Millennials: It’s ok to mourn the death of social media::Wired writes how “first-gen social media users have nowhere to go.” Ouch.
If by “mourn” you mean “tap-dance on its fucking grave,” then sure!
Millennials: It's ok to mourn the death of social media
Submitted 6 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.businessinsider.com/millennial-nostalgia-social-media-facebook-twitter-dead-2023-11
Comments
grue@lemmy.world 6 months ago
pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I mean, you did move to Miami… why are you expecting sophistication?
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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!
Fish@midwest.social 6 months ago
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.
Botzo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
FTFY: ~mourn~ celebrate
Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I only mourne reddit, that website was a lifestyle back in the day. Thats why i’m here lol. God I miss the good oll’ days.
Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeah, it is a bit strange. That was a central hub of where I got news, jokes, stayed connected with internet culture. That’s mostly gone now. So many things feel splintered anymore. I’m old so I don’t keep up with the latest games, but that feels all over the place—too many games, too many communities. Streaming/TV stuff—very few people I know watch the same things I do, and I miss the joy of watching something new and then talking about it the next day moments. Worse now is that most people can’t even access the same content since there are too many services. Music is strange now too. Partly, I’m just not connected to pop culture, but also everyone is listening to VERY different stuff (referring to college-age folks—most other millennials I know just listen to NPR, podcasts and 90s mixes). There doesn’t seem to be any monolithic music culture at all anymore. Everyone has super customized spotify playlists. I know a big part is just millennial aging, but also reddit kept me connected to broader things, and now its just like everything else and enshittified and disappearing. sigh … get off my lawn I guess :(
DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Looks like a small formatting issue:
~~strike through~~=strike through
~subscript~= ~subscript~computergeek125@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Voyager shows those both as subscript
MrOxiMoron@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Boost show the strikethrough, not the subscript
DaCookeyMonsta@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Idk. I feel mentally healthier off social media. But its been around since I was in high school and I have no idea how to socialize with people outside my immediate circle now. My social muscles have atrophied.
spyd3r@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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.
Adalast@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
BeautifulMind@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
HessiaNerd@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
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
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I don’t mourn “social media.” I mourn what we had before they started using that phrase.
pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Also no. I meant the forums, chat rooms and instant messengers we had right before Facebook and Twitter ruined it all.
Flambo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Mourning? More like dancing on its grave. With the fediverse being everything social media 1.0 was and more, there is no need for the legacy platforms. I just hope that the fediverse can get some more traction with folks outside tech circles and we can normalize cooperation and free social platforms as in free speech not as in free beer.
naticus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s also all right to laugh maniacally as it all burns down.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
That was my thought.
I don’t mourn it’s death, I celebrate it.
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Why though? Did you love it when only the rich could affect popular sentiment?
oDDmON@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Once advertising got involved, it was all downhill from there.
Colour_me_triggered@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Social Media is cancer. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
FangedWyvern42@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Social Media is cancer posted on social media
Modern society in a nutshell
cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world 6 months ago
you can be part of a system while not endorsing it or critiquing it
samus12345@lemmy.world 6 months ago
ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 6 months ago
So you are willfully participating in spreading cancer? Because Lemmy is social media.
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Such a simplistic and frankly dumb take, have you really thought about what you’ve said at all?
Regularl people shouldn’t have a voice, all media should be run and distributed by an authority of some kind? If you’re not rich enough to own a newspaper company then you don’t get to express yourself? Only the likes of Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to set trends and influence people?
Or did you just mean ‘some women are popular on social media for doing things that don’t interest me and therefore influencers and all of social media is evil and I hate it’ because that’s what it always seems to boil down to with kneejerk anti haters.
Colour_me_triggered@lemm.ee 6 months ago
You seem to think that social media is about giving people a voice. It isn’t. Most social media is set up either to harvest users personal data to sell for profit or to sell products to and push ideas on users. In most cases, both. It has become the primary method of distributing propaganda and influencing public opinion generally.
Cancer
Sygheil@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Nah, forums are more organic old school is cool.
ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 6 months ago
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.
