> That would explain why messaging, which is mostly based on phone contacts and therefore more in the user’s control, would be the place people now trust for their social graph.
This is the reason the I wouldn't be interested in an new old Facebook. I'd add that Messaging Apps have significantly improved since the time old Facebook was relevant. They allow Group Chats that function like a "feed" and include images, videos, memes. You can even search your chat history.
Group chats are basically old Facebook feeds with a select part of the social graph. I never thought about it this way, but they totally are. This is actually where Messaging Apps improve upon the old model. A Facebook feed was your entire social graph and your "posts" went out to that entire graph. I don't want this. I never did, really. I like the scoped social graph my "posts" reach in a Group Chat.
Since there are probably people on this forum that are young enough to not actually remember Google+'s launch (or just not be paying attention), this was one of its headlining features (limiting post visibility to specific "circles" you chose). It was a great idea, and would have been super useful if it was ever used by anyone but Google fanboys.
Google decided that the way to launch a new social network was to piss off the nucleus of it, namely, the users of its existing social apps. By canceling Reader, and going on a long, obnoxious push to unify gmail and YouTube accounts, two things literally no one wanted.
If they'd been clever enough to make Google+ an extension of those things, it might have gone somewhere.
That "real names" policy is the reason I have always been careful to never open YouTube while logged into any Google account: the understanding I gathered from the noise back then was that, if you ever logged into YouTube or Google+, and then Google for some reason decided that your name was not your real name, you could permanently lose access to more important things like Google Talk or Gmail.
The sad thing is that Facebook had the exact same functionality with lists. You could scope posts and everything. Someone made a clone of the Google+ Circles UI using the Facebook SDK to sort your friends into lists that I used and I still use those lists to scope posts to family only etc.
I think you're right. I recently came to the realization that Discord has functionally replaced Facebook for me and most of my peers. We use it to chat, coordinate events, share pictures, etc. And it gives us all the tools we need to organize this stuff how we want, with no algorithmically curated feed.
Discord is essentially group chat on steroids. And because it's a chat app first, it is fundamentally incompatible with the various "features" that ultimately enshittified Facebook.
One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think).
Everybody has taken a few loops around the merry-go-round at this point, we don’t need to do the whole thing where we try to make it look grown-up and serious. The solution is somewhere in the ballpark of MySpace, AIM, and IRC.
I'm really curious about Discord for social, because literally _no one_ I know uses it here in the UK for anything social. is it a US thing? Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?
> Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?
This one, mostly. Discord has the "cringe" (or at least, silly/quaint/unprofessional, take your pick) "uwu Gamer" feel because that was its target demographic when it launched and is probably still its "home base". It's broken into more social uses by a wide variety of social groups (especially younger generations who like the silly Discord is for Gamers theming in a weird post-ironic way, because it is just memes all the way down; social groups built around group chats of memes can laugh about the silly gamer memes, too).
> One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think).
Yeah, Discord weirdly seems more trustworthy by seeming so unprofessional and silly. Part of that is "yeah, it will be easy to toss if it gets worse", but part of that is how much on the internet "unprofessional" and "silly" is frowned upon. ("You'll sell less ads." "You'll have fewer corporate users." "Complaints" like that.) That also seems as much a feature as a bug: Discord's branding sells less ads, good. Ads seem to be killing the "professional" web.
I also appreciate Discord's weird monetization tools today. Nitro memberships are personal in a weird way that most social media isn't. They mostly just give you more emoji and other memes tools. You don't have to get your whole social network to buy in to the membership, you can just do it for fun for yourself. Same with selling the silly animated name plates and profile cover picks, it's mostly harmless fun that doesn't make the experience worse for everyone and encourages Discord to focus on individual interests on the platform to keep them having fun and buying silly things, rather than the interests of other big corporations or ad buyers or "professional users".
Discord's monetization also makes them come off more trustworthy than other social media companies. Any transaction where I, the user, am also the customer, automatically feels more trustworthy than one where the user is the product.
Hopefully this helps then fend off enshittifying a little longer than most.
