Yes. Now, if we could implement an irl place without all those people as well, I think I’d like that. Everything contains idiots but I find the overall company around here at least somewhat filtered of them.
Linked in is simultaneously the most useful and useless social media platform.
On one hand, you can use it to get jobs, and keep a line of contact with former/present colleagues in a professional setting (as opposed to Facebook or remembering to write down their personal email address).
On the other hand, you have the feed, which is full of the most stupid, banal, and preformative shit you’ll ever see on social media, because it’s all in the name of advancing your career in this superficial society of ours.
I was reading the Wikipedia page linked just an hour ago.
and I was surprised to see over a billion daily users on Facebook. I used to think at best that’d be in millions.
I understand now that what do people mean when they day social media’s amplification of a certain message can have great impact. I used to take it lightly, partly because I an totally detached to any of these big platforms.
and being on Lemmy is a wholly different experience.
Damn! I didn’t know so many people still use Facebook. But it still doesn’t sound right. I definitely don’t feel like 37.5% of Earth’s population uses Facebook.
yeah, there are quite a number of people who have multiple accounts. almost everyone I know does. same goes for whatsapp and instagram. it’s still a massive number nonetheless
It’s nuts how a difference of hundreds of millions of people doesn’t actually feel like a ton more people or provide any better quality except in some niche spots
This is a good point. My interactions with the Fediverse over the last few months has been sublime. Maybe users here are just proportionally more active?
Numbers are nice, but they’re not everything. Yeah, we could onboard 2 billion lurkers, but how would that improve anything?
I already saw this happening on Reddit. The largest subreddit were filled with generic posts. They got a lot of content, not necessarily good content. But there were plenty of small or medium sized subreddits that had much better content. The Fediverse feels like it is missing the big subreddits. It also feels too small to have the small niche subreddits. What is here in terms of content feels more like a few medium sized subreddits.
Just responding to what you say about generic, but lately when I lurk reddit the only stuff I see is REALLY generic Relationship stuff (front page without log in o/c) and recycled OAF memes.
You’re unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.
Dave was bragging to his boss one day, “You know, I know everyone there is to know. Just name someone, anyone, and I know them.”
Tired of his boasting, his boss called his bluff, “OK, Dave, how about Tom Cruise?”
“No dramas boss, Tom and I are old friends, and I can prove it.” So Dave and his boss fly out to Hollywood and knock on Tom Cruise’s door, and Tom Cruise shouts,
“Dave! What’s happening? Great to see you! Come on in for a beer!”
Although impressed, Dave’s boss is still skeptical. After they leave Cruise’s house, he tells Dave that he thinks him knowing Cruise was just lucky.
“No, no, just name anyone else,” Dave says.
“President Obama,” his boss quickly retorts.
“Yup,” Dave says, “Old buddies, let’s fly out to Washington,” and off they go.
At the White House, Obama spots Dave on the tour and motions him and his boss over, saying, “Dave, what a surprise, I was just on my way to a meeting, but you and your friend come on in and let’s have a beer first and catch up.”
Well, the boss is very shaken by now but still not totally convinced. After they leave the White House grounds he expresses his doubts to Dave, who again implores him to name anyone else.
“Pope Francis,” his boss replies.
“Sure!” says Dave. “I’ve known the Pope for years.” So off they fly to Rome.
Dave and his boss are assembled with the masses at the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square when Dave says, “This will never work. I can’t catch the Pope’s eye among all these people. Tell you what, I know all the guards so let me just go upstairs and I’ll come out on the balcony with the Pope.” He disappears into the crowd headed towards the Vatican.
Sure enough, half an hour later Dave emerges with the Pope on the balcony, but by the time Dave returns, he finds that his boss has had a heart attack and is surrounded by paramedics.
Making his way to his boss’ side, Dave asks him, “What happened?”
His boss looks up and says, “It was the final straw… you and the Pope came out on to the balcony and the man next to me said, who the fuck is that on the balcony with Dave?”
There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.
My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.
Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.
Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.
IMHO, the other part of the problem is that spicy hot-takes quickly get engagement from other users and bubble up to the top. And a lot of those spicy comments are trash, but not in violation of rules, so mods leave them up.
This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”
You can see that clearly with both Twitter and reddit. There is no worse feeling than spending time to write something with thought only to not have anyone interact with these posts at all, while tired one-liner and ragebait gets a ton of likes and comments.
