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Beasteh

Confused about Social Media...

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How are people building communities these days? Forums like this one seem quieter than they were about 10 years ago.

 

Is it that poeple have moved over to new platforms? Like Discord - how does that work - how do people find the interest they're looking for? Or is it other social media platforms? How do communities (gaming and otherwise) get built in ths new landscape?

 

Of the ones I know about:

  • Facebook's for people who already know you, not for finding new friends. There are groups, but IME they have a local focus.
  • Twitter seems geared up for companies, bands and celebrities to yell at their fans. Like, I understand if you're a game dev or a business trying to make announcements, a general-interest platform where anyone passing by could see you is great. But for the little guy, what's the point? Do users on Twitter connect?
  • Snapchat confuses me. Tumblr I don't get at all. Same goes for instagram - I take it the point is to follow good photographers and have nice pictures to look at each day, not to form groups? Does anyone even read the comments under the pictures?

 

Sorry for the stream-of-conciousness, but it's been bugging me for a while. None of these platforms seem as good for social networking as what went before, or whatever it was our parents' generation did. People seem to be getting something out of each of these platforms, so they must be good for something else. It's that something else that escapes me. Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky.

 

So help me out here. What platforms do you use, and what do you get out of it?

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Primarily I frequent slack and here, but don't post often. I also lurk a bunch of forums, occasionally look at twitter and begrudgingly use facebook when I have to. For me twitter was always been the most enjoyable, I only follow people who tweet like actual humans and not like their trying to sell me something. Despite this I use it less and less for a few reasons, primarily its a massive time waster. Forums are great too if the community is good.

 

Related politcal side note: A few months ago I took a break from the internet and when I came back I found the echochamberishness to be way more noticeable after disconnecting myself. Its led to me going on everything less. For me peak internet was on this forum a few years ago, the community was very thoughtful and kind and I learnt a lot reading through the threads. I include this because for me at least politics and my browsing habits have a pretty strong link.
 

 

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My two primary social networks lately are twitter and mastodon.  Twitter's only still on my list due to network effect but a lot of my core online social circles have switched over to mastodon, which socially feels like something between livejournal and usenet, but formatted like twitter.

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Never heard of Mastodon until now... learn something new every day. Good point about being on the platform where your contacts are. I suppose it's only worth signing up for something if the people you want to talk to are there.

 

How do (or did) you all find the people you wanted to follow? Was it IRL relationships (work, friends) or a connection through another network (e.g. the Idle Thumbs Slack is obviously related to these forums and the podcast itself), or something else? I ask because Twitter/Tumblr/Insta are so vast, it's not so easy to find people.

 

 

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I primarily use Facebook. I am super aggressive about hiding pages, especially meme or aggregator pages, I want to keep up with friends and family not what dumb jokes they like.

Similarly I have paired Twitter down to just a few people, no celebs, brands, companies etc. I also block retweets from everyone to keep it to just what they themselves tweet.

I like Instagram and use it frequently, also love having an infinite feed of red pandas and kittens.

 

I have Snapchat but rarely use it as i find it too much of a bother to use two photo apps at the same time.

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Specifically for building communities and being social: Discord.

 

I've met people through Twitter (I'm doing some projects with folks that I met using a game jam hashtag, for instance) but Twitter is mostly for consumption of funny jokes and news blurbs, I do very little interacting or Tweeting there myself. Tumblr is exclusively for consumption in that I follow folks who re-post cool pictures/screenshots/etc. I only have Insta installed because of my one friend who uses it and there's one writer I follow who couples a picture with a fantastic min-essay every now and then.

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Some people tend to treat Twitter as a personal space, but I will follow people generously if I feel like my online social-time is too slow. Then I will reply to their tweets if I have something relevant to say regardless of whether or not they follow me. This pisses some people off and a few of them will act indignant but I just unfollow them and go on to greener pastures. I've ended up having a lot of meaningful interactions with a sizable amount of folks who were interested in communicating over time after I initiated this way. This tends to work much better with accounts that have smaller amounts of followers and they have to be cool too. One promising way to find them is to look at game-credits for itch.io games (Soundcloud would probably be similar).

