I've known many people who met through games. They offer something similar, in the sense that you can meet new people and learn about them.

The synchronous nature of multiplayer games leaves most of this expression implicit rather than explicit, though, so for some people it doesn't fit the same need. It's a kind of role-play.

I think most people are, for lack of a better metaphor, blood-sucking vampires for honest, explicit, and carefully-crafted communication. People are pleased when I offer it, but they struggle to offer it back, so I learn to not bother. Most relationships degenerate into expressing things better left unsaid, or being entirely superficial.

I'm glad you said so. So many people take the wrong lessons from social media, and just keep trying to rebuild it more-or-less as-is and inherit most of the flaws that made it awful in the first place. What People fail to understand is that in a very narrow sense, it's better to think of social media like alcohol. It feels good to get a buzz and relax, but the next day you're worse off. Drinking a lot of the time makes your life actively worse even if in the moment you feel good. Social media should be thought of through that lens -- if you think you want to preserve "the good parts," you're like an alcoholic who keeps finding a reason to continue drinking. "No, the problem was just drinking alone. Now that I'm drinking at the bar, socially, it's OK!" To an extent, but mostly it's harming you.

> You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits

There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.

Or how in a private group someone who was invited suddenly leaves the group membership, hops off the channel. Comparative to walking out of a meeting without saying a word and provide a reason. A simple "I enjoyed it here, but I have to spend my time elsewhere" is just simply a polite thing to do, and costs only 2 seconds of time.

Social media has strong parasocial tendencies.

I would like to see social networks that facilitates real life, face-to-face encounters to a much larger extent that the current state of affairs. The Fediverse has the pieces to this puzzle, but I do not know of one project that combines them in the right way yet. We do have Mobilizon for events, we have Mastodon and all the other similar projects for sharing and commenting, but we need something that puts the pieces together in a new configuration.

I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.

But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!

> What's the alternative? I don't know.

Real world connection and a strong foundation of core friends, perhaps?

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and started to poke around with implementing something, I have more ideas but a bit of a chicken and egg problem, if people use it I'll keep working on it and trying to improve it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672734 - the end goal is very very very little/specific discoverability on the platform, even narrower than I have implemented today.

Yeah the first three paragraphs of the article really resonated strongly and then the fourth was an ad for mastodon, which is only slightly less bad IMHO.

> Because walking away from it all isn't the right answer. Why? Because we leave behind all those people addicted to it.

Don't start drinking or smoking, because with this logic you'll have a really hard time quitting

When you say leave behind...do you mean you lose something by not interacting with them, or do you mean that you have some kind of duty to help get them un-addicted? I don't think you are obligated to go hangout at your local bar once a week just because alcoholics exist.

I think the challenge is that the addictive formats will naturally outcompete the healthy ones because they’re, well, addicting. They exert a force pulling people into their orbit and starving anything designed for healthier (less frequent) engagement.

I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.

What we take for granted is it was always addicting, as far back in the 90s when we didn't call it social media. There was just a smaller privileged demographic frequenting it. That said, as much as it was the wild-west, it was probably "better" for us then than it is now.