first thing you were forced to look at. got worse;
.
I’m jealous i was not computer literate enough when myspace was big, all i did back then was play flash games and watch smosh
remember watching early ad spam and people saying, ‘enjoy internet now because the advertisers are going to ruin it’. yep
I read this the first time as “he didn’t try to influence electrons”
Same here, got me really confused for a second
Because you don’t know how he controls electrons? He’s just got rizz.
He even made friends with all of us.
at the time we were like “this is some performative nonsense” but now with all of these awful tech billionaires and Tom’s conducted himself, i do actually think he meant it when he said he did that because he thought everyone deserved to have a friend
Fucking legend!
I’m legit jelly.
Yeah let’s spread misinformation and romanticize the past so we can blame our problems on bad actors and bad times rather than recognize and address the systemic causes that have pervaded social media since its inception.
sorry for being so salty and sarcastic, in a weird mood rn
Nah you’re right. I’ll admit to having a bit of nostalgia for the old timey corp platforms of my youth, but tbh what we have now (with fedi) is better.
I do still think there was and is real value in independent little niche forums hosted on random domains, not federated to anything or linked to any social media or platform or anything. Just a cozy little phpbb or discourse between friends.
forums are the best. i encounter ex-redditors here on the threadiverse who are like “well at least discord is better than old school forums” and i’m like “what am i missing that everyone thinks old school forums are so horrid”
I don’t get it either, but I’ve seen the same perception. My own partner said “but aren’t forums… dangerous?” like BRO we MET on a forum and you think that?? They thought all forums were reactionary chans, and what they used was just a website where people chat.
But yeah discord sucks.
Forums were a bit painful to use comparatively, having to page through threads trying to find info lol, necro bumping, spam bots…etc lol
I do remember running a cracked version of vbulletin on a rando free hosting site tho for my friends lol
Are the people running modern social media not part of the system?
Valid question but IMO, no. replacing Zuckerberg Musk etc would do nothing to solve the fact that capitalism runs social media as a for-profit enterprise
yup! the real problem is the venture capitalists who run the internet as a financial market centered around the attention economy
You shouldn’t let consumers off the hook entirely. Every time some idiot buys new mop they saw on TikTok or a Dubai chocolate bar they are pumping money into the system and reinforcing the idea that spying on us and clogging our space with advertising is a viable business.
IMO ad blocking is not only a quality of life improvement, it’s a moral imperative.
i was thinking of doing an essay about this very concept. advertisers are complicit in, and profit from, a multitude of disasters, both natural and human made. all ad dollars are blood money
It’s part of what I find so frustrating with the American discourse on drugs. We talk about the drug trade in the United States as if innocent victims in America are being poisoned against their will by foreign bad actors.
In reality American consumers have pumped so much drug money into their neighboring countries that the cartels are a threat their governments.
The cartels and the dealers are very bad guys, but the consumer’s hands are not clean.
Systems are made of people. So yeah, remove the bad actors and you already have a better system.
Fair point. My rebuttal: The system here is manifold, a lack of general awareness and understanding, the legislative framework in most places, and most importantly, capitalism. The owners of social media are the most replaceable part of that, if Meta and Zuck imploded today, some other for-profit crap would fill the void
Systems are also made of rules, and bad rules can turn good people into bad people. That’s kind of the point of critical race theory
People have to make the rules, and choose if they enforce them, and choose if they obey them. Ultimately, it comes back to people.
Yeah, but psychological factors decide whether people obey and conform, as demonstrated by Milgram and Asch. Changing the situation changes whether they’ll go along with a bad system.
Good people don’t turn into bad people. By default that rules them out of being good people.
Our brains are hard-wired to be susceptible to specific patterns. Ancestral humans who stayed in good graces with their social group, even when the leaders of that group were factually mistaken, survived at higher rates than humans whose respect for facts drove them to reject or be rejected by the group. The details of which and to what degree we have these triggers override our rationality varies by genetics and environment, but we are all susceptible.
That a very significant percent of humans respond to their system by adopting specific harmful behavior is not something we can fight by moral condemnation. Labeling them as bad people is unproductive. If the goal is to actually reduce the harmful behavior, addressing the system - not the individuals - is the only effective strategy.