However, Lemmy’s algorithm doesn’t really punish writing long form contents the same way reddit does from my experience, so I feel more free to take a little bit longer to write out my thoughts here compared to elsewhere.
One way I thought of to encourage long form content and high quality, is to limit the number of short form content from users.
I imagined every week users would be granted 14 comments that are limited to 250 characters and unlimited long form content. You could also grant more short form comments with every long form comment or with every new oc post.
The only issue would be that long form does not mean high quality and with chatgpt it’ll be easy to create long form posts. Maybe an AI system that evaluates the quality of the post could work but then gaming the system would happen.
Just a thought I had, the numbers about the length and amount of posts could be optimized or use an AI
Just saw a meme the other day about how the old mantra “Don’t feed the troll” seems to have fallen by the wayside and about 90% of the issues on the internet right now are caused by that.
Everyone at my work uses Snapchat regularly. I was pretty surprised to hear them all mentioning it as I hadn’t really heard of it in years. They’re between the ages of 22-40s if that changes anything.
it’s one of the only commonly known messaging platform to most people that:
1: isn’t owned by a company that many people hate, even if they don’t know much about it.
2: isn’t platform locked and doesn’t discriminate.
3: doesn’t require money or verification to use.
i can see how it’s kinda settled out this way. whatsapp never caught on in the u.s. because everyone here was happy with sms and mms when the rest of the world was picking up Whatsapp. from what i understand that’s literally just because texting was cheap in the u.s… now people want more than mms, but apple is being apple about it so we need a third party app. by this point Whatsapp is owned by Facebook and the “privacy” of it is openly mocked by the average non tech person. everyone hates Facebook so the idea of willingly adopting another Facebook messenger that you’re not already on seems crazy. anyone that would accept that is just going to use Facebook messenger instead. anyone that wouldn’t will find something better.
Snapchat has no big controversies. no one knows who owns them. they don’t really try to be more than a messaging platform. i can see why people would uncritically choose it as their default. i bet it’s big among the kids who don’t play that whole blue bubble iphone supremacy game, but don’t use discord either. so i guess the non nerdy kids that aren’t elitist dicks. that’s who I’d guess uses it amongst the youth these days.
edit: before the suggestions come, I know these aren’t good solutions. I’m just theorizing why. getting my friends on matrix as best i can…
No, because those don’t have social media functions built in. Snapchat has those TikTok slideshows and ads among posting pictures of yourself too. It’s more of an all in one that many use
Realistically this graph wouldn’t include Snapchat, as it’s less of a “social media” than the others. Most people nowadays use it strictly as a messaging platform.
Surprised to see LinkedIn’s 930 million MAU! I might have heard someone mention it irl like 2 times my whole life? But maybe that’s cuz I’m not in the job market yet.
It has different aspects to it. Big part of it is job hunters i believe, but i use it mostly for promotion of my research, discussion with other researchers, policy discussions and following conferences / webinars and news about climate related stuff. I use it daily.
It’s big for sales people too - I research who is the right person to contact at an organization, and also to find out what they’ve been up to lately that might be useful in a sales pitch.
Like most popular social media sites, you usually won’t see very valuable discussion in the comments, at least in my experience. It’s mostly for people to post news, research, and so on, and follow the big names or organizations in their field.
Most of the valuable information is diffused via posts but I do put a bit of time and effort into trying to filter out all the crap posts like memes, the faux inspirational stuff, self-aggrandizing nonsense, etc.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Yes. Now, if we could implement an irl place without all those people as well, I think I’d like that. Everything contains idiots but I find the overall company around here at least somewhat filtered of them.
I think the people here tend to filter themselves better than places like reddit.
Having left somewhere else, they don’t want the new place to suffer the same fate.
You want to tell us something?
It’s our Pale Blue Dot
Surprised a boring platform like LinkedIn has that many users.
Fuck LinkedIn. It’s just gross, my feed is just full of shilling.
For most it’s a CV hosting platform and nothing else.
Just don’t tell their investors who are clearly pushing to make it a social media hub.
Edit: it’s the second-to-last place I would ever consider for that purpose. Right after Venmo.
It’s pretty important career-wise, suggest this video if you’re interested.
I, too, have a profile on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean I use it more often than once a month or something, just to check up on notifications
Linked in is simultaneously the most useful and useless social media platform.
On one hand, you can use it to get jobs, and keep a line of contact with former/present colleagues in a professional setting (as opposed to Facebook or remembering to write down their personal email address).
