My take on declining online social engagement is; a lot of people like to consume online content passively e.g. just reading Facebook posts or watching a YouTube video without actually liking or commenting. Another thing is; increasing number of people came to realize that privacy does matter and they refuse to participate in online dramas that can damage their reputation or harm their mental health.
99% of my social media engagement is on anonymous social media because whatever I do on real-identity social media is either broadcast to everyone I know by the platform (FB, LinkedIn, Twitter), or becomes indexed by search engines, and unfortunately my firstname+lastname is globally unique.
In fact I would say this is the singular reason why Facebook declined. I just don't want my 8th grade classmate to see that I liked my cousin's wedding photos 20 years later, y'know?
Yep, or a prospective employer when I'm in my 40s to see what my political opinions were in my 20s. The more polarized and politicized everything gets the more careful a watch I keep on what turns up when you Google my name. What's well inside the Overton window today won't be in five years and I'm not willing to risk my career on the assumption that even I will still agree with myself in a few years.
> unfortunately my firstname+lastname is globally unique.
This is why I have never used, and will never use, my real world identity on the internet in the decades I've been interacting on it. Instead, I use consistent internet-only identities. It allows me to communicate honestly and openly.
Also “don’t recommend channel” for truly obnoxious ones. I follow through 3-4 of their videos so that they start to appear in the side column and then kill it from there, removing all traces afterwards.
- Not interested - removes this exact video with a very low key tuning of recommendations, if at all.
- Dislike - a slightly pronounced signal for recommendations. But still clueless cause no info on why.
- Like - you’ll drown in content similar to this, but not the same quality. Get ready to shovel it and miss your previous interests completely.
- Comment - similar to like.
The default careless youtube experience without all that stopped working around 5 years ago (at least). Can’t imagine using it as is and not degenerating into something inhuman.
I'm just glad there are browser extensions that remove all that Youtube dross no questions asked.
It's interesting to me that somebody would try and curate their experience in this shitshoveling assault on the nerves that is Youtube recommendations.
It’s completely automatic at this point, I barely notice my actions :)
Can you maybe recommend some extensions please? I’m only using unhook (some of) and sponsorblock, but it would be nice to e.g. dislike videos right from the feed or ban channels from their video or a channel page. Oh, and the one that loads X button in history immediately.
The biggest single mistake we collectively made online is deciding to engage online at all with our true identities. Privacy is only a real concern because so many things we do online can be tied to our real lives.
Get rid of identities and the fire hose of click bait social media and I'd expect the internet goes back to something much more similar to what we often see people wax poetic about, a smaller web that's people goofing off and writing random stuff on their own site.
IMO, it’s due to burnout due to pathological manipulation. Which is also playing out in politics and the media/advertising, and the macroeconomic fed rate situation. They’re all related.
Business cycle wise:
- it starts out mellow, with lots of positive ROI and few downsides. Few know about it at first.
- as awareness grows, so does competition. While there is a ton of room to grow, this isn’t a problem. Growth doesn’t have to be at the cost of a competitors market share, there are tons of available untapped opportunities.
- eventually, it starts to become crowded. Now competition starts to become more heated and cut throat. Old tricks to stay competitive stop working, and there is an arms race to develop new ones.
- at some point, some/many players don’t feel they can compete based on fundamentals (positively), and it starts to become a race to the bottom. With some/many players starting to scam or commit fraud, be scary/manipulative, squeeze suppliers to a destructive degree, etc. Zero sum game instead of green field.
- this causes demand side restrictions and additional costs as customers start to get scared/overwhelmed, and cut back or get more demanding on quality.
- this causes a downward spiral that worsens the situation industry wide, eventually bankrupting marginal suppliers and maybe even big ones, until things stabilize or change.
On the social side, a lot of people population wide are flat out not doing it anymore. Including women. Similar to dating apps.
Which is why some advertisers, politicians, businesses keep getting even more insane and craven trying to extract even more value from the remaining people - to keep the numbers going up and right. So they don’t have to ‘look down’ and be potentially bankrupt. The loudest players in this type of environment are almost always the ones in the worst position.
This is also playing out in American Politics and Media right now.
It isn’t just engineer or blue collar types, who IMO were already predisposed to not engaging with it.
Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.
Minuses:
- there are going to be a lot more deeply traumatized people with a profoundly negative outlook on human nature, now and even more in the future.
- society is going to get a whole lot poorer while this plays out.
> Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.
I disagree. Tech literacy is going down, partially due to an overreliance on dashboard-style mobile apps and phishing scams are still widely effective. I have seen people lose mails and accounts to strategies that have been unchanged for an easily googleable 11 years now. Perhaps the inevitability of exposure is a numbers game, but I'm overall pessimistic, I think a lot of scams will become a lot more "personal sounding" due to AI agents, and a preparedness reset is coming.