> We are all experiencing what happened when politicians regulated the web. I hope you are enjoying your cookie modals; browsing the web in 2022 is an absolute hell.
This. Just This.
Seriously though, as someone fairly uneducated in the space of how standards, protocols, and regulations get set in place, how can the ship be moved on this issue? Tech companies will likely only move / allocate resources if there is financial incentive. So what do we do?
Just when you think it's time to count hire education out because of bloated administrative spending, overwhelming student debt, and poor technical training for real world jobs, a light shines in the darkness.
I guess there's still hope if higher education can learn from Professors of the likes of Michael Thaddeus. He and others like him make pursing a degree valuable. The administration can go...
ahh, this is such a refreshing article. Social media is not the evil of all evils. What matters is how you use it. "The Algorithm" can be really good if you use it well. I benefit a lot from my engagement with these platforms from staying up-to-date on the news to blowing of steam after work to thinking about new and interesting thing.
Instead of shouting, "Boo!" Why not talk about how to engage well?
How do credit card companies stay in business? If you just use a credit card like a debit card, it's just free money from the credit card companies. Or am I benefiting from others bad spending habits?
Affirm (and other installment type companies) offer a different benefit, I guess? No rewards, but you don't have to have all money on hand. I love this for my iPhone, but these installments could easily stack up.
Depends on what "credit card company" you are talking about.
Visa/Mastercard/AmEx and others don't care whether you are paying off your bill or not. The take a cut of every transaction done on their networks.
Banks that issue the cards do profit from interest, but that is somewhat balanced by some people just never paying. They also collect various kinds of fees, whether directly for the card or other parts of their business (e.g. they attract customers with good cash back cards then sell them on mortgages or auto loans).
Ultimately everyone is paying for credit cards simply from the price of goods they buy going up to account for the costs.
The companies that provide the cash back get way less than 3-5% of the gross purchase price. Merchant fees, at least for Visa, don't even approach 5%[0] -- it's more like 1.5 to 3%. And they're definitely not spending all that fee on rewards (and thus taking no profit).
Another thing to consider is that no payment method is free for the merchant. Even with cash, you need to pay Loomis, or you need to pay an employee to physically visit a bank.
and your individual spending choices have no bearing on whether the merchants will continue to charge that fee. So you might as well get the benefit of it
Not sure how legitimate my source is but it looks like they raked in ~$75bn in 2020 from interest income alone. That makes me wonder if those of us that do use a CC as a debit card are a minority.
Very much a minority. The average credit card balance is over $5000 according to https://www.creditcards.com/statistics/credit-card-debt-stat... And the interest rates are ridiculously high so they can afford even a large number of people paying off their bills each month.
I like you, pay off mine at the end of the month... It seems the percentage of people who do that is around 40%... which seems maybe high...
ALso don't forget, credit card companies charge at least 1.5% of a fee to the retailer, this is why some places (usually gas stations) will have a cash price and a card price...
But yeah... lots of the perks are paid for by the rest of people who aren't paying off the balance...
1. Interchange fees. You are probably paying 1 to 3 percent baked into the costs of what you are buying to pay for the privilege of using a credit card as method of payment.
2. If you don't pay off every month, you are paying pretty hefty interest on any of your balance that carries over from month to month.
Credit card companies make money from merchants who pay them a fee and from interest on credit card debt. There are likely additional revenue streams but those are 2 prominent one.
> Credit card companies make money from merchants who pay them a fee and from interest on credit card debt.
Wrong on the second point. The issuing banks (Capital One, Chase, etc..) are the ones that collect the revenue from the interest/late fees on credit card debt.
The credit card companies (Visa, MC, etc..) only make money from the transaction and settlement phases.
I thoroughly enjoyed this post. The history of software is interesting... the process is so iterative. Often, I take for granted the current state of software I use. The refinements came through many years, many engineers, and many decisions.
I wonder where I can find more posts / articles like this. short, punchy, well written histories of software I use.
> It's an online version of the black arm band that's often worn to acknowledge the passing of a great figure in a community.