AdmiralShat@programming.dev 6 months ago
I miss forums. Even on technical forums for a software, there was usually an off topic or random section to hang out in
uis@lemmy.world 6 months ago
If you think about it, atmosphere is social media too
j4k3@lemmy.world 6 months ago
“Social media is like a public toilet; anyone is free to use it, no one should drink from it.” -Llama2 70B by Meta
alonely0@programming.dev 6 months ago
Gen Z, I mourned Reddit for 30 seconds. Now I’m here.
Cowbee@lemm.ee 6 months ago
The worst is the ever-shortening of content into an addictive format. It reduces mental clarity.
RichCaffeineFlavor@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Anxiety and depression reduce mental clarity. And people tend towards shorter forms of content when they’re trying to distract themselves. The egg came before the chicken.
hperrin@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.”
Reygle@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
s_s@lemmy.one 6 months ago
It’s turned normal people into unacceptable drooling trash.
They always were. Social media just gave them a platform to you.
Reygle@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Especially fuck meta and xitter.
HERRAX@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Worst part is that they actually started out kind of great, and killed all alternatives. Then they became progressively worse because of their predatory algorithms and whatnot, and now it’s borderline impossible to get friends and family to switch to an alternative like mastodon or pixelfed…
fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 6 months ago
From those annoying af fb “games” to those goddamn algorithms.
Sparlock@lemmy.world 6 months ago
How do you pronounce xitter?
root_beer@midwest.social 6 months ago
Think of how the name of current CCP General Secretary Xi is pronounced.
“Shitter”. It’s “Shitter”.
Number1SummerJam@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The thing that threw me off Facebook was the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, even though I ran a popular meme page. I thought I found a sanctuary on Reddit, but looking back everything major on it was shilled to advertise or sow political discord. I thought Google Plus had a lot of potential, but nobody I knew would join and y’know, Google’s privacy record.
realitista@lemm.ee 6 months ago
By the time Google+ rolled around, it had become clear that any social media owned by a big tech giant would suck after a while, and anything experimental released by Google would be killed after a while, so why invest in it?
HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Thanks for that - I hadn’t seen it before! (My 1 in 10,000 day!)
rustyriffs@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s not over though, it’s really just beginning again.
Corgana@startrek.website 6 months ago
Something tells me the editorial staff at Buisness Insider might have a harder time than most visualizing an online social landscape built around being, y’know, social, and not for profit.
rustyriffs@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ah, now I’m tracking. I really should’ve paid more attention to the source.
metaphortune@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I grew up on forums / IRC / IMs, later transitioned to Myspace, then Twitter / Facebook / Tumblr / Instagram. I had a lot of fun over the years, it definitely saddens me that I can’t get the things I liked about those experiences back.
cogman@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Check out the forums again, they are still around in a lot of cases and sometimes more active than what you’ll find on reddit.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 6 months ago
I only discovered IRC a year ago, and now pretty much all my social life is there) With just a bit also existing in XMPP MUCs)
Blackmist@feddit.uk 6 months ago
Imagine mourning the death of social media.
I mourn its creation.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 6 months ago
As long as humans are social creatures, and the Internet connects us, there will be social media in some form or another.
csolisr@communities.azkware.net 6 months ago
On one hand, it’s a bit sad to see the average person not know about the Fediverse and claim “welp, there’s nowhere else to go, it’s either staying on the same ten junkyards I know or quitting cold-turkey”. On the other hand, the relative obscurity kind of comes from the fact that there’s no single main instance of the Fediverse. Sure there’s things like Mastodon.Social, Lemmy.ML and Misskey.GG that concentrate most users of their niche, but by nature, there is not (and should not be) a centralized place where everybody is, that can be used as the poster child for the Fediverse.
Luisp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
More like piss over the grave
21Cabbage@lemmynsfw.com 6 months ago
I’m not mourning, I’ve just done what I’ve done every few years for at least a decade now and just found a new fucking home. Plus, I think this and mastodon will be my home for awhile now since the decentralized nature of it makes it really easy to avoid the bullshit that brought me here.
hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Is this their first platform death? Common Wired!
Millennials have been losing platforms on the Internet for pretty much the whole history of the Internet. Just a handful of “social media” type services that have risen and fallen in my years of the internet: AOL Instant Message, ICQ, IRC, Usenet, LiveJournal, MySpace, on and on.