On the other hand, you have the feed, which is full of the most stupid, banal, and preformative shit you’ll ever see on social media, because it’s all in the name of advancing your career in this superficial society of ours.
I hate it, but it has its uses.
So this is the Pluto of the internet?
To be honest, despite the smaller community, I feel more at home in the Fediverse than ever I did in those big, bloated, commercial communities.
I was reading the Wikipedia page linked just an hour ago.
and I was surprised to see over a billion daily users on Facebook. I used to think at best that’d be in millions.
I understand now that what do people mean when they day social media’s amplification of a certain message can have great impact. I used to take it lightly, partly because I an totally detached to any of these big platforms.
and being on Lemmy is a wholly different experience.
Damn! I didn’t know so many people still use Facebook. But it still doesn’t sound right. I definitely don’t feel like 37.5% of Earth’s population uses Facebook.
yeah, there are quite a number of people who have multiple accounts. almost everyone I know does. same goes for whatsapp and instagram. it’s still a massive number nonetheless
I’m in the 1%
Since you posted it in a selfhosting community, this is the feeling I get:
Quick, everyone get more friends and grow that family!
It’s nuts how a difference of hundreds of millions of people doesn’t actually feel like a ton more people or provide any better quality except in some niche spots
This is a good point. My interactions with the Fediverse over the last few months has been sublime. Maybe users here are just proportionally more active?
Numbers are nice, but they’re not everything. Yeah, we could onboard 2 billion lurkers, but how would that improve anything?
I already saw this happening on Reddit. The largest subreddit were filled with generic posts. They got a lot of content, not necessarily good content. But there were plenty of small or medium sized subreddits that had much better content. The Fediverse feels like it is missing the big subreddits. It also feels too small to have the small niche subreddits. What is here in terms of content feels more like a few medium sized subreddits.
Just responding to what you say about generic, but lately when I lurk reddit the only stuff I see is REALLY generic Relationship stuff (front page without log in o/c) and recycled OAF memes.
You’re unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.
What percent of humans use facebook! When take out children to young to use fb, people with out internet, what is the actual percent.
Just Dave and my aunt
Sure, but Dave is a heavyweight in social media:
Dave was bragging to his boss one day, “You know, I know everyone there is to know. Just name someone, anyone, and I know them.”
Tired of his boasting, his boss called his bluff, “OK, Dave, how about Tom Cruise?”
“No dramas boss, Tom and I are old friends, and I can prove it.” So Dave and his boss fly out to Hollywood and knock on Tom Cruise’s door, and Tom Cruise shouts,
“Dave! What’s happening? Great to see you! Come on in for a beer!”
Although impressed, Dave’s boss is still skeptical. After they leave Cruise’s house, he tells Dave that he thinks him knowing Cruise was just lucky.
“No, no, just name anyone else,” Dave says.
“President Obama,” his boss quickly retorts.
“Yup,” Dave says, “Old buddies, let’s fly out to Washington,” and off they go.
At the White House, Obama spots Dave on the tour and motions him and his boss over, saying, “Dave, what a surprise, I was just on my way to a meeting, but you and your friend come on in and let’s have a beer first and catch up.”
Well, the boss is very shaken by now but still not totally convinced. After they leave the White House grounds he expresses his doubts to Dave, who again implores him to name anyone else.
“Pope Francis,” his boss replies.
“Sure!” says Dave. “I’ve known the Pope for years.” So off they fly to Rome.
Dave and his boss are assembled with the masses at the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square when Dave says, “This will never work. I can’t catch the Pope’s eye among all these people. Tell you what, I know all the guards so let me just go upstairs and I’ll come out on the balcony with the Pope.” He disappears into the crowd headed towards the Vatican.
Sure enough, half an hour later Dave emerges with the Pope on the balcony, but by the time Dave returns, he finds that his boss has had a heart attack and is surrounded by paramedics.
Making his way to his boss’ side, Dave asks him, “What happened?”
His boss looks up and says, “It was the final straw… you and the Pope came out on to the balcony and the man next to me said, who the fuck is that on the balcony with Dave?”
Quality shit
we really need to stop calling it formerly Twitter and just call it Shitter.
he ruined the platform, the people can ruin a name
Xitter
It was ruined long before he touched it
It just made it worse faster
Twitter’s best days were about 10 years prior to Elon buying it
deleted by creator
There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.
My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.
Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.
Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.
IMHO, the other part of the problem is that spicy hot-takes quickly get engagement from other users and bubble up to the top. And a lot of those spicy comments are trash, but not in violation of rules, so mods leave them up.
