If scrolling feels more exhausting than entertaining, you're not alone. I feel the same way, and a recent study backs up the sentiment: Social media is losing its fun factor.
Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.
For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there’s a lot of posts that you can’t see without having an account and logging in. That’s a big ask for something that you’re not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn’t sidestep that using the old reddit interface.
Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can’t see much of anything without being logged in, but they’re trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you’re human before you can use your account.
If you’ve scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you’re actually a human, and if you don’t have an account, the content that you can see doesn’t seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.
Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.
Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that’s mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.
Reddit is even worse on mobile. They’ve moved to putting up a banner that tells you to use the app. On iOS, it kills the scroll and swiping to go back doesn’t work. Go to the app? Fuck you, log in. Desktop mode is rough on mobile and they’re already talking about nuking old.reddit.com now.
Old reddit is the only way I interact with the site at all, and only for communities and stuff that for whatever reason haven’t moved on to greener pastures. Once old reddit’s gone I guess I’ll finally move that site into the graveyard.
maybe we could help handing them nails to their coffin. Lets start demanding they add even more obnoxious things. Like for reddit, make even more posts no visible to those who are not logged in, have premium members be even more exclusive and away from the view. That should be a decent blow to any new people considering to join there since why would they want to do it if they cant even see what is there. And lets say they do it anyway and maybe even pay something, they will just get shit that isnt worth their money or they are kind of people that make it even worse place.
it could be sold to the crazier users as a way for them to be oh so exclusive and vip users so they would join in too. The executives would likely be extatic to see people demand same kind of shit they would want to put in anyway.
I dont know enough about facebook or shitter to have any ideas how to make them even worse, but for sure there is room there too.
Worse commercial social media becomes the better since it will push people away and eventually make it crumble.
Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.
For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there’s a lot of posts that you can’t see without having an account and logging in. That’s a big ask for something that you’re not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn’t sidestep that using the old reddit interface.
Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can’t see much of anything without being logged in, but they’re trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you’re human before you can use your account.
If you’ve scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you’re actually a human, and if you don’t have an account, the content that you can see doesn’t seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.
Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.
Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that’s mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.
Reddit is even worse on mobile. They’ve moved to putting up a banner that tells you to use the app. On iOS, it kills the scroll and swiping to go back doesn’t work. Go to the app? Fuck you, log in. Desktop mode is rough on mobile and they’re already talking about nuking old.reddit.com now.
Old reddit is the only way I interact with the site at all, and only for communities and stuff that for whatever reason haven’t moved on to greener pastures. Once old reddit’s gone I guess I’ll finally move that site into the graveyard.
It was a cool place while it lasted.
maybe we could help handing them nails to their coffin. Lets start demanding they add even more obnoxious things. Like for reddit, make even more posts no visible to those who are not logged in, have premium members be even more exclusive and away from the view. That should be a decent blow to any new people considering to join there since why would they want to do it if they cant even see what is there. And lets say they do it anyway and maybe even pay something, they will just get shit that isnt worth their money or they are kind of people that make it even worse place.
it could be sold to the crazier users as a way for them to be oh so exclusive and vip users so they would join in too. The executives would likely be extatic to see people demand same kind of shit they would want to put in anyway.
I dont know enough about facebook or shitter to have any ideas how to make them even worse, but for sure there is room there too.
Worse commercial social media becomes the better since it will push people away and eventually make it crumble.