3w ago

What do you think about this approach to social networks?

We never message each other because this isn’t about connection. It’s about keeping tabs.

What do you think about this approach to social networks? I think she is right in this, for me the social networks don't make much sense any more as it doesn't lead to any real interaction, which was the purpose of having online connections in first place.

https://caoilainn.substack.com/p/just-delete-them

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16 comments

I've never like social media based on following other people. I care more about following a topic not a person.
Ie Lemmy/Reddit vs Mastodon/Facebook.
- Apparently, i’m not the only one who feels that way. I tried to use Mastodon, but couldn’t find anyone worth following. People always post random stuff I don’t care about.
  
  Don't follow people. Follow hashtags. It's a much better experience.
  
  Hashtags don't work as well as disambiguated topics used to work on Quora before enshittification. Many real topics have many hashtags associated to them: acronyms, whole names, misspellings. Meanwhile, many hashtags have many real topics associated to them, especially acronyms with many possible collisions: https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/AGI
  
  They work better than following people does, though.
- Quora used to have a fantastic crowd-edited question topic ontology/taxonomy for feed shaping, but they enshittified the system away, and now it's all LLM misunderstandings of what the question topics should be. The bot thinks a question is about apples when the question is a mathematics word puzzle; "How many apples...". The excuse for AI tagging was "tags can be abused" when in reality the crowd corrected the abuses quickly. With the new AI tagger, my feed turned into viral trash from Quora-celebrities, mostly about recent news.
  They never made the obviously needed features of being able to topic tag answers, not just questions (for when the question is general and the answer is specific, like "What do you think everyone needs to know in 2025?"), and the ability to follow a topic from a user, because most people write about many topics, so a follow brings uninteresting topics to my feed, but not all people write well about that topic I follow, so I'd need to follow a topic from a user.
- On my Mastodon I follow ... maybe a dozen people? Total?
  I follow, like you said, topics in the form of hashtags. This gives me a much better feed than Xhitter or Farcebook ever did.

16 comments