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Social Media Has Run Out of Fresh Ideas
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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What kind of get-off-my-lawn take is that?
Of course because that's where a lot of the fun is in tech, inventing, learning about, using and talking about new stuff. Newness can make mundane things interesting and entertaining for a while, just look at a child figuring out new things for the first time.
So the point is to be fun for the developers? Because that doesn't sound like a good thing for the users necessarily.
Why are you creating narrow strawman arguments from what I'm saying? Being fun is one upside of new things in tech, and for everyone who enjoys that sort of thing.
Trying new things is also the major way to create progress and improve lives over time. Everything you are used to right now was new at some point, and we wouldn't have any of it if people were just content with what they had. And I think we can all agree that social media needs some real improvements right now.
Okay, why does there need to be progress when it comes to social media? How does that improve lives over time? Most of the new features I see don't improve anything. They just make things worse. Name the last new Reddit feature that actually made Reddit better. When was it?
And that's pretty much what this article is about: Social media could do with some real improvements, but all the big companies come up with are new money-making schemes.
The Fediverse is a real improvement for example. Idk if you heard of this app called "Lemmy", but it's kinda nice.
But that's the thing, most new features in corporate-driven social media are not supposed to improve user experience, they are supposed to increase corporate control, marketability and data harvesting.
That's not the same as the possibility space of good new features for social media being exhausted.
It's a lot like a new smaller band, which is trying to make a difference in the world. They might sound terrible, but they have to start somewhere.
Social media companies are not new or small. That's nonsense. What happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it?"
I am talking about features and developers themselves. Yes, companies are giant immortals that always existed. However, developers are individuals trying to create something new. And features do work like new bands - some people like them, others don't and it all depends on how/when they are introduced to the customer.
A different problem which you can identify is, for example, how some companies use the customer as a test subject. They release unfinished features to the public to test them in a real environment. This often causes chaos, as new features tend to have multiple exploits and bugs.
Saying this in tech is complete nonsense. Nothing is ever not broken! Because there is always something to be polished, acessibility and usability can only be perfected over time.
Catering to the whims of developers is not what a giant social media company should be doing. The company's job is not to keep them happy, it's to keep its customers happy.
If the developers want to do whatever new idea they come up with, they can start their own company.
What about mainstream social media "ain't broke" right now exactly?