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I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictur

by 8s2ngy 1y ago

I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends, college friends, and distant family without having to see irrelevant posts, like some stupid remark from a politician halfway around the world or influencers doing something outrageous just for attention.

aramattamara 1y ago
Try MySpace, classmates.com? They are still around.
- salt-thrower 1y ago
  The trouble is: broadly speaking, no one uses those.
  - RajT88 1y ago
    I logged into classmates a couple of years ago. I had a message waiting from 2005 from one of my sister's insane ex-friends. That was a blast from the past and hilarious. 18 years without bothering to log in. Then I realized their business model is so low-rent, they had web 1.0 style protections on scraping all their scanned yearbooks. So I liberated all the ones with anyone I was likely to know and posted them to Archive.org. You're welcome. Also: #deletefacebook
frankacter 1y ago
From Feeds in the sidebar, select Friends. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
wegfawefgawefg 1y ago
i used facebook back when it functioned like that. and it was still retarded then
- LtWorf 1y ago
  But less :D
  - blitzar 1y ago
    I got shot 7 times in the head rather than 10.
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      When I got on it I'd just see local events and stuff people I knew posted. Now it's "science" pages and shorts, which spread disinformation.
      - 9rx 1y ago
        The "Friends" tab (sometimes "Feed" instead; the A/B testing on this one seems strong) only shows the posts of people you know. Events is still there as well. But in both cases the rate of creation has dropped dramatically since the time you remember, making these nearly useless. That's why the social media services have had to focus on content created by professional content creators instead. The outcome was inevitable. People had fun posting posts and photos when it was a novelty, but once the novelty wore off they were back to not wanting to put in the effort. You can only post so many photos of your cat before you grow tired of it.
        LtWorf 1y ago
        What's the point of posting stuff if nobody will see it because facebook decided so?
        9rx 1y ago
zdc1 1y ago
Instagram used to be closer to this when they showed posts in chronological order. Of course, Facebook got to work and ended this by showing posts in algo-sorted order, added an explore page, and even started showing non-followed people's viral content on the main feed. So unfortunately the trend has been a slow frog-boiling march towards engagement and enshittification. In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the group chat instead...
supriyo-biswas 1y ago
> This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media... Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating with you because of the additional friction caused, especially when a free alternative exists. Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if you had users pay for the product. Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain their initial spread. I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing is generally useful or entertaining, respectively. This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social circles would also follow through with the same choice. This ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages. Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1]. (Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people disagree with.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window#
- nehal3m 1y ago
  > However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company I’m reading this as: The corporate internet is unable to fulfill the actual social needs of its users. >Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. And this translates to: Our economic system drains us of so much of our energy that living a fulfilling life is no longer possible, and so we fill our valuable time with the slop that same system serves us. I think you’re being downvoted because your comment speaks to an uncomfortable truth, namely that none of this is working to advance quality of life but rather to advance the contents of a few wallets.
designerarvid 1y ago
Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. As you say, the algorithmic feed is superior for creators wanting reach, and more importantly, advertisers who want eyeballs on their ads. Due to network effects, it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative. Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement. The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff). The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.
- UnreachableCode 1y ago
  > it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative. Isn’t this just WhatsApp now though? The addition of Statuses, Following and now Communities almost confirms this. People are dropping Facebook and IG, but can’t give up WhatsApp (yet).
  - Thorrez 1y ago
    WhatsApp isn't non-profit.
- doubtfuluser 1y ago
  > Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. I’m not sure if that’s actually a “shortcut” to the reptile brain and it’s just about “I have to scroll more to get stuff I’m interested in. At least for me it feels like that and it causes me to use these social media things far less. For me it feels more like intermittent rewards vs full rewards at once. Obviously for the ad-industry the intermittent rewards are more useful, that’s why we can’t have nice things
- xobs 1y ago
xyzal 1y ago
I think the EU should flex their regulatory muscle and forbid algorithmic feeds on by default unless the networks break european society as the US is broken.
- vekker 1y ago
  I'm sure that would work out fine. Just like the GDPR regulation made the web so much better & more private, and the promise of the AI act is boosting innovation in Europe...
  - earnestinger 1y ago
    You probably mean the visible cooky thing. But behind the scenes companies did start to think about customer data gathering, retention and deletion in terms of maximal fine of 4% of turnover.
  - sureglymop 1y ago
    The GDPR regulation is great and arguably does make the web more private and better. At the very least, it's better than having no regulations. I've even been able to successfully use it to remove something private about me from the internet. I don't think I would have even gotten a response had there been no legal precedent. You can always argue about how some regulations are badly implemented or incomplete but I believe it would be very misguided to believe that no regulations are instead the better alternative.
  - intended 1y ago
    Yes, the Americas are a hot bed for innovation. Enshittification is also an innovation.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  They should just say that algorithm is editorialised and needs to be subject to the same regulations as newspapers (fined for fake news, editor can lose his journalist status).
