alt Hacker NewsPeople are seeking multiple things on social media. One common one is connection. I am in Mexico dealing with family business. I am in a rural area. My Spanish skills are developing but are still weak. I can have light conversation here, but I can't deeply connect. My desire to use social media has drastically increased.
But I only want to engage with my friends. Every platform feeds me various flavors of rage bait mixed in with my friends' content. Some of my friends groups have moved to chats on other less public platforms like Discord, Signal, or Whatsapp. But that's not the same experience. And a lot of the people I like to engage with aren't moving over to those platforms.
We all thought maybe social media would evolve into something good... but it was enshitified. So maybe part of the solution here is to develop a tool that offers that connection without the whole being exploited aspect?
I know the feeling but my impression is that interacting with people that are strictly internet friends is a proxy to the real thing, the same way watching porn is a proxy for the real thing. When you spend X hours talking to people on the Internet you're spending at least less X hours talking to people IRL and building the sense of community that we now feel thinning away.
I know people that are internet famous and are terminally online all the time. I'm pretty sure it must feel like they're accomplishing something but for somebody IRL not familiar with the game they're playing their life looks very weird socially.
My current mindset for this is that social media should only work augmenting my real world social life, not take what's left of it away from me.