My mutual interests tend to be game-jam type stuff so the folks who are more receptive to my methods of initiation tend to actively promote events or smaller groups that they are participating within. There is a lot of small social projects that are starting up with very few members all the time. For instance, I just joined an Experimental Games Reddit group because someone I followed on Twitter retweeted it. That Reddit group then has its own Discord it was advertising so I joined. I end up running into people I've already seen in other Discords or on Twitter and at this level of fame (very low, but still producing creative content) they tend to be appreciative that someone noticed that they exist or that someone found something they made interesting. Some people will be dicks though, I don't mind I just unfollow them; It's just their way of saying they aren't interested. Don't let that stop you from meeting the people who want to be met.

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Twitter is the only social network I use on a daily basis. I remember the author J. G. Ballard once saying something to the effect that he wished he could have one of those old ticker-tape stock price machines that would feed him a steady stream of concentrated information about the state of the world: that's partly what Twitter is for me. Another part of it is following creative work by people and teams I admire. Another part is personal self-expression: a place to put dumb thoughts, bon mots, hot takes, pictures of my cat, and so on. It's where I tweet exactly once about things I've written, and then never mention them again (I am not good at self-promotion).

 

I almost never use twitter for conversations, or to reach out to new people, because I find all of that to be quite intimidating. The thought of @'ing even a long-term mutual follower is painful at the best of times. Bunging someone a notification feels like a very mild analog to phoning them up – like I know that somewhere out there a buzz, a light, has gone off, because of something I did! – like I'm grasping for their attention. I'm not comfortable with that, but I think this is exactly why a lot of people love twitter: you can spend all day grasping for the attention of that guy with bad opinions, and for Jennifer Lopez, and from your point of view the network factors it as the same kind of interaction.

 

I have pages on LinkedIn and Facebook but they're basically just friends-only placeholders at this stage. Facebook in particular I find almost overwhelmingly unpleasant to use. I'm aware that for many people it's essentially their Operating System for the internet, and perhaps that's why I'm so wary of it. Opening Facebook is like looking into another computer that lives inside my computer. It's weird.

 

I use tumblr to host my blog. When I first started on that site many years ago the attractions were obvious: it was one of the easiest ad-free ways to host a free website, and they made it ridiculously easy to share a variety of content. But ever since the Yahoo buyout they’ve added next to nothing in the way of useful features except a slurry of 'promoted content' that clutters up my dashboard. It has the same problems it always had – in particular that it's really hard to find interesting, unique stuff, among stuff that is just insanely popular – and nobody seems to have any idea how to fix it. Most of the great writers I used to follow there have since migrated to other platforms (e.g. Medium). I cling to it because it is still easy(ish) to post new writing, and because the thought of migrating years of content elsewhere leaves me really scared. I should probably just make a clean break of it but also: that seems, like, a lot of work?

 

Oh, and I also use Goodreads, but mainly because it is such a useful tool for cataloguing my reading. The social aspects are kind of awful, but given that I write a lot about books, more people seem to read that stuff here than anywhere else. Oddly, nobody has ever said anything especially mean about my reviews, but some of the Goodreads commentariat are quite strange.

 

I'm over 30 now so of course I don't understand Instagram or YouTube or Snapchat or Twitch.

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All the attention that net neutrality debates are getting right now has really prompted me to pay more attention to how I'm using the Internet and social media--and I'm not loving what I've noticed! It seems like in the early days of the internet (most of which I wasn't around for, admittedly, but from what I've gathered) people thought of it much more as a space for exploration, where you could seek out and build small weird social communities in all kinds of places, where anyone could make their voice heard. Now there's much more of a tendency to stay within certain popular spheres and mimic the social circles you have offline. I think the way people use the internet on mobile phones points to the trends in internet use more broadly. People use apps that provide access to a particular site, but not to the entire connected internet as a whole. And then people get stuck and stay within those sites and think of the internet as a series of apps rather than this massive space for exploration and play. Recently there's been more of a push to create those small social communities within the larger ones--all the "Weird Facebook" groups are an example--but those don't feel like quite as authentic to me, since they're still within this massive corporate framework. Thoughts on this? Suggestions for more interesting ways to use the internet?

