're really involved.
Want to find those places that have engaging enriching discussions about topics? Stop looking at Facebook, Twitter, et al. That's not where it's happening. And my money is on it never happening. That's not what they're for.