Millennials: It’s ok to mourn the death of social media::Wired writes how “first-gen social media users have nowhere to go.” Ouch.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In Wired, Jason Parham writes about how first-gen social media users have nowhere to go.
Indeed, millennials have soured on the big social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram feel dead.
There’s a lot of ways to feel about this: maybe relief, maybe anger at the companies who messed things up.
But Parham made me feel something different: sad.
He points out that “first-gen” users (like me) were part of a “golden age of connectivity,” and for those years, it really was exciting.
I’m sad that golden age is over, and I’m not sure we’ll ever experience anything like it again.
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The original article contains 103 words, the summary contains 101 words.
wow thanks so much
If by “mourn” you mean “tap-dance on its fucking grave,” then sure!
I just moved to Miami and don’t know where to meet groups of like-minded people. There is nothing on MeetUp, but there are groups on Facebook. I hate that I had to sign into that garbage fire for the first time in years. My whole feed is filled with “suggested posts” of people I don’t know nor things I give a shit about.
I mean, you did move to Miami… why are you expecting sophistication?
Personally, if I moved to Miami, I would expect this at the very least.
Yeah, the other day I had to wade past fucking stacks of junk that doesn’t apply to or interest me, there was a whole wall of stuff that makes no sense at all for me, adverts for services I’ll never use and even study areas that I’m not ever going to need because I’m not at school! Fuck libraries we should burn them all down, how dare they don’t serve and cater to me and me alone!
I mean, I’ve been rooting for the demise of social media for nearly 20 years. I don’t know why I’d be mourning.
Gen Z, I mourned Reddit for 30 seconds. Now I’m here.
“Social media is like a public toilet; anyone is free to use it, no one should drink from it.” -Llama2 70B by Meta
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Imagine mourning the death of social media.
I mourn its creation.
As long as humans are social creatures, and the Internet connects us, there will be social media in some form or another.
And as long as multi billion dollar companies are allowed to engage in anti-monopolistic behaviour and erode our privacy by buying politicians, they’ll ruin every form of it to make a quick buck.
As someone who was on the internet before social media existed, please let it die in a fire.
Everything now is curated and cultivated by corporations and political entities to weed out any “unacceptable” discourse and content that doesn’t support a particular agenda or narrative.
100% agree. I was learning networking and internet coding back when Javascript was new, web 2.0 was going to revolutionize our lives, and Macromedia was releasing a little animation software called Flash. As an elder Millenial I can confidently say that the death of social media would be the absolute best thing that could happen for our society as a whole. The society was not mature enough for it, still aren’t. Maybe next time it is invented we will be ready and someone will remember to keep the damn corporations out of it.
Were BBSs social media?
They were decentralized. If not federated, definitely connected in many aspects.
I was thinking of standing up an instance of this
Just for friends and family
In of the opinion the term social media needs to be broken into two groups. Ones where you’re yourself by name and one’s where you’re an online handle. The “personal” social media are all garbage, but there’s some alright “unpersonal” social media, like Lemmy for example. BBSs would mostly be the later, but probably would be social media if the term existed when they were popular
TBH I’m right there with you when it comes to wishing corporate social media a fiery demise.
And yet, I’m happily using decentralized/non-profit social media that I’d very much like to see flourish. The thing I don’t like about social media today is that it’s billionaires selling personal info to people that want to direct advertising or propaganda to intellectually defenseless people, I really think democracy can’t withstand the firehose of bullshit that now empowers bad actors to lie at scale that used to require traditional media or state resources.
I don’t mourn “social media.” I mourn what we had before they started using that phrase.
Facebook was actually awesome back in the late 2000s. I had an account when it was just 4 year universities, that was it’s hey day.
You mean traditional media owned and controlled by people like Murdoch? Or rumors and innuendo spread by word of mouth in pubs?
I know you were le born in le wrong generation like every other hipster complainer on the planet but you’d have hated wherever was popular at any time in history because it’s not about finding a balanced and sensible view it’s about hating whatever is popular.
Hey, I’m fully on board with your defense of social media, but I think in this case the commenter is just saying “i miss the social media we had before they started calling it ‘social media’”. Even 2004 facebook fits this description, and I’m inclined to agree. I miss social media when it felt more like IRC and craigslist, when facebook was a glorified personal guestbook, etc.
