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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

> Social media was built on the romance of authenticity.

It never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.

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I think the romance of authenticity is something only old people like me got to experience e.g. the early days of thefacebook. It died a few short years(?) after when the algorithms took over.

Facebook died with the like button. Twitter died with retweets.

The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming. We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies. People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.

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You don't even need the algorithm, the type of social network (the connection graph) is enough. I disliked Facebook-style social media right from the start because people's self-presentations were performative right from the start.

There wasn't the slightest romance of authenticity for me.

My take on this kind of view: it wasn't built on authenticity or social connection. That was what the enthusiasts were claiming it would be. It was a reference to something known, very superficial in nature, only meant to to increase the appeal.

There was no algorithm in the original Facebook and Twitter.

The echo chamber you got was the same you get in real life: your friends and family may share your pov and bias.

It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash.

Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...

By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).

The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.

Facebook always had the ability to organize contacts, but few people use it. https://www.facebook.com/help/200538509990389/

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