  - 1y ago
smelendez 1y ago
This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back. Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances. Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.
- raffraffraff 1y ago
  Wife went cold turkey on social media and then had to join Instagram and LinkedIn for her business. Now she's addicted to Instagram. No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    People love LinkedIn cringe on instagram and twitter - but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious
    - lazide 1y ago
      Well, serious in the same way cult members have to be serious. If you crack and admit it’s fake, everything falls apart and it’s your fault. Expulsion out onto the street follows. Even worse, now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.
      - throwawee 1y ago
        >now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time. Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.
raffraffraff 1y ago
You mean, what it was to begin with? Right now WhatsApp is basically my family Facebook. Images, videos, chat. Separate groups of people so you can remain friends with two former friends who are now mortal enemies. Facebook is just another toxic, addictive social media.
tianqi 1y ago
You're talking about something exactly like the ‘Moments’ of WeChat, China's largest social media. It doesn't have a feed, but only updates from friends and family. But still, people spend so much time on that - 900 million people spending an average of 1 hour and 42 minutes per person per day.
d1sxeyes 1y ago
The “like” button killed genuine engagement, and made Facebook an exercise in lever-pressing. The problem is that in a lot of cases (not all), those stupid remarks and outrageous influencers are being “liked” and “reposted” by your network in order to gather reflected glory and dopamine hits. A social network is no better than the sum of its parts, and to create something really worthwhile, you have to limit what people are allowed to post (original content only, for example). Doing that at scale I think is very hard.
openplatypus 1y ago
You described Mastodon.
anal_reactor 1y ago
I wrote my own client for Twitter, which was later adapted to also support Bluesky. The idea behind the project was to scrape porn easily, but it's also an amazing tool where it shows me the feed I personally want to see. This is pretty much the only way I interact with these services.
- pelagicAustral 1y ago
  username checks out
ashoeafoot 1y ago
its what whatsapp is for many and why the metastasis crams feeds, ai and horrors to it.
brnt 1y ago
The single problem with social media is that they are not public, but are heavily thought of (and propagandized) as such. Any marketplace that is privately owned, is not a free market place. And, the elephant in the room, these social media marketplaces are owned by parties with very particular interests. As long as don't recognise that, we will let ourselves be distracted by details that are always the result of this private control. Something social must be public, or it isn't social, and it isn't what you and I really want.
mikewarot 1y ago
I read Facebook with the special URL[1] that gives a traditional reverse chronological feed (plus ads, of course), but it's all my friends and family. Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views, usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of the USA and the elimination of due process are good things doesn't help my mental health. [1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
- avhception 1y ago
  While there will always be unhinged relatives, maybe the problem would be less pronounced without the polarization that comes with the networks pushing polarizing posts into their faces in their never ending quest for more "engagement" by users.
  - dfxm12 1y ago
    It's important to note that this is not a new or unique feature of social media. At least in our lifetimes, conservative moguls have always had a habit of buying up as many media outlets as possible and polarizing the constituency with unhinged stories. Before social media (everything I don't like is woke), it was cable news (Obamacare means death panels for your grandmother, stay tuned), before that it was talk radio (Rush Limbaugh calling Bill Clinton an extreme leftist), before that, it was the papers (get a load of this nerd Dukakis in a tank, in this op ed...). Today, it's all of the above. If anything is different today, it's not that social media makes things easier or faster, because we've always had 24/7 talking heads on TV or the radio, we had dailies with evening editions, etc. It's that consolidation is even more prevalent today.
- lloeki 1y ago
  > some of my family post insane political views Would they still if any such poster's feed would strictly only be viewable by families and friends? (I have no idea)
  - RadiozRadioz 1y ago
    Yes. Crazy political people are crazy political people and think the issue they care about is the most important thing ever.
The-loan-wolf 1y ago
Whatsapp stories
veunes 1y ago
Social media started as a way to stay connected with people you actually know, but it's morphed into this performative attention economy where the loudest, most extreme content wins.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
RicoElectrico 1y ago
There's a spectrum; when it comes to short videos on YT and IG merely ditching the slide-down-for-next video for a thumbnail grid gives some agency - and liberally using "don't recommend" (which I think most normies never notice is there) cleans it up further.
heresie-dabord 1y ago
> many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^ The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It craves monetisation — at the expense of all else, including factual information. What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to see.
jeffjobs4000 1y ago
Yes. Social networking was fun. Social media is brain rot.
xtiansimon 1y ago
> “…instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life…” I’ve stopped using FB regularly, because I don’t like their feed algorithm. I don’t like the ads or the content, and I had curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends update. That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I see FB’s problem and I don’t envy them. The vitality of the platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock). I’m not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I’m an emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The only platform all of my friends and family use are group private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats we have are few and far between.
spamizbad 1y ago
I'm inclined to agree. I remember when Facebook (and before that, MySpace) was new and was still mostly a reverse-chronological feed of your friend's updates. It caused zero stress or anxiety at all - and it was kind of nice checking in to see what was going on. Your feed was like an internet forum for your social circle.