Also no. I meant the forums, chat rooms and instant messengers we had right before Facebook and Twitter ruined it all.
I grew up on those and they were all awful, take off the rose tinted glasses and you’ll see those chat rooms were basically twitch chat with more sexual predators.
And forums still exist and they’re still awfull, having to read fifty stupid comments of people saying totally off topic ‘yes Bob, we got our cat six years ago’ but it fills the entire screen because he’s quoted the entire script of life of Brian in his signature. Finally you find someone replying to the question you were interested in but it’s only to ask another question do you got fifty more comments from poorly replying to questions in the OP which have been answered hours ago but they didn’t bother reading the thread before posting.
And there’s a million great messenger apps out there, of course none of them are as good as they used to be because they don’t have my childhood friends on, or if they do they’re all to busy with kids and carers to come ride bikes.
Nah, forums are more organic old school is cool.
Forums are social media as well, though. They just have different features. “Social media” are all websites and applications which allow sharing of content between users.
I think a forum was just less anonymous. I never remember any name on Lemmy, for example. On the forums ~back in the day~ I actually got to know the people. We even had forum meetings in real life.
I miss forums. Even on technical forums for a software, there was usually an off topic or random section to hang out in
I fear those sections would look very different today. I watched that unfold in an Otaku forum which was quite nice and peaceful for years. It got radicalised by hateful people until the owner shut it down. The same happened with a gamer forum and several other communities I frequented.
Yeah that’s why it’s a forlorn memory. Forums are way too easy for toxic people to dominate.
If you think about it, atmosphere is social media too
Censorship and Centralized manner killed all the goodness.
Actually, I think I’m kinda okay with the “death” of social media. I mean, I’m already on this platform a lot, so…I guess I’m not missing much?
I for one celebrate the inevitable crash/death of all this social media. It’s turned normal people into unacceptable drooling trash. That is if you’re able to ignore the data collection and use of it, in which case it turned the whole internet into a dumpster fire as well.
It’s turned normal people into unacceptable drooling trash.
They always were. Social media just gave them a platform to you.
It also gave those trash people the feeling of “look I’m not alone” and amplified all of it. At least before people were worried about being seen as a fuckwit.
hey, we’re not all like that.
‘life isn’t as fun as it was when I was younger, it must be the internet’s fault’
The world in general is far shittier than it was a decade ago, internet included.
I too preferred being young, things were exciting and fresh back then not jaded and worn down by decades of grind as my dreams one by one crumble to dust while my own mortality starts to loom on the horizon…
Almost everything is better than it was when we were kids and it’s a tough pill but it’s reality.
We used to watch television at specific times because there would be a documentary about something interesting and it wouldn’t be exactly what you want but if you like nature or science or something it’s your only choice - if you’re super lucky the people who made it would have briefly talked with someone who kinda understands the subject.
YouTube and other VOD services have completely ended that tyranny, you’d be very hard pressed to find a subject I couldn’t find you free to watch videos from knowledgeable and passionate people deeply involved in the field. YouTube even has far less adverts than TV, adverts you can skip after five seconds - we used to have to go make a cup of tea every fifteen minutes because the breaks were so long, that was our idea of an addblocker.
Have you ever been to a library to do your homework and found that someone else has the volume of brittanica you need so you just have to wait two hours while they lean on it and chat with their friends? If you’re only looking back ten years to your youth then proubably you haven’t, kids today certainly haven’t - I have though and so have most people my age. That’s what progress is, incredibly easy not to notice things getting better beside we only tend to think about problems when we encounter them. All today’s problems are fresh and we forgot what problems we had back then.
More people have better access to improved medical care, more access to education, more access to basic necessities AND luxuries, it’s easier than ever to travel, to learn new skills, make friends based on a shared interest, there’s an unprecedented amount of free entertainment in pretty much every form.
But we’re tired and busy and struggling to make ends meet - just like adults were when we young and didn’t have to worry about anything but b3ta’s Photoshop Friday and which custom doom wad to try next.
I feel like it should read, “Millenials, remember to drink water in between your champagne glasses while you’re toasting to the death of social media.”