This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”
You can see that clearly with both Twitter and reddit. There is no worse feeling than spending time to write something with thought only to not have anyone interact with these posts at all, while tired one-liner and ragebait gets a ton of likes and comments.
However, Lemmy’s algorithm doesn’t really punish writing long form contents the same way reddit does from my experience, so I feel more free to take a little bit longer to write out my thoughts here compared to elsewhere.
One way I thought of to encourage long form content and high quality, is to limit the number of short form content from users.
I imagined every week users would be granted 14 comments that are limited to 250 characters and unlimited long form content. You could also grant more short form comments with every long form comment or with every new oc post.
The only issue would be that long form does not mean high quality and with chatgpt it’ll be easy to create long form posts. Maybe an AI system that evaluates the quality of the post could work but then gaming the system would happen.
Just a thought I had, the numbers about the length and amount of posts could be optimized or use an AI
I like that you’re describing an anti-Twitter, where people have to express themselves in over 250 characters, rather than under 140 or 280.
Just saw a meme the other day about how the old mantra “Don’t feed the troll” seems to have fallen by the wayside and about 90% of the issues on the internet right now are caused by that.
great comment!
i tend to agree. i think the fediverse is probably the best model moving forward. it is a challenging problem!
I’m surprised Snapchat is that popular. It’s not something I hear about too much anymore.
Everyone at my work uses Snapchat regularly. I was pretty surprised to hear them all mentioning it as I hadn’t really heard of it in years. They’re between the ages of 22-40s if that changes anything.
it’s one of the only commonly known messaging platform to most people that:
1: isn’t owned by a company that many people hate, even if they don’t know much about it.
2: isn’t platform locked and doesn’t discriminate.
3: doesn’t require money or verification to use.
i can see how it’s kinda settled out this way. whatsapp never caught on in the u.s. because everyone here was happy with sms and mms when the rest of the world was picking up Whatsapp. from what i understand that’s literally just because texting was cheap in the u.s… now people want more than mms, but apple is being apple about it so we need a third party app. by this point Whatsapp is owned by Facebook and the “privacy” of it is openly mocked by the average non tech person. everyone hates Facebook so the idea of willingly adopting another Facebook messenger that you’re not already on seems crazy. anyone that would accept that is just going to use Facebook messenger instead. anyone that wouldn’t will find something better.
Snapchat has no big controversies. no one knows who owns them. they don’t really try to be more than a messaging platform. i can see why people would uncritically choose it as their default. i bet it’s big among the kids who don’t play that whole blue bubble iphone supremacy game, but don’t use discord either. so i guess the non nerdy kids that aren’t elitist dicks. that’s who I’d guess uses it amongst the youth these days.
edit: before the suggestions come, I know these aren’t good solutions. I’m just theorizing why. getting my friends on matrix as best i can…
And here I am, using Google messages, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp and line. And teams and discord. And steam chat.
Oof
It’s the WhatsApp equivalent in the US tbh. People ask for each other’s Snapchat instead of numbers sometimes these days
So this graph should include WA, TG, signal, matrix etc
No, because those don’t have social media functions built in. Snapchat has those TikTok slideshows and ads among posting pictures of yourself too. It’s more of an all in one that many use
Realistically this graph wouldn’t include Snapchat, as it’s less of a “social media” than the others. Most people nowadays use it strictly as a messaging platform.
It seems a lot of kids these days in the US use it
Surprised to see LinkedIn’s 930 million MAU! I might have heard someone mention it irl like 2 times my whole life? But maybe that’s cuz I’m not in the job market yet.
It has different aspects to it. Big part of it is job hunters i believe, but i use it mostly for promotion of my research, discussion with other researchers, policy discussions and following conferences / webinars and news about climate related stuff. I use it daily.
It’s big for sales people too - I research who is the right person to contact at an organization, and also to find out what they’ve been up to lately that might be useful in a sales pitch.
Oh wow, I didn’t know it’s used for research and policy discussions as well! That’s pretty neat.
Like most popular social media sites, you usually won’t see very valuable discussion in the comments, at least in my experience. It’s mostly for people to post news, research, and so on, and follow the big names or organizations in their field.
Most of the valuable information is diffused via posts but I do put a bit of time and effort into trying to filter out all the crap posts like memes, the faux inspirational stuff, self-aggrandizing nonsense, etc.
I agree it’s has the corporate and institutional side of tech news that Lemmy doesn’t have.
Look we are on the map!