manbitesdog 1y ago
I've been using BeReal this way with a bunch of friends and family for the last couple of years. It definitely fills its purpose of seeing what my friends are up to without occupying too much of my headspace. Can't be happier about it
redbell 1y ago
> ..and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. I think that’s the tough reality—over time, people gradually become accustomed to consuming random content from random accounts or pages, to the point where the original idea of interacting with friends and family on social media starts to fade away. That said, messaging apps might still bridge that gap through groups.
dsego 1y ago
Whatsapp group chats.
amarant 1y ago
This is basically how I use WhatsApp.
erkt 1y ago
>solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase profits abusing the user base.
- zpeti 1y ago
  I think this is what your conscious mind thinks but your actual desires don’t. Facebook was refocusing on friend and family content before TikTok came along. But they had to adjust to the TikTok trend otherwise they would have lost market share or potentially lost the entire market. You might think you want friend and family content, but actually you don’t. Not as much as you want engaging content.
  - svnt 1y ago
    This is slightly inaccurate. You might want friend and family content, but engaging content will increase your dwell time and profitability as a user, often against your will.
  - _Algernon_ 1y ago
    You are equating action and desire which is a false equivalence. You wouldn't claim that somebody who died in a car accident wanted that to happen, would you?
  - jjulius 1y ago
    This ignores nuance. There's "engaging content" (nods head) and "engaging content" (shakes head). I want the former, not the latter. Social media is optimized for the latter.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    My mind also wants lots of cocaine. That doesn't mean it should have it.
  - solumunus 1y ago
kccqzy 1y ago
I cannot agree more. It's amazing that WeChat, a Chinese app, has figured this out years ago; its Moments feature had no ads, no influencers, only posts by contacts. It even suppresses comments made by people you don't know, even if the subject of a comment is a post by people you do know. Of course there are other Chinese apps that operate entirely based on feeds. What I found interesting is that on Rednote it tried to suppress your posts from what it infers to be your friends in real life. I think it is a great approach. There are sometimes I just want to see updates from friends and family. There are other times when I only want to see something interesting to me without necessarily telling all my friends what I'm interested in. These are two entirely different categories of social media and it is a good thing to require users to switch apps.
sam0x17 1y ago
This is what Facebook was the last time I used it, which is like a decade ago at least
amitp 1y ago
There's a version of Facebook that only shows things from your friends, and not "suggested" or "reels" etc.: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr (it still shows ads but not the other random stuff) And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page: > You're all caught up on Most Recent posts > Check back later for more updates
- jjulius 1y ago
  >... that only shows things from your friends... And any page you follow, including anything that tries to convince you to click through to their website via clickbait, anxiety-inducing headlines, etc.. It also shows FB groups you're in, which are often full of their own unnecessary drama.
dfxm12 1y ago
I think the fact that "the algorithm" capitalizes on negative emotion has been known for a while. The problem is that Zuck (and Elon, etc.) is at best motivated by making money, at worst motivated by swaying public opinion, and certainly not motivating by improving the emotional state of the users of these services, or even giving them a good experience. I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.
dansimco 1y ago
This is where I want to see legislation. Required opt-out ability for algorithmic timelines.
- kube-system 1y ago
  That will work just as well as requiring Philip Morris to allow one to opt out of nicotine in their cigarettes. The addictive properties are the reason for the prevalence of the product.
  - OKRainbowKid 1y ago
    It would make it easier for people aware of the problem to stop self-sabotaging.
sullivantrevor 1y ago
I agree with you and I am building this app right now. elswhr.app Would love to hear your feedback and any feature requests you might have.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
SoftTalker 1y ago
> displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life This is called "email" (and/or "text messaging" i.e. iMessage or SMS).
9rx 1y ago
> and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when others have their personal information/drunk party photos. Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside content creators so that the services could give you... something. Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family" feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect asymptotically nobody.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
The issue for social media companies is that its dead. No one posts like they did in 2010 anymore. Go ahead and follow only your friends actual posts on fb and it is going to be pretty dead. Likewise for instagram and other platforms. They don’t want you to be able to scan an entire chronological feed in 10 mins and be updated.
martin82 1y ago
You can easily do that?! On Twitter, don't follow anyone, put everyone in a list, only read that list - you get a feed of chronological posts from only the people on the list, no algorithmic bullshit. Or use Nostr. Definitely zero algorithm nonsense over there.
Timwi 1y ago
You can already get that with Mastodon.
bamboozled 1y ago
Shared Albums on iPhone photos is what you want. They’re amazing.
aaronbaugher 1y ago
It's tough, because even within real friend circles there can be a lot of junk. I have a friend who constantly posts "What does your favorite color say about your personality?" type of stuff. I don't want to hide her posts because I don't want to miss anything actually important that happens in her life. But there's no clear line between that and the cruft that you can solve with a rule. So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.
- freedomben 1y ago
  I find this with a generation gap too. For example, my daughter posts stuff like that a lot.
- taraindara 1y ago
  Perhaps locally running ai can help us filter this. Or rather, a locally tuned algorithm.
hmandal 1y ago
On the Instagram home page, on the top left there's an option to switch to only following feed which shows posts only from the people I follow. I found this somewhat useful but wish it was the default.

