Curious how old you are?

There was definitely a sweet spot if you were in highschool or college in like 2004 - 2010 (so born something like 1986 - 1994?) where online social media was almost painstakingly manicured to mirror real-life social dynamics.

Many people remember the drama of deciding who your "top friends" were on MySpace.

I am very critical of social media but this is far too of a myopic take. There is a ton of real life social benefit to these platforms.

Simplest example - someone posts a picture/video of them in a city that I also am in and now I know they live there / traveling there and I can meet up with them.

For a window, it was really social, early to late 2000s (anyone in NL remember Hyves?). It was a great way for keeping up with friends as you went to different schools, when they were traveling, etc.

There were a bunch of things that destroyed it: Ajax [1], async tech made it possible to continuously push new dopamine shots when viewing a page; the rise of smartphones, since before smartphones you could only check social media when you were behind a computer, which was not true for most people most of the day; and the realization that dopamine shots + ads can bring in a lot of money.

Even though we had cell phones in the early 2000s, in most countries it was just for calling and some SMS (which was expensive outside the US). You would only go to Hyves, Myspace, or whatever when you had some time in the evening. I am sure some people got addicted, but it was much harder than having a device that tries to entice you all day to look.

That said, I still find social networks like Mastodon very useful. Not so much as a replacement for keeping up with friends/family, but it makes it very easy to discover what people who are in niches I'm interested in are up to. And since it does not have an algorithmic feed or ads, the addiction factor is much lower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

You're confusing social networks and social media.

Social media was never meant to be a virtual extension of social life. It's what it says on the tin: media created by users, and shared from user to user. Old-school BBS were social media.

Of course you can have actual social experiences, make friends, etc. on social media. But that almost never happens.

Online social networks on the other hand basically do not exist any more.

I 'member when facebook was campus only. For about 5 minutes my friends were friends.

10 minutes later it was just a frenzy of (trying to) poke people that I thought I might have seen at some point that year, and conversations about how many "friends" people had.

For a brief period it was social. Even if you had hundreds of people you had barely interacted with there were still people you continued to interact in real life from that lot.

Getting updates helped me even to form friendships long after the first interaction where we had added each other, I'd see someone I had connected with visiting a place nearby, and could go grab a beer with them while they are around. Or the other way around, I'd be visiting their city and would try to catch up, more often than not it helped to keep in touch, develop a deeper friendship, etc.

That is absolutely dead nowadays, it's drowned in noise on any "social" feature (feeds, Instagram stories [and similar features in other "social" apps], etc.), just a barrage of ads, influencer bullshit, and the odd friend update that isn't just a meme...

The worst part for me is that it was a deliberate choice from these companies to disappear with most social aspects of these apps in favour of the money printing scheme that created the whole influencer culture.

I still have hopes for the rebound, when people get extremely fed up with how these apps work, and something different appears to retake what "social" means, not this doublespeak-esque meaning it came to be.

When I was in college it served as a useful directory of everyone I met (like, "oh, who was that guy again?" type of questions) and also essentially every offline event was organized through Facebook. It served a clear social function that posting in meme groups does not.

I wrote a humor post about it https://open.substack.com/pub/yelluwcomedy/p/old-school?r=7c...

Facebook definitely was social before about 2010. Especially if you were at uni in the golden era before they left everyone in.

You pretty much only had people you actually knew as friends. People posted photos and messages about real life. No sharing of posts, memes, few stupid people. It was great.

We'll probably never get that back.

It was quite social if you only added your actual friends instead of everyone.

Now the feeds are just pure algorithm and very seldom I see someone I know.