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2 hours ago, phoebeshalloway said:

Recently there's been more of a push to create those small social communities within the larger ones--all the "Weird Facebook" groups are an example--but those don't feel like quite as authentic to me, since they're still within this massive corporate framework. Thoughts on this? Suggestions for more interesting ways to use the internet?

 

I think there is a tendency to idolize the past. 20 years from now people will feel like nothing is as authentic as Facebook groups once were. That isn't to claim that you (particularly) don't need something that Facebook groups aren't offering.

As far as finding what you are looking for, I suggest trying to make it. It's not that you will necessarily create an interesting space, but I suspect that the process of creating it and promoting it will bring people out of the wood-work that have similar sensibilities and they might know where the real stuff is happening.

Screenshot_20180114-134527.thumb.png.e57ade0b11d109686934661832f0c326.png

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12 hours ago, phoebeshalloway said:

People use apps that provide access to a particular site, but not to the entire connected internet as a whole. And then people get stuck and stay within those sites and think of the internet as a series of apps rather than this massive space for exploration and play.

 

i wonder how much of this is due to moblie sites/browsers being terrible for such a long time? even now the way ads can take over a screen make me not want to browse the internet on my phone and stick to an app where and ad can just scroll by.

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I think the rise of the big players certainly changed things a bit, but then again, we had Yahoo Groups (which were weird) and usenet. What has changed is that usenet groups used to be laser-focussed on their specialist topic, and it was the community around those topics that mattered. New social media seems to put the individual above all other things. You have to follow people not topics. In doing so, you lose that focus - instead you get to hear everything they're talking about, from video games (cool) to what they had for lunch (boring) to their political opinions (oh fuck no).

 

As for alternatives, there's Reddit, but its voting/threading system is dire. Sometimes I wonder where "the real stuff" is.

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On 1/14/2018 at 5:25 PM, phoebeshalloway said:

All the attention that net neutrality debates are getting right now has really prompted me to pay more attention to how I'm using the Internet and social media--and I'm not loving what I've noticed! It seems like in the early days of the internet (most of which I wasn't around for, admittedly, but from what I've gathered) people thought of it much more as a space for exploration, where you could seek out and build small weird social communities in all kinds of places, where anyone could make their voice heard. Now there's much more of a tendency to stay within certain popular spheres and mimic the social circles you have offline. I think the way people use the internet on mobile phones points to the trends in internet use more broadly. People use apps that provide access to a particular site, but not to the entire connected internet as a whole. And then people get stuck and stay within those sites and think of the internet as a series of apps rather than this massive space for exploration and play. Recently there's been more of a push to create those small social communities within the larger ones--all the "Weird Facebook" groups are an example--but those don't feel like quite as authentic to me, since they're still within this massive corporate framework. Thoughts on this? Suggestions for more interesting ways to use the internet?

Small communities still exist independently from facebook, reddit etc. Of course the majority of people will be on the larger sites (by definition), but if you want to seek out the smaller communities you can.

 

For me this is more of a problem in online gaming actually. I strongly prefer a structure where players run dedicated servers that are listed in a server browser. Each one has its own flavour and community. Match making is a very different experience and doesn't let you form communities at all.

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On 1/17/2018 at 10:23 AM, eot said:

Small communities still exist independently from facebook, reddit etc. Of course the majority of people will be on the larger sites (by definition), but if you want to seek out the smaller communities you can.

 

I think a big part of the issue is that seeking out smaller, or even just different types of communities, is really difficult these days. I haven't heard of a new large social site in years, and the ones that I do use (Facebook/twitter/tumblr) have seemingly tightened up to nudge out fringier aspects and push a more corporate agenda. There's no 'wild west' anymore, it seems, much less finding somewhere you want to visit daily unless you get vastly lucky in terms of knowing a guy who knows a place.

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