by 8s2ngy 1y ago

aramattamara 1y ago

Try MySpace, classmates.com? They are still around.

salt-thrower 1y ago
The trouble is: broadly speaking, no one uses those.
- RajT88 1y ago
  I logged into classmates a couple of years ago. I had a message waiting from 2005 from one of my sister's insane ex-friends. That was a blast from the past and hilarious. 18 years without bothering to log in. Then I realized their business model is so low-rent, they had web 1.0 style protections on scraping all their scanned yearbooks. So I liberated all the ones with anyone I was likely to know and posted them to Archive.org. You're welcome. Also: #deletefacebook

frankacter 1y ago

From Feeds in the sidebar, select Friends. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

wegfawefgawefg 1y ago

i used facebook back when it functioned like that. and it was still retarded then

LtWorf 1y ago
But less :D
- blitzar 1y ago
  I got shot 7 times in the head rather than 10.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    When I got on it I'd just see local events and stuff people I knew posted. Now it's "science" pages and shorts, which spread disinformation.
    - 9rx 1y ago
      The "Friends" tab (sometimes "Feed" instead; the A/B testing on this one seems strong) only shows the posts of people you know. Events is still there as well. But in both cases the rate of creation has dropped dramatically since the time you remember, making these nearly useless. That's why the social media services have had to focus on content created by professional content creators instead. The outcome was inevitable. People had fun posting posts and photos when it was a novelty, but once the novelty wore off they were back to not wanting to put in the effort. You can only post so many photos of your cat before you grow tired of it.
      - LtWorf 1y ago
        What's the point of posting stuff if nobody will see it because facebook decided so?
        9rx 1y ago

zdc1 1y ago

Instagram used to be closer to this when they showed posts in chronological order. Of course, Facebook got to work and ended this by showing posts in algo-sorted order, added an explore page, and even started showing non-followed people's viral content on the main feed. So unfortunately the trend has been a slow frog-boiling march towards engagement and enshittification. In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the group chat instead...