Everyone has a price, and everyone can be led down the wrong path. I mean, the supposed “good guys” in all of this were laughing and cheering at a man being murdered in front of his wife and kids just last week. I wonder how many of them, even just 5 years ago, would have done that? But they see the assholes on the “bad side do it” and all of sudden its ok.
Social media has fucked all of our brains. whether its tiktok, facebook reddit, instagram, lemmy, whatever. Its made us weird about information, and the opinions that we have. The downvotes give us little dopamine hits. So we start to want the uparrows. Then we get weird about the uparrows, moaning that people are misunderstanding what we are saying. Then we cant risk the uparrows, so we just say whatever everyone else is saying. Whatever gets us our fix.
And anyone reading this disagrees, I would ask you how often you look at your profile to make sure your comments are all getting upvotes… Social media has been programming us for years. And this is now what it looks like. Radicalisation of the left and right, to the point we raging over people using bathrooms, finding joy in other peoples misery, and worst of all we are ignoring the real world for it. We all need a big reset to rehinge our damaged brain function.
Mob violence has been a thing for all of human history. Before humans, even: chimpanzee groups, if they get large, will split into two groups. After a few months apart, if the groups encounter each other, the stronger group will murder every individual in the weaker one.
I think we had settled on a regulated and normalized system in pre-internet media that moderated the mob violence tendencies. Our current polarization is not really that social media created this new thing in society, it’s that it removed the guardrails in traditional media that were suppressing natural human tendencies. I hope we can figure out and implement some new guardrails sooner rather than later.
Nah, I dont by that. Thats the same kind of logic that rapists use. “She was wearing a short skirt, and I just couldnt help myself”. The fact is, social media in its current form is basically using gambling mechanics to get everyone to do weird shit. Comments on reddit, or facebook, or twitter are basically one armed bandits. Each tuck/comment is hoping for a win to get a little dopamine hit. Thats the long and the short of it. This has been going on for so long now, that people are radicalised by it.
Fuck yeah I’m happy Kirk is dead. He was a mass murderer, he just did it with a camera instead of a knife. I take glee in knowing his reign of terror is at an end, and I think it’s funny that he was stopped halfway through making an asinine point about transgender gun violence.
We need to label MAGA a terrorist organization, then go after them as if they are ISIS, then go global: AfD, the oil industry, etc.
All should be labeled terrorists.
Pretty sure you already are, mate.
Yeah, thats just ghoulish behaviour. And youve made up some nonsense to justify it. And funny thing is, you look exactly like those MAGA fuck wits. You just have a differing point of view. The moment you forget theres a human being on the other end, is the same moment you become the very thing you hate.
But you do, brobeans. Whatever gets you those worthless internet points, am I right?
Did my great grandpa shoot Nazis at D-day because it was popular? Was he just chasing trends?
BTW the fact that Hitler shot himself is hilarious
Well then if you ever ate meat, you were never a good person. But I think people can be corrupted and they can be redeemed, and people who eat meat because society encourages it can be rehabilitated.
So all those people who are medically unable to follow a vegan diet are evil because…
Because they are a cursed creature of the night, doomed to forever dine on the blood of virgins.
Oh wait, that’s vampires. And people who need meat to live are different from vampires because… Okay help me out here, what’s the difference?
they’re different because they are people, and they are real.
How is it meats problem here?
Eating meat is mean, it’s just an example of a bad thing a lot of people do. The point is we’ve all done bad things, but we can all be redeemed if we stop doing bad things. Like eating meat.
eating meat is not mean
Ummm… when he sold MySpace he literally sold our data to NewsCorp?
I remember when NewsCorp bought MySpace and I was already on Facebook at the time. I knew that NewsCorp had been taken for suckers because it was plain as day that young people would all move to Facebook.
Of course, I no longer use Facebook, but it’s a lesson for business people. If you’re making an investment in something young people use, maybe ask young people something about it first.
As you get older, you really just lose touch with that kind of thing, so it’s understandable how a bunch of suits missed that and flushed half a billion dollars down the toilet.
Memes never lie!
Hello, cyber police? Yeah, this person is lying on the information super highway!