Most of these aren’t even properly “dead”, many I just.mentioned still have big user groups too. They just lost a critical user share when folks moved on.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 6 months ago
Bots and spam have ruined social media for me. I wish there was a private social media.
Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Hopefully it’s just the death of surveillance and fake news infested social media with censors ensuring you don’t deviate from the Overton window.
heygooberman@lemmy.today 6 months ago
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?
woshang@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Censorship and Centralized manner killed all the goodness.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 6 months ago
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.
The original article contains 103 words, the summary contains 101 words. Saved 2%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
BedSharkPal@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
I’m just excited the internet is in part going back to its non corporate backed roots with Lemmy mastodon and the like. The internet started that way, and thanks to the enshitification it will hopefully slowly revert back to it
The idea that corporations were involved in social media was insane looking back. The results were exactly what one would have anticipated
VaultBoyNewVegas@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I remember when I first started using Reddit and there was so much weird and crazy shit that it really did feel like there was a sub for everything. Now it’s so sanitised that it’s nowhere near as diverse in its content and subs, hopefully Lemmy/fediverse can have as many different instances as old Reddit and the active community too.
Corgana@startrek.website 6 months ago
What I don’t understand is who is moderating the big subs and why? When r/funny, r/holup, r/publicfreakout, r/damnthatsinsteresting (and I’m sure many others) are all basically the same memes and short videos, what kind of “community” is that? What kind of person signs up to clear the spam out of what is essentially 9gag 2.0 for free?
There are many smaller communities that would probably be happy to move to the Fedi if it were easier and bigger, and I hope Lemmy evolves to the point where those can be absorbed. Reddit can keep the endless meme scrolls.
pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 6 months ago
BreadStapledToTrees had me so confused the first time I found it. It still confuses me. Even though I have only been active on Reddit for the past 5 years, even I saw a massive change in it.
When I first found GoneWild and the like I was like “Mother of God, this is amazing…” and now 85% of the porn subs are just OF advertisements.
Wahots@pawb.social 6 months ago
This, every time I see a post in the frontpage here where someone has taken a picture of a pear stuffed up their ass (etc etc), I breathe a sigh of relief knowing no advertisers or asshole CEOs are ruining this place. Feels like the old days of the internet, roughly. Sure it’s small, but it feels real, not sterile and clean for advertisers and shareholders.
Renacles@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
I use old reddit from time to time to check specific subs and it’s wild seeing how boring they’ve gotten.
darreninthenet@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Do we have a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook yet…?
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 6 months ago
yes, Friendica has been around for longer than Mastodon has.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Mastodon has rich media features and such that it could be considered a replacement for modern Facebook.
Now for the legacy Facebook that was more focused on the Facebook wall, homepages, and etc. There really isn’t a replacement but nobody can use Facebook for that now.
As for a replacement for Facebook groups, kbin or Lemmy can do it. Kbin does both the microblogging/status updates and communities.
Someone else mentioned frendica. But I don’t have any experience with that.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
Facebook does a lot of things. Depends on what exactly you’re looking for. Facebook allows you to follow friends and organizations (= Mastodon), it also allows you to participate in groups (= Lemmy), and then it has a few other features too.
sucricdrawkcab@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Bluesky now has a federated server and moving people over. I’m curious how that’s going to play out.
Corgana@startrek.website 6 months ago
Bluesky is not really decentralized like Mastodon. It’s more like crypto where the bigger you are the more influence you have over the network. There is zero incentive for someone to host a server off of .social since it does nothing besides provide Jack Dorsey and co with a little free hosting.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’m hopeful that long term, AtProto and ActivityPub end up merged into one future standard. But even if they end up separate, it’s not the end of the world since they’re both open and bridges already exist.
It’s kind of like Atom and RSS. Soon, users won’t have to care or know the difference and eventually, code libraries will make it so even developers don’t have to know the details.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 6 months ago
I’m very small part.
Twitter has proven that they won’t. Reddit has proven that they won’t. They’ve both proven that you can shit all over your own users, give them nothing in return, and they’ll complain for a few days but never leave in any significant numbers. Meta has proven that these shitty corporations can start up wholly new operation (Threads) and the masses will flock to it by the tens of millions.
People have demonstrated over and over that, by and large, they will let these corporations piss on their heads and tell them it’s raining and that they will do absolutely nothing about it.