supriyo-biswas 1y ago

> This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media... Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating with you because of the additional friction caused, especially when a free alternative exists. Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if you had users pay for the product. Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain their initial spread. I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing is generally useful or entertaining, respectively. This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social circles would also follow through with the same choice. This ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages. Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1]. (Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people disagree with.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window#

nehal3m 1y ago
> However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company I’m reading this as: The corporate internet is unable to fulfill the actual social needs of its users. >Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. And this translates to: Our economic system drains us of so much of our energy that living a fulfilling life is no longer possible, and so we fill our valuable time with the slop that same system serves us. I think you’re being downvoted because your comment speaks to an uncomfortable truth, namely that none of this is working to advance quality of life but rather to advance the contents of a few wallets.

designerarvid 1y ago

Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. As you say, the algorithmic feed is superior for creators wanting reach, and more importantly, advertisers who want eyeballs on their ads. Due to network effects, it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative. Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement. The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff). The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.

UnreachableCode 1y ago
> it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative. Isn’t this just WhatsApp now though? The addition of Statuses, Following and now Communities almost confirms this. People are dropping Facebook and IG, but can’t give up WhatsApp (yet).
- Thorrez 1y ago
  WhatsApp isn't non-profit.
doubtfuluser 1y ago
> Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. I’m not sure if that’s actually a “shortcut” to the reptile brain and it’s just about “I have to scroll more to get stuff I’m interested in. At least for me it feels like that and it causes me to use these social media things far less. For me it feels more like intermittent rewards vs full rewards at once. Obviously for the ad-industry the intermittent rewards are more useful, that’s why we can’t have nice things
xobs 1y ago

xyzal 1y ago

I think the EU should flex their regulatory muscle and forbid algorithmic feeds on by default unless the networks break european society as the US is broken.

vekker 1y ago
I'm sure that would work out fine. Just like the GDPR regulation made the web so much better & more private, and the promise of the AI act is boosting innovation in Europe...
- earnestinger 1y ago
  You probably mean the visible cooky thing. But behind the scenes companies did start to think about customer data gathering, retention and deletion in terms of maximal fine of 4% of turnover.
- sureglymop 1y ago
  The GDPR regulation is great and arguably does make the web more private and better. At the very least, it's better than having no regulations. I've even been able to successfully use it to remove something private about me from the internet. I don't think I would have even gotten a response had there been no legal precedent. You can always argue about how some regulations are badly implemented or incomplete but I believe it would be very misguided to believe that no regulations are instead the better alternative.
- intended 1y ago
  Yes, the Americas are a hot bed for innovation. Enshittification is also an innovation.
LtWorf 1y ago
They should just say that algorithm is editorialised and needs to be subject to the same regulations as newspapers (fined for fake news, editor can lose his journalist status).
- 1y ago

smelendez 1y ago

This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back. Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances. Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.

raffraffraff 1y ago
Wife went cold turkey on social media and then had to join Instagram and LinkedIn for her business. Now she's addicted to Instagram. No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.
- blitzar 1y ago
  People love LinkedIn cringe on instagram and twitter - but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious
  - lazide 1y ago
    Well, serious in the same way cult members have to be serious. If you crack and admit it’s fake, everything falls apart and it’s your fault. Expulsion out onto the street follows. Even worse, now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.
    - throwawee 1y ago
      >now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time. Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.

raffraffraff 1y ago

You mean, what it was to begin with? Right now WhatsApp is basically my family Facebook. Images, videos, chat. Separate groups of people so you can remain friends with two former friends who are now mortal enemies. Facebook is just another toxic, addictive social media.

tianqi 1y ago

You're talking about something exactly like the ‘Moments’ of WeChat, China's largest social media. It doesn't have a feed, but only updates from friends and family. But still, people spend so much time on that - 900 million people spending an average of 1 hour and 42 minutes per person per day.

d1sxeyes 1y ago

The “like” button killed genuine engagement, and made Facebook an exercise in lever-pressing. The problem is that in a lot of cases (not all), those stupid remarks and outrageous influencers are being “liked” and “reposted” by your network in order to gather reflected glory and dopamine hits. A social network is no better than the sum of its parts, and to create something really worthwhile, you have to limit what people are allowed to post (original content only, for example). Doing that at scale I think is very hard.

openplatypus 1y ago

You described Mastodon.

