It died when it went beyond dial up and ASCII. The vibe of BBS culture in the 1980s and early '90s was so much more social than the dogshit people do now.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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When social media started it focuses on friends. You add someone as a friend and you could see what they were up to.
Then Facebook came along and made it competitive, it became less about seeing what friends were doing and more about posting things that people liked.
As Facebook grew, it changed. One day you didn’t see the stuff your friends posted unless you constantly interacted with their posts or a lot of other people did.
It’s gotten worse and worse since then. They have added more and more ads and posts from people and pages you might know that you no longer see stuff from people you do know.
It’s absolutely worthless.
Facebook died to me when the timeline was no longer linear
Yeah, that was the moment it changed from a social media platform to an advertising platform.
when instagram changed the algorithm a decade ago to no longer show your friends' recent posts, that's when they lost me. prior to that, it was actually useful for sharing trips and events with friends.
now it and Facebook are entirely ads / sponsored posts, and random shit fb thinks I'll hate
Dude they filled my timeline with a bunch of ads and AI generated nonsense. We stopped posting because no one ever saw it thanks to all of the filler.
For me, it's the death of the chronological view. That's when I stopped using social media. I'd see random, irrelevant stuff from weeks ago instead of what my friends were up to today.
That explains the bots.
Dead Internet theory is real.
Let's get it to 85%
I just signed up for my local Nextdoor; holy crap, it’s 75% commercial ads, about 10% personal ads, about 10% dogs/cats/kittens, and 5% misc. Utterly useless.
You're lucky then. For me there was at least a double digit percentage of just plain racism.
Photo of black man walking: "ANYBODY KNOW WHO THIS IS?!"
Car broken into: "I BET IT WAS THAT MEXICAN".
Absolutely vile place. Boomers talking to other boomers with no filter, an HOA board given a social platform.
I think Nextdoor encourages it. I'm from a very liberal state (Maryland). Around here, people started posting on there complaining about a house right beside an elementary school always flying some garbage flag. For a while it was a Confederate flag, then a FJB flag, etc. So someone posted a picture of it asking if there was some kind of ordinance it was violating for which they could submit a complaint, and then people piled on about how much they hated it and how inappropriate they thought it was. The next thing I see is that the post was taken down and the poster was given some kind of warning for endangering the owner/ doxing them, even though the street address was not posted and the owner's name was not mentioned. Everyone in the community knows which house that is and could look up the owner from the county records if they want to!!
but nextdoor is happy to keep racism alive, it's the bread and butter
Yeah I'm originally from a very notorious southern state for racism and the nextdoor app was like that there too.
Hated it. I've not been in it ever since. Also, a lot of people being very nosy about weird stuff.
I thought it was going to be like a community app, a good way to meet people. How naive I was.
Too many people tell me they prefer small towns because people are "nice". In my experience, absolutely not. They may say hello to you, but that does not mean they are nice people. My experience aligns with yours. Selfish, ignorant, nosy. After you leave they'll immediately start talking about you, your family, and anything else gossipy. Not much else to do in a small town.
Say what you will about big cities but no one gives a damn about you and its great. Someone rude to you? You can literally never see them again. It's wonderful.
Fortunately I live in a pretty diverse area; a fair number of the posts are in spanish. Probably 5 or 6 non English languages spoken in my court alone.
Because no one fing cares about your hourly updates and you're just advertising your insecurities.
Social media is 75% ads, 15% shared content (more ads), and 10% people you know creating actual posts. You're a gluten for punishment if you hang out there.
the article actually says the opposite - that it's the random nature of pushing internet algorithm-chasing influencers that pushes people away instead of it being a way to keep in touch with people you know and love.
Yea, it was actually pretty great when there wasn't an algorithm forcing-feeding us bullshit. It was just us and our friends keeping in touch with each other. It was a boon for many introverts.
Now though? Why post when we know the algorithm won't show our posts to our friends unless they dig through mountains of grift, brain rot, and propaganda.
I stopped using sites like Facebook years ago when I noticed I was seeing posts from random meme pages I didn't even follow that were days old yet I hadn't seen any posts from my actual friends in days. So, went check their pages to see they had been posting daily and the algorithm just never showed them to me.
that's the case for me and it seems like most of the people in my circle
yeah none of us care about the hourly updates. but our circle doesn't do that, we generally would only share things other people actually want to see. but it's been a long time since anyone did that. now the only sharing that happens is just Strava and in group chats
"gluten for punishment", thanks autocorrect for another genius coinage
Darn it! I'm not changing it. I shall live with my shame of not proof reading
For some, gluten could indeed be punishment.
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That's how I felt when I tried bluesky. I missed the boat on Twitter and it'd already gone down the shitter so I never tried it. Figured bsky would be an opportunity to try the whole tweeting thing for myself.
And even still, it was just nothing but political bitching, navel gazing, and glorified (or actual) advertising. Like... what's the point of it all? Deleted my account within the month.
Lemmy has its share of faults but at least people are willing to have actual discussions and conversations here. On bsky it felt like talking to a bot. People talking past each other instead of actually communicating.
Doesn't it depend on who you follow? The only things I see on bsky are those I follow.
For me it's the idea that by interacting with social media I'm working to generate profit for a billionaire-led company.
Social media used to be mostly about keeping up with friends. Now it’s about competing with everyone for money and views.
Big change.
also the best way to disseminate propaganda.
Because it's stupid, you get nothing out of it and you lose time on top
They're already trying to track everything I do. Why would I help them?
Funny, I'm not american, but I'm working on disconnecting my self too, that's the reason I'm quitting Reddit and I'm here.
Reddit's just so swamped with bots anymore. And even in the small subs where you're reasonably sure no one's wasting bots on, the people are just weird.
And the bots are posting stories, so you literally have a lifeless machine picking fights with people
AITA, AIO, all the variations are likely just AI bots, or a person just gauging a reaction for thier own writing/novels. plus all those ask "advice" subs about thier personal or family problems.
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