Whaaaat TIL
In 2005, two years after launching the site, Anderson and DeWolfe sold Myspace to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million. Afterward, Anderson continued working as the company’s president. He retired from active involvement with Myspace in 2009 or 2010 as its popularity waned and Facebook usurped it as the most popular social networking site.
He then went to burning man and traveled and got into travel photography. Lives between Hawaii, LA, and vegas
it cost 'em $580 million… they got back, six years later, a whole $35 million when they unloaded it.
Also MySpace was one of the first platforms to use a built-in targeted advertising model, and partnered with Google for both adserve, indexing, and search. To say they didnt sell data is the same as saying Facebook doesn’t sell data, they were the data user, selling ad space based on profiling users.
Revisionist bullshit. Despite what came later, Facebook was the privacy-respecting alternative to MySpace at the time.
Bullshit. Facebook asked for my real name and school email to sign up.
I don’t know that Facebook ever sold itself that way. It was privacy respecting perhaps only because it only allowed college students to sign up for it, so only your classmates could see what you were doing. However, shortly after launching Zuck came out with the news feed, which told everyone whenever you looked at their profile. People hated this! The news feed in general felt like a huge privacy violation and Zuck issued his first apology. Still, they kept the news feed.
Soon they also allowed photo sharing and this is how everyone got into trouble though, as people posted photos of themselves partying and then their friends tagged them in those photos and then a couple years later, Facebook let everyone’s parents in and by that point people were trying to get jobs. It quickly became clear that maybe sharing everything on Facebook wasn’t a good idea.
Zuck promised flat out that there wouldn’t be any spying or surveillance, ever. That turned out to be a massive lie, of course (just as when Page & Brin told us in 1998 that they believed advertising was incompatible with search), but it was a big part of the draw of the early Facebook that you (seemingly) didn’t have to choose between your friends and getting spied on by Rupert Murdoch & Co over at Myspace.
My memory of MySpace was creating over 2 dozen accounts and maxing out the Playlists.just a bunch of my favorite albums uploaded, as my friends ‘private’ music server.
How was the “dumb fucks” platform ever privacy-respecting? The shit came out later, but it was always a privacy nightmare since the farmville days and even as “The Facebook”
edit: I just read another comment about the Google adserve partnership, didn’t know that, guess I see your angle now. But still, it was only surface appearance of privacy, behind the scenes the Zucc has always been the same and doing their own tracking instead of partnering with someone else
I don’t know why are you so angry with poor Zucc. He just wanted to oogle his classmate’s bathsuit pics, isn’t that relatable?
My how things changed!
For example, in 2006, when Facebook decided to open its doors to the public – not just college kids with .edu addresses – they understood that most people interested in social media already had accounts on Myspace, a service that had been sold to master enshittifier Rupert Murdoch the year before. Myspace users were champing at the bit to leave, but they were holding each other hostage.
…
Those live, ongoing connections to people – not your old posts or your identifiers – impose the highest switching costs for any social media service. Myspace users who were reluctant to leave for the superior lands of Facebook (where, Mark Zuckerberg assured them, they would never face any surveillance – no, really!) were stuck on Rupert Murdoch’s sinking ship by their love of one another, not by their old Myspace posts. Giving users who left Myspace the power to continue talking to the users who stayed was what broke the floodgates, leading to the “unraveling” that boyd observed.
Wow, I had no idea about the Facebook/MySpace message bridge bot. Definitely shows the power and importance of the various bridge/mirror projects like Bridgy. It says that the same kind of bot would now be Fedrally illegal in the US, but I haven’t seen any specifics about that, and seems like the EU just made it mandatory to enable through APIs.
I have thought a bit about this and how to breakout of silos, and it seems like now with LLM tools accessing the browser it will be nearly impossible to prevent messaging and posts from being cross-platformed, though the compute cost would be higher than by using the old API method.
You don’t need llm to import posts from another website, just an API or scraper to fetch them. Much cheaper, faster and more reliable.
But what about messages? When you say “scraper” what would that look like in the context of receiving and sending direct messages from one platform to another when one of the platforms closes their API?
Doesn’t matter. As long as sent and received messages are shown in the accounts inbox you can parse them back out.
But how do you then reply to those posts back into the platform of origination from the outside platform?
