Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

Source: Hacker News

The Early Days

When web‑based social networks started flourishing nearly two decades ago, they were genuinely social. You would sign up for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked, and read updates from them. When you posted something, your followers received your updates as well. Notifications were genuine, and the little icons in the top bar lit up because someone had sent you a direct message or engaged with something you had posted.

At the beginning of the new millennium there was a general sense of hope and optimism around technology, computers, and the Internet. Social networking platforms were part of what was called Web 2.0, a term used for websites built around user participation and interaction. It felt as though the information superhighway was finally reaching its potential.

The Turn

Sometime between 2012 and 2016, things took a turn for the worse.

Infinite Scroll

The infamous infinite scroll arrived. The first time a web page no longer had a bottom, I felt uneasy. Logically, everything a browser displays is a virtual construct—just pixels pretending to be a page. Yet my brain had learned to treat web pages as objects with a beginning and an end, and the sudden disappearance of that end disturbed my sense of ease.

Bogus Notifications

What had once been meaningful signals turned into arbitrary prompts. Someone you followed posted something unremarkable, and the platform surfaced it as a notification anyway. It no longer mattered whether the notification was relevant to me; the system started serving itself rather than serving me. This felt like a violation of an unspoken agreement between users and services. Although the platforms remained social in a diluted sense—notifications were still about people I knew or had chosen to follow—that, too, would change.

The Rise of Attention Media

Over time, my timeline contained fewer posts from friends and more content from random strangers. Using these services began to feel like standing in front of a blaring loudspeaker, broadcasting fragments of conversations from all over the world directly in my face. I gave up on these services because there was nothing social about them anymore; they had become attention media. My attention is precious, and I cannot spend it mindlessly scrolling through videos that have neither relevance nor substance.

Mastodon as an Alternative

A few years ago I stumbled upon Mastodon, and it reminded me of the early days of Twitter. Back in 2006 I followed a small number of nerd‑type folks on Twitter and received genuinely interesting updates from them. Today, logging into the ruins of those older platforms shows only random videos presented for reasons I can neither infer nor care about.

Mastodon, by contrast, still feels like social networking in the original sense. I follow a small number of people I genuinely find interesting and receive only their updates. What I see is the result of my own choices rather than a system trying to capture and monetise my attention. There are no bogus notifications; the timeline feels calm and predictable. If there are no new updates from people I follow, there is nothing to see. It feels closer to how social networks originally worked, and I hope it stays that way.