anal_reactor 1y ago

I wrote my own client for Twitter, which was later adapted to also support Bluesky. The idea behind the project was to scrape porn easily, but it's also an amazing tool where it shows me the feed I personally want to see. This is pretty much the only way I interact with these services.

pelagicAustral 1y ago
username checks out

ashoeafoot 1y ago

its what whatsapp is for many and why the metastasis crams feeds, ai and horrors to it.

brnt 1y ago

The single problem with social media is that they are not public, but are heavily thought of (and propagandized) as such. Any marketplace that is privately owned, is not a free market place. And, the elephant in the room, these social media marketplaces are owned by parties with very particular interests. As long as don't recognise that, we will let ourselves be distracted by details that are always the result of this private control. Something social must be public, or it isn't social, and it isn't what you and I really want.

mikewarot 1y ago

I read Facebook with the special URL[1] that gives a traditional reverse chronological feed (plus ads, of course), but it's all my friends and family. Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views, usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of the USA and the elimination of due process are good things doesn't help my mental health. [1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

avhception 1y ago
While there will always be unhinged relatives, maybe the problem would be less pronounced without the polarization that comes with the networks pushing polarizing posts into their faces in their never ending quest for more "engagement" by users.
- dfxm12 1y ago
  It's important to note that this is not a new or unique feature of social media. At least in our lifetimes, conservative moguls have always had a habit of buying up as many media outlets as possible and polarizing the constituency with unhinged stories. Before social media (everything I don't like is woke), it was cable news (Obamacare means death panels for your grandmother, stay tuned), before that it was talk radio (Rush Limbaugh calling Bill Clinton an extreme leftist), before that, it was the papers (get a load of this nerd Dukakis in a tank, in this op ed...). Today, it's all of the above. If anything is different today, it's not that social media makes things easier or faster, because we've always had 24/7 talking heads on TV or the radio, we had dailies with evening editions, etc. It's that consolidation is even more prevalent today.
lloeki 1y ago
> some of my family post insane political views Would they still if any such poster's feed would strictly only be viewable by families and friends? (I have no idea)
- RadiozRadioz 1y ago
  Yes. Crazy political people are crazy political people and think the issue they care about is the most important thing ever.

The-loan-wolf 1y ago

Whatsapp stories

veunes 1y ago

Social media started as a way to stay connected with people you actually know, but it's morphed into this performative attention economy where the loudest, most extreme content wins.

deleted 1y ago

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RicoElectrico 1y ago

There's a spectrum; when it comes to short videos on YT and IG merely ditching the slide-down-for-next video for a thumbnail grid gives some agency - and liberally using "don't recommend" (which I think most normies never notice is there) cleans it up further.

heresie-dabord 1y ago

> many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^ The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It craves monetisation — at the expense of all else, including factual information. What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to see.

jeffjobs4000 1y ago

Yes. Social networking was fun. Social media is brain rot.

xtiansimon 1y ago

> “…instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life…” I’ve stopped using FB regularly, because I don’t like their feed algorithm. I don’t like the ads or the content, and I had curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends update. That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I see FB’s problem and I don’t envy them. The vitality of the platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock). I’m not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I’m an emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The only platform all of my friends and family use are group private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats we have are few and far between.

spamizbad 1y ago

I'm inclined to agree. I remember when Facebook (and before that, MySpace) was new and was still mostly a reverse-chronological feed of your friend's updates. It caused zero stress or anxiety at all - and it was kind of nice checking in to see what was going on. Your feed was like an internet forum for your social circle.

manbitesdog 1y ago

I've been using BeReal this way with a bunch of friends and family for the last couple of years. It definitely fills its purpose of seeing what my friends are up to without occupying too much of my headspace. Can't be happier about it

redbell 1y ago

> ..and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. I think that’s the tough reality—over time, people gradually become accustomed to consuming random content from random accounts or pages, to the point where the original idea of interacting with friends and family on social media starts to fade away. That said, messaging apps might still bridge that gap through groups.

dsego 1y ago

Whatsapp group chats.

amarant 1y ago

This is basically how I use WhatsApp.

erkt 1y ago

>solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase profits abusing the user base.

