The article mentions of days when you were anonymous, getting to know strangers through common interests and exchanging ideas.
Heck, I wrote a Dutch online book about Slackware with a guy I didn't really know the name of until after a couple of years when he told me he just used a pseudonym.
For me, social network stopped being social as soon as reasonable assurance of anonymity when out the window
To me it is the introduction of likes (which are really a hack to make people more addicted through social confirmation) destroyed social networks. Shallower posts (party pictures, family announcements, memes) to get more likes, so people post them more and more. Genuinely interesting posts are buried by algorithms. Since comments can be liked as well, people write comments to conform with group biases (and are more likely to be upvoted) rather than to be useful.
tl;dr: to increase engagement, social networks have turned into popularity contests. As with other popularity contests, they are usually vain.
> tl;dr: to increase engagement, social networks have turned into popularity contests. As with other popularity contests, they are usually vain.
The idea of "engagement" as a key metric for some of these services is bizarre. When Netflix changed from 5-star ratings to like/dislike to "increase engagement", the usefulness of ratings on the site plummeted. I will take a single, considered review over thousands of mindless "+1" clicks any day of the week.
Emoji "reactions" are like that too. They're fun to click on, but are all noise and no signal if you actually want feedback.
>The idea of "engagement" as a key metric for some of these services is bizarre.
If they were a social network, I would agree. But they are an ad display network. therefore engagement is a key metric to their business and customers.
But what is weird is Netflix is not an ad network (yet?). Why would they be interested in "engagement" ie, people watching lots of stuff? That costs them extra money. Their best customer would be someone who pays the $10/month and watches just a few movies/shows.
>People that use the service a lot are less likely to cancel, and more likely to recommend it to others.
I'm not sure how true this is with cheap(ish) subscription services. In many cases, the Planet Fitness model might be more apt. They rely on inertia and apathy to keep the subscription payments coming, but they actually rely on people not using the service very much and actively discourage "power-user" usage patterns.
Heck, I wrote a Dutch online book about Slackware with a guy I didn't really know the name of until after a couple of years when he told me he just used a pseudonym.
For me, social network stopped being social as soon as reasonable assurance of anonymity when out the window
To me it is the introduction of likes (which are really a hack to make people more addicted through social confirmation) destroyed social networks. Shallower posts (party pictures, family announcements, memes) to get more likes, so people post them more and more. Genuinely interesting posts are buried by algorithms. Since comments can be liked as well, people write comments to conform with group biases (and are more likely to be upvoted) rather than to be useful.
tl;dr: to increase engagement, social networks have turned into popularity contests. As with other popularity contests, they are usually vain.