zpeti 1y ago
I think this is what your conscious mind thinks but your actual desires don’t. Facebook was refocusing on friend and family content before TikTok came along. But they had to adjust to the TikTok trend otherwise they would have lost market share or potentially lost the entire market. You might think you want friend and family content, but actually you don’t. Not as much as you want engaging content.
- svnt 1y ago
  This is slightly inaccurate. You might want friend and family content, but engaging content will increase your dwell time and profitability as a user, often against your will.
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
  You are equating action and desire which is a false equivalence. You wouldn't claim that somebody who died in a car accident wanted that to happen, would you?
- jjulius 1y ago
  This ignores nuance. There's "engaging content" (nods head) and "engaging content" (shakes head). I want the former, not the latter. Social media is optimized for the latter.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  My mind also wants lots of cocaine. That doesn't mean it should have it.
- solumunus 1y ago

kccqzy 1y ago

I cannot agree more. It's amazing that WeChat, a Chinese app, has figured this out years ago; its Moments feature had no ads, no influencers, only posts by contacts. It even suppresses comments made by people you don't know, even if the subject of a comment is a post by people you do know. Of course there are other Chinese apps that operate entirely based on feeds. What I found interesting is that on Rednote it tried to suppress your posts from what it infers to be your friends in real life. I think it is a great approach. There are sometimes I just want to see updates from friends and family. There are other times when I only want to see something interesting to me without necessarily telling all my friends what I'm interested in. These are two entirely different categories of social media and it is a good thing to require users to switch apps.

sam0x17 1y ago

This is what Facebook was the last time I used it, which is like a decade ago at least

amitp 1y ago

There's a version of Facebook that only shows things from your friends, and not "suggested" or "reels" etc.: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr (it still shows ads but not the other random stuff) And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page: > You're all caught up on Most Recent posts > Check back later for more updates

jjulius 1y ago
>... that only shows things from your friends... And any page you follow, including anything that tries to convince you to click through to their website via clickbait, anxiety-inducing headlines, etc.. It also shows FB groups you're in, which are often full of their own unnecessary drama.

dfxm12 1y ago

I think the fact that "the algorithm" capitalizes on negative emotion has been known for a while. The problem is that Zuck (and Elon, etc.) is at best motivated by making money, at worst motivated by swaying public opinion, and certainly not motivating by improving the emotional state of the users of these services, or even giving them a good experience. I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.

dansimco 1y ago

This is where I want to see legislation. Required opt-out ability for algorithmic timelines.

kube-system 1y ago
That will work just as well as requiring Philip Morris to allow one to opt out of nicotine in their cigarettes. The addictive properties are the reason for the prevalence of the product.
- OKRainbowKid 1y ago
  It would make it easier for people aware of the problem to stop self-sabotaging.

sullivantrevor 1y ago

I agree with you and I am building this app right now. elswhr.app Would love to hear your feedback and any feature requests you might have.

deleted 1y ago

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SoftTalker 1y ago

> displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life This is called "email" (and/or "text messaging" i.e. iMessage or SMS).

9rx 1y ago

> and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when others have their personal information/drunk party photos. Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside content creators so that the services could give you... something. Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family" feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect asymptotically nobody.

kjkjadksj 1y ago

The issue for social media companies is that its dead. No one posts like they did in 2010 anymore. Go ahead and follow only your friends actual posts on fb and it is going to be pretty dead. Likewise for instagram and other platforms. They don’t want you to be able to scan an entire chronological feed in 10 mins and be updated.

martin82 1y ago

You can easily do that?! On Twitter, don't follow anyone, put everyone in a list, only read that list - you get a feed of chronological posts from only the people on the list, no algorithmic bullshit. Or use Nostr. Definitely zero algorithm nonsense over there.

Timwi 1y ago

You can already get that with Mastodon.

bamboozled 1y ago

Shared Albums on iPhone photos is what you want. They’re amazing.

aaronbaugher 1y ago

It's tough, because even within real friend circles there can be a lot of junk. I have a friend who constantly posts "What does your favorite color say about your personality?" type of stuff. I don't want to hide her posts because I don't want to miss anything actually important that happens in her life. But there's no clear line between that and the cruft that you can solve with a rule. So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.

freedomben 1y ago
I find this with a generation gap too. For example, my daughter posts stuff like that a lot.
taraindara 1y ago
Perhaps locally running ai can help us filter this. Or rather, a locally tuned algorithm.

hmandal 1y ago

On the Instagram home page, on the top left there's an option to switch to only following feed which shows posts only from the people I follow. I found this somewhat useful but wish it was the default.